ON THE SUBJECT OF "GLOBAL WARMING", THE THEOLOGY OF AN ADVOCATE IS RELEVANT ON THE QUESTION OF MOTIVE
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Ottrose,
In effect you are saying, decide IT on the basis of "science" and empirical observation. Yes?
In 1920, just before he died, German socialogist Max Weber made an address to students (all demobilized soldiers) entitled "Science as a Vocation". For many intellectuals even today, it is famous.
Weber was responding to the argument that "science" could/would lead to answering life's important issues: the ‘way to true being’, the ‘way to true God’, the ‘way to true happiness’. Ridiculing those who believed that "mastering" life in this sense was possible, Weber asked rhetorically, “Who believes in this (now)?– aside from a few big children in university chairs or editorial boards?”
Tolstoy, he said, has given the simplest answer: “Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: “What shall we do and how shall we live?”
EMPIRICAL OBSERVATIONS
What, after all, shall we say of all the CONFLICTING empirical
observations cited by the advocates. Global warmers had claimed that 1998 was the hottest year ever in North America. But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere's coldest in decades.
In May 2006, German climate modelers reported in the journal "Nature" that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added theese global warmers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
But the WSJ's Bret Stephens argues, this raises a useful question: "If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science."
Many Global Warmeers have advocated that CEOs of corporations who question "global warming" be criminally tried by an international tribunals for 'crimes against humanity.' Do you remember the American politicians who excoriated Exxon-Mobil for its funding of research by scientists disputing the global warming hypothesis?
Does not this sound more than a little like the heresy trials of the Rennaissance? (Galileo etc.)
Why shouldn't the MOTIVATIONS of the global warmers likewise be questioned?
GLOBAL WARMING AS A VEHICLE OF IDEOLOGICAL CONVENIENCE
As Bret Stephens points out, isn't global warming ideal for promoting many "left-wing" political goals?
"Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species."
Go back and re-read Frances Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man. "Man" is not just a product of "reason" and "desire." As Plato argued 2300 years ago in "The Republic" (and elsewhere), Man has a third "thymotic" side that relates to subjects such as politics, nationality & patriotism, ideological and RELIGION.
bruce |
