50 Million Elvis Fans Can't be Wrong About Global Warming

                                                              50 Million Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong

The "Argumentum ad Populum" (appeal to the people) is the contention that something must be true because lots of other people believe it.    Most people logically know that just because lots of people believe something doesn't make it true, but there is a human tendency to think that if so many people agree on something, then maybe they actually know something about it.

Advertisers often assume that humans are like lemmings----they can be convinced to all buy the same clothes and use the same phones and eat the same things if they think everyone else is doing it.   For instance,  Elvis's "greatest hits" album was marketed on the  basis that since 50 million people have already bought Elvis records, everybody else should just get with the program.  

A new twist on the "Argumentum ad Populum" is the idea that there is "wisdom" in crowds, and the best way to determine what the best thing to do is at any time is find out what the crowd is doing and then do it too.   This variation on the "Argumentum ad Populum" was recently applied to the question of global warming by Forbes magazine.  You might expect that Forbes would've been impressed by the fact that 97% of scientists believe that CO2 pollution of the atmosphere is causing Global Warming, but evidently Forbes believes it is reasonable to ignore the opinions of scientists when it comes to the science of Greenhouse Warming.   

What really impressed the folks at Forbes was the fact that almost 40% of the earth's population lives near the seacoast.  That means about 3 billion people live near the coast, and who in their right mind would live near the coast, reasons Forbes, if there was a risk that global warming would cause sea level rise?  Therefore, because so many people ignore the risk of sea level rise----Forbes contends that it must be true that there is no risk from sea level rise.    

One can only assume that the guy who wrote the opinion piece then put on a jacket insulated with asbestos, got into his Corvair, lit up a cigarette, and after drinking a bottle of whiskey, drove off to the local brothel to have unprotected sex.  After all, lots of people do those things, so they must be totally safe.