The Absurdity Of Global Warming Politics

http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,22069080-5001031,00.html

The beauty of the current Global Warming Religion is that it can be used as the basis for local cooling, warming, more rain, less rain, more storms, fewer storms, … pretty much anything your lil’ heart desires. Since the GW pantheists have pretty much dispense with scientific rigor, peer review, experimental duplication, validation of input data, and all the rest, anything is possible.

This ought not to surprise anyone. When an issue divides itself almost perfectly along lines of political ideology, you can pretty much bet there isn’t much science or reason involved – it’s all about agenda.

When you look to the Right, you see people flatly denying the anthropogenic model of warming because … well, “God gave us dominion over the planet” or “it’s bad for business” or (worse still) “it won’t be a problem in my lifetime”.

The Left has wildly embraced the anthropogenic warming mode. It has done so because of a slightly more complex set of intellectual defects than the Right and these come in several parts:

1. The Left was deeply influenced by “theory”in the mid 20th Century. I don’t mean a real theory like scientists might propose. I’m talking about the -isms: Postmodernism, Poststructuralism, Deconstructionism, and such. These schools of “thought” varied in detail, but shared one essential character: Reason was not seen as the sole or even primary way by which humans acquired knowledge that could be made normative upon other humans. It was all about reading meaning into the object under consideration, even if that meaning was entirely an artifice of the reader. When you abandon Reason entirely – which the various theory schools did, more-or-less – you can make anything “true” as you see fit.N.B. That even the most devoutly religious members of the Right never abandoned Reason. They merely claim that it is only one of several ways we acquire knowlege. A considerable portion of Judeo-Christian theological history was dedicated to the development and use of Reason in service to the Creator.
2. The Left was also early to the game of abandoning religion and any notion of transcendent meaning outside human definition. If there is no Creator and no meaning to the physical universe – it is just a random set of physics equations – then it follows pretty quickly that the only possible source of either “good” or “bad” things happening to our world must either be one of those random equations OR we humans are to blame. In effect, elevating humanity to being the single highest source of transcendence in the known universe, opened the door to blaming humans for the “bad” things that might happen. In short, anthropogenic warming serves a kind of Humanist ego agenda that with the help of 1) above doesn’t need any real rational basis.***
3. Even as traditional religious observation was abandoned, nothing could stop the inherent nature of humans to seek meaning in their lives. Here the Left stepped up with a variety of offerings from Eastern Mysticism to the various gobbledygook New Age practices. One popular form of replacement religion was Earth-worshiping – shrouded in the form of “Environmentalism”. In effect, the adherents of these ideas became closet pantheists with the Earth as their (non-personal) deity and the Environmental dogma as their theology.
4. The Left has been losing political traction since the late 1970s. Witness the recent Democrat “mandate” in the mid-term US elections wherein the Left Democrats have been essentially powerless in actual fact. In the face of losing the hearts and minds of the voters (“You mean those people in the Mid-West and South actually vote????!”), one sure way to try and win them back is to scare the “dummies” into believing that: a) There is imminent danger ahead and b) Your side has the answer.

Taken together, 1-4 explain the Left obsession with anthopogenic warming causes. Now, it may well be that we are in fact causing some acceleration of warming. But the science still isn’t complete and cannot make that case in any compelling way just yet. But that doesn’t stop the ideologues on both sides from making declarations with solemn certainty.

*** A closely related expression of this intellectual defect (the Humanist insistence that there is no transcendent meaning to life outside of mankind itself) can be seen in the current healthcare debates. At the bottom of the noise, there is, I am convinced, an essential bitterness on the part of the Humanists. It just annoys them to no end that we humans inevitably die. Especially so since, in the absence of any transcendent meaning, life alone has meaning. Death ends all meaning. Thus, it is all the more important that the center of the universe of meaning – the human being – be preserved for as long as possible and at any cost, even the use of government force. What is particularly revolting about this view, beyond its necessary use of force to be achieved, is that the same people who hold this view get convenient amnesia when the subject of abortion is introduced. Apparently, only some human lives’ meaning are worth preserving.