Farrago Line

Fear Factor

Yet another float on the panic parade: We should be more afraid of climate change than nuclear warfare. And just because nuclear apocalypse never transpired doesn't mean the doomsayers aren't right this time.

Is it fitting the article begins by referencing fictional accounts of planetary doom?

Not everybody's caught climate fever.

Some don't buy any of this "climate porn", as a UK think tank recently described such talk. Al Gore's movie is "bullshit from beginning to end", according to Ray Evans, a former Western Mining executive and author of the Lavoisier Group's Nine Facts About Climate Change (2006). For Evans and many others, man-made climate change panic is a bugaboo, perhaps even a hoax.

Check out this next graf: The debate isn't about climate change (no debate, there: climates change) or the fantasy that humans cause catastrophic climate change. It's about something we can all yak about no end.

Either way, the debate over climate change is now about fear. How afraid should we be? It's a valid question, because a sensible reaction to any threat begins with fear. Fear can help propel us towards solutions, as it did in the case of ozone-depleting CFCs. But we don't want to respond to a threat with asymmetric alarm.

Is that a load of crap? "A sensible reaction to any threat (the existence of which in this case is entirely suspect if not patent nonsense) begins with fear?"

The article dismisses debate (whatever that is) on catastrophic climate change saying the "debate" (cough propaganda machine cough cough) has switched to how much fear and panic is needed to lead to proper solutions. And here's why we should be terrorized: "Just because it never happened before, doesn't mean it won't ever happen."

Very true. Utterly useless.

Here's the author's parting remarks, and yet another reason I don't buy the climate panicmongers.

What's really cheering about climate change anxiety is that it's about the deep future, a place the Bomb managed to obliterate without a single missile leaving its silo. This time, our fear means something because we can act on it.

Exactly what panicmongers love to see: people acting on their fear, which is always the only fear to fear.

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Esoterica Warning

In the spirit of openness, full disclosure, open sources, free ranges and what have you, this post, received the following comment:

An Inconvenient Truth - Sheikh Omran

Compare what media reported and what sheikh Omran said about Climate change
http://aswjblog.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-sheikh-omran-said-about-climate.html

First off, thanks to whomever at ASWJ for commenting.

Second, what's your point?

The "Clerical Error?" post does not defne or purport to know what the media reported ... about anything. It linked to a story in News.com.au. The post linked to that story so that Farrago Line readers (all both of them) could see for themselves the primary document from which I lifted two paragraphs to beef up my miserable post.

Furthermore, the ASWJ comment points to a partial transcript of a speech that, as far as I can tell, doesn't address one way or another anything in the "Clerical Errors" post.

All I can discern, from both the news.com.au story and the generous ASWJ comment is that at least one Islamic brother buys the Global Warming hype. He may disagree on who's to blame. Al Gore blames jet fuel burning, massive electric power using, big car driving Americans such as himself. And Sheik Omran blames, near as I can tell, secular scientists' experiments.

Maybe I'm missing something embarrassingly obvious?

The Green Conundrum

Human nature rears its ... rear, I guess.

Greens say that their message is getting out. We've all heard it. And we all want to save the earth ... just so we don't actually have to do anything about it.

An Australian TV network worked up a "2½ hour feast of practical advice on how (viewers) might save the planet."

But only about 600,000 actually tuned in. And it's not like nobody knew about the special.

"We had study guides in schools, we had the full support of the print media (italics added) , both editorially and with advertising, and an extensive [Ten Network] on-air campaign with a number of different creative treatments and different stances.

"We spent a fortune to get the audience there and it didn't work. We've talked about it quite a lot internally. We're disappointed."

The SydneyMorning Herald calls it "the green condundrum".

Despite the focus on climate change, the green conundrum is alive across myriad product categories, including toilet paper.

Australians spend $500 million a year on the stuff but just $20 million each year goes to brands using recycled paper. Since 2005 the category has been in decline, although it showed some promise in the latter part of last year.

Maybe it is a conundrum. Or perhaps it's hype overload?

Is it possible that decades of doomsayer prognostications -- all of which faded and were forgotten when the predicted troubles failed to materialize at the appointed time (the population bomb and attendant famine, overcrowding, even longer lines at the motor vehicle department, etc.; holes in the ozone; ice age; etc.) -- have inured us 'umble masses to the foam-flecked forecasting of panicmongers so that we no longer buy their incessant ballyhoo?

Maybe not.

Another explanation may be that we all know it's not nice to mock the Global Swarming theologians. "It's settled science!" "Debate Ended!" So we don't. When asked, we politely aver that we really do totally honest to gosh fully and wholeheartedly believe we're all gonna fry, drown, starve and go crazy in ten years if we don't use recycled toilet paper, carpool around in solar-powered coke cans and dwell in caves. But once left to ourselves, we resume our lives, heat our homes, drive to work, church, and soccer practice, and leave poor Mother Earth alone. Maybe we know instinctively that she's a tough old broad and can take anything we can dish out. Maybe we got the message about global warming. Maybe we don't need another two and half hours of media blast on earth-saving tips, especially not if it's up against CSI.

Or maybe we don't take the message any more seriously than Al Gore appears to.

And then, of course, there are those rebels who simply find GW's Kool-Aid too sweet.

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Chill Al

In a New York Times article today geology professor Don J. Easterbrook sprinkles ice water on Al Gore's global warming flames. According to the Times, Easterbrook is among a number of scientists who can't warm to Gore's global panic crusade.

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

In a response, Gore makes a telling remark about the vaunted "consensu" on global warming in the scientific community.

Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points” about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions” scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,” he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand.”

The "degree of consensus". Oh, I get it. It's a degree of concensus. And does anyone dispute consensus on global warming? Isn't the question: Does human activity that produces CO2 cause catastrophic climate change? And if that's the issue on which there's a degree of consensus, what is that degree?

In the article, one scientist backs Gore while conceding "minor inaccuracies", "imperfections", and "technical flaws" in the former V.P.'s science. Ah, but then, he's also "a top adviser to Mr. Gore".

Oh...Kay.

Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among scientists against his work.

Could death threats and ostracization maybe have something to do with that? Or maybe he ignores Robert Carter's blog:

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,” Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.”

Clerical error?

Another Global Swarming true believer offers scientific evidence that man, or at least Australians, are responsible for global warming.

Radical sheik Mohammed Omran told followers at his Brunswick mosque that out-of-control secular scientific values had caused environmental disaster.

This guy certainly has the name for this game:

British-based Sheik Abdul Raheem Green forbade Muslims from having fewer than four children so Australia would become an Islamic state.

Green wants his followers to out-breed Australians so they can take over the country. Doesn't he know that Mark Steyn is wrong about that whole demographic thing?

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Death to the Cools

History repeats:

Hotties -- the Global Swarming True Believers -- are sending death threats to the Cools: anyone who dares to question the alleged science or sanity of the Humans-Cause-Global-Warming fundamentalists.

Scientists who questioned mankind's impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.

Shades of Galileo. Different church.

One question: What's the most environmentally friendly way to kill a GW heretic?

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We're All Gonna Die!!!

"We truly are standing at the edge of mass extinction"

So says Terry Root of Stanford University one of the many co-authors of yet another report on the imminence and dangers of global warming.

Tropical diseases like malaria will spread. By 2050, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos, their habitats gone. Pests like fire ants will thrive. The dead will rise from the grave!

OK, that last sentence was mine.

Anyway, more scaremongering inspired by the IPCC. Shine on True Believers (italics added):

The United Nations-organized network of 2,000 scientists was established in 1988 to give regular assessments of the Earth's environment. The document issued last month in Paris concluded that scientists are 90 percent certain that people are the cause of global warming and that warming will continue for centuries.

What do we care if warming continues? We'll be extinct, our bodies picked over by fire ants, our zoos overrun by polar bears.

Wow

Jesus rejected the Jews?

I believe that if Jesus lived today, he would be a secular humanist and would reject Christianity, just as he "rejected" Judaism and inspired Christianity.

This phenomonal confession astounds me on several levels and inspires numerous questions.

(Randomly: Why does the author believe that if Jesus lived today he would be a secular humanist? And why doesn't he believe Jesus lives today? He used to be a Christian, so he once believed that. Why doesn't he tell me what changed his mind? (What "advances and science and exposure to other religious traditions" led to this change?)

He says he was once a Christian. OK, so if he was a Christian he believed he talked to God, right? Isn't that something Christians believe they do when they pray? He prayed right? Because that's what Christians do, right? So I'm wondering why a guy who used to think he talked to God and now is convinced there is no God to have talked to expects me to believe him without offering any reason why I should believe a guy who admits he was nutty enough to believe he talked to a God who he's now convinced doesn't exist. Shoot fire! 

Today (or at the time of his writing) he believes that Jesus was not God, but he used to believe Jesus was God, and as such (or not) rejected the Jews, of which Jesus was one, so he presumably rejected himself, which, if it's true, and this author's dependence on the "light of the advances in science and our exposure to other religious traditions" exposed this truth to him in a clear and understandable way ... (deep cleansing breath) ... why wouldn't he share this (these) revelation(s) with his readers so they, too, might advance to the next level of spiritual (or scientific) understanding?

What. Changed. His. Mind????

He doesn't say.

I'll ask this one again: Jesus rejected the Jews?

Romans 11: 1-3

1I ask then: Did God reject his people? By no means! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin. 2God did not reject his people, whom he foreknew. Don't you know what the Scripture says in the passage about Elijah—how he appealed to God against Israel....

Later in the author's letter, he states "Paul was wrong" about another issue -- the necessity of Jesus' bodily resurection to the validity of Christian faith. So, presumably, he believes Paul wrong about God not rejecting Jews. Maybe he's right. But he invites no evidence to back up his claim. I'd like to know what science and secular humanism offered him by way of convincing argument. It might come in handy in turning me from my own erroneous embrace of Jesus to the next new best thing. Otherwise what I'm left with is the impression of a writer devoid of the basic knowledge of Christian theology.

I think in light of the advances in science and our exposure to other religious traditions, it is time again to humanize further our understanding of "God" (or the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty) and come to a more universal understanding of religion.

Random knee-jerk reaction questions:

Humanize (??? Sorry, what does one do when one humanizes? Is there foam or smoke involved?) further (??? than what?) our understanding of God (who doesn't exist, hence author's atheism) (or the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty)(which science addresses how?). What does this mean? What's the working definition of "goodness"? "Beauty"?

Who is "our"? Has this "our" been exposed to religions that "ours" in the past have not? Advances in science? An understanding of biology gives one greater insight into theology? By that logic (I may be way out of bounds here, but I found this guy in the rough, so I'm playing from it) why hasn't a greater understanding of biology (or whatever scientific discipline) made us better musicians and artists, lovers, poets, dancers?

Are people taking this guy seriously? If so, what am I missing?

And come to think of it, if I am missing something ... (or many things) ..., what does science and secular humanism have to offer me to fill the vacuum? And come to think of that, what does it matter?

Check this out:

In the 21st century, we are able to see more clearly than the saints before us (just as Jesus was able to see more clearly than prophets before him) that deeds of love live on forever in the hearts and minds of all those who are transformed by such love and by those who value loving acts of goodness and justice. This is the immortality of the saints.

What saints? Is that a scientific designation? Is this guy a former Christian or not? Saints?

Who decides who's a saint?

Deeds of love live on forever in the hearts and minds of people who die? While I'm in the neighborhood -- who defines "loving acts of goodness and justice" and  are they different (or are they somehow better) than non-loving acts of goodness and justice?

So it's deeds of love that live on forever? How is that the "immortality of saints"? Sounds more like the immortality of impressions and memories. What good does immortality of deeds do for dead saints? I'm not asking why they would care, but how? ________________________________________________________________________

The Globe is melting, the globe is melting!

Kool-Aid Swallower

Kool-Aid Spitter

More on this farce later.

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Light 'em up

Oh, wait! A place in the brain controls the urge to smoke?

So ... what you're saying ... it's not in the left glute?

"Clearly brain damage isn't a treatment option for people struggling to kick the habit."

I know it didn't help me quit.

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