Washington Post Condemns Abe Lincoln's Gas Hog

I used to have some respect for the Washington Post, as much as I tended to disagree with its editorial views.  But in the Bezos era (for the Post, if not for the planet), the paper really seems to print just about any nonsense that spins left.  They published a blog piece by Raphael Lataster, sure the worst New Testament scholar Australia (if not the Milky Way Galaxy) has yet produced.  And now take this apocalyptic spin on Global Warming from Tim McDonnell, for example (also published by the Baltimore Post, without the pay wall).  Take it, please:

"The number of migrants across the world is at a record high — 244 million people left their homes in 2015, according to the United Nations. They were driven by war, dire economic straits, and for some, worsening environmental conditions brought on by climate change."

How does your bologna-detector like that claim?  

Follow the link, and anyone who can read learns that the 244 million people referred to did not "leave their homes in 2015," but had left their home country some time in the past and had now lived in another country for at least one year.  This is a good thing, because the link numbers immigrants to the US at 46.6 million.  If that many immigrants arrived in the US in a year, in twenty years the US would have a population of over a billion -- which it does not, and is not about to. 

And no, the International Organization for Immigration does not claim all these people left home due to 'war, dire economic straights,' or Anthropogenic Global Warming.  Though no doubt most of them found the economic pickings better where they landed, as has always been the case on this planet since one trilobite slithered across the ocean floor to a perch closer to the current's rich harvest of tasty drifters.    

Such a blatant and fantastic misrepresentation ought to be astounding in a major newspaper like the Washington Post, and ought all by itself get the author laughed out of journalism for a lifetime.  But we're just getting started.

"There’s a growing body of evidence linking migration and climate change, from Pacific island nations being subsumed by the rising ocean, to the drought-wracked Horn of Africa. In a speech this spring, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that 'as regions become unlivable, more and more people will be forced to move from degraded lands to cities and to other nations.'”

We skip these links, since the first two are behind pay walls (and are probably crap, anyway), and the third is, well, a speech from the UN Secretary General predicting future events, which hardly need be taken seriously.  

"A recent report from Oxfam found that more than 20 million people a year have been displaced by extreme weather events since 2008, mostly in developing countries."

That would come to one in 350 people in the world.  And if you read the article, this figure includes, for example, those who fled hurricanes in the US this past year.  (Being "displaced" is not the same as becoming a "refugee" or "immigrant:" it might just mean you moved out of town until the storm blew over.)

Would that be more or less than the percentage of people who fled "extreme weather events" in previous centuries?

You can be sure it is dramatically fewer.

Consider the Bible.  Jacob's entire family emigrated to Egypt because of famine, an "extreme weather event" by Oxfam's definition.  Naomi and her family also emigrated for similar reasons.  That's two or three books in the Bible right there.

Or consider China.  The history of China is a history of enormous flooding that forced millions from their homes in some years.  And considering the fact that most ancient civilizations were built along rivers -- the Euphrates, Tigris, Nile, Indus, Ganges, Yellow, and Yangtze -- it is a sure bet that major floods alone have almost always taken a far higher toll than one in 350 per year.

Hurricanes, typhoon, and tornadoes, snowstorms, even glacial advances and avalanches, are if anything far more easily thwarted in our era of r-bar, hurricane clips, and snow-blowers, than at any time in the past.

"But linking migration to climate change is tricky because the environment is just one of many pressure points, many all happening at the same time. Take the case of northeastern Nigeria, where nearly 2 million people are displaced.  Climate change is clearly a factor: Lake Chad, the region’s main water source, has been drying up as the Sahel Desert expands southward."

Only the Sahel Desert hasn't been expanding south: it's been greening in recent decades.  And the lake  (which is no more than 30 feet deep at the deepest) was already noted as having dried significantly by 1899.  And one major reason is water is being diverted for agriculture.  

Dang those facts!  

"But at the same time, the Islamic insurgence of Boko Haram has run a brutal terrorism campaign. Rural poverty and food insecurity were already major problems. Economic opportunities are better in the south. So what combination of factors is causing people to leave home?"

I'd guess American gas-guzzlers.

"For any given instance of migration, how can we know the impact of climate change, if at all?

"A new study may help with that question, by looking at a very different wave of migration with 150 years of hindsight. Researchers at Germany’s University of Freiburg analyzed 19th-century migration from central Europe to North America, and discovered new evidence suggesting climate change played a major role in spurring mass movements of people."

"Through the 1800s, about 5 million people immigrated to North America from what is now southwest Germany, including President Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich, who moved to the United States in 1885. The study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed journal Climate of the Past, found that up to 30 percent of those people moved because of climate disruptions."

I was under the impression he just didn't like growing grapes.  

But if this is true (big if), I'm not sure it helps Tim's case.  Bad weather happens in every century.  But the amount of CO2 kicked out by industrialization before 1900 would have been a tiny fraction of what it is in modern times.  No cars.  A world population a third to quarter what it is now.  Little industry except in a few countries.  Even if the small world population with its primitive industry in a few remote corners could burn enough carbon to effect the weather already, the extra energy would likely have gone into warming the surface of the oceans.

So Tim is cutting the branch he is sitting off with this argument.  Apparently the gas-hog driving must have started in the early 19th Century, already.

Shame on you, "Honest" Abe!

"That figure is much higher than researchers expected, said lead author Rüdiger Glaser. Research on historic migrations has tended to overlook climate change.

“'I was surprised, to be honest,” Glaser said. 'The 19th century is a period with remarkable changes in the climate, economy, and politics. This is like a case study of learning how system change works.'”

"The findings reveal a historical precedent for a pattern that is increasingly familiar: unusual weather, followed by crop failures, followed by economic instability, followed by a mass exodus.
The study’s window of time, from 1812 to 1887, was a transitional period in climate history following the so-called Little Ice Age, when global temperatures were much cooler than today.
As temperatures began to heat up in response to what we now recognize as manmade global warming, it was a time of tumultuous year-to-year variability. Years of drought were suddenly punctuated by crop-killing cold snaps. So while the “climate change” people experienced then was different from what we’re living through now, its impact on food systems was similar.

Researchers identified a handful of emigration peaks throughout the century, then matched those to historical records of weather, harvests and prices for local staple grains such as barley, oats, and rye."

"That correlation was compelling on its own, Glaser said. But, of course, there’s more to the story: the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, increasing industrialization and global trade, and other forms of political and economic upheaval. So Glaser and his colleagues built a statistical model that could account for the influence those other factors exerted on emigration."

Here you see the witch-hunted mentality perfectly framed and hung on the wall of history: confirmation bias on an apocalyptic scale, combined with a complete inability (or unwillingness) to think critically.

If 1.3 billion people, burning perhaps 2% of the present CO2, were able to so dramatically effect the climate already by 1885 (remember, the effect isn't instant, so we have to count back several decades from that point), why hasn't the entire globe burned up by now and the smoke gone up to the moon?

Yet that is clearly McDonnell's meaning.  Temperatures were heating up because of "what we now recognize as global warming."  This is why he mentions "increased industrialization" as one of the contributing factors to forcing Grandpa Trump, or at least his neighbors, out of Europe.

But then, in another bizarre twist, McDonnell admits that in fact it was COOLING that was causing the problems: 1

"In some years, the environment was a dominant factor, such as 1816, when the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia sent up a cloud of volcanic ash that put a chill on European crop production and spurred thousands to flee.

"In other years, other factors were more important, such as the practice followed by some municipalities in the 1850s of paying  their poorest citizens to move out. But overall, it was clear that millions of people might have stayed put if not for adverse climate conditions, the study found.  The upshot, Glaser said, is that researchers should make better use of historical records to look for clues about how climate migrants might behave in the future.  That’s going to be even more important as global warming continues to send more people on the move."

It is hard to understand how a literate person could put up with such drivel in their newspaper.  McDonnell holds to an ideology which The Washington Post wishes to promote, but that is no excuse for such shoddy reporting.

McDonnell begins by claiming 240 million people migrated in a single year for apocalyptic reasons, a figure no one with any head for numbers would buy for an instant.  In fact the number refers to all who live outside their home country and have done so for at least one year, for any reason.  He claims areas of the world that have greened in recent years are actually becoming desert.  He ignores the reality of Lake Chad in favor of his doomsday cartoon.  He shows no sense of historical awareness, for instance of the fact that people have fled weather (or climate) disasters throughout recorded history, and before.  (See theories for the fall of the Harappan and Maya civilizations, for instance.)  He conflates cold weather disasters with global warming, and shows no sense whatsoever when it comes to proportion and the scale of industrialization in the 19th Century and now.

And yet this fellow seems to get published easily enough.

What people these days put up with, if you only flatter their prejudices.

"The number of migrants across the world is at a record high — 244 million people left their homes in 2015, according to the United Nations. They were driven by war, dire economic straits, and for some, worsening environmental conditions brought on by climate change.
There’s a growing body of evidence linking migration and climate change, from Pacific island nations being subsumed by the rising ocean, to the drought-wracked Horn of Africa. In a speech this spring, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “as regions become unlivable, more and more people will be forced to move from degraded lands to cities and to other nations.”

Trump gets Spitting Image treatment

Donald Trump is to get the Spitting Image treatment in a potential reboot of the show in the US. Co-creator Roger Law says he is in talks with production company Avalon to take the show stateside, and a puppet of the President has already been made. © Getty John Major was a regular take on Spitting Image The American version of the show, popular in the UK in the '80s and early '90s, would be written by US writers for NBC, but filmed in the UK, where the puppets would also be made.Mr Trump's puppet likeness is to go on display in Norwich from Saturday until April next year.

Analysis Did President Trump ’ s ancestors migrate to the United States because of a changing climate ? 3. When your kid tries to say ‘Alexa’ before ‘Mama’. Subscribe to The Washington Post. Try 1 month for .
President Donald Trump blows off the seriously worrisome implications of human-driven climate change with hardly a thought. Trump ’ s grandfather emigrated from Bremen, Germany, to the United States in 1885 when he was just 16.

A recent report from Oxfam found that more than 20 million people a year have been displaced by extreme weather events since 2008, mostly in developing countries.
But linking migration to climate change is tricky because the environment is just one of many pressure points, many all happening at the same time. Take the case of northeastern Nigeria, where nearly 2 million people are displaced. Climate change is clearly a factor: Lake Chad, the region’s main water source, has been drying up as the Sahel Desert expands southward.
But at the same time, the Islamic insurgence of Boko Haram has run a brutal terrorism campaign. Rural poverty and food insecurity were already major problems. Economic opportunities are better in the south. So what combination of factors is causing people to leave home?
Source: http://uk.pressfrom.com/news/world/us-news/-225817-did-president-trumps-ancestors-migrate-to-the-united-states-because-of-a-changing-climate/

The number of migrants across the world is at a record high — 244 million people left their homes in 2015, according to the United Nations. They were driven by war, dire economic straits, and for some, worsening environmental conditions brought on by climate change.
There’s a growing body of evidence linking migration and climate change, from Pacific island nations being subsumed by the rising ocean, to the drought-wracked Horn of Africa. In a speech this spring, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “as regions become unlivable, more and more people will be forced to move from degraded lands to cities and to other nations.”
Source: http://uk.pressfrom.com/news/world/us-news/-225817-did-president-trumps-ancestors-migrate-to-the-united-states-because-of-a-changing-climate/

The number of migrants across the world is at a record high — 244 million people left their homes in 2015, according to the United Nations. They were driven by war, dire economic straits, and for some, worsening environmental conditions brought on by climate change.
There’s a growing body of evidence linking migration and climate change, from Pacific island nations being subsumed by the rising ocean, to the drought-wracked Horn of Africa. In a speech this spring, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “as regions become unlivable, more and more people will be forced to move from degraded lands to cities and to other nations.”
Source: http://uk.pressfrom.com/news/world/us-news/-225817-did-president-trumps-ancestors-migrate-to-the-united-states-because-of-a-changing-climate/

The number of migrants across the world is at a record high — 244 million people left their homes in 2015, according to the United Nations. They were driven by war, dire economic straits, and for some, worsening environmental conditions brought on by climate change.Source: http://uk.pressfrom.com/news/world/us-news/-225817-did-president-trumps-ancestors-migrate-to-the-united-states-because-of-a-changing-climate/

Will Jesus Destroy the Planet? (with cars?)

The second chapter I read in John Loftus' new anthology, Christianity is Not Great, is called "Christianity and the Environment."  My eyes quickly gravitated there, I think, because it is mainly about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), and that debate brings together so many fascinating subjects -- the weather, glaciers, volcanoes, history, trees, politics, life on other planets . . .

William Patterson's point is that Christianity is a danger to the environment.  ("Grave danger?"  "Is there any other kind?" -- Cruise vs. Nickolson)  His tone is more reasonable than that of Annie Gaylor, and he does not seem to engage in deliberate lies, as she seems to do as a matter of course.  But of course the charge here is a serious one -- we only have one planet, after all.

Biblical "dominion" theology, Patterson argues, leads to excessive population, animal extinction, and deforestation.  But the worst problem it creates is Global Warming.

Let's stop and take a reality check with these preliminary claims before we look at Patterson's main argument.


Do Christians over-breed, kills critters, and cut down trees? 

I just returned to Seattle from the major southern Chinese city of Changsha.  Changsha has about twice the population of Seattle.  But it is almost free of overt theological influence.  The people there have figured out how to make babies in bulk, even without being told audibly by God to "go and multiply."  The country is run by communists, still atheistic in their ideology, and in the propaganda they teach young people.  (I leaf through some of my students' other text books, and find anti-religious propaganda that would surely please Loftus and his fellow authors.)  And the kids buy it: I took a survey of Chinese college students a few years ago, and found that almost two thirds were atheists, at that point in their lives.

So there must be no problems with excessive population, animal extinction, or deforestation in Changsha, right?  And hardly a tree or animal left in Seattle, with the douglas fir and cedar all felled to built church spires, and roast sacrificial deer and bear to Yahweh?

Yeah, right.

God's toxic waste dump.

Flying into beautiful green Seattle last week, I got a great view of Mount Olympus, a mass rising in white to the west of the Olympic World Heritage / Biosphere site.  We can see three national parks from downtown Seattle on a clear day -- national parks are an American invention.  But even the city itself, 13th largest in the United States (metro) and one of the densest (city), is, I discovered when I first returned from a year or two in Asia, just one huge park.  The whole city is trees.  Raccoons, squirrels, even foxes, bald eagles, and river otters -- I've seen most of them right within the city limits.

Moving to Asia as a young man, on the other hand, where a mere 5% of the population is Christian (maybe a bit more, now), I learned that a river can still flow when it is deep black (Hindu India, Buddhist Taiwan, atheist China), and you can smell it a block away.  I learned what the expression "bare as a monkey's butt" means when applied to mountains.  I saw rare wild animals on sale on sheets of linen on street corners, and in cages.

Where in the world is overpopulation a real crisis, right now?  India.  Indonesia. Bangladesh.  The Philippines.  Vietnam.  Eastern China.  Japan?  Maybe, though the population is falling.

What percentage of that population -- more than 3 billion, all told -- is governed by Christians?

The Philippines, about 2-3% of the total.

In my little town, again, on the outskirts of Changsha, the government seems to have declared war on trees and beauty.  On three sides are on-going construction projects, with a 15-story wave of new apartments breaking just beyond the wall of our school grounds.  They are as monotonous as sin.  On another side, black smoke rises from drills pushing into the ground to build an indoor ski center.  On another, they are building a running track, covered so far in what appears to be grey concrete, without so much as a tree for shade between laps.  The one side free of construction, so far, is still beautiful, full of old lotus and rice farms, and you can walk for miles in clear air.  But some of the farmers build an extra story or two, so the government will compensate them extra when the bulldozers come.

Yeah, Patterson, that's the real environmental threat in the world today -- Christian theology.

Remember, Patterson's PhD is in International Studies -- shouldn't he take a global perspective?

OK, end reality check. let's go on now to Patterson's main argument.  Will the Bible will cause runaway global warming and doom us all? (Since we Christians think we are just visiting this planet, anyway, we might as well trash it?)


Burn, Planet, Burn?

Dr. Patterson owns a doctorate in "international studies."  (I have an MA in the subject.)  Since AGW is, as I mentioned above, a multi-disciplinary issue, this is probably an OK place to enter the discussion.  But it does make his focus on Christian theology, which continues, seem increasingly parochial, for those who share a genuinely global consciousness.  

Patterson argues that AGW is an "impending catastrophe," and that Christianity has "hindered a response" to it.  (286) This begs three questions:

(1) Is AGW really an "impending catastrophe?"

(2) Does Christianity really "impede a response" to it?

(3) Was the response that is allegedly being impeded the right one, in the first place?

Patterson addresses the first two questions, but entirely neglects the third.  But frankly, his answer to the first is so weak, that we need not bother much with the last two. 


(1) Is the sky, weighted down with excess CO2,  really about to fall?

Patterson mainly argues from authority.  He cites the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change), along with the US National Academy of Sciences, American Geophysical Association, and many other authoritative American scientific organizations.  He also claims (citing historian of science Naomi Oreskes) that of 928 articles from scientific journals published on "climate change" from 1993 to 2003, not one contradicted the fact that global warming is happening and is mostly caused by humans.  

Actually, the IPCC only admitted that warming "in the past 50 years" has mostly been driven by human activity.  But almost half of the warming of the past 100 years came before that date.  Since only a relatively tiny amount of CO2 was released before World War II, compared to that released in recent years, it seems highly unlikely that the warming before then was caused by human activity.  Therefore, even if 70% of the warming after 1970 or so has been due to our machines, probably less than half has been, over the past century.  And that's worth noting, since a lot of the effects Patterson notes -- such as melting glacial ice -- have been going on since about 1850.

But I largely agree with Patterson's first two points: Earth's atmosphere has warmed about 1 degree Celsius in 100 years, and probably 1/3rd to 1/2 of that is due to human activity.

Patterson then describes the alleged harms likely to result from global warming.  Here's where his argument heats up, so to speak:

"The global harms brought about by climate change include, but are not limited to: sea level rise, increased strength of extreme weather events such as hurricanes; droughts; increased spread of certain diseases such as malaria, cholera, and yellow fever in vulnerable parts of the world; famines . . . loss of biodiversity . . . (it is estimated that a quarter of all plants and animals currently living will either be extinct or in danger of extinction during the next half century due to climate change); increased risk of large forest fires; economic disruption and loss of productivity; and conflict brought about by the increased scarcity of resources, such as potable water." (289)

I remember in Taiwan, visiting an office where Christians were cutting news articles out of the paper about disasters.  Each of these, they believed, was proof that the world was doomed, and the End Times were near.  Some people seem irresistably drawn to doomsday scenarios.  You can't argue them out of out-sized fears: the hold to them like a dog to a bone.  Every new bit of data is fed into the monster.

That appears to be what's going on here.

Despite all the alarm, polar bears seem to be thriving in the Arctic.  Of course there are far more species of mosquitoes than polar bears, so the spread of mosquitoes north and south would seem to increase biodiversity, if it that is what we want.

What really threatens species?  Chinese medicine.  That's why there are few tigers left in the wild, that and all those new roads and chopped down forests.

What causes forest fires?  Over-zealous Smokey the Bear, federal forest programs that do not allow smaller natural fires in the undergrowth, allowing the undergrowth to build up until it becomes a tinderbox. And what increases the danger of those fires, is an influx of new homes in the pine and aspen forests.  (More on this below.) 

Are hurricanes any worse now, than in the "old days?"  Patterson cites one Admiral Locklear: "You have the real potential here in the not-too-distant future of nations displaced by rising sea level.  Certain weather patterns are more severe than they have been in the past."  But  As Dr. Christopher Landsea and others explain (great name for a meteorologist!), peak storms come in cycles.  There is no evidence that storms striking either the US mainland or East Asia have grown in intensity over the past decades.  (Though it seems they do vary in landfall, depending on complex factors, such as snow melt in Tibet.)  Landsea notes:

"All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, 
long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin." 

How about droughts?

I once debated a passionate defender of AGW, a Christian, on this very issue for about a month.  He believed that 20% of the planet had ALREADY become extremely dry due to AGW.  (Based on research by a climatologist named Dr. Dai Aiguo.)  The problem was, as I looked around the world and cited study after study, my opponent couldn't tell me where the areas of radically increased drought (20% of the non-polar land area of the whole planet!) had occurred.  It hadn't happened in Siberia.  We couldn't find it in China.  North America was pretty normal (here you can watch areas of drought skip around the country over the past 14 years), it wasn't in Alaska.  South America had some largish region of drought, probably due in part to felling of timber.  The southern Sahel in northern Africa was greening in some places.  Australia was dry in places, but nothing too unusual.

As for glacial melt, one eminent Indian scientist lost his job because he made extravagant claims about loss of glacial ice in the Himalayas, that proved untrue. Let's learn from our mistakes. 

Some of Patterson's arguments is pretty vague and unfalsifiable.  But he offers one argument that is highly specific, and can be easily checked:

"Increased frequency and intensity of forest fires is another predicted outcome of global warming.  Speaking of the western part of North America, the IPCC foresaw in 2007 that "disturbances from pests, diseases and fire are projected to have increasing impacts on forests, with an extended period of high fire risk and large increases in area burned."  Unfortunately this proved prescient, as forest fires of unprecedented size and frequency have since occurred in Colorado, California, and other western states.  The Black Forest Fire near Colorado Springs, CO, burned 5,780 hectacres of land and destroyed 500 homes in June 2013.  This was the most destructive fire in Colorado history, the second most destructive was the Waldo Canyon Fire, which occurred only the year before."

This sounds convincing -- but unfortunately for Patterson, it only takes a few clicks of the mouse to show the fire had nothing, in fact, to do with Global Warming.

I went to the Weather Underground site for Denver, Colorado, about 100 miles north of Colorado Springs.  I checked the weather report for the 20 days previous to the Black Forest Fire, which occurred on June 11th, 2013.  Indeed, the high temperature on the 10th and 11th both made it into the upper 90s, almost 20 degrees warmer than the norm for those dates.  But overall, the 20 days previous to the outbreak of forest fire were only about 1.5 degrees warmer than usual -- a relatively mild warm spell.  By comparison, the entire month of May, 1985 (the second-earliest year with data on that site), averaged almost 4 degrees warmer than the norm.

True, Think Progress.org warned in the winter of 2011-2012 that low snowfall in the Colorado mountains had created a danger of summer fires, blaming that on Global Warming.  But the reporter admitted that the previous year, Colorado had enjoyed a record snowfall of (at one site) 525 inches.  So if we get no snow, that's Global Warming.  If we get tons of snow, that' Global Warming, too.  Anything extreme and noticable, feeds our theory.  Anything normal is not noticed, so we don't notice it!  Anyone who has watched the weather over decades gets used to that sort of ebb-and-flow from year to year, which I remember from my youth in Alaska, as well.  Change is the very definition of weather. 

And then the next year, before the really big Black Forest Fire, Denver got 20 inches more snowfall than usual.

So it seems unlikely that AGW caused the Black Forest Fire.   But "it only takes a spark, to get a fire going."  It only takes an accumulation of kindling on a hot day, to turn it into a conflagration.  And then if over the past 30 years, your state's population has swelled, and people all move into the pine trees to get out of the mile-high sun (and some of them smoke) -- disasters are bound to grow by leaps and bounds in magnitude.

Patterson further writes of "nations displaced by rising sea level."  Unfortunately he neglects to name any, which makes his "argument" hard to refute.  When someone names such a country, or island, I sometimes check Google Earth, and reports by oceanographers, and find the island is generally still there, and not going anywhere.  (Since really, the sea has not risen much yet: I grew up almost on Puget Sound, watching it nearly every day.)  The biggest danger would probably be to Bangladesh, partly from deforestation in the Himalayas due to poverty (people cut trees for firewood).  The solution is to enrich the poor through economic development, then if we need to, build up dykes in Bangladesh.  (Rich Bengalis will do that more easily than poor Bengalis.)

So all in all, while I admit that global temperatures have gone up over the past 100 years, and a good chunk of that is probably due to carbon use, Patterson doesn't really get to first base with his argument -- showing that this is a dire threat.  His argument is mostly vague, and when specific, often highly dubious.

I have not mentioned Christian theology so far, and have not had to.  After making his first points, however, Patterson turns to the role of Christianity in causes the evil he claims to see.

Since Patterson does not make a good case for an "impending catastrophe," I don't see that I need to respond in detail to the following ten pages of argument that Christianity "impede a solution."  And anyway, Patterson doesn't say what that alleged solution is, or why it's the best one.  So I'll pick and choose what to answer, in response to rest of his paper.  But the focus will mostly be on this claim that Christian theology is the root problem. 


"God is to blame!"

"Only 33% of evangelical Christians see global warming as a major problem, thereby making them the least likely among fifty population groups studied to view the problem as serious.  Atheists and agnostics were the most concerned."  (292)

Well good!  It seems on this issue, at any rate, Christians are less susceptible to unwarranted hysteria.  Christians were also less likely to buy the leftist line about how cool socialism was, in the last century, which I believe helped "saved the planet" in a more genuine sense, while most atheists were enthusiastic for Marxism-Leninism.

"The earth is God's gift to humankind to use as it pleases to meet its own needs and to prosper . . . " (293)

This is a caricature of Christian theology.  Christians believe that, "The earth is the Lord's."

"Scientists agree that the negative repercussions of these changes will be far more severe than any positive side effects."

Patterson had not mentioned any "positive side effects" before this, and doesn't again, as best I recall.  Nor, as we have seen, is his description of "negative repercussions" very reliable.  

"Christians . . . believe that widespread negative impacts are impossible in principle because God's creation is perfect." (294)

This is another strange caricature of Christian thought.  Patterson cites the Cornwall Alliance to support this bizarre claim, but what they say is that creation is "robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting," not that it is "perfect."  It's a good idea to cite people accurately.  Patterson also cites three youngish scientists on what Christians think, calling them "scholars," rather than identifying them as environmental scientists, rather than theologians or any other authority on what Christians think.  Patterson also cites that famous theologian, Rush Limbaugh.

So when I say Patterson is more honest than Gaylor, it's a relative thing.  He ought to represent those he criticize, and the facts, far more carefully. 

Later in the chapter, Patterson also cites several Christian politicians, who in some cases do say some embarrassing things -- if he is citing them accurately.  "All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell."  Odd, that the Catholic astronomer Georges Lemaitre, who discovered the Big Bang, would have to go to hell to fetch that theory.  Odd, too, that so many atheists reacted with such terror to it, at first.

Finally, on page 297, Patterson, again an "international studies" scholar, not a scientist, complains about how one Roy Spencer "of the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance" misrepresents the proper scientific use of the word "theory:"

"Man-made global warming is a theory, and not a scientific observation."

Is Patterson talking about Dr. Roy Spencer, "Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite" who "has served as Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center?"  That Roy Spencer?  

No, I don't suppose a senior NASA scientist and eminent professor would know how the word "theory" should be used by scientists, nearly so well as an International Studies major.  

But really, it is a little cheeky to refer to him merely as "of the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance," as if he were some Bible-toting hillbilly, or a backwoods pastor.  That's not quite leveling with your readers.  A proper citation gives the reader the most relevant credentials the person cited has. Tricksy citations such as this one do does not build confidence in a writer's objectivity.  

So is Christian theology going to destroy the planet?  I suppose it is possible -- cause and effect are often mysterious and outcomes in a "Butterfly Effect" world unpredictable -- but Patterson makes no credible case for such a danger.  (Though he does prove politicians sometimes say pandering and foolish things -- if that requires proving.)  The industrializing East and South is polluting, badly, and fouling air, water, and soil, as the industrializing West did before it.  Let us hope they clean up, after the party, as Taiwan is beginning to do.  Given that temperature rise is proportional to doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, that means the effect will grow increasingly small per unit carbon released.  I think pollution itself is the more worrisome problem.  But if, in the future, the sea level does rise in a few low-lying areas (the forecast is a foot or so during this century), dykes in the most vulnerable places are probably a better solution, than trying to reverse the Industrial Revolution, and telling the billions of poor who now have some pocket change, to keep their bikes and not buy cars like us.  And no, I don't care if you use plastic bags -- at least in pagan China, where they are provided, I don't drop my groceries on the parking lot when it rains, as I have here in "Christian" America. 

And if AGW really is a serious problem, it remains to be seen whether the solutions offered really are ideal.  Even if one opposes them, one would have to explain why they are the best, to show that opposition is harmful.  Patterson does not even say quite what he thinks we should do, let alone demonstrate that his solution is the best.  Odd that skeptics should find such a vague critique, a persuasive indictment of Christianity.    

Next up: Peter Bogghossian on faith -- again?  Wasn't he bad enough last time?  But this time, he has a confession to make -- implicitly.  

Alaskans on Mars!

Comet West apparently
broke into four fragments
in 1976.

My aim in this blog is to "map the universe, one blog at a time."  But so far, my blogs have been a tad parochial -- about events on that one planet that most of my readers seem to inhabit.  (And yes, there are readers, and their numbers appear to be increasing.) 

So let me take a first, tentative, if nascently imperial, step beyond our world. 

How about turning Mars into a summer home for Alaskans?

Here is how we would do it.  First, develop one of the larger spacecraft considered for "Project Orion," which use nuclear bombs as propulsion.

Second, capture several dozen large comets with a lot of ice, and force them to crash on the surface of Mars.  (The mass of Earth's oceans is about 5 million times the mass of Halley's comet, which is a small comet.  We would need at least 1/500th as much water to make a viable ocean on Mars, whose surface area is one third that of Earth -- a thousand feet deep might be a good start.)

Third, if needed, add a smaller, more salt-rich comet or two.  Shake well to mix. 

Fourth, wait for the energy of the crash to melt the ice -- this might take some careful calibration, we'll put our best Chinese and Indian engineers on the job.  Before the oceans evaporate into space, they should provide an atmosphere for a few thousand years, which we can tweak, once we have enough practice with our own.  (Perhaps tax credits for Humvees on the Red Planet?) 

Fifth, stock the new oceans with halibut, king crab and the better species of salmon. 

Then open Mars up as a winter resort for Alaskans who can't book a flight to Hawaii, or in case we have to sell Hawaii to China to pay off our debt.

The sun does not shine very brightly on Mars, admittedly.  But Alaskans are used to that.  And it's sunny every day.  We could, perhaps, also import a few seals, polar bears, and other animals that enjoy that sort of weather, once we've got the planetary thermostat down.  There's a fair amount of CO2 in the Martian atmosphere already, so that should warm things up. 

If Sarah Palin buys a summer home on Mars, she can reign as governor, if not goddess of the sea (a position that may not tax her powers of patience for too long.)  Then, as Earth increasingly resembles its greenhouse-gas befogged sunward neighbor, the saying will come true, "Republicans are from Mars, Democrats are from Venus."

Fish the Red Planet!



And if we mess up our own planet badly enough, we'll have some off-world relatives to get things going, again.  (Since chat lines will take at least 16 minutes for communication at the speed of light, this may also bring back some of the old romance of letter-writing.  Imagine what it will do for stories of tragic lost love, as well.)

Global Warming: The Four Noble Half-Truths

One of the fun things about the Global Warming debate is how many different fields of knowledge it draws on.  What is the temperature and acidity of the ocean?  How has the beta radiation emitted by the sun varied?  How quickly did balsa trees in Siberia grow?  How much methane is released per year in the Arctic?  What sorts of grapes were grown how far north in Medieval Europe?  What kinds of mosquitos can survive in the "heat island" of urban Tokyo?  Even scientists in obscure fields like glaciology get their moment in the sun, so to speak. 

How about those of us who study comparative religion?  Can we add anything to the discussion?  Perhaps a bit of perspective on the Global Warming movement as a religious movement. 

Has anyone noticed how closely the claims of Anthropogenic Global Warming resembles the basic teachings of Buddhism? 

The Buddha is said to have discovered Four Noble Truths while meditating under a bodhi tree:

First, life involves suffering (or "is suffering," there is some debate on just how broadly he defined the problem). 

Second, the cause of suffering is desire (or karma; again, there seems to be some question about exactly what Buddha meant). 

Third, the way to end suffering is, therefore, to end desire (karma). 

Fourth, Buddha offered an "Eight-Fold Path" to ending desire or karma, and therefore attaining nirvana: right view, aspiration, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration (of mind, not of greenhouse gases). 

The parallels stumble over one another to emerge.  Let us put them in the following order:

The Four Noble (Half) Truths of Global Warming

By most measures, worldwide air
temperatures have increased
over the past 2 centuries by a
little more than 1 degree C.

#1  Earth's atmosphere has been warming. 

The truth: Almost certainly so.  While some skeptics point out that weather stations in cities are subject to "heat island" effects, and argue that AGW proponents have not taken this into account sufficiently, it seems clear from a variety of measurements that global temperatures have, in fact, gone up about 1 degree C over the past century. 

Mendenhall glacier,
near Juneau, with
Nugget Falls in
foreground, early 1980s.

If nothing else, global warming can be deduced from the fact that around the world, glaciers have retreated dramatically since about the mid-19th Century. 

#2  The main cause of atmospheric warming, is car-ma.  (And car-pas, they reproduce so swiftly nowadays.)   

The truth: possibly so.  There is nothing inherently unreasonable in supposing that greenhouse gases will warm the atmosphere, in fact it seems to be simple physics.  (Or so they say.)  What is clear historically is that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased over the past century, and that carbon isotopes in the CO2 show that much of the increase comes from carbon released by human activity.  

The same glacier a quarter
mile behind the falls, about 2006.
(My sons John and James
standing in front of the falls.)

However, almost half of all warming occurred before about 1945.  The amount of CO2 put into the atmosphere per year was about 1/30 then, what it is today.  So it seems unlikely that the small amount released before WWII would have had such a dramatic effect on worldwide climate.  Applying Occam's Razor, it seems plausible that whatever caused MOST of the global warming before 1950, may have cause some or most of it after 1950.  Therefore, it seems likely that half or more global warming was NOT caused by release of CO2 and other greenhouse gases by human industrial activity.  (car-ma)  But it is also possible that these trends mask other changes (much discussed by climate scientists, including sun-spot cycles, solar radiation, ocean currents, and so forth) that would normally result in cooling rather than warming.  And it is also true that temperatures rose most dramatically after about the mid-1970s.  So empirically, it seems a flip of the coin whether half the warming was due to human activity, more or less. 

#3 Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a terrible thing, which will harm or destroy much complex life on earth, including our own.  It is therefore critical to end the cause (car-mas, car-pas) of this bad effect.

The Truth: I seriously doubt it.  If Earth's ecosystem were so fragile and subject to runaway warming and cooling trends, how did we develop life on this planet in the first place?  Some periods in the past have been much warmer than today -- yet the ice sheets did not melt, and Earth did not become another Venus.  Reports of flora and fauna from the Shang Dynasty in northern China show that 3 thousand years ago, the region was much warmer and wetter than it is today, for instance.  Other periods have been much cooler, yet Ice Ages eventually ended due to natural cycles and (presumably) negative feedback mechanisms.

Planet Earth seems fairly resilient.  Even UN predictions suggest that continued global warming will only raise the sea level by about a foot or so over the 21st Century -- so slight a rise it will be easy to gradually adjust for it, even on the lowest Pacific islands. 

What makes it easier to doubt the apocalyptic scenarios offered by AGW, is how often they have proven empty.  Al Gore blamed the Bush administration for Hurricane Katrina, and won a Nobel Prize for doing so.  The many gross errors he made in An Inconvenient Truth make one wonder about the standards of his supporters.  One also commonly comes across extreme claims about Pacific Islands sinking under the waves, Himalayan glaciers disappearing, the causes of melting ice on Kilamanjaro, and the supposed desertification of the planet, leading, one otherwise well-informed AGW proponent assures me, an "end to agriculture" and mass starvation, would reach 70% in a few decades, despite reams of contrary evidence I pointed him to. 

One can see the psychology of doomsday thinking at work, here.  Population Bomb, anyone?  Late, Great, Planet Earth? 

#4  Our environmental Buddhas offer an "Eight-Fold Path" to end car-ma, and attain nirvana, which also involves right view (global), aspiration (green), speech (media), action (turn off the lights!), livelihood (organic farming), effort, mindfulness, and concentration (of greenhouse gases, but first of cash into the right pockets).

The Truth:  Most of this looks more and more like a scam.  Adopting the whole program might well destroy the world's economy (what's left of it), and would likely devastate poor countries.  And Al Gore and Co would probably get even richer than they already are, off government pork falling off the butcher's wagon. 

Why do I think that?  Over the past several years, the world economy has been deeply threatened by public debt.  This is a problem that we all know the answer to: spend less money.  And yet the Left, which pushes programs to solve AGW, has in fact not decreased spending, even when it held the White House and both houses of Congress.  No, it has increased spending dramatically. 

And where has that money gone?

Into the pockets of constituents and supporters. 

So long, cruel world!  Republicans
aim to slow the growth of spending
 by two freckles and a hair,
in the year, 2525!

Faced with years of crisis, the Right has been far too timid in cutting federal spending, and has often been complicit in pork-barrel spending, too.  Meanwhile, the Left (both in America and Europe) has reacted by sabatoging every effort to bring spending under control.  An overly modest program by Paul Ryan, for instance, was depicted in attack ads as an effort to "push grandma over a cliff" -- even though it would in fact not effect seniors. 

What does that tell us? 

The Left in America and Europe is addicted to huge amounts of public spending.  It doesn't matter what the money is spent on -- the Democratic Party is unwilling to cut ANYTHING.  (Except maybe the military.)  After a year of crisis and negotiation, the Democrats agreed -- maybe -- to cut some $1 billion from the federal budget, when the debt that year was more than $1.5 trillion!  Our enormous national budget, nearing twice what we take in, now, appears to consist entirely of sacred cows.

It is reasonable, I think, to distrust attempts by people so eager to spend money and increase government power to "manage" the alleged threat from AGW by further increasing the size and power of central government.  I simply don't believe what the plutocrats claim or promise, anymore.  I think it is mostly an effort, perhaps unconscious in some cases, to line their own beds and increase their power over the rest of us. 

Furthermore, given the growth of technology and how slowly the Earth is warming, I believe far cheaper methods of cooling the atmosphere, should they be needed, will become available, if they are not already.  Some discussion has taken place over the possibility of releasing SO2 into the upper atmosphere. Whether that will become viable, or some other solution will be found, I think it would be foolish at this time to wed ourselves to expensive, economy-killing, and probably unnecessary programs from the same people who gave us 20th Century socialism and the debt crisis, and stopped nuclear power in the US. 

And those, my friends, are the "Four Noble Half-Truths," so far as one scholar of religions can make them out.  If that does not seem so far, take comfort in the fact that after 2600 years, no one seems to really get Buddhism, either.