Proof Reading

Snow lies thick on the ground here today. This proves, in the overall climate scheme of things, nothing at all. This last summer was not as hot as the previous two. This proves not a darn thing. There were bad hurricanes on the Gulf Coast in 2008 and 2005. This proves not a bloody thing. In this area many of the record cold snaps happened in the 1980s. Again proving diddly. Many of the record warm temps for December dates here were set in the 1930s--proving jack-squat. Northern Hemisphere temps were, duh, warmer in the "Medieval Warm Period" and colder in the late 1700s "Little Ice Age". Proving, let me see, oh yeah, nothing whatsodamnever.

Taken altogether, along with any and all climate records from the crudest early measurements to ice cores to tree rings, they do prove that predicting next week's, next year's, the next decade's or the next centuries' average global temperature is an utter fool's errand. And hubristically predicting the "climate", let alone any particular weather event, of any particular spot, region, country or continent with any remote degree of accuracy years hence is simple lunacy.

The earth will warm, it will cool, storms will destroy, droughts will endure and end, floods will ravage, and ice will retreat and advance. The climate record of the earth paints a picture of a dynamically unstable system that may or not be recordable or explainable but what it is not is predictable no matter if supercomputers are lined up from here to the moon and back. A planetary biosphere is a creature of chaos, minutely sensitive to thousands of "initial conditions", shifting and rotating inscrutably, that cruelly mock attempts to model it with our current crude computer skills.

Global warming alarmists loudly aver that we are smart enough to do the job, that present computer modeling and data collection techniques are entirely adequate to the task, that the "science is settled", that "we" are dead bang certain that the climate of Terra is morphing into a hell of overheated turmoil bringing mass death and destruction down upon the heads of all of us evil human wankers with our insistence on continuing our vile sick monkey motions of planetary despoilization.

Those of us unenthralled by all this gloom mongering are painted as manifestly evil planetary criminals if we have the gall to question the grand project of the expenditure of trillions of currency units on the wholesale rearranging of our lifestyles so as to avoid a degree or three of possible planetary average temperature change. We are thuggish insensate "deniers" if have the temerity to question the many assumptions of modeling software or the dodgy malleable "normalizing" of collected climate data. We are paid industry shills doing the dirty work of our corporate/political dictators if we voice even vague suspicions that the whole enterprise of "saving the planet" dovetails nearly perfectly with a grand overarching progressive political agenda. If the contrarian "we" has disputation with the science-is-settled "we" then it is now acceptable, practically required, for the latter to engage in sneering ridicule, academic apartheid, and emotional persecution of the former.

Saving the Planet has become not a mere incidental feature of the progressive ideological thrust but rather its living beating heart, the consummate and overpowering justification of all things good and green, and the opportunity to not merely use the "crisis" to rearrange society in ways deemed planet friendly but to also retool and hyper-compassionize our very psyches.

It is a truly spectacular irony that while conservatives have ever been painted as dreary maintainers of the cultural status quo (standing athwart History yelling "Stop!) the current green progressive political thrust has resulted in a frantic keening headlong pursuit of the status quo of an entire planetary biosphere. Thus, in contrarian contrapuntalism, we offer the image of a placard waving green activist standing athwart the whole Planet yelling "STOP! Or F**king Else!"