Mama Don't Preach

Yes, it’s an easy target, but I’m feeling lazy — yet not too lazy to address a totally non-condescending article from a magazine that’s “proudly printed on recycled, processed chlorine-free paper, using soy-based ink.” It’s also published online using only pixels pushed by purple SEIU pixies, and using electricity generated by unicorn flatulence-fired steam engines boiling fair trade vegan hippie urine. Just kidding about the non-condescending part. You can’t throw an overpriced organic strawberry toward the pompous pulp and not nail some haughty hipster’s hit piece.

How To Convince Conservative Christians That Global Warming Is Real

Nope, nothing patronizing about that title.

But seriously, folks...

I believe there are very few reasonable people who think that civilization has absolutely zero effect on the earth’s environment, including its climate. As an analogy, turning on an incandescent flashlight in a large room will affect its temperature to a small degree. But to say that the flashlight is the primary, or even a significant factor in the room’s “climate,” marginalizing all others, such as variations in the outside temperature — and that turning off the light is necessary to “normalize” its climate — seems ridiculous to me.

I also contend that there are few reasonable people who believe that the pushy progressive policies of the United Nations (the same body that puts Iran on a women’s rights commission) will ultimately save us from turning the atmosphere as opaque as the interior of Snoop Dogg’s Escalade.

Note that the MJ article continues to hawk the hockey stick temperature graph, projecting a catastrophic cascading effect coinciding with an increase in human-caused greenhouse gas emissions.

Apparently, some climate scientists who have previously sided with exponents of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming — Judith Curry, for one — have revised their thinking, acknowledging the reliance on questionable proxy-based data, the fact that numerous other factors and multitudes of interactions of natural climate cycles have been marginalized, and that real data indicate climate projections can be extremely unreliable.

If you’re looking for religious ideologues, much like the ones whom this piece seeks to “enlighten,” there are some who claim to be scientists who are pushing an agenda that’s pretty much reliant on faith in computer models that miraculously always happen to agree with what their fabricators are soliciting.

And if you want an example of closed-minded accusations of heresy, look no further than the treatment of Dr. Curry by some in the alarmist camp.

As a slightly educated person, I am familiar with some basic philosophical concepts and arguments, and one that comes to mind is framed in the story of the paranoid at the party. You strike up a conversation with a stranger at a party who says he’s certain that a group at the other end of the room is plotting to kill him, and he’s convinced that he’ll never get out of there alive. You then go over to the group, discover that they are discussing nothing of the sort, and return to the stranger to report that fact. But he says, “Oh, so you’re in on it, too!”

“Oh, so you’re a shill for big energy...” “Oh, you disagree with 98 percent of climate scientists®.” “Oh, you deny incontrovertible data and evidence...” “Oh, you deny the Holocaust...” “Oh, you believe in a flat earth, lizard people, and that Paul McCartney was...” No.

Exactly what evidence would it take to convince alarmists that their narrative of nearly-inevitable, human-caused impending climate disaster comes off as nothing less than a Jor-El complex — the secular equivalent of a Messiah Complex?

Apologies for the convoluted metaphor, but the proof of the pudding is in the eating — and conveniently for some, not many people who are alive now will be around when the pudding is ready to eat. If you’re truly concerned, instead of speculating on the future cumulative effects of multiple flashlights, why not concentrate on what’s happening with that big ol’ oven that’s been burning since the world’s been turning?

Everybody now, “We didn’t...”