Getting Hollywood to “Sell the Product” to Children
| November 3, 2007 | Posted by William Dembski under Global Warming, Science |
In reading the article/speech below, ask yourself how successful (or unsuccessful) by comparison Darwinists have been in selling their product to children.
Inhofe Slams Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurie David
by Marc Morano (more by this author)
www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=23092
Posted 10/29/2007 ET
Updated 10/29/2007 ETSenator James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Environement and Public Works Committee, delivered a more than two-hour floor speech today debunking fears of man-made global warming. Below is an exerpt of his remarks about how Hollywood, led by Leonardo DiCaprio and Laurie David, has promoted unfounded climate fears to children. For video of speech section denouncing Hollywood is below.
Senator Inhofe Speech Excerpt:
We are currently witnessing an international awakening of scientists who are speaking out in opposition to former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, the Hollywood elitists and the media-driven “consensus” on man-made global warming.
We have witnessed Antarctic ice GROW to record levels since satellite monitoring began in the 1970′s. We have witnessed NASA temperature data errors that have made 1934 — not 1998 — the hottest year on record in the U.S. We have seen global averages temperatures flat line since 1998 and the Southern Hemisphere cool in recent years.
These new developments in just the last six months are but a sample of the new information coming out that continues to debunk climate alarm.
But before we delve into these dramatic new scientific developments, it is important to take note of our pop culture propaganda campaign aimed at children.
HOLLYWOOD TARGETS CHILDREN WITH CLIMATE FEARS
In addition to Gore’s entry last year into Hollywood fictional disaster films, other celebrity figures have attempted to jump into the game.
Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio decided to toss objective scientific truth out the window in his new scarefest “The 11th Hour.” DiCaprio refused to interview any scientists who disagreed with his dire vision of the future of the Earth.
In fact, his film reportedly features physicist Stephen Hawking making the unchallenged assertion that “the worst-case scenario is that Earth would become like its sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 [degrees] centigrade.”
I guess these “worst-case scenario’s” pass for science in Hollywood these days. It also fits perfectly with DiCaprio’s stated purpose of the film.
DiCaprio said on May 20th of this year: “I want the public to be very scared by what they see. I want them to see a very bleak future.”
While those who went to watch DiCaprio’s science fiction film may see his intended “bleak future,” it is DiCapro who has been scared by the bleak box office numbers, as his film has failed to generate any significant audience interest.
Gore’s producer to kids: ‘Be activists’
Children are now the number one target of the global warming fear campaign.
DiCaprio announced his goal was to recruit young eco-activists to the cause.
“We need to get kids young,” DiCaprio said in a September 20 interview with USA Weekend.
Hollywood activist Laurie David, Gore’s co-producer of “An Inconvenient Truth” recently co-authored a children’s global warming book with Cambria Gordon for Scholastic Books titled, The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming.
David has made it clear that her goal is to influence young minds with her new book when she recently wrote an open letter to her children stating: “We want you to grow up to be activists.”
Apparently, David and other activists are getting frustrated by the widespread skepticism on climate as reflected in both the U.S. and the UK according to the latest polls.
It appears the alarmists are failing to convince adults to believe their increasingly shrill and scientifically unfounded rhetoric, so they have decided kids are an easier sell.
But David should worry less about recruiting young activists and more about scientific accuracy. A science group found what it called a major “scientific error” in David’s new kid’s book on page 18.
According to a Science and Public Policy Institute release on September 13:
“The authors [David and Gordon] present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature. The manipulation is critical because David’s central premise posits that CO2 drives temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous that CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes.”
David has now been forced to publicly admit this significant scientific error in her book.
Nine year old: ‘I don’t want to die’ from global warming
A Canadian high school student named McKenzie was shown Gore’s climate horror film in four different classes.
“I really don’t understand why they keep showing it,” McKenzie said on May 19, 2007.
In June, a fourth grade class from Portland Maine’s East End Community School issued a dire climate report: “Global warming is a huge pending global disaster” read the elementary school kids’ report according to an article in the Portland Press Herald on June 14, 2007. Remember, these are fourth graders issuing a dire global warming report. (LINK)
And this agenda of indoctrination and fear aimed at children is having an impact.
Nine year old Alyssa Luz-Ricca was quoted in the Washington Post on April 16, 2007 as saying:
“I worry about [global warming] because I don’t want to die.”
The same article explained: “Psychologists say they’re seeing an increasing number of young patients preoccupied by a climactic Armageddon.”
I was told by the parent of an elementary school kid last spring who said her daughter was forced to watch “An Inconvenient Truth” once a month at school and had nightmares about drowning in the film’s predicted scary sea level rise.
The Hollywood global-warming documentary “Arctic Tale” ends with a child actor telling kids: “If your mom and dad buy a hybrid car, you’ll make it easier for polar bears to get around.”
Unfortunately, children are hearing the scientifically unfounded doomsday message loud and clear. But the message kids are receiving is not a scientific one, it is a political message designed to create fear, nervousness and ultimately recruit them to liberal activism.
There are a few hopeful signs. A judge in England has ruled that schools must issue a warning before they show Gore’s film to children because of scientific inaccuracies and “sentimental mush.”
In addition, there is a new kids book called “The Sky’s Not Falling! Why It’s OK to Chill About Global Warming.” The book counters the propaganda from the pop culture.
Objective, Evidence based Science is Beginning to Crush Hysteria
My speech today and these reports reveal that recent peer-reviewed scientific studies are totally refuting the Church of Man-made Global Warming.
Global warming movement ‘falling apart’
Meteorologist Joseph Conklin who launched the skeptical website in 2007, recently declared the “global warming movement [is] falling apart.”
All the while, activists like former Vice President Al Gore repeatedly continue to warn of a fast approaching climate “tipping point.”
I agree with Gore. Global warming may have reached a “tipping point.”
The man-made global warming fear machine crossed the “tipping point” in 2007.
I am convinced that future climate historians will look back at 2007 as the year the global warming fears began crumbling. The situation we are in now is very similar to where we were in the late 1970′s when coming ice age fears began to dismantle.
Remember, it was Newsweek Magazine which in the 1970′s proclaimed meteorologists were “almost unanimous” in their view that a coming Ice Age would have negative impacts. It was also Newsweek in 1975 which originated the eerily similar “tipping point” rhetoric of today:
Newsweek wrote on April 28, 1975 about coming ice age fears: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.”
Of course Newsweek essentially retracted their coming ice age article 29 years later in October 2006. In addition, a 1975 National Academy of Sciences report addressed coming ice age fears and in 1971, NASA predicted the world “could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age.”
Today, the greatest irony is that the UN and the media’s climate hysteria grows louder as the case for alarmism fades away. While the scientific case grows weaker, the political and rhetorical proponents of climate fear are ramping up to offer hefty tax and regulatory “solutions” both internationally and domestically to “solve” the so-called “crisis.”
Skeptical Climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball formerly of the University of Winnipeg in Canada wrote about the current state of the climate change debate earlier this month:
“Imagine basing a country’s energy and economic policy on an incomplete, unproven theory – a theory based entirely on computer models in which one minor variable (CO2) is considered the sole driver for the entire global climate system.”
And just how minor is that man-made CO2 variable in the atmosphere?
Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo, the first Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chairman of the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecasting, explained in August how miniscule mankind’s CO2 emissions are in relation to the Earth’s atmosphere.
“If the atmosphere was a 100 story building, our annual anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor,” D’Aleo wrote.
47 Responses to Getting Hollywood to “Sell the Product” to Children
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Joseph,
I should have put this in my last post, so apologies. But please, don’t put words in my mouth. I have not used the term supernatural to refer to the origin of design. I have only said “non-material,” “outside of nature,” and so forth. The term supernatural may carry baggage that’s worth avoiding.
Maybe I should not refer to the designer at all, but rather to a non-material origin of ultimate design. This would allow the universe to be designed without a designer — an intelligent universe! But as I said above, such a conclusion seems needlessly complex IMO.
Getawitness, I think Dr. Dembski is talking “natural laws” versus “intelligence” in this quote. An arrowhead is the product of “intelligent design”, not merely natural laws, even though humans are part of nature.
So intelligence agency is not a thing that scientists may detect unless they first guess who or what was the source of the intelligence? If we find complex, purposeful machines operating on Jupiter, but no one in sight, why is speculation about Jupiterians necessary before we can infer design?
russ,
“I think Dr. Dembski is talking “natural laws” versus “intelligence” in this quote. An arrowhead is the product of “intelligent design”, not merely natural laws, even though humans are part of nature.”
No. The point is developed throughout the chapter that CSI has no natural origin. As Dr. Dembski says on the same page, “for a natural cause to ‘generate’ CSI would mean for a function to map some item to an item that exhibits CSI…. In other words, natural causes just push the CSI problem from the effect back to the cause.” And later (151): “To claim that natural causes have ‘generated’ CSI is therefore totally misleading — natural causes have merely shuffled around CSI.” And later (159): “Since chance, necessity, and their combination characterize natural causes, it now follows that natural causes are incapable of generating CSI.”
If CSI (a key to the design inference) is not generated by natural (material) causes, then it is either uncaused or has a cause outside of nature. That’s all I’m saying.
“If CSI (a key to the design inference) is not generated by natural (material) causes, then it is either uncaused or has a cause outside of nature. That’s all I’m saying.”
I think ultimately, information/intelligence has to come from something “uncaused” But, as far as life on earth is concerned “the designer”, it does not.
Just in re-reading my post, I realize how dumb my response is. God or not, we’re going to have something (either matter or intelligence) that was uncaused, or else there would be nothing right now. I meant to say, ultimately intelligence/information is non-material, but this non-material cause does not need to be the *direct* cause of life on earth.
getawitness
If CSI (a key to the design inference) is not generated by natural (material) causes, then it is either uncaused or has a cause outside of nature. That’s all I’m saying.
The source of your misunderstanding is you are conflating “natural” and “material”. The opposite of natural in this context is “artificial”. Artificial doesn’t necessarily mean supernatural or immaterial.
MacT
I see you dodged the question of how the modern synthesis can explain why falciparum didn’t evolve in billions of trillions of replications.
ID doesn’t need positive verification. We already know that intelligent agents can purposely tinker with DNA. It’s called genetic engineering and I’m quite sure you’re familiar with it. The $64,000 question is whether anything other than intelligent agents can purposely tinker with DNA.
I state the biological ID hypothesis as
All complex biological systems are generated by intelligent agency.
This conforms perfectly to what Karl Popper defined as a scientific hypothesis in his famous “swans” example:
All swans are white.
Popper stated that while it is impossible to prove that all swans are white the observation of a single black swan falsifiies the hypothesis. If the hypothesis can be falsified then it is “scientific” according to Popper.
It is impossible to prove that all complex biological systems are generated by intelligent agency but the observation of a single complex biological system generated by non-intelligent agency will falsify the hypothesis.
Now explain again why the ID hypothesis is not scientific and why, in principle, it is not falsifiable. P.falciparum replicating billions of trillions of times was the most comprehensive search to date for a “black swan”. It could have, in principle, falsified ID. The proverbial black swan could have been observed but it was not. This does not prove ID but it certainly lends strong support to it.
Dave:
Your point in response to MacT on white and black swans is excellent. Can I borrow and use it with attribution?
On the source of CSI, I think it may be appropriate to point out that mind [and its observed characteristic product, complex, functionally specific, coded information] has very different properties from matter.
In this sense, GAW has a point; though he may not have expressed himself in the best possible way (very hard to do on this subject I think).
Namely, we observe three main classes of causal patterns: [1] chance (especially in random situations), [2] mechanical necessity, [3] agency. The last of these is on observation inherently mental, while the former two are often seen as manifestations of raw, undirected material-energy interactions.
I think characteristically of molecular-scale patterns studied through statistical mechanics and related disciplines, when I try to see the difference.
As my always linked, appendix 1 section 6 discusses: we would not expect the millions of molecule scale microjet parts to clump together and spontaneously assemble into a flyable configuration in a vat at random. But, with intelligent, programmed algorithms and the aid of our sci-fi thought experiment nanobots, they can credibly be so assembled into a flyable jet.
Such algorithms and the programs by which they are expressed, are the product of mind; i.e. of agency. Such also has the characteristics of mind: a workable program is logicallly sound [thus true and valid], can be in multiple places at once, etc.
Voltages and magnetic domain alignments, absent coding, are simply facts on bits of matter and associated fields — a mag field of so many micro-Teslas, pointing up has no inherent property of being true or false, logically valid or algorithmically sensible etc! The same holds for voltages 0 – 0.7 for logic 0, 2.0 – 5.0 for logic 1 [if I remember the good old days of TTL well enough!]; being arbitrary code assignments, though of course informed by all sorts of physical considerations.
Maybe we can find common ground and a mutually acceptable way to express it?
GEM of TKI
DaveScot,
“All complex biological systems are generated by intelligent agency.
This conforms perfectly to what Karl Popper defined as a scientific hypothesis in his famous “swans” example:
All swans are white.”
No, it does not conform, except in a superficial way.
What is necessary (and sufficient) to treat this as a well-formed hypothesis is not simply the analogous syntax, but also an explicit statement of the premises. In other words, a meaningful hypothesis relies on independently defined terms: We agree what a swan is, by prior observation; we agree what white is, also by prior observation. We can therefore agree what the meaning is of “All swans are white.” Once we agree the a priori definitions, we are in position to agree how the statement could be falsified. This is a crucial prerequisite to hypothesis testing.
Your parallel construction fails to meet the necessary condition of definition. I think we can generally agree what is meant by “complex biological systems.” Many instances have been described independently of a theory. But what is intelligent agency? An independently verifiable definition is required. First the definition, then we’ll be in a positition to falsify they hypothesis you state. As things stand now, you can point to any complex biological system, state the claim that intelligent agency is responsible, and because there is no definition that allows falsification, I can’t carry out any study that shows you are wrong.
Now, it may be you are right. I don’t know. But I suspect you are wrong. The problem you have is that you can’t convince me (or most scientists) if you don’t do the work to define your terms, and then allow your hypothesis to be tested.
DaveScot,
I think what I have been saying here is much closer to the heart of ID than your response. As Dr. Dembski points out (page 366 of NFL), this is why ID is controversial in the first place:
Where intelligent design gets controversial is when one takes its methods for detecting design in human contexts and shifts the to the natural sciences where no embodied, reified, or evolved intelligence could have been present. (Emphasis added)
If, as you say, life requires intelligence — not life on earth merely but Life — then ID points toward an intelligence outside material existence.
To be sure, Dr. Dembski does take panspermia seriously — so seriously that he devotes a whole half of a sentence of No Free Lunch to the topic:
The reason that attributing specified complexity to intelligence for biological systems is regarded as problematic is because such an intelligence would in all likelihood have to be embodied (though strictly speaking this is not required of intelligent design — the designer could in principle be an embodied intelligence, as with the panspermia theories).
Wow. Half a sentence.
But even here ID strongly suggests that the source of design (the designer) is unembodied. I don’t know why Dr. Dembski gestures toward panspermia, since he clearly does not take it seriously enough to give it a whole sentence in book of almost four hundred pages.
Finally, let me say that I have read comments in which you have candidly admitted the spiritual motivations of many prominent ID advocates. Good for you! But you refuse to consider its spiritual implications. If ID is true, then gesturing toward some alien founding intelligence avoids the central question.
Kairosfocus, thanks for supporting the general point I was making. Sorry if I made it inelegantly.
I have not used the term supernatural to refer to the origin of design. I have only said “non-material,” “outside of nature,” and so forth.-getawitness
And as I stated even the materialistic anti-ID position requires something beyond nature to get it started.
BTW IDists define “natural processes” as those produced by nature, operating freely. IOW it does not refer to processes that exist in nature.
MacT asks:
But what is intelligent agency?
Anything that can produce counterflow.
correction- the above IOW it does not refer to processes that exist in nature. Should have been:
IOW it does not refer to processes that merely exist in nature.
Joseph,
“And as I stated even the materialistic anti-ID position requires something beyond nature to get it started.”
Maybe — I don’t think that much about materialism, so I’ll have to consider that. But Dr. Dembski’s work suggests that, for ID, that something outside of nature must also have intelligence.
“BTW IDists define “natural processes” as those produced by nature, operating freely. IOW it does not refer to processes that exist in nature.”
Huh? Can you clarify this?
But Dr. Dembski’s work suggests that, for ID, that something outside of nature must also have intelligence.
Right- intelligent cause vs unintelligent cause.
“BTW IDists define “natural processes” as those produced by nature, operating freely. IOW it does not refer to processes that (merely) exist in nature.”
Huh? Can you clarify this?
Sure- humans manufacture cars. There isn’t anything supernatural about it, so the process is natural, ie it exists in nature. However nature, operating freely, could not produce a car.
See also “Nature, Design and Science” by Del Ratzsch.
Joseph,
Thanks for the reference. I haven’t read Ratzsch’s book. My understanding is that it’s actually somewhat critical of ID as a science. I found a paper of Ratzch at Calvin College called “Design Theory and its Critics: Monologues Passing in the Night”. He’s critical of both sides, but of ID he says:
“ID has not at this juncture produced much of positive empirical significance, especially of a sort which is not plausibly also available to mainstream evolutionary theory. But that is not to say that ID could not do so, and it is certainly not to say that ID should be systematically barred from the scientific conversation.”
Is that the kind of thing he says in the book?
Getawitness,
The book’s focus is on determining design, and as you noted, the author isn’t exactly an ID ethusiast. (see also the definition of “counterflow” linked to in comment 42- that is from the book)