Global warming has become the apocalyptic cult of the new millennium. None of the other jeremiahs, throughout the ages, can hold an end-of-the-world candle to ozone-layer mystics prophesying climate Armageddon. . .(via JunkScience)
The CO2 witch doctors view a modest rise in the Earth's temperature with the alarm of Stone Age savages in Borneo encountering a 747. It's as if the surface temperature of the planet has been a constant for the past 5 billion years and suddenly things are heating up - due to greenhouse gases.
In reality, the Earth has regularly gone through hot and cold cycles. A thousand years ago, Viking settlements in Greenland were growing crops. (It really was green then.) When Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants in 218 A.D., it wasn't nearly the feat many imagine. There was little ice and snow. . .
Global Warming a la Gore is merely the left's latest attempt to frog-march us into its brave new world.
With Marxism (another doomsday cult), the apocalyptic vision was a world where the rich kept getting richer and the poor sank deeper and deeper into drudgery, near-starvation and despair. The party elite was the priesthood sent to exorcise these political demons.
Since then, there has been a succession of leftist secular faiths - each calling on us to repent social sin, prophesizing doom and holding out the hope of salvation if only mankind can be coercively saved from itself.
In the '50s and '60s, it was the military/industrial complex. Then came overpopulation. Does anyone recall Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller "The Population Bomb"? Dr. Ehrlich confidently forecast worldwide starvation and the exhaustion of natural resources sometime between 1970 and 1985, due to overpopulation. With birthrates falling worldwide, and well below replacement levels in most industrialized nations, Ehrlich joins the League of Distinguished Malthusians.
The pollution scare started with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (1962). We were poisoning the Earth. Species were becoming extinct. We would shortly choke to death on our own garbage and toxic fumes. Part of the service for this particular faith was banning DDT - which led to millions of Third World deaths from disease-laden mosquitoes.
And now we have the Church of Global Warming, under the leadership of Pope Albert I and his college of cardinals (the Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and editorial board of The New York Times).
Friday, August 10, 2007
QOTD
Don Felder in FrontPage :
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3 comments:
The point is that people who act like environmentalists should be rewarded for being better people and having the right values. The actual temperature of the earth means nothing to them. I did not used to say this so bluntly, as the average person with some sympathy for environmental causes has little of this status warfare in their makeup.
But the deeper one goes in, the more one finds these makers of social rules. Environmentalism is mostly a social signalling device.
Actually, if you want to see some fun with Paul Ehrlich, you should be aware of the late Julian Simon's classic bet with him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Lincoln_Simon
The late Simon was a great source of data for decrying the doomsayers (Wired, back when it was a worthwhile read, had a cover feature calling him "The Doomslayer" -- Wired 5.02, mysteriously unavailable from the Wired Archives, with point you to the ToC of Wired 5.01). He continually refuted claims of idiots like Ehrlich with raw, pure data -- not data from biased sources but from obviously unbiased ones like the National Archives and published UN Food And Agriculture Organization statistics.
Thanks, OBH: The Simon-Ehrlich bet is one of my favorites; I wrote about it extensively here.
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