[Wullu]

How does this man stay employed at the CBC? He thinks far too clearly. Guess he just out smarts them all. Not a huge task.......

Quote:

More a cause than a science



By REX MURPHY

Saturday, June 9, 2007 – Page A23



The key imprint of George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, is its sadness. There is the sadness of Dorothea, the heroine, led by guileless idealism into a loveless marriage with the desiccated scholar, Edward Causabon. Eliot's craft is to present the Reverend Causabon, who in a less skillful writer's hands would have been a repellant bore, as a figure of much melancholy affect.

Causabon's relentless and sterile quest to write a universal book, the chimera of The Key to All Mythologies, first strikes the reader as vain and, then, as simply sad. Eliot's artistic triumph was to place Causabon and his mania within the circle of our sympathies.

There is no key to all mythologies. There was not one in the 19th century and there is not one now. Life is a radically complex phenomenon. The world is vast and intricate and human reason, for all its progress, is still stranded on the approaches to a full understanding of its processes, its myriad enigmas, its ultimate origins and perhaps even its point.

Since the days of Isaac Newton, Western science has advanced our knowledge of the world and the cosmos to an almost miraculous degree. We know enough now perhaps to say with the force of real truth what was not possible to say before our time: that now we know how little we know.

Certainly this was Newton's own attitude. Even after the titanic intellectual achievements of his work on gravity, planetary motion, and light he related in a letter how he saw his work. The quotation is familiar and eloquent: "To myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on a seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

It is also a very comforting quotation. When a mind of the reach and penetration of Isaac Newton measured with such exquisite proportion his great achievement ("a smoother pebble or a prettier shell") against what was yet to be discovered and explained ("the great ocean of truth") we were given one of the great signatures of real science. Its hesitancy, its deference to what remains to be said or explored, its horror of overstatement and its aversion to dogmatic certitude.

Newton - despite his wanderings into alchemy - was no Causabon. He saw the limits of what he knew, and knew the vanity of striving to know all.

There's not much of hesitancy, or deference, or horror of overstatement, in this the high noon of the global warming movement. Global warming as "explanation" is now tethered to the most minuscule of circumstances to the most macroscopic. A group called Pets Across America (which we may assume is not an assembly of climatologists) reported this week that "droves of cats and kittens are swarming into animal shelters nationwide, and global warming is to blame," and that since "global warming is probably not going to be slowing any time soon" it's best for pets to be "spayed and neutered" now.

This is of course ludicrous to the point of farce. Global warming as a key to randy cats. But it is but one illustration that could be multiplied by a thousand of the now nearly automatic linkage of the most particular or local circumstances to the available "explanation" of global warming.

Global warming is the new Key to All Mythologies. It is a vast and total reading of our world, and because it is vast and total it calls up responses from changing light bulbs to rearranging the economies - and the politics - of the world. It pits the industrial countries against the developing ones, it "relates" a flight from Ottawa to Montreal to the future impoverishment of some Pacific island, it speaks in the doom-laden accents of pure certitude of what will happen in 50 or 75 or a hundred years from now - and, with the same ferocious certitude, demands decisions of immense consequence be made now to forestall its bleak and definitive projections.

There is so much of blind or casual acceptance of global warming as the crisis of our time, or its high "moral" essence, and such an overwhelming pressure to accept its tenets and claims as to amount to a stampede.

There is, in other words, so much that is antithetical to the spirit of real science in the various campaigns being waged as to immensely discount the principal claim that it is science that is driving them all.

Global warming has some science at its core. But it has been overlaid with a vast engine of continuous alarmism, propaganda, relentless campaigning, facile projections, and not a little bullying righteousness by some of its celebrity proponents.

It is, for all that is shouted to the contrary, more a cause than a science.

REX MURPHY

[Banff]

There is money in it , "alot of it " therefore we are doomed to all the rhetoric that goes with it by george even the gas and oil industry is making huge sums off of this global threat (imaginary) With it I'd say Science is insulting itself with its own ignorance and stupidity . There is nothing worse than science demonstrating how wrong it is but how much people just go with it (cause) I think Rex is slow at the draw if he just realizes now .

[sandorski]

Rex is partially correct here, but only in that some are certainly taking advantage of the situation for their own gain. It's nothing new and is more similar to how some take advantage of a pending Hurricane or some other more immediate disaster. Conmen, snake oil salesmen, Televangelists, and all sorts of persons of questionable moral principle live for these types of events/situations for they give them the opportunity to take advantage of the gullible.

[grainfedprairieboy]

sandorski wrote:

Rex is partially correct here,

Only correct until he dares to suggest that the science is faulty?

Climate Catastrophe Cancelled - PART 1/5

[youtube width=425 height=350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwgruLoObWo[/youtube]

[hwacker]

speaking of "retarded" how's Iceowl doing ?

[grainfedprairieboy]

IceOwl wrote:

I think it only makes sense, at this point in time, to include people who think global warming is a hoax in the one quarter of the population that's just fucking retarded.

One quarter of Canada's population lives in Southern Ontario. Coincidence?

[PluggyRug]

This apt phrase....

Quote:

it has been overlaid with a vast engine of continuous alarmism, propaganda, relentless campaigning, facile projections, and not a little bullying righteousness by some of its half-wit proponents.

is an excellent description of.....lemmings.....and.....place name here.

[hwacker]

Quote:

fuck up your chances for survival

we can only hope.

[hwacker]

IceOwl wrote:

grainfedprairieboy wrote:

IceOwl wrote:

I think it only makes sense, at this point in time, to include people who think global warming is a hoax in the one quarter of the population that's just fucking retarded.

One quarter of Canada's population lives in Southern Ontario. Coincidence?

Yes, that would be the intelligent quarter, who understand that when thousands of reputable scientists who have nothing to gain from telling us that, yes, indeed, there is a huge problem that will fuck up our chances for survival if we don't do something about it, we should probably do something instead of pretending it doesn't exist.

Oh I’m sure you'll get some interesting responses for that one.

[neopundit]

IceOwl wrote:

I think it only makes sense, at this point in time, to include people who think global warming is a hoax in the one quarter of the population that's just fucking retarded.

There's a huge difference between believing it's a hoax, and believing it is being blown out of proportion. I think Mr. Murphy holds the latter opinion (as do I).

[grainfedprairieboy]

IceOwl wrote:

It's strange how retards react so excitably when false threats of terrorism are in abundance and they can shout their bigotry from every street corner and internet message board, but when real threats to human survival rear their heads in the form of melting ice caps and permafrost, and heat waves that kill thousands of people nearly every summer, it's just a hoax. But I guess that's why they're retarded.

People are flying planes into buildings in the name of Islam you idiot. These same extremists are committing 1000s of acts of terrorism against innocent people around the globe every year and are currently trying to acquire nuclear weapons in order to do Allah's will. They are a clear and present threat to Canada and the security of her citizens.

Global warming is not a threat to Canada. But it is a fanatical religion on its own similar to Christian fundamentalism or Islamic Wahabbism and you are a typical advocate of 2 out of 3. What you fail to understand or dismiss outright is:

There is not one shred of evidence to even suggest that CO2 can actually cause global warming let alone evidence to suggest it is. The fact is that CO2 IS AN EFFECT OF GLOBAL WARMING AND NOT THE CAUSE. From tree rings to ice cores; 250,000 years of climatic data proves this conclusively. Why oh why do you advocates of CO2 induced climate change continue to ignore this FACT?

The globe itself has not really warmed and there is no hard evidence to suggest it has. Only evidence available proves cities have slightly warmed and that is understandable given their sizes, energy output and thermal mass properties. Now while it is true that the last decade has been warmer then normal the 70s were also a decade much cooler then normal.

How do you explain that more Climatologists actually are opposed to the science of CO2 induced climate change then support it? How do you dismiss the 19,000 scientific signatories to the Oregon Petition as wrong but a Toronto Star editorial position as all knowing?

Sea levels are not rising but actually receding - explain that one.

Planetary temperatures are actually dropping in many areas - explain that one.

There are more glaciers actively increasing in size around the planet then receding - explain that one.

Ice caps are melting and the polar bears are being stranded on ice floes and calved glaciers? Aside from Ziggy's first hand accounts of it still being pretty gol darn cold up north, how about we dispel that classic one right now:

[youtube width=425 height=350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKAC4kfHruQ[/youtube]