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| b-n-o... |
 Posted: Mon Nov 02, 2009 12:26 am |
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November 1 2009
QUOTE: The vital question that we now face is whether our politicians really
believe this type of hysterical nonsense or whether some have the courage to
step back from the brink of eco-apocalyptic hysteria
High Priest of the Eco-Apocalypse
As I pointed out in a recent article on Quadrant Online, apocalypticism has
a firm grip on Western Civilization, reaching fever-pitch on many occasions
over the last 2500 years.
Critically, in the 20th century, apocalypticism assumed a secular guise, as
various cultural historians have observed, "evoking world destruction and
transformation through ecological disaster . and technological breakdown",
with both religious and secular versions "converging upon the belief that
the world is about to undergo a staggering transformation, in which
long-established institutions and ways of life will be destroyed"
Paul Boyer, When Time Shall Be No More, 1992, p.336
As a further example of such doom-laden prophecy, here is the latest sermon
on the impending eco-apocalypse, according to James Lovelock, "the closest
thing we have to an Old Testament prophet", as the Sunday Times observed in
its review (19 February 2009) of his latest Jeremiad, The Vanishing Face of
Gaia: A Final Warning (2009).
According to Lovelock, in the next few years we will face an abrupt leap in
average global temperatures of 9ºC, leading to the collapse of global
civilization and the virtual extinction of humanity in an orgy of violence
that Lovelock gloatingly dismisses as a "massive natural cull of humanity".
Quite quickly, "the earth's landmasses will be largely destroyed by flood
and drought, and most of the world's seven billion inhabitants will not
survive", while those who do will struggle for life amidst billions of
rotting corpses backing in the sun of a "desert world" that stretches across
the globe.
Such a prospect might be expected to appall most people but the reviewer
just remarks that, "all this should make for a bleak read but the effect is
strangely exhilarating" - such is the morbid fascination with the
eco-apocalypse in our culture.
There is some hope, with fortuitously located island nations like Britain
and Australia serving as life boats in this ocean of misery, although some
crucial decisions will have to be made - not democratically, for democracy
is a luxury that the world cannot afford, but by ruthless, environmentally
aware warlords who rise to the top amidst the chaos. They will determine who
is kept aboard and who is jettisoned, with evolutionary theory dictating
that the old, the sick, and the infirm will have to go, along with those who
choose to accompany them as helpers, in a last fleeting expression of human
compassion, while the rest surrender to the ruthless amorality of natural
selection.
Because "genocide by tribal mobs is as natural as breathing", human beings
will embrace various forms of Green fascism and eagerly agree to the
suspension of constitutional rights, convinced that blind obedience is the
only way to survive and that their free will and personal autonomy must the
surrendered to a self-selected elite of omnipotent environmental scientists
and the strutting self-righteous Green politicians who exist to implement
their dictates - a species that Australia possesses in abundance.
As a fundamentally religious thinker, Lovelock claims that the earth should
be properly known as 'Gaia', the Earth Goddess, because she is allegedly a
living organism - indeed 'the largest living being on the planet' (because
she is the planet!) - and 'she' operates according to scientific laws that
dictate that humanity is an evolutionary dead end - a sort of sentient
stool - that will be excreted by Gaia as she continues to ensure her own
homeostatic well-being through her manipulation of various environmental
parameters, as she has done for millions of years in the past and will
continue to do for millions of years after humanity's apparently
well-deserved demise.
Not long ago, most people would have thought that such ideas were best left
to bad science fiction, but no longer.
Indeed, it is a measure of the corruption of science amidst the moral panic
of global warming that Lovelock's 'Gaia Hypothesis' has now been elevated to
the status of a scientific theory, which Tim Flannery - one of Australia's
own eco-apocalyptic prophets - assures us means that it has "been tested and
is considered true"
"A Great Jump to Disaster", New York Review of Books, 19 November 2009.
Consequently, in 2006 Lovelock was awarded the the Wollaston Medal by the
Geological Society of London, for opening up a "whole new field of Earth
Science study", apparently some sort of geo-theology.
Moreover that Lovelock feels confident in making such dire predictions on
the basis of experiments conducted on a "simple" computer model, while this
impending catastrophe is made all the more sinister and irrefutable by his
insistence that just "before the jump to a desert world, the climate will
briefly become cooler again", which means that "a cold summer, or even a
series of them, is not proof that global heating has ended".
In other words, global cooling - like we are currently experiencing - will
only be confirmation that global warming is real and is accelerating towards
'the final jump' into the eco-apocalypse.
Such extreme claims, and the invocation of allegedly 'scientific' arguments
that cannot be falsified, because even negative observations confirm their
predictions, is further evidence that the global warming panic and its
projected catastrophic effects is a fundamentally religious phenomenon and
signals the emergence of an eco-fundamentalist cult that follows a 2500-year
old pattern in predicting an apocalypse according to which the world and all
human civilization will shortly come to a catastrophic end.
The vital question that we now face is whether our politicians really
believe this type of hysterical nonsense or whether some have the courage to
step back from the brink of eco-apocalyptic hysteria to insist that
Australia's national interests are best served by a rigorously skeptical
attitude towards what is emerging as one of the greatest moral panics the
world has faced since the witch-craze of the middle ages.
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2009/11/the-eco-apocalypse-craze
Warmest Regards
Bon z0
"It is a remarkable fact that despite the worldwide expenditure of perhaps
US$50 billion since 1990, and the efforts of tens of thousands of scientists
worldwide, no human climate signal has yet been detected that is distinct
from natural variation."
Bob Carter, Research Professor of Geology, James Cook University, Townsville |
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