Return of the Warm-Monger
- From: jose <josefsoplar@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 1 Apr 2008 08:39:46 -0700 (PDT)
Return of the Warm-Monger
By Jay D. Homnick
Published 4/1/2008 12:07:37 AM
Global warming is heating right back up, with ex-Senator, ex-Vice
President, ex-Presidential candidate, best-selling author, Oscar
winner, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and all-around creep Al Gore Jr.
announcing some new initiative that will cost a mere $300 million.
Some kind of education thingie to increase awareness and sensitize the
hitherto clueless to the profound challenge that faces our
civilization in this darkest hour of crisis. Or something.
This sort of project has a new name, which I feel a profound
obligation to promulgate in the culture. It is a "public advocacy
campaign." No great skills of augury are required to offer the
prediction that these will soon be "acronymized" as PAD. What a
wonderful opportunity to PAD the numbers, PAD the facts, PAD the truth
and, ultimately, PAD the pockets. When I consider that I have not put
up a single one of those three hundred million simoleons (I hope), a
shiver runs down my spine. Is it guilt? Nah. More like dread of the
there-but-for-the-grace-of-common-sense-go-I variety.
It used to be that we could hide behind the Velvet Curtain, i.e. the
religious-secular divide. We could say, with the late, G.K.
Chesterton, that one of the redemptive features of faith in the
Creator is that we are freed of the primal tug to believe all sorts of
arrant nonsense. Those who do not believe in God, said Chesterton, do
not believe in nothing, they believe in everything. The late Rabbi
Jacob Kanievsky (1899-1985), one of the great Jewish scholars of the
recent era, used to marvel at the fact that brilliant scientific
thinkers who rejected religion always seemed to have a troll hanging
for luck from their rearview mirrors.
So it was with global warming, until recently. The intellectual
formula that gave us solace was simple. People who do not believe in a
Creator are living in a world defined entirely by chance. As easily as
it emerged in randomness, it could disintegrate into chaos. Their
lives are fragile tendrils clinging for support to the slender reed of
a world governed by habit rather than purpose. They are only too
easily gulled by the soothsayers, the naysayers, the doomsayers.
Although they scorn our mercy, they are more to be pitied than to be
censured.
NOW, SADLY, THIS formula has broken down, as major religious figures
have succumbed to the propaganda. From the Catholic Church to Pat
Robertson, the clergy has taken of late to haranguing us for hastening
the demise of the planet with our excess. As the drumbeat grows
louder, it apparently becomes more difficult for good sense to
prevail.
Let me offer here two brief arguments, one from faith, one from
science. From faith I would maintain that man must be humble in
stewarding individual offshoots of nature, the things provided for his
comfort. In this spirit, Jews do not chop down fruit trees, they do
not spay animals, and they frown upon hunting for sport; all
restrictions that accept a higher moral commitment to the integrity
and productivity of fellow creatures. Yet that same humility should
translate itself into an awareness that nothing man can do will truly
destroy the world. The scale of global reality dwarfs our minuscule
effect.
It is a spiritually absurd idea to think that the world will end one
minute before God is ready for it to be shut down. Or, conversely,
that we could extend its lifespan an instant beyond that appointed
time. As long as mankind is engaged in the enterprise of bringing the
Divine vision for this planet into fruition, there will be no oops
moment of auto-incineration.
The argument from science goes in another direction. All the
disciplines of physical science are in agreement that in human terms,
this planet is billions of years old. Even most religious people
understand that although the history of mankind begins 5768 years ago
with the advent of Adam, there is no reason to refute the notion that
the cumulative processes leading up to that point could well pass
through stages that would represent billions of years if codified
mathematically. (Since God is above time, all of history is
simultaneous to Him, so the actual numbers and the experience of
waiting for things to develop is relevant only to humans.)
Bottom line, this planet has endured billions of years by mathematical
and scientific measurement. In that amount of time, the degrees of
permutation in temperature and infinite other chemical variables is
some mind-bendingly huge number. If this planet has survived every
possible heating, cooling, burning, icing, watering, steaming, gassing
and drying that billions of years in this solar system have produced,
the thought that a bunch of humans driving trucks for a hundred years
could destroy the system is profoundly, you should forgive the
expression, unscientific.
Jay D. Homnick, commentator and humorist, is a frequent contributor to
The American Spectator. He also writes for Human Events.
.
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