Homocon

Take this 2002 article out of Oregon State University regarding global warming: "It's by no means certain that climatic changes of this magnitude and speed will come to pass, the scientists say, but even the reasonable possibility that they might are a cause for serious concern . . . 'To answer difficult questions such as this we depend a lot on our computer models, and in this area different models reach different conclusions,' said Peter Clark, an OSU professor of geosciences and one of the world's leading experts on glaciers and prehistoric climate changes."

In other words, no one really knows anything beyond "reasonable possibilities" about the causes and effects of long-term climate change, and there are as many different conclusions as there are different computer models, but sure, let's get hysterical about it anyway and force all the governments in the world to enact regulations that are aimed at slowing industrial growth even though we don't know that regulating the hell out of industrialization will have any significant long-term beneficial effect on the global climate because . . . because . . . well, we have to do something, and large industrialized nations are a broad target as they have deep pockets and so can be easily blackmailed with the threat of bad publicity, whether the bad PR is warranted or not.

I mean, from the fevered rhetoric emanating from the global warming corner, you'd think that everything must have been just dandy in our pre-industrialized Hobbit Lands until those awful polluters moved in and established the electrical grid, developed indoor plumbing, built roads, airlines and international shipping facilities, facilitated hi-tech medical research and practices, organized against our tendency towards inefficient sprawl, utilized the outer atmosphere, mechanized agricultural production, extended human life-spans and so ruined the neighborhood!

Right?

I swear, you can drop a house-load of paperwork on a lefty that supports the case for the democratization of the Middle East and yet they'll still spit in your eye about the current struggle in Iraq, but toss another rumination about catastrophic climate change in their direction and they react like a 14 year old boy at the climax of a wet dream. It's as if environmentalists comfort themselves by asserting human-centered causes for events which are wildly beyond their control -- Hurricane Katrina was a perfect example of this, as the natural disaster along the Gulf Coast states was quickly blamed on the United States' refusal to ratify the Kyoto Treaty. It's a mindset that harkens back to when tribal communities pitched virgins into volcanoes in order to appease the gods . . . "See? We can control the uncontrollable." And should the volcano go ahead and erupt anyway, they would find yet another human-centered reason -- "Agh! One virgin isn't enough -- find ten more!"

Only instead of virgins, environmentalists want to sacrifice industrial and technological progress. Sorry, I mean, quote-progress-unquote. But guess what happens when emotionally driven, hypothesis based treaties like Kyoto don't do what they're supposed to do? Mothers, hide your daughters and lock your doors (only, in this case, we'll probably be hiding our computers and locking our garages)!

Let's face facts here -- if environmentalists really cared so much about the planet, they'd be the loudest voices encouraging and supporting every conceivable effort to enable the human population to leave Earth and survive in space, independently of any geographically based ecosystem. I mean, what could possibly be better for the planet than that we all blast off and simply leave it to itself? Besides, it's not like our precious Gaia is going to live forever anyway, no matter how many SUV's the eco-fundamentalists vandalize . . .