Tuesday 1 May 2007

Worldwide Religio-Enviro-Babble

What do you get when you mix faith and pseudo-science? The answer seems to be "laughable nonsense." Religionists -- mainstream religionists that is -- are up in arms about the global warming religion, and all are equally unhinged.

You'll recall Garth George's arrant nonsense on the subject: that he knew global warming couldn't be happening because God had "sent" a rainbow after Noah's flood to show he was "keeping his promise."

To that foolishness you can now add "the diverse 50m-strong conservative evangelical churches" of the US, many of whose leaders, says The Guardian, "say they are still not convinced that global warming is human-induced and have argued that the collapse of the world is inevitable and will herald the second coming of Christ." Opposing them are younger leaders who are "redefining environmentalism as 'creation care'," and now joining them is none other than the Pope, that guardian of all that is scientific, who declares that "abuse of the environment is against God's will, and we must all "respect creation" while "focusing on the needs of sustainable development." The story of all this religio-enviro-babble is here.

This is what happens when you abandon reason, and rely instead on superstition. But how do you decide who's right about your god's wishes when you all claim a direct line to your own imaginary friend? And how do you understand or deal with your differences on the the scientific evidence when the only means of 'knowledge' you respect is not evidential, but that so-called shortcut to knowledge that is actually a short-circuit: that enemy of reason that is faith?

UPDATE 1: A big surprise: the polar bears' picnic, The Daily Telegraph
This short report from the foot of Christopher Brooker's column is worth republishing in full:
When [Tony Blair's Environment Secretary] David Miliband sends every school in the country a copy of Al Gore's ... film An Inconvenient Truth, to alert our children to the horrors of global warming, he had better instruct teachers to avert their charges' gaze from the drama making front-page news in Canada.

The May blossom may be out three weeks early in England, but for three weeks off the coast of Newfoundland, a fleet of seal boats - bent on culling the seals that are a major threat to Canada's fish stocks - have been trapped in the worst ice for decades. Thanks to global warming, it has been so cold that about 40 are frozen in, and not a few, as their crews are winched to safety by helicopter, will have to be abandoned.

As the pupils watch Al Gore's heart-rending sequence on the plight of the polar bears, doomed by the vanishing Arctic ice, their gaze will also have to be averted from the latest study by the US National Biological Service, which finds that polar bears in Alaska are increasing in numbers to the limit that their environment can sustain.

This confirms last year's report by Mitchell Taylor that, of the 13 polar bear groups in eastern Canada, 11 are increasing in numbers, only two declining - one of these, on west Hudson Bay, being the one the global warming doomsayers concentrate on.

It is clearly vital that our schoolchildren's ability to think for themselves should not be undermined by alerting them to such inconvenient truths.
Guess that old Inuit wisdom was right, huh?

UPDATE 2: Lewis Black on the Daily Show extracts the urine out of fucking Earth Day and all those polluting emissions from fatuous shit-eating fucking celebrities. As Kenny says hopefully at SOLO, "When the Green lobby is ridiculed by the liberal media, there is still hope that environmental statism can be stopped."

4 comments:

Greg said...

Aim higher and try harder! Hit post-modern "all narritives are equal" for a change.
Po-mo culture and 'thought' is more influential in wider society than the comments of a few Christian leaders to thier followers.

It's the merde-spinning French beret wearers that put the wisdom of the Inuit elder and the Green "thinker" on the same level as a modern scientist not the whimsies of Garth George.

Anonymous said...

I think the Vatican's about-face can be explained in the sentence 'Many faiths also realise their potential to influence politicians and financiers'. Another step towards theocracy.

Christians of the evangelical flavour oppose GW because it contradicts religious principles - the same people are pro-smacking for the same reason - freedom from the state has nothing to do with it. Falwell said recently that God would take care of the earth until Jesus returns. They have long abandoned rational thinking.

BTW there is a new scienceblog about denialism which looks good http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/

Anonymous said...

A timely warning from the Pope.
Look what happened to this place when the Doolins got going with their V8s.

http://tinyurl.com/33azkm

JC

Anonymous said...

I think that Garth George is a good bloke. Perhaps Garth George & Ken Ring (the weather forecaster) would like to meet with the Climate Change minister David Parker and give him a lecture on how climate patterns evolve over time.