Some people seem bewildered by the idea that Orthodox Jews might be skeptical of climate change or global warming. As their limited reasoning goes, they figure that since we're dupes for believing in matan Torah and show no skepticism when dealing with the unity and antiquity of the Torah's text we'll fall for anything. The idea that some of us might have used cirtical thinking, looked at the sources and concluded that the Torah is genuine and true is incomprehensible to them. But skeptical I am of the claims of the climate change ecofascists that dominate the debate today.
I realize I'm treading into controversial waters by saying that. When it comes to climate change one is either a true believer or an evil pawn of the oil companies, a friend to Mother Earth or an enemy plotting her demise.
As far as I can see there are three possible options as to what's happening in the world right now:
1) The climate is not changing and all this is made up for reasons I'll write about later.
2) The climate is changing but this is a natural process and humanity is not contributing to it.
3) The climate is changing as a result of humanity's activities.
Now, the ecofascist lobby is solidly behind (3), no question of that and no questioning of that. According to them the climate across the planet is changing and humanity is directly responsible for it and only through massive changes in our behaviour can we avert global catastrophe. Certainly they have scientific evidence to back up their claim and if it's true then we have reason to be worried. Shouldn't that be enough?
As a person with some scientific training I have some reservations. Here are the reasons:
1) "The science is settled". This is one of the mantras of the ecofascist lobby. It's four word sentence used to shut down debate. For anyone who is both scientifically trained and intellectually honest it's a loaded statement that indicates the exact opposite and if multitudes of international scientists are muttering it today that tells you where intellectual honest is in today's science community. The science is never settled, certainly not in complex areas like the environment. The science may strongly indicate a trend, it may strongly suggest a conclusion but it cannot be settled. There is always room for questioning and further testing of the data. A scientist who tells you that "the science is settled" is saying that he is only interested in that data which supports his conclusion. That's not real science.
2) "All credible scientists agree". This is another slogan and one which is circular. All credible scientists agree that climate change is real and caused by humanity's misbehaviour because to be labelled a credible scientist you must believe that climate change is real and caused by humanity's misbehaviour. You could be an amazing scientist with dozens of publications to your name but the minute you say you doubt the ecofascist lobby's beliefs you are no longer credible.
3) What's is called anyway? When Al Gore began his lobbying efforts back in the 1990's the issue was called global warming. Perhaps he did this to distinguish himself from those 1970's climate scientists who assured us that we were on the edge of a new ice age. We were treated to Michael Mann's now-disproven hockey stock graph and told temperatures were about to shoot up across the planet. The IPCC has recently had to admit that temperatures on average have not significantly risen across the planet in the last 15 years. I'm right now living in what is the tail end of one of the worst winters in memory where I live. It's almost the middle of March but we're still expecting subzero temperatures for another 1-2 weeks. Normally we'd be well into the spring thaw by now. To get around this annoying inconvenience the lobby changed terms, now calling it climate change. This made their job far easier. Was it a colder than normal winter? Climate change! A warmer than normal winter? Climate change!
4) Cilmate change is also a misnomer for the movement because climate change is a normal feature of life on Earth. Ask any mastadon who survived the last ice age (okay, bad example). The climate changes on Earth from time to time and has been doing so since time immemorial. What's more we have recent Medieval Warming Period, an era in which the northern hemisphere became warm enough to support active colonization of Greenland, a desolate frozen wasteland today. Given the small human population and low technological situation at the time one cannot blame humanity for the MWP. This is an inconvenient bit for the ecofascists who either downplay the significance of the MWP or forget to mention it when sermonizing about climate change.
5) The hypocrisy of the leaders. Al Gore lives in a mansion that consumes more electricity than some small towns. David Suzuki trots around Canada in a diesel powered bus. Barack Obama flies everywhere in a jet. The high priests of Green are some of the biggest individual consumers of carbon although this doesn't stop them from lecturing the rest of us on reducing our carbon footprint.
6) Shut up! That's usually the response one gets from ecofascists when their orthodoxies are confronted with contradicting facts. You don't get reasoned discussion. You don't get an alternative explanation of those facts. You get yelled at and insulted. I recall David Suzuki appearing on a right wing readio show and storming off after the radio host began listing scientists who did not believe in global warming and had data to support their point. A strong ideology does not respond to challenges that way, a weak one that knows it's a load of hooey does and that exactly describes the representatives of the eco-fascist movement.
If climate change is real why does the ecofascist movement act like it does?
Navonim - The Ramblings of Garnel Ironheart
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8 comments:
And calling these scientists and environmentally concerned individuals "ecofascists" is clearly a sign of a well-reasoned analysis.
Richie, these scientists and environmentally concerned individuals spend as much time if not more villifying their opposition than presenting their "facts". They long ago crossed the border between concerned scientists and political/religious activists and they need to be called out on that.
To them "settled" means "imposed on everyone without regard to its merits".
Climate change is a scam on multiple levels.
The green industry wants to conflate carbon monoxide and dioxide into just saying that carbon is a pollutant in order to sell carbon rights to people and companies. They want to create this new right/product as a legal fiction, sell it to the world, and get exceedingly rich.
However, dioxide is perfectly natural and not pollution. Monoxide is the pollutant. However you don't see them going after cars and cigarettes (two main co1 emitters) everyone needs their cars and the gubermint makes big money with their sin taxes on cigarettes.
Scondly, the third world would like to use climate change in order to rip off the industrialized world making it like they are owed something. Climate change is just an excuse for the turd world to be all Al Sharpton on the west at the united nations.
Now for some real science- the world is getting colder. x.x And on top of that many western European nations already tried green energy and their economies are all shit. It is very easy to have no pollution if nobody is working. roflmao
Hear, hear, Sir Ironheart a rare man of goodly sense you are in these times! This man was once oblivious of the issues until he smelled rot when the Hockey Stick Mann took his T-square to flatten the Medieval Warm Period and thoughtlessly iron-out the Roman and Minoan ones along the way too. The nerve of that rascal.
So many things wrong about this "anthropogenic global warming" bubemeise, but the one which fascinates Temujin most is how it was possible to obliterate the obvious, the intuitive, the historically proven: Warm good; cold bad.
To wit, the World verily rejoices when the mercury climbs the glass. Civilizations grow, commerce buzzes. With more moisture in the atmosphere and longer growing seasons the crops flourish and humans do too, as milder temperatures and more protein and variety in the diets let folks live longer, happier lives. But when it dips, even by a degree or two, woe is onto us, for we plunge into nasty times; evil plagues, endless wars, crop failures and famines, eco system degradations, extinctions, human and animal migrations, draughts, religious nuttery with heretic and witch hunts and the most savage persecutions of the Jews. A desperate prayer from the Little Ice Age just after the halcyon years of the Medieval Climate Optimum: A bella, a fame et pestus, liberas nos Domine… “of wars, famine and plagues, liberate us, o Lord!”
Global Warming indeed. We fret over our carbon footprints as temperatures flatten and threaten to dip in line with the patterns of a long cycle of Solar minima, with our Sun’s present activities at their lowest in a century and very much like those of the Mini Ice Age, the Maunder Minimum of the mid-17th. We may yet wish for the Goracle’s Global Bovine Faeces, what?
Harrumph! Temujin keeps coming back to check this page, expecting to find a raging comments war or long discussions and...nada! Not only is this topic a hobgoblin of Temujin's, but this here be perhaps the most important issue of our generation and our children's generations; our governments and betters are making sweeping changes to our laws, siphoning dizzying sums of money from us and most importantly, finding ways to limit our access to what fuels and sustains us on this physical plane: Energy. They are changing our future by decree and fiat. Somewhat disconcerting, no?
Sir Ironheart, perhaps one totally misunderstood the plain meaning or context, but you wrote: "Certainly they have scientific evidence to back up their claim and if it's true then we have reason to be worried."
One can a argue with confidence that remarkably, no. Not a bit, bissle, nor quantum to show human cause. One would think there would be some amount of evidence to justify error on their part, but astonishingly, no. Another unique feature of this global warming shtick, apart from the success of the counter-intuitive bleat of "warm bad, cold good," is that it went so far without one iota of convincing empirical evidence. And what a mess: A panic over a logical rise in global temperatures in the post-glacial Holocone; normative dips and peaks, curious "adjustments" of temperature readings and history; ignored Solar data and dismissed Milankovich cycles; lost or ignored historical data on glaciation and fluctuations of sea ice extent, computer simulations which are still unable to deal with the complexity of a spherical Earth or a cloud cover; greenhouse hypotheses based on static lab experiments applied to a dynamic, self-balancing environment we barely understand; total failure of predictive models....one can go on and on with this litany, but you, Sir, can probably rattle such off as well as or more likely better than Temujin.
Anyhow, looking forward to your next post on this topic!
As the infamous Rahm Emanuel once said "never waste a good crisis". In other words, use the crisis to frighten the public into agreeing to give up their rights, eliminate democracy and carry out foolish policies that the radical Left wants which cooler heads would never agree to.
That is the whole story here. The people who push this hysteria are generally unhappy people who are always fretting about "capitalism", "partriarchy", "religious obscurantism" and the such and so are using this climate change stuff to frigthen everyone into giving up their freedoms to allow these extremists to control everyone's lives.
Ben-David, one could add to this, "never waste a convenient idiot" either. And of such, our betters in the corporate boardrooms, university halls, government ministries and the UN have entire armies: The radical left, the Greens, the Panda bear crowds, the eco-fascists, the malleable children and teens, and the docile public which was already trained to religiously gather up, wash, sort and hand over raw materials in the form of economically useless (expensive even) "recyclables."
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