User:Woozle/LwaC/2014-05-30

Today at #lunchWithAConservative, we learned:

1. that Condoleezza Rice and other members of the Bush administration made an honest mistake in starting the Iraq war.
2. that mistakes made by politicians and others in positions of power may seem like evil acts to outsiders, but they're really just dealing with political pressure the best they can.
3. that any significant conclusion about global warming must be based on accurate modeling of the climate.
4. that some models predict catastrophe, and others don't, and we just don't know which ones are right, so it's a bit early to predict doom and disaster.
5. that global warming is the Left's version of the Book of Revelations, because both predict doom and disaster if we don't conform to some prescribed set of behaviors for which there is little or no evidence.
6. that the hockey stick has been disproven, because it was based on falsified data (and Michael Mann "may be a criminal"), therefore the extreme temperature rises claimed by the global warming alarmists aren't actually happening, therefore the default hypothesis is that there's nothing to worry about.
7. that his personal experience talking with global warming alarmists and global warming skeptics indicates that the skeptics are interested in rational dialogue and the alarmists are not.
8. that because of the Obama administration's support for global warming, global warming advocates have as much or more influence over public debate (e.g. because of television exposure) as the global warming skeptics do. When the media treats both sides of the debate as equally credible, this is because they are equally credible.
9. (everybody sing along) that you can prove absolutely anything with information you get from the internet.

It's probably unfair of me to be reminded of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpkOs8xPS_8

He's off to England next Tuesday, so we won't be having lunches for awhile.

I finally (too late) thought of a good retort for #9: the same is true of any decent library.

Note that he mentioned most of the points listed above after he started the conversation with a wish that we could stop wasting our time talking about politics, whereupon I said that I wouldn't bring it up if he didn't.