Monday, July 14, 2008

Funny, I’ve Seen a Lot of Cases

Anyone who has worked in an a bar or hospital emergency room will tell you that you never know what will come through the door. Andrew Bolt makes that abundantly clear:

Psychiatrists have detected the first case of "climate change delusion" - and they haven't even yet got to Kevin Rudd and his global warming guru.
Writing in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry, Joshua Wolf and Robert Salo of our Royal Children's Hospital say this delusion was a "previously unreported phenomenon".
"A 17-year-old man was referred to the inpatient psychiatric unit at Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne with an eight-month history of depressed mood . . . He also . . . had visions of apocalyptic events."
Green is indeed the new bleak, and this desire to kick the legs out from under civilization is ubiquitous, as Bret Stephens pointed out this week in the Wall Street Journal noting in the number of ways Global Warming science, now called “Climate Change” science in a desperate bit to give it credibility might – just might – suffer from the same uncertainty and politically induced corruption that theories suffer from when they get big-game-prize money attached to them. A parasitic casts emerges and makes itself out to be a priestly class to benefit off of it, much like Charles Manson, using the impressionable young and the intellectually weak and wayward as a victimized flock. Free to wrap their limit their philosophical exploration to doom, self abuse and little else, it’s hard to imagine a Thomas Aquinas or Augustine emerging from it, nor do they want anything more elaborate than the repetitive pinning of the voodoo doll:
If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn't evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn't mean God doesn't exist, or that global warming isn't happening. It does mean it isn't science.
So let's stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.
The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification. One wonders what the left would make of a scientific "consensus" warning that some looming environmental crisis could only be averted if every college-educated woman bore six children: Thumbs to "patriarchal" science; curtains to the species.
A second explanation is theological. Surely it is no accident that the principal catastrophe predicted by global warming alarmists is diluvian in nature. Surely it is not a coincidence that modern-day environmentalists are awfully biblical in their critique of the depredations of modern society: "And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart." That's Genesis, but it sounds like Jim Hansen.
And surely it is in keeping with this essentially religious outlook that the "solutions" chiefly offered to global warming involve radical changes to personal behavior, all of them with an ascetic, virtue-centric bent: drive less, buy less, walk lightly upon the earth and so on. A light carbon footprint has become the 21st-century equivalent of sexual abstinence.
Can you feel the love there? The hand-wringing, the concern for out mother earth on the way to a universally poor, unhealthy, and short life where all we burdensome inhabitants of the planet earth can be both equal and the same? Pfft!

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