It’s hard to believe it’s been 23 years since Ghostbusters came out. I’ve always liked that movie, particularly the seen where Bill Murray’s character is trying to convince New York’s mayor that he’s got a problem on his hands:
Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, “biblical”?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria.
I was inexorably reminded of this scene when I read at American Thinker that the UN, when it released its latest climate change report, was afraid of a media panic:
Achim Steiner explained that while scientists would never use words such as “crisis,” “terrifying” or “Armageddon,” the media’s over-hype may damage public willingness to act by making the problem seem all but insurmountable:
“I’m a bit preoccupied that the media, having contributed to every day making another doomsday news headline, then in six weeks time will declare it hysteria and move on.”
Mr. Steiner was right to be worried. The same American Thinker article points out that, within hours, the major media outlets had generated the following high pitched headlines:
Climate Report: Poor Will Suffer Most (CBS News)
UN Warns of Extinction, Flooding From Global Warming (Bloomberg News)
Panel: Global Warming a Threat to Earth (ABC News)
Results Of Global Warming: Hunger, Disease, Extinction (AP)
U.N. Report: Climate Change Poses Bleak Future (NPR)
Be afraid, be very afraid. It’s either this or the Stay-Puff Marshmallow man.
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I think it quite likely that the problem of climate change IS insurmountable, whatever its cause. Let’s assume that the climate is changing and will continue to change much more rapidly than imaginable — not over 100′s or 1000′s of years but over decades. How should you spend the time we’ve got: promoting carbon off-sets, passing carbon taxes, cannonizing St Bore? Or, planting gardens, installing solar panels, or (as the Mormon’s have been preaching forever) storing food?
Think in terms of Pascal’s wager: if I believe climate change and famine is coming and prepare and I am wrong, I have lost nothing. If I disbelieve climate change and famine is coming and I do not prepare and I am wrong, I lose everything.
I think famine will be precipitated more by food crops converted to ethanol than by global warming. Though I don’t doubt the reality of climate change — of course the climate changes; Mother Nature shuffles the cards and plays her games — the gospel of catastrophic global warming seems like another form of hysterical eschatology. I gave up believing the End is Near when Y2K fizzled.
As an IT professional, I have a collection of Y2K hysteria artifacts and there are a lot of similarites! Y2K was a real problem that was, although big, simple and easily fixed. And was made huge, mysterious and “end-of-the-world” in impact. This made uncounted numbers of consultants rich.
In the same way, the prophets/profits of climate change are cashing in. But that doesn’t make it not happening.
I said climate change is a reality. As the Buddhists say, change is the only constant. What I disavow is the hysterical catastrophic preaching.
And what I am preaching is disavow the hysterics and look at the reality!
I live in the Chicago area and the reality is that without global warming neither I nor 3.5 million of my neighbors would be able to live here. The area, afterall, was at one time under a glacier. The reality is that February was the fourth coldest month since people started keeping track of the weather in this area. Oh,and thats per the Chicago Tribune. The reality is that weather changes and man has always accomodated himself to it.
My all time favorite line in Ghostbusters was “If someone asks if you’re a god, SAY YES!” It appeals to my medical training.
As far as Global Warming goes, this is the latest version of “the world will end tomorrow” phenomenon which far too many alleged adults fall prey to. The believers feared the world would end at the turn of the First Millennium, people thought the Black Plague was the beginning of the end, there was the Y2K panic, there are people who maintain that when the measured time line on an Inca calendar carved on a stone circle runs out, the world will end (I think that is supposed to be 2012). Such fears appeal to an atavistic element in man’s psychi, and it sure sells newsprint. So, any intelligent climatologist legitimately avoids the media, whatever his conclusions on the cause and outcome of “Global Warming”.
Is the Earth getting warmer? Yes.
Is man the primary cause of the Earth getting warmer? No.
(How can you say that?!!!. Because Mars is getting warmer too and the last time I looked, man ain’t there. The Earth and Mars are getting warmer because of the Sun.)
Has this happened before? Yes.
Will man survive? Yes.
It is time that more people followed rockdalian’s observations. There are benefits to the Earth becoming a bit warmer. Growing seasons lengthen, fewer people will die. There are many more deaths from disease in the Winter than the Summer. As was said before, the only constant is change. Flexible, calm, intelligent men will adapt and grow. Rigid, hysterical, myopic men will pass away.
And I sincerely hope that those who profit off the hysteria they promote go straight to Hell.
Al
It’s the socio-political aspect of the Climate Change phenomenon that gives the game away. Lawyers might ask “Qui Bono?”, or “Who benefits?”. Fans of detective fiction might say, “Follow the money”. Essentially, all the folks advocating climate change are outsiders, those not essential to the central discourse of our society – Commerce. They tend to be people who either were once important, (Al Gore, Nicholas Stern) or never were important, (Green-left activists, research scientists, journalists, etc.) to the market economy. Such people are as prone to ego-driven excess as Wall St. “Masters of the Universe”, but unlike successful business people, are not accomodated in this by society. How to rectify this oversight on the part of their fellow human beings? Simple! Just re-order society so that the folks currently running it are hobbled, and all political and economic power is vested in Green-left activists, research scientists, journalists, etc. Of course this will require the old order to be swept away by mass dissatisfaction, which the current controversy is intended to promote. Me, I’m betting that folks like hot water, SUVs and Plasma screens far too much to become all that dissatisfied.
I’m betting that folks like hot water, SUVs and Plasma screens far too much to become all that dissatisfied.
Which is why they will get the Islamic Jihad to do it for them, either directly or through mass economic destabilization.