Editor, The News:
Re: Human nature to seek bias (Letters, May 21).
My mother taught me whilst I was growing up that arguing with someone you know is wrong reduces you to their level. But unlike Rudyard Kipling’s Victorian ideal, I find I can’t “bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools.”
John Sawyer states: a) “there is data and there are many scientists” who dispute CO2 induced climate change; b) “it is obvious to all,” government funding depends on adhering to an alarmist climate agenda; c) 97 per cent of scientists agreeing about global warming is a “meme that has been debunked so many times in the past.”
Since the scientific method forms the basis of my “personal bias,” I’m honestly interested in having Mr. Sawyer, or any other advocate, specify the data and experts, evidence of conspiracy and meme debunkings. His personalized snark towards me aside, no longer having to concern ourselves about a differentiated future for billions of fellow humans would be well worth my having to admit I was once wrong.
Frankly, my column’s climate change conclusions, which he criticizes, are biased – by Google (despite Stephen Colbert advising “facts have a well- known liberal bias”), as well as an adaptation of a Lewis Black joke: “Glaciers, glaciers, glaciers, glaciers – I win.”
So a “proper discussion” is thus quite welcomed, if nothing else but to help overcome the unspecified (subconscious?) personal bias Mr. Sawyer asserts motivated my attempt to “score cheap media points.” Regarding what, if I’m right, is the most influential “truth” of our time, my aim is for readers to thus be assisted in building “agreement based on logic.”
Mike Shields
Maple Ridge
