(Image courtesy of AP Photo/dapd//Jean-Christophe Bott)
A straw man argument, if you don't know already, which you should, is a made-up opponent position. When your adversary's real point is too difficult to tackle, you simply transform what he or she said into something more easily refuted. For instance, when I say there is no evidence for the existence of a supreme being, many people twist my words into something like, "He said he can prove God doesn't exist," which I obviously can't conclusively (I also can't conclusively prove Bertrand Russell's teapot, Zeus, Odin, Ba'al, Cthulhu, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, et al, don't exist either, but somehow magically my inadequacies here are never brought up so smugly...shocking, I know). That dishonest formulation of my actual statement can be countered much more handily, hence the reason why it's formulated that way. The idea behind the straw man metaphor is that real people are harder to push over than lightweight, straw effigies made of them. Get it?
Now that we've had our little review, we can move on to the point of this post...
The curious case of Hurricane Sandy.
It has been over a year and a half since Hurricane Sandy hit, and, like New Orleans after Katrina, many towns are still struggling to rebuild. Many will continue to do so for years to come, and some will never return to the same communities they once were before Sandy hit. Simply put, the storm was amazingly powerful, and it came at the end of the hurricane season when the northeastern US normally breathes a collective sigh of relief.
If you've read or taken part in online climate change debates, you've undoubtedly seen Sandy enter the discussion. And maybe, like me, you've seen this priceless straw man countless times...
Enamored twits at Fox invoke Al Gore for no reason other than their undying love for him, and then predictably set up the straw man. I mean, if you're in love with someone, the least you could do is try to understand what he or she is actually saying, even if you've been turned down repeatedly for a date.
Monckton couldn't help his confused self...
And, gee, wattsupwiththat gleefully promoted this straw man...imagine that...
Clearly, I could go on forever.
When I point out that not even the most dyed-in-the-wool climate hawks make the claim that climate change caused Sandy (like CO2 molecules intentionally started spinning over warmer Caribbean waters in an effort to whip up a cyclone, or something), and that what they do claim in reality is that climate change undeniably amplified Sandy's strength and damage, I either get the halfwit, idiotic "yes, they do" response (sorry, they don't, and repeating nonsense ain't a very convincing argument), or the standard subject change, "well, there was nothing special about Sandy."
Nothing special about Sandy? Is that so...?
The nation's largest mass transit service shut down all stops for only the 2nd time in the system's history. What was the 1st time? Irene, the year before.
Though Irene "fizzled" (as some put it), Sandy precautions were justified as the NYC subway flooded and pumps were overwhelmed in November.
Largest diameter of any Atlantic cyclone ever recorded.
Lowest barometric reading ever recorded for an Atlantic storm (940 millibars or 27.76 inches), a sign of its troubling strength.
Highest sea level ever recorded at Battery Park in New York (13.88 feet).
Anywhere from 186 to 285 total fatalities. Whatever the actual number, it's too many.
And so on.
So there ya go. "Nothing special about Sandy," according to deniers. Never mind the fact that none of these spineless gits have the guts to say that to the faces of people still rebuilding for a moment, because here is the challenge I've given them many times before without receiving one, single, solitary, satisfactory, sensible answer: if Sandy was such a ho-hum, run-of-the-mill, uninteresting storm, untouched by climate change, then name me one historical North Atlantic cyclone that did what it did when it did it, at the tail-end of hurricane season in November.
Just one. ONE. That's all you gotta give me, ya senseless screwballs.
G'head, lemme have it. I'll be waiting right here for your answer. But I won't be holding my breath.
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