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Gore Becomes Republican, Gives Back Nobel Prize

Posted by Rajjpuut's Folly on Monday, June 29, 2009 8:42:45 PM
Al Gore Burns Down 40,000 Square-foot Mansion
Real science goes to work as "hoopla dies"
Celebrities ask, "Global Warming, what's that?"
Obama calls for return to "pollution-tech"
 
Nobel Prize Officals’

Political-Activism Backfires

                Back in 2000, when the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded to Al Gore and the United Nations’ IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Rajjpuut commented to his now ex-wife that “I can’t believe it, every year it’s more and more political . . . Nobel must be rolling over and moaning in his grave!”   The question has become now nine years later,  now that real scientists are saying this is NOT the slam-dunk that the Nobel people thought it was, now that real scientific debate is occurring . . . when will Al Gore give back his prize?

Now, however I feel sorry for the IPCC. Despite all the criticism, they did proper science and their conclusions were scientific, so why in God’s name would they get a “peace prize?”Ah, because as the Nobel Committees realized, the science wasn’t conclusive (which is exactly what the IPCC said) . . . ah, because Gore had done no real science and they couldn’t justify giving him anything at all for no science unless . . . ah because they didn’t like George W. Bush raining on their (The European) leap to judgment on the issue . . . ah, because they found Gore’s movie entertaining . . . ah, because they wanted to make a political statement with their idiotic peace prize decision.   On the other hand, the IPCC did proper science and came to a proper set of conclusions,  to wit:

A.       They called it Global Climate Change (GCC) not “global warming” and they are right

B.      They stated GCC was occurring and they are right**

C.      They stated that greenhouse gas proliferation seemed to be the main causative agent (undoubtedly right, but they hardly paid enough attention to methane released when permafrost melts; methane is 20 times the greenhouse gas that carbon dioxide is)

D.      They stated that small and large climate shifts into colder and warmer eras were commonplace in the earth’s history (absolutely correct)

E.       They stated that the relative effects of man’s negative contributions and the natural processes were impossible to delineate (clearly true)

Unfortunately, the IPCC did not combine all their science with the wonderful investigations done by the History Channel as revealed in their marvelous dvd “Little Ice Age, Big Chill.” If they had, they might have come to a sixth correct conclusion:

F.                Since mighty volcanic actions and sunspots and other powerful agents have been at work in normal, natural climate shift, it’s most likely that at present, (short of all-out nuclear war and the subsequent “nuclear winter” phenomenon)  man’s negative effects are still far too puny to measure up to nature’s power in shifting climate.
 
Ya’Ya'all live long, strong and ornery,
 
Ra Rajjpuut
Th  .** Those who've seen the History Channel dvd . . . most likely would conclude that global climate shift right now means more extreme weather (more record highs, more record lows, more and mightier storms that mother nature is bringing our way) with every passing year.
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Global Climate Shift: The Big Skinny

Posted by Rajjpuut's Folly on Saturday, June 20, 2009 6:49:50 AM
 Mankind's Negative Contribution Probably Puny, but

Severe Weather

Associated with Global Climate Change

Brings Potential Dangers

                 There's good news, bad news, more good news and more bad news.  Positive:  mankind still isn't powerful enough to dramatically affect the global climate patterns.  However, negative:  global climate shift is real (and driven almost totally by Mother Nature herself) and capable of bringing us truly nasty weather as a constant new emerging pattern.  Positive:  there is no need for the green-tech "emergency the liberal contingent is trying to drive down our throats.  Negative:  the madman in charge and his cronies are showing great industriousness in doing all the wrong things to our economy in the name of green, clean and obscene.

                Loyal readers of Rajjpuut’s Folly will notice that Rajjpuut’s take on so-called global warming is nothing like the Al Gore liberal feeding frenzy (“An Inconvenient Truth”) nor is it anything like the ultra-conservative’s “denial” that anything at all is happening that ‘s heard from many here at TownHall. Near as reason can surmise, the science in the U.N.’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is real science and not just a propaganda ploy such as Gore’s interpretation. The U.N. Report which deserved the Nobel Prize, Gore did not, basically says Global Climate Shift is going on and says, “yes,” man is contributing to it via greenhouse gasses released into the atmosphere. The report also says that global climate shifts have happened all throughout earth’s history and have been driven entirely by natural forces up to now so it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly the size of the deleterious effect mankind is creating. That is a very reasonable and scientifically based assessment. 

Rajjpuut, however, believes that the IPCC missed a bet by not relying on more of the research into areas shown in the History Channel DVD “Little Ice Age, Big Chill.” After examining both the DVD and the U.N. report, as stated a couple times already on this site: Rajjpuut concludes that the real effect of the global climate shift going on will be more frequent and more intense weather extremes (i.e. more lows set; more high sets; more hurricanes and tornadoes and more powerful ones; more flooding; etc., etc. and no significant global warming at all. Now this is not necessarily happy news if true. And one small, perhaps even tiny, beneficial approach to limiting any climate effects would indeed be the “green-tech” approach favored by liberals. However, creating five million impermanent green jobs at a cost of eleven million real jobs from the rest of the economy (according to statistics from a Spanish study of that nation’s green tech program) for an overall loss of six million jobs is clearly not an intelligent answer. 

In any case the liberals’ latest study of the climate phenomena contains this one chart that seem s to back up the Rajjpuut conclusions 100%:

                The chart taken from the Obamaites recent Global Climate Change Impacts 170-page report:

http://downloads.globalchange.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/climate-impacts-report.pdf

 was pretty much what one would expect. The group put a PR firm was in charge of the report and actual scientific intervention was minimal. In fact, University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke, Jr. claims the report “misrepresents” his work; makes claims unsupported by citations provided, relies heavily on analyses that were never peer reviewed, ignores peer-reviewed studies that reach opposite conclusions from those proclaimed by the report, and cites analyses that do not support conclusions rendered."  Pretty much par for the Obama-clan's course. 

However, if valid, one little chart depicting a nineteen-fold increase in weather related power outages over the last sixteen years while outages from all other causes held pretty much steady  is pretty much a shocker . . .  and, again if valid, seems to carry a message directly in line with the Rajjpuut projections. 


To reiterate:  here then is the likely truth about Climate Change:

A.     The accurate term is "Global Climate Shift" or "Global Climate Change" and it is real, but

B.     Most likely our puny human efforts are nothing as compared to the planet’s natural forces at work. 

C.    The most probable results are: more record hot temperatures and more record cold temperatures (more extremes in winter and summer) and most importantly: more severe storms and more frequent storms like hurricanes and tornadoes as the effect of greater greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere . . . these effects becoming far more noticeable in the Northern Hemisphere where the largest population centers exist. 

D.    None of this is desirable, but starving people are not desirable either and putting huge segments of the populace out on the streets by creating impermanent green energy jobs is NOT the solution.  The History Channel's "Little Ice Age, Big Chill" dvd presents a balanced and scientific look at all this far superior to Al Gore's propanda and indicates that gradual shifts in weather are quite common and quite recent (five or six hundred years or a thousand years is small potatoes in the global scheme of things). 

E.     The power of these kinds of shifts over, say, 200 years should not be underestimated. For example:  the Vikings discovered Greenland and Iceland and colonized both areas during the "Medieval Warm Period" immediately prior to the Little Ice Age.  This was a time when Greenland was virtually clear of glacial ice as it is becoming today.  During the Little Ice Age, however, the hardy Vikings were frozen out of Greenland.

F.     The problem in all the liberal green-tech notions . . .  is that with the exception of "curvy light bulbs," solar panels, and fewer polluting emissions, present green initiatives have not yet arrived at a point where using them to replace present human jobs and present human energy is a viable alternative. In a phrase:  we need a green energy Edison NOT green energy government pork.  Rajjpuut suggests that instead of diverting needed funds to green energy jobs now:  a reward of ten billion dollars upfront and $100 million per year for life plus normal patent rights be offered for viable green energy that can more or less "seamlessly plug into the present energy grids." 

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Bob

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“Green” Dems Play Both Sides Against Middle

Posted by Rajjpuut's Folly on Friday, June 19, 2009 2:51:27 PM
Global Climate Shift is nothing new

We need a green energy Edison NOT green energy government pork.  Rajjpuut suggests that instead of diverting needed funds to green energy jobs now:  a reward of twenty billion dollars upfront and $100 million per year for life plus normal patent rights be offered for viable green energy tech that can be more or less "seamlessly plugged into the present energy grids." 

Key Lessons from “The Little Ice Age” DVD 

            As the French saying goes, “The more things change, the less things change.” In other words, whatever’s going on now . . . it’s all happened before. The History Channel DVD “Little Ice Age, Big Chill” paints a different story from Al Gore’s much hyped presentations on “global warming.” The correct term is “Global Climate Shift” or “Global Climate Change” as it was labeled by the U.N.’s IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) which presented a much more balanced and thoughtful picture than Gore did. 

While Gore and the IPCC shared the Nobel Prize, the IPCC report was much deeper and more detailed, documented and much closer to the big picture gained from watching “Little Ice Age, Big Chill” than from watching Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” While the IPCC concluded that man’s contribution to global climate change via polluting green house gasses was definitely a fact . . . the U.N. panel also pointed to the fact that “natural” climates shifts were frequent and might even dwarf our own human results. 

            The real results of “global climate shift” (the best term to use since it connotes a pattern of historical import) are:  more record hot temperatures and more record cold temperatures (more extremes in winter and summer) and most importantly: more severe storms and more frequent storms like hurricanes and tornadoes as a result of greater greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere . . . these effects becoming far more noticeable in the Northern Hemisphere where the largest population centers exist. 

None of this is desirable, but starving people are not desirable either and putting huge segments of the populace out on the streets by creating impermanent green energy jobs is NOT the solution.  "Little Ice Age, Big Chill" presents a well-balanced scientific look at all this far superior to Al Gore's propaganda and indicates that gradual shifts in weather are quite common and quite recent (five or six hundred years or a thousand years is small potatoes in the global scheme of things).  For example:  the Vikings discovered Greenland and Iceland and colonized both areas during the "Medieval Warm Period" immediately prior to the Little Ice Age.  This was a time when Greenland was virtually clear of glacial ice as it is becoming today.  During the Little Ice Age, however, the hardy Vikings were frozen out of Greenland.

            The problem in all this is that with the exception of "curvy light bulbs," solar panels, and fewer polluting emissions, present green initiatives have not yet arrived at a point where using them to replace present human jobs and present human energy is a viable alternative.  We need a green energy Edison NOT green energy government pork.  Rajjpuut suggests that instead of diverting needed funds to green energy jobs now:  a reward of twenty billion dollars upfront and $100 million per year for life plus normal patent rights be offered for viable green energy tech that can be more or less "seamlessly plugged into the present energy grids."  

When liberal propaganda goes well the outcome is that the gullible public gets a picture closely akin to a last-minute cavalry charge rescuing the wagon train from imminent massacre. However, propaganda is just that, propaganda. The truth is much more likely this: there’s the baby, there’s the bathwater, and now both are simultaneously thrown out as "inconsequential" and any benefits to their actions result from normal market forces or normal forces of nature doing their normal things and Democrats immediately claiming credit. 

            The "Democratic instantaneous reverse pattern" is what happened in 1998 when Bill Clinton and his liberal allies made a thinly disguised attack on the landlord class (70% conservatives) with a mortgage guarantee law designed to get everybody into their own homes regardless of their Inability to afford the mortgages. Although James Stack of Investech.com was warning of a mortgage-related meltdown as early as late 2003, the problems didn’t actually come into easy public viewing until 2007-2008 and this time the Democrats deflected "credit" onto the Bush administration.

The green-tech boondoggle is a less-thinly disguised attack on the oil industry and the internal combustion engine (ICE). Since green-tech is not yet ready to assume the load now carried so very well by oil and ICE you can quite confidently expect the result of the Dems initiatives will be the same as if huge amounts of 1865 federal money were diverted to creating an “auto-mobile” because the methane gas emissions of horses were troublesome.  As always, the liberals are masters of "positioning" strategy.  It looked good to be in favor of homes for everyone in 1998.  It looks good to be in favor of green-tech and clean energy now.  It always looks good to be in favor of more jobs.  Republicans and Libertarians like Rajjpuut, need to build a career on continually reminding the short-attention-spanned public that the Democrats never tell anyone what the real and more profound costs are for their boondoggles:  e.g. 11 millions real jobs lost in creating 5 million temporary green ones. 

Ya'all live long, stong and ornery,

Bob

 

 

 

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Global Warming Not Snazzy Enough for American Public

Posted by Rajjpuut's Folly on Friday, June 19, 2009 1:01:29 PM
Dems Hype The “War Bonds of Our Era”
 
 
Truth is:  what's needed is a green energy Edison NOT green energy government pork.^^
 
 
Another Bad Idea: “Clean Energy Bonds”
 

 
           Political correctness and smoke and mirrors are the driving force behind a fresh new liberal initiative called “Clean Energy Bonds.” In a memo to “interested parties," Josh Freed, Senior Policy Advisor of The Third Way Clean Energy Initiative discusses a sales pitch that the Dems can use to make clean energy bonds the “War Bonds of Our Generation.”
 
           Apparently, the Democrats are discovering that supposed global warming^^ doesn't carry enough pizzazz for the American people so the strategy is to concentrate all focus on "green energy" and "clean energy" to drum up support for the Democratic initiatives.  It's like calling pool:  "pocket billiards" nothing more.  However, the changed terminology is a tool the Dems hope will inspire participation to fund green energy initiatives faster.

            Saying that “today changing light bulbs is the equivalent of collecting scrap iron and tin 65 years ago,” Freed continues “now as then, this sort of individual effort is not enough” to get the job done and a “national strategy to get the public involved is needed.” Concluding that setting thermostats a few degrees lower or driving less is not enough, the memo says the clean energy bonds will give the public a way to invest in the transition to a green economy.

             While on the face of it, giving taxpayers a choice (akin to the choice to gamble on state-run lottery schemes which generate revenue) does not seem such a bad idea, but anything that diverts funds from one sector of the economy to another and costs the government interest on bonds is probably a bad idea.  Here are some other things to consider:

            What’s not said in all this? 

A.    Bonds pay off at interest: more national debt will be generated.

B.     Investing in bonds means normal spending in the economy and money for important private sector initiatives may get “waylaid.”

C.    The Spanish study of green energy’s impact in that country showed that for every new green job created 2.2 jobs were LOST from the broader economy. If Obama creates five million new green jobs than Americans might well expect eleven million real jobs in the economy to be lost.  Using green bonds to possibly create more such jobs is therefore a very bad idea.

D.    Cost for generating one green job in the Spanish study was equivalent to $775,000 and most telling: only one green job in ten was permanent.

E.     In sum: diverting money for green bonds is the ultimate contra-productive liberal boondoggle.

Ya’all live long, strong and ornery,

Bob
 
^^ As discussed in Rajjpuut's  O'Bummer Hypes Untenable Green-Tech Strategy
 
 
The correct term is "Global Climate Shift" or "Global Climate Change" and it is real, but the most probable results are: 
more record hot temperatures and more record cold temperatures (more extremes in winter and summer) and most importantly: more severe storms and more frequent storms like hurricanes and tornadoes as the effect of greater greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere . . . these effects becoming far more noticeable in the Northern Hemisphere where the largest population centers exist.  None of this is desirable, but starving people are not desirable either and putting huge segments of the populace out on the streets by creating impermanent green energy jobs is NOT the solution.  The History Channel's "Little Ice Age, Big Chill" dvd presents a balanced and scientific look at all this far superior to Al Gore's propanda and indicates that gradual shifts in weather are quite common and quite recent (five or six hundred years or a thousand years is small potatoes in the global scheme of things).  For example:  the Vikings discovered Greenland and Iceland and colonized both areas during the "Medieval Warm Period" immediately prior to the Little Ice Age.  This was a time when Greenland was virtually clear of glacial ice as it is becoming today.  During the Little Ice Age, however, the hardy Vikings were frozen out of Greenland.

The problem in all this is that with the exception of "curvy light bulbs," solar panels, and fewer polluting emissions, present green initiatives have not yet arrived at a point where using them to replace present human jobs and present human energy is a viable alternative.  In a phrase:  we need a green energy Edison NOT green energy government pork.  Rajjpuut suggests that instead of diverting needed funds to green energy jobs now:  a reward of ten billion dollars upfront and $100 million per year for life plus normal patent rights be offered for viable green energy that can more or less "seamlessly plug into the present energy grids" 
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The Cold Hard Facts about “Global Warming”

Posted by Rajjpuut's Folly on Monday, June 08, 2009 7:01:28 AM
 

Gore Got It Plenty Wrong;  But

Heartland’s Joe Bast Got It Wrongggrrrrrrr

 

                There is something nasty and “inconvenient” about truth, when you’re on the wrong side of it; and there’s something downright liberating when you’ve got things straight.   Ex-Vice President Al Gore has been leaving his politically-incorrect “mansion” in Tennessee with its monstrous “carbon-footprint” to barnstorm all over the globe spreading the Gospel of Global Warming before impressive crowds.  Here in the United States Heartland Institute’s President Joe Bast has been doing the same thing while talking against Gore, but the audiences to hear him have been minimal. Neither man owns the right side of the argument. Gore is a Liberal interested in action now, to stop the end of the world as we know it. He believes notions of “progress” have brought us to a yawning cliff.   Bast is a Conservative strongly interested in preserving the status quo; he believes that the answers for human beings always lie with “progress.” Politics and science do not mix, but both men are politicians first and scientists not at all.

                The story of the search for truth about so-called “Global Warming” starts in Boulder, Colorado.   Incredibly enough the United States Government in a typical and outrageous waste of taxpayer money has created a national climate research center in Boulder, Colorado,  in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. I’m a Coloradoan (actually I’m from everywhere: 47 states and 28 foreign lands and lived in Colorado for the majority of my adult life), but I’m not such a fool as to think you can monitor climate from Boulder, Colorado. 

I’m NOT saying Boulder is a bad place to monitor weather, the day to day fluctuations in temperature, barometric pressure, wind, precipitation, etc. Boulder is a great place to monitor weather. But, friends, you can no more monitor climate from Boulder than you can monitor hummingbird migrations from the moon.  To underscore that point, recently the national climate research center changed its name (for, I believe, the third time) from AIRS to “Earth System Research Laboratory” and were placed under control of the “National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In other words somebody with some clout decided you just can’t monitor climate effectively in Boulder.

Climate, the major shifts in atmospheric patterns around the entire globe, is the result of a crazy-quilt set of interlocking systems virtually dominated by the world’s oceans, period. In San Diego, California, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has been monitoring the world’s oceans for more than a century. Scripps knows what it’s talking about, Boulder does not. Even though climate is not Scripps’ only concern, the private institution is light-years ahead of the government bureaucrats. 

Since the hanging chads and Supreme Court decision on Florida’s electoral vote of the 2000 presidential election sent him packing from Washington, D.C., Vice President Gore has been spreading the word about so-called “Global Warming.” Gore and a United Nations’ entity called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) won co-Nobel Peace Prizes in 2007 for “their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” Gore split the prize money with the U.N. Panel. 

Unfortunately, the Nobel Foundation and the folks selecting the Peace Prize recipients are not talking about PEACE here but rather about SCIENCE. No war involved, no oppression involved, sorry, just a question of where real science leads and that’s as plain as the nose on Al Gore’s face.   Let’s call that STRIKE ONE!   Secondly, the Nobel Peace Prize folks have shown a misguided willingness to make political statements more often than not in recent years. 

You give a Peace Prize to Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Nelson Mandela, that’s one thing. You give one to Jimmy Carter for actually NOT accomplishing anything towards lasting peace in the Middle East and for sitting on his duff while American hostages were taken and held forever in Iran: that’s a political statement. You give one to Mikhail Gorbachov but not to Ronald Reagan, (“Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachov” and the initiator of their numerous face-to-face meetings) how in hellfire can you justify that? That’s a political statement. You give it to Al Gore to share with the U.N. that’s a political statement. Let's call that STeeeRIKE TWO!

Let me say unequivocally, the IPCC did real science and they deserved the medal, though clearly not for peace, but for earth science or climatology, if you wish to get more specific. If the medal were presented today, the IPCC would deserve it even more, because they, unlike Gore, have continued to grow in their understanding. From the start, Al Gore and his film “An Inconvenient Truth” have been a political statement, an effort to prove Al Gore and liberal environmentalists right and everybody else wrong. From the start the U.N. Panel has been about real science, as in, what in the hell is happening? The IPCC is about what’s true, not about who’s right or wrong. That most clearly is seen in the naming of the problem: Al Gore inaccurately calls it “Global Warming.”   The IPCC names itself IPCC after “Climate Change.”  So by giving Al Gore any part of this recognition:  STRRRRRIKE THREE, Yer out!

Real science is not about rubbing somebody’s nose in it. Real science is about getting into the truth, not just superficially, but deeply and accurately:   about nailing down the “Why?” way beyond any reasonable doubt. Real science is a-political, there is no agenda to real science.  

Let me give you an example of what I mean by “having an agenda?”  I’ve got this chess position I love to show to very good (but not great) players. It calls for “White to move and checkmate in three moves.” No matter how they struggle, the players who study the position unless they are chess masters, senior masters, or grand masters cannot win, they can draw or lose the position but not win.  I’ve only shown it to one expert (the playing strength below master) who could solve it.  The position is actually very, very easy, surprisingly enough. When they can’t solve it, I ask them “how many possible legal moves do you see for White?”  

They invariably tell me there are “Six legal moves.”   The reason they can’t solve the puzzle is because there are actually nine legal moves in the position and one of the “missing three” moves is the correct first move. The players aren’t stupid, they know the rules of the game . . . but they can’t solve the puzzle because they cannot see all the possible options. Every time they count up the possible moves, they can only see six.   It turns out a common five-letter word in their brain makes it literally impossible for them to solve the puzzle until they come to understand that their own thinking and their own seeing are being limited by their “expectations.” That’s what an agenda is and in science it’s the death knell to finding truth. 

Politicians are notorious for being UNable to see truth because it’s hidden by their agendas.   Al Gore is no exception. He expects to see man-made actions, and virtually nothing but man-made actions driving “Global Warming” and he can literally see nothing else.  The U.N. panel sees worldwide climate shifting, they believe that man-made “pollutants are the chief driving force, but they are open to possibilities. So what is the truth about climate shift and where is it to be found?

                A good place to start is:

                http://shop.history.com/detail.php?p=69311&ecid=5511&pa=CSE-FGL

                This is a provocative, thought-provoking and scientifically detailed and exciting DVD taken from a History Channel presentation called: “Little Ice Age, Big Chill.” In the DVD you see real science in action. And unlike Al Gore and his know-it-all approach (to the answers), the first thing you see is that real science is all about the questions. Questions after questions after more questions are explored honestly. The truth: we don’t know with 100% certainty what caused the Little Ice Age nor what’s causing the current climate shift.  However, we do glean certain truths from the DVD as well as an inquiring perspective that would demand further exploration.   

We come to see that there have been an almost infinite number of shifts in the earth’s climate. We come to see that what’s happening now could be a “normal” climate shift. We come to see, however, that man’s actions are creating an overabundance of what are called “green house gasses” with carbon dioxide and methane among the most crucial. We come to see the effects of those green house gasses have been with us throughout history: but, sometimes the earth itself releases immense quantities of carbon dioxide or methane. Sometimes, in fact quite often, volcanic actions seem to be the key factors in short-term climate shift toward colder times. We come to see that there are no easy answers but that, in all probability man is exacerbating trends already underway in nature.

We not only come to see there are no easy answers, but we see that Al Gore is wrong, the most important consequence if present trends continue is that the climate shift will cause individual weather patterns to become more extreme: more tornadoes and hurricanes and more violent ones; more extreme storms and resulting floods; more records for heat and more records for cold and fewer “average, typical or normal” days, etc. etc. We come to see how desirable it is to get mankind’s negative contributions to present day trends under control.   We come to see that the human side (jobs, food, recreation even) must always be considered and that we must come to terms with the environment but also with the necessity of progress. We come to see that global climate change is happening, but there is much debate about how much effect man is having on the process.  We come to see there is NO debate that less man-made interference in natural global processes of climate is better.

And then there is Mr. Bast.   To say that his head is in the sand seems accurate.   I have to come to respect the Heartland Institute.   Three of my favorite websites are:

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/i-pencil/

http://www.heartland.org/

http://jim.com/econ/

                I keep all three of these sites right under Wikipedia at the top of my favorites list. So I am mightily distressed to have to write this conclusion about Heartland Institute and its President Joe Bast when it comes to their stance on Global Climate Shift. I think that when you are so often right (as Conservative thinkers are on virtually all things economic) it may come to a point from time to time where you’re in the “argument” with the intent of winning (finding out who’s right) rather than discovery of truth (finding out what’s right). In other words, you go into it with an agenda and thus you, like Al Gore are very likely NOT to see all the options.

                Two areas of Conservative thought jump out at me as I make this conclusion: Creationism vs. Evolution; and Joe Bast’s present stance on Global Climate Shift (that mankind is having NO significant effect on climate at the present). 

I firmly believe these two stances are killing Conservatism’s chances (as the most logical line of reasoning about the way things are) to assume its rightful place in leading America forward. I believe that this need to always be right, is making us wrong in the eyes of many Americans and making us vulnerable to charges of narrow-mindedness. Let me explain, hopefully, I can convince you that there is another way . . . a way that makes Conservatism stronger and the obvious choice for, say, 58% of Americans on say, 98% of the issues.    

Consider the 23rd Psalm, I do not literally believe, “The Lord is my shepherd . . .” that is a metaphor. I do not literally believe, “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures . . .” another metaphor. I do not literally believe, “He leadeth me beside the still waters . . .” or “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies . . .” again a metaphor. I do, however, deeply believe that the 23rd Psalm is the most beautiful and most powerful prayer ever written. I do believe that the lovely metaphors delineate clearly and comfortingly my relationship to God when I am at my best; most calm; most alert; most at peace with myself; most courageous; most able to contribute to worthwhile human endeavor. 

Any Biblical scholar can tell you that not only the 23rd Psalm, but all of the Bible was written by human beings.   In the Old Testament, it is obvious: Divinely inspired human beings, but nevertheless human beings fallible and inspired both created the Old Testament. Moses clearly has his own sections etc., etc. And some of the Bible is symbolic, metaphorical just as the 23rd Psalm is. Is there any good reason NOT to see the earliest part of Genesis as a metaphor for just how powerful Almighty God is and to see his desire to create a perfect being to inherit all of his creation. Are there fingerprints? Is there DNA? Are there fossils? Did God give us a brain to think with and create with?   Are not my brain, my soul, my body and my emotions all gifts from God. Everything came from God.   If God chooses to create man late in the history of the universe must we believe he literally did it from the dust of the earth (and then woman literally from Adam’s rib) or can we not see this as a metaphor. All powerful God takes up the chemical underpinnings of life and creates intelligent life (and a mate to be close to his side). And if God chooses to create through DNA and evolution are we going to make our churches so small that Almighty God is “uncomfortable inside? 

On global climate shift, I can only say, watch “Little Ice Age, Big Chill” with an open mind. Is it possible that mankind can do a better job of stewardship of God’s earth? Now just because we see some areas which need to be corrected . . . we do NOT need to make the constant liberal mistake and discard the baby with the wash water (for example, only green-energy can save us: so creating five million new green jobs but losing eleven million other jobs is a necessity??) but we can and should enjoy progress itself; while instituting progress in cleaning up God’s earth.
 
Live long, strong and ornery,
Bob
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