timeimmortal

The Earth’s atmosphere is represented by the blue area above.

The area represented by the combination of the red and black lines, and the yellow square, represents the amount of CO2 in said atmosphere.

The black line represents CO2 produced by human beings.

Oh, and…the yellow square is Canada’s share in said amount of human-produced C02.

Personally, for me, the analysis more or less stops at the black line; it’s already insignificant when compared against…pretty much the rest of the chart. And we’re to believe that this nigh-insignificant contribution to the atmosphere is supposed to be heading the planet toward ruin?

That said, the chart would also seem to suggest that a carbon tax imposed on Canadians would be a pretty silly thing.

The face of the sun remains, in the words of one researcher, “dead”. Sunspot activity has been at an 11-year low, and shows no signs of surging upward any time soon.

What this means, of course, is the basis of some debate. In the past, a 50-year absence of sunspot activity coincided with what came to be known as the Little Ice Age, a period of time between 1650 and 1700 in which global temperatures plumetted. Whether the connection is a direct one or merely a coincidence is the debate in this case.

Although it serves to note that the global temperature did fall rather precpitiously during the last year or so.

Perhaps in this case too, the Earth will cool again, for lack of energetic output from its star. Perhaps not — we shall see. Personally, I’m not worried, and in fact agree with Mark Shea’s analysis of the situation and news: “I notice more and more the language in the media is shifting to handwaving about “climate change“. Since that’s all climate ever does, ever has done, and ever will do, it will be interesting to see how long panic about it can be maintained before that thought dawns on people and they start asking “compared to what?”"

mike b writes in with his thoughts on the 31,000 scientists who recently put forth a petition rejecting the concept of anthropogenic global warming and urging the U.S. government not to adopt or ratify the Kyoto protocols or any agreement that is derivative thereof.

Simply put.

Why haven’t these scientists spoken up before? Because they quietly go about their day to day doing GOOD science. Good, refereed, peer-reviewed science. The Global warming people are shrill, loud, and misinformed….Earth History has demonstrated that neither climate nor sea level are constant, two important and completely erroneous precepts of the GW argument. Now we scientists are just fed up at the hot air.

I have to admit that I’ve always been skeptical when people raise alarms over the concept of climate change — given that I live in Alberta, I’m quite used to the idea, actually. The Earth’s climate is not a static thing, and it’s preposterous to argue against changes in it.

Now, the obvious rejoinder might be to point out that it’s not the fact that change happens, but the quality and nature of the changes that are happening that are the real issue for climate change alarmists.

Which would, I suppose, be a legitimate argument, if in fact there were real, demonstrably harmful shifts happening in Earth’s climate. There is not exactly a great body of evidence for this, and what little evidence may exist more or less vanishes with the observation that mike b makes above: when considered in the context of history, what changes have been observed are, in essence, normal. The Earth has had periods where its average temperature has been higher than it is now, and the Earth has also had periods where the average temperature has been lower than it is now.

Within recent history, the global average temperature is basically at where it was a decade ago, and that same average temperature is expected to drop. That drop will probably be followed, at some point, by a rise. That is because such a thing as the global average temperature, imprecise metric of the relative “health” of the ecosystem that it is in the first place, fluctuates over time. Climate does as well, and what fluctuations in climate have been perceived of late seem to be within normal parameters.

The alarmism over these apparent non-issues is not driven by good science as much as it is by groupthink and backslapping. Now other scientists, those not so interested in harvesting a few “green” dollars along the way methinks, are speaking out against the alarmism, and it’s a good thing.

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

The list of only those scientists whose (last) names begin with ‘K’ has 1,495 entries. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that is a bit more than half the number of scientists who produced the latest IPCC report, no? And there are twenty-five more letters in the alphabet.

Related: It’s U.S. data, but April 2008 was fully one degree (F) colder than average in America, which makes it the coldest April on record in the last 11 years.

I mean, global average temperatures have more or less returned, here in 2008, to their 1998 levels, which means (in essence) that there has been no net global warming over the last decade.

And it seems that the latest predictions indicate that global temperature is expected to fall for at least another decade.

But don’t worry, O Reader. This all just underscores the dire threat that global warming presents to humanity, and we should all be very afraid. After ten years, temperatures will skyrocket! Carbon taxes! NOW!

Count Roland invokes Neil Postman’s classic work in his response to this article.

Neil Postman, in various books but especially Technopoly, makes a similar argument about technology and how it and ‘scientism‘ have become our civil Religion. One of my favourite anecdotes is the student who could not declare a room to be hot before consulting the thermostat.

Socrates said it 2500 years ago that writing would impoverish humanity, as it would lead to a weakening of memory. Maybe it has, but likely not since writing can help us discover and adapt beyond one man’s lifetime work. But the kernel of truth is that every technology we develop changes us, and not necessarily for the better. Our trust in technology and in ‘they’ is as irrational as the faith we hold, if secularist claims about religious faith are to be beleived (they are not), and more irrational than the actual faith claims and their rational justifications especially in light of the ends to which they are going. GPS may save time on a temporal shipment; our faith has the telos of our immortal souls and the eternal situation in which they end.

What is increasingly troubling is that the gap between those who know (in a full sense) the technology and those who use it is widening. For example, thirty years ago most men could fix their own cars — they were simple nough to understand — or at least know if the mechanic was being less than honest, but today most drivers can not fix many problems because cars have become more technical. Yet, we seem to be putting more trust in said technologies. Trusting more what one understands less of, as a society, is irrational insofar as it makes us more vulnerable to personal and corporate catastrophe — a broken car on a lonely highway in winter, a terrorist attack using a Tandy 3000 on our power network. That is the opposite thrust to what Christians strive to do — trust more as we understand more. Now, we can never fully understand God and a childlike (NOT childISH) faith is important, but a child’s most important question is ‘why?’ and we seek to find the answer to that question about God and about creation. Blind faith in what ‘they’ tell us is right is not mainstream Christianity. Mainstream Christianity is fides quearum intellectum — faith seeking understanding — and while we,in sin, can follow the wrong path, a sincere journey will eventually take us towards the Truth. Modern society’s faith in ‘they’ — usually scientists or media-political elites — is indicative of cult (in the contemporary sense) behaviour.

Chesterton was so right, but then again, aren’t we Christians just ignorant fools? Everyone is, but sometimes God graces us with wisdom — I suspect Chesterton would have told the two mothers to cut the child in half, too.

Roland hints at a rather curious thing — the underlying paganism in atheism (or, more broadly, secularism).

Even a cursory look at history should inform the reader that, for as long as humanity has had any semblance of society (even down to the tribal level), humanity has had Religion. The act of worshipping is an intrinsic aspect of human nature, and the philosophers of atheism have it exactly wrong. The question is not, as some might suppose, whether we shall worship; the question is what we shall worship.

For example, Daniel Dennett would ultimately suggest that we worship the meaty organ located an inch or two behind our eyes, and its capacity for reason and rational thought. Other secular categories of worship include the environment (through movements such as radical global warming/climate change alarmism) and animals (through movements such as PETA and other rabid animal rights organizations), the sexual organs and the sexual act, money, power, technology (which we are discussing here), and Barrack Hussein Obama. Most adherents of these movements and philosophies might not regard their participation in them as being an act of worship, but fundamentally that is what it distills down to, personal opinions nonwithstanding.

In other words: formal, ardently disbelieving atheism is but a temporary interlude between (in the West at least) Christianity and whatever religion will supplant Christianity, or between old Christianity and a new, resurgent Christianity.

Humanity’s reliance on — and increasing credulousness in the face of — technology, however, seems poised to continue and to worsen. Roland is exactly right in noting the widening gap between the typical user’s understanding of the complexity of a particular piece of technology and the actual complexity of that technology. Think for just a moment, O Reader, about the last time someone — if not yourself, mind — pointed at a computer tower and called the whole assembly a “hard drive.” That’s a tiny (if somewhat irksome, in my opinion) example, but illustrative all the same.

We trust too much in technology, while at the same time knowing less and less about the ins and outs of pieces thereof. That’s not a good — nor very Christian — position for us to be in.

Have a read and watch as a BBC story reporting that increases in global temperature had reversed, taking temperatures back to roughly 1998 levels, morphed into a story that foretold ominous increases in temperature.

The climate change activist who wrote to the article’s author is an interesting case. Pay special attention, O Reader, to the threat she makes to the columnist in her last message to him, by suggesting that she will strive to impugn his credibility. For bonus points, note and laugh at how she points to the oceans as heat sinks, when it has been discovered that oceanic temperatures have not changed at all in as long as we’ve been monitoring them*.

I actually take it as a good sign that proponents of global warming alarmism have to resort to bullying in circumstances like this. It means, I think, that they are beginning to feel a strain on their credibility, and that they are realizing that more and more people aren’t buying in to their lies.