Curtis Dahlgren
The Origin of the Specious: Not dressed for "church"; part 2
By Curtis Dahlgren
"Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continued and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found." — plaque on U. of Wisconsin's Bascom Hall
"We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech!" — Dr. Kathleen Dixon, Womens' Studies, Bowling Green State University
SEE HOW THAT WORKS? Just "shut up," you people who complain about Political Correctness. Most academics have never seen a threshing machine or combine work, so they wouldn't understand "winnowing" or "sifting" anyway. "Truth" is just a cliche anymore. The PC professors are paid to think, so they get to tell you what to think!
Well, I'm not paid to think, but last week I talked about examples of academic eagerness — such as the search for life in outer space — that leads to "bad science" (Wall St. Journal, 4/23/11). Darwinists and the "man-made global warming" enthusiasts belong to the same religion, the Church of the Great Mother of the Gods, Mother Earth.
"Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined with implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age." — Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT prof of Atmospheric Sciences (back cover of Christopher Horner's book on Global Warming and Environmentalism)
I receive On Wisconsin from the UW alumni association, and the current issue has a brief article about an assistant professor of geoscience who is studying Greenland's history. He found that Greenland never completely melted off, even during "the last warm period, which was around 125,000 years ago." Of course Anders Carlson may still believe in AGW and is simply trying to make the computer models more accurate, but he says:
"All models are wrong. Some models are more wrong than others. They always have some missing pieces."
Our vaunted "experts" think that they can predict our climate at the end of the 21st century, while the Weather Channel's 5-day forecast may or may not even be close to accurate. The future of worldwide climate depends on so many things, from trade winds, ocean currents, the jet stream, vapor and clouds, and in the end the same warmth that could theoretically melt ice would also increase evaporation from the oceans — and evaporation causes cooling!
If you fill up a glass with an ice cube in it, the ice cube sticks up above the rim. But as the ice cube melts, the glass won't run over — not one drop — because the volume of the ice shrinks as it returns to the liquid state. So don't get all holier-than-thou with us skeptics on AGW. The front cover of the Horner book says:
- The earth has often been hotter than it is now.
- Only a tiny portion of greenhouse gases are man-made.
- Most of Antarctica is getting colder.
- "Global warming" hasn't made hurricanes worse.
Last week I mentioned that WSJ article on "claims about alien life" and here's one of the interesting statements: "Mars was probably a warm, wet planet in its infancy four billion years ago. But then it lost its heat-trapping atmosphere and became cold and dry."
AHA. Losing our greenhouse gases would be a greater catastrophe than an unprovably increasing amount. And linking "climate change," plus or minus, to man and the industrial age is virtually impossible. We geezers have heard it all before.
- The "calamities" of the 1950s were the Cold War and a possible literal Ice Age.
- "Overpopulation" was a biggie of the 1960s.
- If you're stuck in the 70s, remember "Global Cooling"" again?
- In the 80s there was too much prosperity; we were told that it's just not right to expect a better life for our kids than we had.
- In the 90s, the Ozone Hole was the big scare.
- In the oughts, man-made "global warming" was dogmatized and advertised.
- In this decade, we hit the 7th billion number in population, so maybe that'll make a comeback (ironically, a little bit of global warming would make more farm land available and make it easier to feed people).
The eco-theists accuse every skeptic of just being out for money. We need to remind people of the millions being made off this hoax by the academics and questionable "green jobs" businesses, including the TRILLION DOLLAR market for anticipated trading of "carbon credits" — and the big bucks to be made in planting trees to supposedly "offset" carbon.
I've written before about the article in Fast Company magazine (July/Aug. 2008):
"Tree Huggers Corner a $1 Trillion Market"
"Legal limits on greenhouse-gas emissions are coming fast, with a $1 Trillion carbon market emerging. At the core: a cadre of young, idealistic Yale forestry grads. But will carbon offsets do anything to slow global warming?" — Anya Kamenetz
Some excerpts from the article:
"CAPITALISM, long the alleged enemy of the environment, is today giving new life to the environmental movement" [said Arnold Schwarzenegger, BUT] . . . It should be cause for concern that not a single person interviewed for this article, on either the investment or the carbon-project side, would assert with confidence that the rules currently being written for a U.S. cap-and-trade market will actually reduce overall carbon emissions . . People are suddenly starting to see that carbon forestry is not the silver bullet . . . I think it's really important to find ways of determining if these markets are actually helping the problem or just transferring money from here to there."
"I'm making five times what I ever thought I'd be making as a tropical forester," said one of the Yalie greens. Maybe greenbacks and "ecology" will mix like oil and water.
P.S. "The Origin of the Specious" was the title of an article I wrote several years ago in the 1990s. I found it the other day quite by accident, but here are a few important excerpts:
"Our local newspaper has been publishing a series of pro and con letters on the theory of evolution. One headline read:
"'Evolutionist getting tired of explaining the obvious.' This letter writer said he hopes that the debate will be carried on 'only by people who have been exposed to certain books.'
"Darwinists evidently have their own holy scriptures (by Stephen Gould, etc.), and when they wax eloquent at great public expense, their True Believers call that 'Education." But when the rest of us raise questions at our own expense, it's called 'polarizing' and 'dividing' people.
"Well excuse me — I'm not dressed for church — but it's a free country with a wide variety of explanations for the Origin (many denomiations within the Darwinist community even), so the real question is 'Are the evolutionists having panic attacks?' — or, more bluntly, 'Has their theory become the tax-supported Established religion our forefathers warned us about?'
"They have all the accutrements of 'organized' religion, like, dead saints (Hegel, Huxley), their high priest (Carl Sagan), their ark of the covenant (Hubble telescope), and the holy-of-holies, the electron microscope.
"They have their awesome cathedrals (Ivy covered ivory towers), their Holy Grail (missing fossils of the missing links), high holy days (Earth Day, etc.), their televangelists (news anchorpeople), and their Crusades: everything from ban technology to PETA (which believes eating meat is cannibalism).
"They have their Pharisees (academics) and their Sadduccees (civil servants), and their King Herod — all casting lots upon a robe (a Supreme Court robe) and supporting Roses-Are-Red "reproductive health" clinics. Their androgynous populace goes 'What? Am I my baby's keeper?' and chant 'Give us Barabbas' (anyone running for office who who is hip and correct, politically).
"The 'philistine' and 'unscholarly' Christians are browbeaten unmercilously, but the Church of What's Happening Now even has its own 'Revelation':
"Our local letter-writing Darwinist said that 'natural selection was the greatest and most beautiful revelation of the 19th century."
PPS: Shoot — dumb farmers were using "selection" long before Darwin was born! Let the "sifting and winnowing" continue, but don't deny that evolution is a religion, and is becoming the Established one, politically. A TV network deliberatly omitted "Under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance at the U.S. Open. Christians have become the New heretics. "Just shut thyself up!" [the new atheism says].
As a liberal friend told me, "Believe what you want, and write what you want." I intend to, because I was in a relatively good mood in the 90s when I wrote the lines above. Arrogance and dangerous spirits in High Places today have me in a slightly different mood.
NOT THAT I'VE GIVEN UP HOPE. WE IN THE TEA PARTY ARE NOT "BITTER" CLING-ONS.
Sarah Palin said: "Politics isn't just a game . . but [a way] to leave the nation better than we found it."
A wise man once said, "I study politics so my son can study agriculture . . [etc.]."
Christians must become both "involved" and free of "anxious thoughts"; we can have it both ways. I will cut this column "short" now with an excerpt from my daily prayer book:
"Allow us not we beseech Thee, to become the prey of useless forebodings through the habit of morbid and sinful worry. So guide us in all our way that we may keep our faces always to the Light, that our shadows may lie behind us." AMEN.
© Curtis Dahlgren
December 4, 2011
"Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continued and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found." — plaque on U. of Wisconsin's Bascom Hall
"We forbid any course that says we restrict free speech!" — Dr. Kathleen Dixon, Womens' Studies, Bowling Green State University
SEE HOW THAT WORKS? Just "shut up," you people who complain about Political Correctness. Most academics have never seen a threshing machine or combine work, so they wouldn't understand "winnowing" or "sifting" anyway. "Truth" is just a cliche anymore. The PC professors are paid to think, so they get to tell you what to think!
Well, I'm not paid to think, but last week I talked about examples of academic eagerness — such as the search for life in outer space — that leads to "bad science" (Wall St. Journal, 4/23/11). Darwinists and the "man-made global warming" enthusiasts belong to the same religion, the Church of the Great Mother of the Gods, Mother Earth.
"Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century's developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined with implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age." — Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT prof of Atmospheric Sciences (back cover of Christopher Horner's book on Global Warming and Environmentalism)
I receive On Wisconsin from the UW alumni association, and the current issue has a brief article about an assistant professor of geoscience who is studying Greenland's history. He found that Greenland never completely melted off, even during "the last warm period, which was around 125,000 years ago." Of course Anders Carlson may still believe in AGW and is simply trying to make the computer models more accurate, but he says:
"All models are wrong. Some models are more wrong than others. They always have some missing pieces."
Our vaunted "experts" think that they can predict our climate at the end of the 21st century, while the Weather Channel's 5-day forecast may or may not even be close to accurate. The future of worldwide climate depends on so many things, from trade winds, ocean currents, the jet stream, vapor and clouds, and in the end the same warmth that could theoretically melt ice would also increase evaporation from the oceans — and evaporation causes cooling!
If you fill up a glass with an ice cube in it, the ice cube sticks up above the rim. But as the ice cube melts, the glass won't run over — not one drop — because the volume of the ice shrinks as it returns to the liquid state. So don't get all holier-than-thou with us skeptics on AGW. The front cover of the Horner book says:
- The earth has often been hotter than it is now.
- Only a tiny portion of greenhouse gases are man-made.
- Most of Antarctica is getting colder.
- "Global warming" hasn't made hurricanes worse.
Last week I mentioned that WSJ article on "claims about alien life" and here's one of the interesting statements: "Mars was probably a warm, wet planet in its infancy four billion years ago. But then it lost its heat-trapping atmosphere and became cold and dry."
AHA. Losing our greenhouse gases would be a greater catastrophe than an unprovably increasing amount. And linking "climate change," plus or minus, to man and the industrial age is virtually impossible. We geezers have heard it all before.
- The "calamities" of the 1950s were the Cold War and a possible literal Ice Age.
- "Overpopulation" was a biggie of the 1960s.
- If you're stuck in the 70s, remember "Global Cooling"" again?
- In the 80s there was too much prosperity; we were told that it's just not right to expect a better life for our kids than we had.
- In the 90s, the Ozone Hole was the big scare.
- In the oughts, man-made "global warming" was dogmatized and advertised.
- In this decade, we hit the 7th billion number in population, so maybe that'll make a comeback (ironically, a little bit of global warming would make more farm land available and make it easier to feed people).
The eco-theists accuse every skeptic of just being out for money. We need to remind people of the millions being made off this hoax by the academics and questionable "green jobs" businesses, including the TRILLION DOLLAR market for anticipated trading of "carbon credits" — and the big bucks to be made in planting trees to supposedly "offset" carbon.
I've written before about the article in Fast Company magazine (July/Aug. 2008):
"Tree Huggers Corner a $1 Trillion Market"
"Legal limits on greenhouse-gas emissions are coming fast, with a $1 Trillion carbon market emerging. At the core: a cadre of young, idealistic Yale forestry grads. But will carbon offsets do anything to slow global warming?" — Anya Kamenetz
Some excerpts from the article:
"CAPITALISM, long the alleged enemy of the environment, is today giving new life to the environmental movement" [said Arnold Schwarzenegger, BUT] . . . It should be cause for concern that not a single person interviewed for this article, on either the investment or the carbon-project side, would assert with confidence that the rules currently being written for a U.S. cap-and-trade market will actually reduce overall carbon emissions . . People are suddenly starting to see that carbon forestry is not the silver bullet . . . I think it's really important to find ways of determining if these markets are actually helping the problem or just transferring money from here to there."
"I'm making five times what I ever thought I'd be making as a tropical forester," said one of the Yalie greens. Maybe greenbacks and "ecology" will mix like oil and water.
P.S. "The Origin of the Specious" was the title of an article I wrote several years ago in the 1990s. I found it the other day quite by accident, but here are a few important excerpts:
"Our local newspaper has been publishing a series of pro and con letters on the theory of evolution. One headline read:
"'Evolutionist getting tired of explaining the obvious.' This letter writer said he hopes that the debate will be carried on 'only by people who have been exposed to certain books.'
"Darwinists evidently have their own holy scriptures (by Stephen Gould, etc.), and when they wax eloquent at great public expense, their True Believers call that 'Education." But when the rest of us raise questions at our own expense, it's called 'polarizing' and 'dividing' people.
"Well excuse me — I'm not dressed for church — but it's a free country with a wide variety of explanations for the Origin (many denomiations within the Darwinist community even), so the real question is 'Are the evolutionists having panic attacks?' — or, more bluntly, 'Has their theory become the tax-supported Established religion our forefathers warned us about?'
"They have all the accutrements of 'organized' religion, like, dead saints (Hegel, Huxley), their high priest (Carl Sagan), their ark of the covenant (Hubble telescope), and the holy-of-holies, the electron microscope.
"They have their awesome cathedrals (Ivy covered ivory towers), their Holy Grail (missing fossils of the missing links), high holy days (Earth Day, etc.), their televangelists (news anchorpeople), and their Crusades: everything from ban technology to PETA (which believes eating meat is cannibalism).
"They have their Pharisees (academics) and their Sadduccees (civil servants), and their King Herod — all casting lots upon a robe (a Supreme Court robe) and supporting Roses-Are-Red "reproductive health" clinics. Their androgynous populace goes 'What? Am I my baby's keeper?' and chant 'Give us Barabbas' (anyone running for office who who is hip and correct, politically).
"The 'philistine' and 'unscholarly' Christians are browbeaten unmercilously, but the Church of What's Happening Now even has its own 'Revelation':
"Our local letter-writing Darwinist said that 'natural selection was the greatest and most beautiful revelation of the 19th century."
PPS: Shoot — dumb farmers were using "selection" long before Darwin was born! Let the "sifting and winnowing" continue, but don't deny that evolution is a religion, and is becoming the Established one, politically. A TV network deliberatly omitted "Under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance at the U.S. Open. Christians have become the New heretics. "Just shut thyself up!" [the new atheism says].
As a liberal friend told me, "Believe what you want, and write what you want." I intend to, because I was in a relatively good mood in the 90s when I wrote the lines above. Arrogance and dangerous spirits in High Places today have me in a slightly different mood.
NOT THAT I'VE GIVEN UP HOPE. WE IN THE TEA PARTY ARE NOT "BITTER" CLING-ONS.
Sarah Palin said: "Politics isn't just a game . . but [a way] to leave the nation better than we found it."
A wise man once said, "I study politics so my son can study agriculture . . [etc.]."
Christians must become both "involved" and free of "anxious thoughts"; we can have it both ways. I will cut this column "short" now with an excerpt from my daily prayer book:
"Allow us not we beseech Thee, to become the prey of useless forebodings through the habit of morbid and sinful worry. So guide us in all our way that we may keep our faces always to the Light, that our shadows may lie behind us." AMEN.
© Curtis Dahlgren
The views expressed by RenewAmerica columnists are their own and do not necessarily reflect the position of RenewAmerica or its affiliates.
(See RenewAmerica's publishing standards.)
