All the wrangling about what the scientists believe as opposed to what other scientists believe regarding global warming can be encapsulated in “data” and “models” that are worth little more than info-garble that folks can read and then decide for themselves about the issue. Without any help or hindrance by man, apparently, the cycles have been around for what the experts say are millions or billions of years, as if anyone has even a slight clue as to what caused the warming and cooling cycles.
One thing is clear if the historians and anthropologists can be believed, to wit, industrialization and its alleged CO2 emissions played no part, no matter how hot or cold the earth was in any given period. Something else is clear, to wit, that reputable scientists are now in the process of shredding to pieces the UN/IPCC global warming report, never mind the grand conclave of the end-of-the-earth crowd in its conference ending this week at Bali. Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, cannot even be shown in England’s public schools unless the students are told that it is a “political” instrument, not a scientific one, and unless the teacher points out the many errors in the propaganda piece.
There’s an uglier aspect to this matter, namely that people in positions such as university professors – especially university professors – have made an effort to condemn this country and a sizeable number of “religious” folks for environmental profligacy, namely, callous disregard for God’s creation and the world’s “other” people. Until recently, David Gushee was a “professor of moral philosophy” at Union University in Jackson, Tenn., but now he is a “professor of Christian ethics” at Mercer University in Macon, Ga.
This is how Gushee began an article in the Associated Baptist Press of 11 December: “Global warming is becoming the ultimate moral-values issue. Both religious and political leaders must mobilize immediately to address it. No society is more reluctant to accept these two claims than the United States. No religious community is less sympathetic to them than ‘Bible-believing’ Christians. What will it take for us to change our ways?”
According to Gushee, then, this country, oblivious to “ultimate moral values” (his, presumably), is the one most willing to end the world, and “Bible-believing” Christians (one wonders what other kind there are) simply don’t give a damn. When he classifies GW as the “ultimate moral-values issue,” he places it in the same category as one that concerns life and death, actually making it into a weapon and places the U.S. in the “them against us” category, which is descriptive of the current war on terrorism, which actually is a war against Islam. He substitutes the inculcation of global warming for the AK-47.
Surely Gushee, operating in the field of human dynamics, recognizes the “drive for survival” and “survival of the fittest” as perhaps the intrinsic considerations most shared by all people. So…what he’s actually saying is that this country, by enhancing global warming and assuming U.S. technological ability to deal with such warming while others can’t, is exercising, if not domination, total disdain of other peoples. Whether he meant this or not is moot.
From his perch in the ivory tower, Gushee damns his own country as being the predominant user of the ultimate weapon – global warming – to work its will, notwithstanding that both laws and technology probably make this country the most efficient in the world in restricting pollution of all kinds. From his perch in the ivory tower, Gushee damns “Bible-believing Christians” for having no significant sympathy for people adversely affected by global warming…in other words, “tough luck all you non-believers…we got the Book on our side.”
It would be hard to put a number on the degree of outright silliness in Gushee’s pronouncements, probably causing even the freshmen to snicker at such inane statements. Certainly, anyone who’s been around for a while laughs out loud at such foolishness. In one fell swoop, Gushee makes the U.S., driven at least partly by its “Bible-believers,” into the villain of the piece, the executioner using global warming (simply by not destroying it) to dominate the world until everyone else either melts or learns how to live in air-conditioned suits. This guy teaches in a university when hatred of both the U.S. and Christianity dominates administrations and faculties on most campuses, whether or not at Mercer, so he reflects that same anti-country, anti-conservative Christian (assuming such person to be the “Bible-believer” by Gushee) bias. Disgusting!
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
3 comments:
Jim:
I'm not a huge fan of all the pseudo science surrounding "climate change." I'm also not convined there's any reasonable way to reduce CO2 w/out crippling our economy.. something a democracy won't allow.
With these caveats, I wanted to offer you the latest scary prediction:
From the New Repubicn (opening paragarphs... subscription required):
Burning at the Stake, by Philip Jenkins
How global warming will increase religious strife.
Post Date Monday, December 10, 2007
When John of Patmos listed the four horsemen of the apocalypse, he didn't have access to climate-modeling software or any of the technology used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If he had, he might have described the end of times in slightly more specific terms. And, to know what those terms would be, you just have to look at the area approximately between the latitudes of 23 degrees north and 23 degrees south over the next 50 or so years.
Over the next half-century, this equatorial swath will be broiling from global warming. Droughts will kill crops, and warming oceans will cripple the fishing industry (decimating the populations of fishing villages that will be disappearing, anyway, because water from the melting ice caps will drown them). By midcentury, water shortages could force countries already suffering from generations of ethnic and religious conflict to explode. A country like Nigeria, for example, where Christians and Muslims have self-segregated to the Southeast and the North, might erupt in a violent tug-of-war over limited water supplies. The Coptic Christians in Egypt could become a lost people, as ethnic cleansing in the name of resource protection becomes common. By the same token, Muslim minorities in places like Uganda and Kenya might be annihilated or driven out, creating vast waves of refugees that will swarm the more prosperous countries looking for aid (in response to which Western countries could see a new era of harsh border enforcement). Gradually, whole areas would become arid, uninhabitable wastelands.
The ramifications for the global warming-driven destruction of equatorial nations are frightening for everyone--but they should be especially frightening for Christians, whose numbers have been growing so explosively in those very areas. By 2050, although the world's largest Christian population will still be found in the United States, many of the other most populous communities will belong to the global South, in places like Brazil, Mexico, Nigeria, the Congo, Ethiopia, Uganda, and the Philippines. Christianity is no longer synonymous with the West, and that equation will become ever less plausible as time passes. What Christianity is becoming synonymous with, however, is the most volatile and the most ecologically threatened area of the world--and the coming temperature changes could have serious consequences for the future of the religion.
Sorry, I meant "The New Republic."
Thanks. I don't mean that people shouldn't be concerned about the warming, which is a cyclical thing climate-wise. I simply don't think, and I think competent scientists are proving it, that the warming is manmade in any way and thus not a matter of Christianity, but a matter of dealing with the problems cited in the article.
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