A Climate Change Parable

I was reading some silliness about Global Cooling or Global Warming or  Climate Change on The Guardian's website, and came upon this little parable by someone named CloutPerson.  It beautifully captures why there are so many skeptics and denialists remaining in the reality-based community.

(Another reason for our skepticism is that we all own thermometers.  Read the article in the link.  The author is distressed and bothered because the thermometers aren't agreeing with the theories.) 

Enjoy.  I've changed a few of CloutPerson's obscure British references to equally obscure Texas references, and I've thrown in some helpful pics at the end. 

Here's Mr. CloutPerson's parable.   

I was engaged in my favourite hobby of jumping up and down the other day, when a fellow up-and-down jumper sidled up alongside me and said "Do you realise that jumping up and down will cause the ground to collapse? If we don't stop jumping up and down we'll all fall into an enormous chasm and be killed."

"Really?" I answered. "In that case why are you still jumping up and down?"

"Didn't you hear what I said?" he hissed. "It's known as ground-collapse theory - GCT for short!"

"I heard you very well," I answered. "But you haven't answered my question. I'm still curious as to why you keep jumping up and down if it is going to cause the ground to collapse."

"You fool!" he spluttered. "Don't you realise that 95% of scientists are convinced that GCT is real!"

He pointed. "Look!" I followed his finger, and saw a large group of people. By their appearance you could tell that they were all eminent scientists.  They were wearing white lab coats and were jumping up and down with thick academic studies that proved that jumping up and down was going to cause the ground to collapse.  And yet all of them were jumping up and down with varying degrees of vigor.

"You still haven't answered my question," I said. "Surely if all these eminent scientists are convinced that GCT is real, they would stop jumping up and down."

"Idiot!" he spat out the word. "Stupid, blinkered, denialist!"

"Actually, you still haven't answered my question," I responded mildly. "If I was as convinced of the reality of GCT as you seem to be, and I wanted everybody to stop jumping up and down, then I'd probably stop jumping up and down myself first. Otherwise my argument might seem rather less than compelling -"

"SHUT UP!" he interrupted me with an apoplectic scream, his face contorted with rage and hatred. "It should be a CRIMINAL OFFENCE to deny the reality of Ground Collapse Theory! You're worse than a MURDERER! You should be in JAIL along with all the other RACIST SWIVEL-EYED DAILY HEIL READING NAZI UKIP FACISTS!"

(UKIP is the United Kingdom Independence Party - Libertarian, non-racist, limited government - all the usual insults.  I think the Daily Heil is a reference to London's Daily Mail.  Somebody on that side of the pond, please help us out in the comment field....) 

And with these final words he took his leave, frothing and purple.

"But why are you still jumping up and down?" I called after his disappearing form....

Good stuff, right? 
Earlier this weekend, our Secretary Of State, John Kerry, put on one of his longest of long faces and declared that Climate Change "science" is clear.

"It is irrefutable and it is alarming," Kerry told a climate conference in Majuro in the Marshall Islands in a video address from Washington.
"If we continue down our current path, the impacts of climate change will only get worse."

Here are pics of John Kerry's houses, getaways, beach cottages, mansions, townhouses, and cabins.  If John Kerry wants anyone to believe his bullshit, he needs to stop jumping up and down.
 
Most of the pics came from here. 

This is the Kerry Karbon Footprint in Beacon Hill. 

 

Here's Kerry's small, sensible, ecologically sensible Georgetown residence

 

Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania.  A carbon footprint big enough to negate all the recycling you'll do for the rest of your life. 

 

The little beach cottage in Nantucket. 

 

The Ketchum, Idaho ski getaway

If you believe Kerry's Chicken Little-ism, or Al Gore's, by all means send them money.  Pay for factories to reconfigure to reduce emissions.  Give Gore and Kleiner-Perkins money to plant trees to offset your carbon footprint. I respect your right to be gullible. 

 

But please don't tell anyone that these guys believe a word they're saying.  In a world of people who are now afraid that the ground is going to collapse, they're the ones jumping up and down the hardest.  

Have you taken in a Climate Change refugee family?

I have taken in a climate change refugee family of four.  They were driven out of their home in the Mekong Delta because of the flooding from the melting polar ice caps. 
We are working to place 8 other families, and I hope you can spread this appeal to everyone on your email list. 
In the meantime, please pray for the people in the Southeastern U.S. as they begin abandoning their homes in a quest for higher ground. 

Oh.  Wait a minute.  None of that happened.  False alarm.  Chill out.  Never mind. 

Back in 2005, the U.N.'s Chicken Little Climate Outfit put out an alarm designed to scare the crap out of everybody living less than half a mile above sea level.  We were going to have 50 million climate refugees by 2010. 

Fifty million climate refugees by 2010. Today we find a world of asymmetric development, unsustainable natural resource use, and continued rural and urban poverty. There is general agreement about the current global environmental and development crisis. It is also known that the consequences of these global changes have the most devastating impacts on the poorest, who historically have had limited entitlements and opportunities for growth.

Why the screen shot, instead of a link? Well, the representatives of truth at all costs decided that their predictions were a bit embarrassing and scrubbed the site.  We still have this Inconvenient Truth of a relic thanks to the miracle of Google cache. 
The also tried to delete the delightful map that showed which parts of the world would most likely be under water by now.  With that many climatologists leaning all over each other at the U.N., you'd think that one of them would know that this stuff stays out there on the internet forever....

And in the words of Anthony Watts,

And here it is in full-sized hi-resolution glory, suitable for printing, slides, or coffee mugs…wherever it might be appropriate to show the folly of these boneheads.

You can hit this link and get a larger version. 

I'm emailing this trophy to our graphics department today to have it posterized.  And I'm talking a really huge poster.

This non-crisis is about fund-raising through fear. 

It would've been interesting to live with one of those flooded-out refugee families, though. 

A suggestion to the Feds for the large graphic warning labels soon to be required on cigarette packs

From the L.A. Times:

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — Corpses, cancer patients and diseased lungs: These are some of the images the federal government plans for larger, graphic warning labels that will take up half of each cigarette package.

The images are part of a new campaign announced by the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday to reduce tobacco use, which is responsible for about 443,000 deaths per year.

"It acts as a very public billboard because you all of the sudden are reading something about lung cancer from that pack behind the cash register, whereas before you were just reading 'Marlboro,' " said David Hammond, a health behavior researcher at the University of Waterloo in Canada, who is working with the firm designing the labels with for the FDA.

....Anti-tobacco advocates are applauding the federal campaign and the new warning labels.


"This is going to stop kids from starting to smoke ... and it's going to give smokers a strong incentive to quit smoking," said Patrick Reynolds, the grandson of R.J. Reynolds and executive director of the Foundation for a Smokefree America. Reynolds' father, brother and other relatives died from smoking-related illnesses.

It remains to be seen how well the scare tactics will work.

"I don't think they're going to be a deterrent at all for people who already smoke. Most people start smoking when they're young, and I don't think they're going to think about the effects," said 27-year-old Zak Hoffman, who has been smoking since age 14.

Well, Zak, that's because I'm not the one picking out the pictures. 
Forget cancer, gum disease, and tongue amputations. 
Put me in charge of the pictures, and I'll scare the hell out of some smokers. 

How about the now-proven link between smoking and economic retardation, communication difficulties, and an inability to speak without prompts? 

I got yer frightening graphic images right here.  Get the kids out of the room, back away from your computer, and hit this link. 

A fresh coat of Whitening to the P.O.W. In California for the heads up on this one. 

Albert Mohler and Christian Yoga

Since everyone else is attacking Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville Kentucky, I can't help but jump on the dogpile. 

LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A Southern Baptist leader who is calling for Christians to avoid yoga and its spiritual attachments is getting plenty of pushback from enthusiasts who defend the ancient practice.

Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler says the stretching and meditative discipline derived from Eastern religions is not a Christian pathway to God.
Mohler said he objects to "the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine."
"That's just not Christianity," Mohler told The Associated Press.

Well, it will soon be Christianity, if enough people decide that it is. 

Sometime around the year 325, people decided that "The Trinity" was Christianity.

About 1500 years after that, Protestants decided that Infant Damnation was no longer part of Christianity.  They invented something called "the age of accountability".  It worked, it was handy.  Everyone felt better.  The Catholics already had a place called Purgatory, so it helped us keep up with 'em.

Religious beliefs are fluid.  They change.  They evolve. 

Tortillas were not a part of traditional Christianity, since Christianity first grew and developed in the Middle East.  Tortillas originated someplace in Latin America, perhaps more than 10,000 years ago.  Many Christians, even in Louisville, Kentucky, have been known to consume tortillas. 

Mohler said he objects to "the idea that the body is a vehicle for reaching consciousness with the divine."

Good lord in heaven, what a bass-ackward witch doctor is Albert Mohler.  Let's start from the top:  Christians kneel.  Christians clasp their hands in prayer, as a gesture of supplication.  Christians sometimes lift their hands, with their palms turned upward, as if to receive whatever heaven is offering.  Christians bow their freakin' heads.  Those are the examples most likely on display in the Protestant churches of Louisville. 

Branch out geographically and historically, and you'll find examples of Christians fasting, mortifying the flesh, flogging themselves and going through all sorts of other contortions to escape the idea that "this" is all there is. 

It boils down to this:  Yoga is different from anything that Dr. Mohler grew up with.  It's also a threat.  You don't need Albert Mohler with you if you're going to practice yoga. 

There's nothing in the curriculum at Dr. Mohler's Louisville Angel Factory that prepares him for this.  If current trends continue, theologians will suddenly discover a pre-existing Baptist/Yoga tradition that goes all the way back to W.A. Criswell. 

I could go on and on with this, but I'm starting to break out in stigmata. 
 
The picture came from Christian Yoga magazine.
Additional pic at the request of Cedric Katesby (see comments).  This statue depicts Mother Earth being nuzzled by an infant Al Gore.  Also from Christian Yoga magazine. 
I don't think Cedric gets out much.