Activists will hold Day of Climate Action tomorrow
Step It Up is taking steps to cut carbon emissions across the country.
April 14 is a National Day of Climate Action.
Step It Up 2007 is organizing a day of citizen action to encourage Congress to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050.
Here’s how to find an action near you.
Almost 1,400 actions have been organized across the country. You could reef dive with global warming protest signs in Key West, Florida. Or you could demonstrate to “Keep Alaska Cold” in Homer, Alaska. Or you could see Bill McKibben speak and be a part of a what they’re calling a “Sea of People” in New York City, where a mile–long line of city–dwellers dressed in blue will ebb and flow in Battery Park, showing where the waterline is expected to rise after the polar glaciers melt.
Cutting carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 is an absurd goal that entails returning to the stone age. We’re being asked to give up prosperity and freedom for something that is not provably caused by man and in fact is strongly indicated to be caused by increased solar activity which occurs naturally on a cyclic basis. The campaign against “manmade global warming” has become a cult. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than di-hydrogen oxide (water)is…the ignorance of people pretending to be scientist-priests is as galling as the gullibility of those who fall in line behind them as the march off a cliff.
Doug, yes, there has been an article or two published about possible increased solar activity causing a temperature rise on Earth. Willie Soon, for example, has written of this possibility.
Those articles are as nothing in contrast to the decades of research on the causes and effects of global warming by thousands of scientists around the globe.
I continue to be amazed by the confidence and outspokenness of those who do not believe in human-caused global warming. I ask again … how do you know you are right?
It’s the job of scientists in our culture to explain the natural world. I just wonder … why don’t you believe them? Or at least consider the possibility that the scientific consensus on global warming might be correct?
Best regards,
Deborah
Dear Doug,
There you go again!
If we choose to ignore the evidence upon which the carefully gained scientific consensus on global climate change is based, and the scientific evidence is good, then following YOU would result in humankind “falling in line and marching off a cliff,” as you put it? Do you disagree?
Please forgive me for saying so, but good scientific evidence indicates so clearly that the seemingly endless expansion of the economic globalization, given its current scale and anticipated growth rate, are patently unsustainable on the relatively small, finite planet we are blessed by God to inhabit. Do you see the possibility, let alone probability, that even in the first half of this century the well established economic growth requirements of unbridled capitalism would literally overwhelm the ecosystem services and diisipate the natural resources the Earth provides to humanity for its benefit?
Thanks for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Steve
Lately I’ve been noticing allusions to science as religion in the man-made global warming discussion. In the comment above, Doug refers to climate scientists as “people pretending to be scientist-priests.” And at a recent event, I saw a man holding a up sign stating, “Man made global warming is a religion, not a science.”
I’m wondering where this argument comes from. Religion is based on faith and science is based on concrete evidence. Religion and science, no matter which one may prefer, are not usually so easily rearranged. Scientists do not make references to faith, and the IPCC report is not the equivalent of sermon.
I’m thinking that there might be some kind of reverse-psychology involved in this approach, but otherwise I have no idea… please enlighten me.
Dear Jaye,
From my very limited vantage point, the manufactured ‘confusion’ you are noticing could be a feature of what has gone terribly wrong with public discourse on global climate change. Many are the ways specious thinking, contrived logic and faulty reasoning are used to deny the actually formidable, distinctly human predicament that is posed to humanity in these early years of Century XXI.
A taxonomy of rhetorical devices and biases will not be introduced here. Suffice it to say, many people are choosing ways to magically avoid or otherwise miraculously escape the requirements of practical reality which are imposed upon the human species by the very nature of the world we are blessed to inhabit.
Nothing is spared in the manifold attempts of many too many people to maintain certain illusions: that we are what we proclaim, masters of the universe; that human beings can live for centuries to come without regard to either Earth limitations or human limits; and that human beings can perpetually consume limited resources, can endlessly expand the global economy on a relatively small finite planet, and can expect the skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population to stabilize soon….....so that the current prodigious growth of the human species worldwid somehow comes to an end around 2050, as so many demographers may have been erroneously assuring us.
Sincerely,
Steve
Dear Jaye,
Something is happening. Something may also be seriously wrong with the way the masters of the universe in my generation believe the world in which we live actually works.
An aspect of this unexpected problem of perception has to do, it now appears, with a consensually validated, preternatural demographic transition theory. It posits that the skyrocketing increase of absolute global human population numbers will magically level off in the middle of this century and the population growth of the human species will miraculously end. Consider that it is a misperception to believe the global numbers of the human population are soon to stabilize.
Another aspect of the unforeseen problem of perception is associated with the widely shared view that the members of the human species can continuously increase their per capita consumption of the limited resources provided by the Earth for human benefit. Consider that it is a misperception to believe per human consumption of scarce resources can perpetually occur without regard to limits to growth imposed by the relatively small planetary home we inhabit.
Still another aspect of the unacknowledged problem of perception is connected to the specious idea that the current scale and anticipated growth rate of the predominant global economy can endlessly increase on Earth. Consider that the artificially designed, human construction of economic globalization cannot endlessly expand in a finite world the size of Earth.
When taken together, it appears that the leaders of my not-so-great generation could be making a set of errors of perception, ones borne of hubris and overweening ambition, that result in their adamant insistence upon patently unsustainable forms of human enterprise and in their self-righteous denial of human limits and Earth’s limitations.
Sincerely,
Steve