Real Sceptic

The Effectiveness Of Prayer

AP Photo/Erich Schlegel

Remember the call for prayer from Rick Perry? The one where Texans should, among other things, pray for rain?

More than a month later the heat is still on in Texas and there hasn’t been any significant amount of rain that would have brought some relief from the drought. In fact, the drought has actually intensified. And to add insult to injure massive wild fires have raged in texas, leaving thousands of people homeless.

Shows how effective this day of prayer has been. And It isn’t strange that someone who denies the existence of climate change and thinks creationism is teached in Texas classrooms calls for something this ineffective.

Climate Change Deniers, The Merchants Of Doubt

Denial of the scientific evidence for Anthropogenic Global Warming was the running theme during the 24 hour broadcast of the Climate Reality Project.

And one of the shorts that was broadcast, called “Doubt,” is wel worth a watch. It’s about how the fossil fuel industry took the tobacco industry’s playbook to confuse the public on the science of climate change. Not by disproving the facts, but just by creating enough doubt to make the public dismiss it.

The following quote from the short sums it up quite nicely:

How did the tobacco companies manage to lie to the public in face of all the scientific evidence?

They realized that the science didn’t need to be disproven. It was enough to create doubt in the minds of the public to keep them from recognizing the truth.

This misinformation and doubt peddling is something I often talk about. Like for example when Chris Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute said a potential new maunder minimum would cause a new little ice age, so we don’t need to do anything. Or the confusion Watts Up With That tries to create every time there is some sort of cold spell.

And the short DOUBT shows how eerily similar the tactics of the tobacco industry are to what we are seeing with climate change: