How often do opponents of analytical thinking try advocating their position with a comparison but their comparison is just wrong? Frequently when I look at climate change activists and their claims, they appear to always attempt to push opinions and persuade people without providing a realistic comparison. Critical Thinkers can see through such arguments.
For example people are being encouraged to do their part in saving some electricity to reduce carbon emissions. They want people to sacrifice some convenience in their life to do their part, because every little bit adds up. So if we took an energy savings measure of unplugging an appliance when not in use, like a mobile phone charger after the phone was fully charged. Maybe a person managed to save enough electricity over the course of one year to reduce their personal CO2 emissions with that one action by 10 pounds. Does that sound impressive?
However, does the average person actually know what 10 pounds of CO2 is worth? The Regional Greenhouse Gas Institute (RGGI.org) is a carbon emission trading system in the northeastern United States that puts a cap on the amount of CO2 emissions from power plants authorized for their region. Power plants can trade authorizations on the exchange and current value for one ton (1000 pounds) of CO2 emissions are between $6-7. So a handful pennies per year are saved on the CO2 authorizations for your local power plant. Does that provide any context for the energy savings?
What about if we compare the 10 pounds of saved CO2 emissions to the average amount a person in the U.S. caused over a year, about 16-17 tons (according to Wikipedia)? A rhetorical question, why don’t activists simply ask for money that will go towards technological improvements on power plants to reduce CO2 emissions per unit of energy produced instead?
Another comparison misused are prediction models that fail to point out forecasts that do not include adaptation or mitigation. Pointing out worst case scenarios that fail to account for people taking actions to prevent the negative outcomes are also failures of proper comparisons. To effectively understand impacts requires some critical thinking to be applied to ensure the comparisons are proper.
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