What, no donkeys in the new Jerusalem (Copenhagen)?

IsraCast: Dec. 1917 - General Allenby Enters Jerusalem:

On the first day of the Jewish feast of Hanukkah in December 1917, the Battle of Jerusalem resulted in the city of Jerusalem falling to British forces led by General Allenby, after 400 years under Turkish rule.

Allenby was an accomplished horseman and it would have made sense for him to ride triumphantly into the city. However on 11 December Allenby entered on foot out of his great respect for the Holy City, becoming the first Christian to control the city in centuries.

According to Wikipedia:

In both Jewish and Christian traditions, the messiah (Jesus Christ in the later case) was often described as riding on a donkey. As noted, in the context of the Hebrew Bible this connoted wealth and affluence befitting the House of David, as at the time commoners are described as simply going on foot. However, in later times when the aristocracy used horses, depicting the messiah as riding a donkey came to have an opposite connotation, as indicating a simple, sober way of life and avoiding luxury. The same connotation is evident in the description of saints such as Francis of Assisi as riding donkeys.

This is all preface to the latest news on the great religious festival now unfolding in Copenhagen: Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges - Telegraph:

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen's biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the "summit to save the world", which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

"We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention," she says. "But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report."

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. "We haven't got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand," she says. "We're having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden."

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? "Five," says Ms Jorgensen. "The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don't have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it's very Danish."

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change "Truth Squad." The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.
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And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to "be sustainable, don't buy sex," the local sex workers' union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate's pass. The term "carbon dating" just took on an entirely new meaning.

I'm not sure, but I sense this gives a whole new meaning to allegations of "raping the planet." In any case, we can forgive Bruce Bawer for being confused, in an otherwise first-rate piece of reporting on "Hopenhagen" ("Barf"):

Well, here I am at the Vatican in Rome, where thousands of pilgrims from every corner of the earth crowd St. Peter’s Square, their eyes trained on the glorious basilica within which the College of Cardinals is gathering in secret conclave to settle the all-important question: Who will stand in the shoes of the fisherman?

I despair at what is going in Copehagen, as the left seeks to gain control and put serious breaks on economic freedom and legitimate human aspirations to escape from poverty and the nanny state. Yet as I tell my friends, it's time to get used to this kind of "new" religion. Don't get me wrong, I don't believe much in the religion of AGW, to the extent it is a form of scapegoating Carbon Dioxide in the support of the leftist desire to control and limit economies, instead of seeking, if it proves necessary, other forms of mitigating or adapting to climatic change. And I condemn the many in the "climate science" field who have proven themselves, as the latest CRU scandal further emphasizes, just too keen to corrupt science to religious ends.

But it is the very nature of science that it can't have the final word, that its work is but a series of discrete empirical observations and not complete knowledge of complex systems. These observations well may, and in many cases should, allow us to construct models of larger systems; but it is the nature of science that we realize that these models can never be complete, that we must remain open-minded as to the unending chain of causes and consequences on that which we are now modeling, and not discretely observing.

This means that science cannot enter into political calculations without some element of religion creeping in, for religion is inherently that which mediates the specifically human, self-interest in the meaning of causes and consequences. Ultimately, what the global warming debate teaches us is not science's final word - the religious belief that the "science is settled" is ridiculous - but rather what the various sides in "debate" want to believe of sciences, as a basis for their political and economic desires, be these of a relatively totalitarian or libertarian bent.

We live in a time when the growing number of discrete observations of science are, whatever they may prove to be, only going to add up to more complex models of the interactions of human behaviour and larger geo-physical systems. In turn, these models, one way or another, are inevitably and increasingly going to be used in political and economic arguments.

At the same time, human beings cannot live without something akin to a religion, some kind of shared belief in what we should hold together as sacred. All language, all consciousness, depends on shared scenes of desire, focussed on some central object of desire (hence made "sacred") whether we desire to imagine a world without cars, or without prostitution, etc. etc.

Those of us who would defend science from religious corruption must keep this need for religion in mind: one way or another religion and politics in future is inevitably going to use science to buttress its accounts of humanly-significant causes and consequences. Our task is not to pose facile oppositions of science vs. religion, presuming the twain should never meet: we should reject both the polemics of Richard Dawkins, and the Carbon-Dioxide-Witch Burners, but also some of their polemical opposition, all for similar reasons. Rather, we need to become much more sophisticated about how to relate our understanding of real human religious needs to cool, disinterested, reason. As Eric Gans argues:

The predicted catastrophic consequences of global warming, however distant, are no more or less hypothetical than those of an Iranian nuclear device. Politics exists to adjudicate the respective degree of gravity of such dangers, which cannot be determined in the formal rationality of a judicial procedure but only through the negotiation of personal and collective resentments. What is both fascinating and frustrating about such debates is the impossibility of maintaining the "objective" basis of the issue, that is, the projected significance of global warming for humanity in general, outside the sphere of political debate. The real question at stake is not whether the Earth is getting warmer or even whether human activity is the cause, but how much industrial productivity should be sacrificed for how much reduction in "greenhouse effect." The Left sees global warming as a weapon in its critique of the market system and its values; the Right sees its opponents as mere resenters of a system they consider fully capable of dealing with environmental issues in its normal course of operations. If tomorrow it is discovered that the production of CO2 actually reduces global warming, within a few days all the positions will have switched around, but all the underlying resentments will remain the same.

Although the coming and passing of the postmodern era has posed challenges to the market system, it has not put an end to the modern political dichotomy of Left and Right. On the contrary, the recent evolution of virtually all the major European countries, which were dominated during the Cold War by shapeless "center-right" coalitions as bulwarks against communism, suggests that if anything this opposition has been sharpened--as witness the just-concluded French election. If "politics" is an indispensable feature of the market system, it is because it has proved effective at releasing energy from the deferral of violence into the economy at large. Today, as the modern world confronts its Other [i.e. Islamic Jihad] in what appears to be their "final conflict," it is easy to grow impatient with a political debate that seems so irresolute in the face of the fanaticism of transcendentally guaranteed resentment. And the critique of this lack of resolution is an important element of the debate itself. But whether its outcome be reason or folly, the only alternative to the uncertainty of politics is not the certitude of "science," whether of climatology or of Generative Anthropology, but the dogmatic truth of our enemies.

See also:

Religion is about faith, and faith is about supporting a hypothesis—making a bet. To believe in global warming is to bet on the veracity of a set of hypotheses. More specifically, the kind of faith that deserves even metaphorically to be called a religion is one that is focused on deferring the violence that threatens to destroy the human community. Indeed, the belief in global warming and the catastrophes it is presumed to entail makes explicit that the deferral of violence is the primary object of faith, a truth masked in traditional religion by the mediation of supernatural powers. Global warming is like a divine punishment for our sins of excess energy consumption—sins against "Gaia," if you like, but the divinization is altogether optional because the punishment is the wholly natural consequence of these sins. Global warming is comparable to the self-generated sufferings of a drug addict rather than the externally inflicted punishment of a murderer, except that, as its name implies, it takes place on a global scale, and its cure, assuming this is even possible, will preoccupy all of humanity for decades, not to say centuries, to come.

But this emphasis on the deferral of external violence is not the only, nor even the principal deferral effected by the belief in global warming. Its most important feature is that it provides its believers with an externally-directed goal that can in principle defer human violence. Violence and disaster—même combat. By turning our desires away from what might be thought more pressing dangers—Osama with an H-bomb—toward reduced energy expenditure, we work for the benefit of humanity as a whole. More precisely, by focusing our efforts on global warming, we not only diminish its effects, but we also demonstrate the possibility of action toward a goal that can in principle be shared by all—Osama reducing his "carbon footprint." Like the "Aranda" religious rituals described by Durkheim, the global warming praxis serves to promote solidarity. But where traditional religions, however "universal," have concrete historical roots that, involuntarily or not, exclude others, the science-driven behavior demanded by the fight against global warming obeys no such constraints. It would not be an outrageous exaggeration to claim that global warming is the first global religion—which makes its principal spokesman, independently of all politics, a perfectly fitting candidate for the Peace Prize.

The religion of impending disaster transforms the nature-centered apotropaic rites of "paganism" into rational, goal-directed activity. Instead of sacrificing an animal to appease Neptune or Apollo, one rides a bike to work to lower one’s gasoline consumption. The nonbeliever may scoff, but this activity makes a fully rational appeal to natural forces. Nor is global warming comparable to the Enlightenment-derived secular religions of Communism and its Fascist antithesis, whose worship of unaided human powers leads inevitably to their concentration in a quasi-deified Supreme Leader. Al Gore is closer in spirit to Jesus or the Buddha than to Stalin or Mussolini.

Is the sea level really fated to rise twenty feet? (At its present rate of 3mm per year, this will take place in about 2000 years.) There are moments when the religion of global warming overreaches itself into apocalyptic fantasy not all that different from cultist predictions of the end of the world. One might say in their defense that these extreme possibilities are evoked to dramatize the urgency of conversion. Yet these apocalyptic tendencies reveal in this new embodiment of the sacred a potentially fatal flaw.

The traditional objects of faith are, ultimately, hypotheses concerning the divinely approved forms of human interaction; such hypotheses can be discredited only by the failure of the faithful to maintain a viable society. This is equally true of political religions such as Communism; had Khrushchev really "buried us" under Communist productivity, it would have been the USSR who won the Cold War without firing a shot. In contrast, faith in global warming is adherence to a scientific hypothesis independent of human activity, even if it concerns this activity as an important parameter. This makes global warming vulnerable to disconfirmation independently of the benefits the fight against it may confer on global human society. If next week or next decade the climatologists revise their models of climate change, the common goal that was to have preserved us from the selfish incentives of the Prisoner’s Dilemma will vanish. If they do not, bringing climate change within acceptable limits would have the same result.

Fraudulent Science

The local worthy, ahem, who writes for the Vancouver Sun had a little conniption a while ago about the anthropogenic global warming "skeptics" who assert that we are currently witness to a lot of "junk science". Stephen Hume wrote:

In the world of climate skeptics, skepticism is apparently acceptable only when it agrees with the climate change skeptics' point of view. Show skepticism toward their own implausible theory of a vast scientific conspiracy at leading universities to deceive the world about global warming with fraudulent "junk science" and it's just unworthy scoffing from a lazy, dishonest hack.
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"Junk science" is often used by non-scientists to imply that work by scientists is false or incompetent, although the term is an oxymoron since if it's "junk" it can't, by definition, be science. And if it is genuine science, it can't, by definition, be junk.

Well, I wonder if Mr. Hume will now advise us which it is, in light of the apparent revelation of fraudulent science being conducted at the heart of the AGW industry.

In an earlier article, Hume invokes Britain's top science academy, the Royal Society, and its recent rejection of the "skeptics", as the epitome of good science. Today, I had moment to remind myself of the origins of modern science and the Royal Society in a comment at Pajama's Media (Charlie Martin's post on the Hadley Climate Research Unit's betrayal of our trust in the peer review processes of science, that sparked some comments on whether peer review is essential to science) that might be worth reproducing here, since, along with illuminating the circumspect origins of "good science", and its relationship to the honour of the gentleman observer, it ends with Adam Katz's illuminating comment on a concern dear to our hearts: should we be raving about or reviling the youth of today?:

It’s interesting that the little debate that has erupted here parallels that which occurred at the birth of modern science. As the publisher’s blurb (http://press.princeton.edu/titles/2353.html) for Shapin and Schaffer’s book on Robert Boyle’s airpump reads:

In the aftermath of the English Civil War, as people were groping for new forms of political order, Robert Boyle built an air-pump to do exper­iments. Does the story of Roundheads and Restoration have something to do with the origins of experimental sci­ence? Schaffer and Shapin believed it does.

Focusing on the debates between Boyle and his archcritic Thomas Hobbes over the air-pump, the authors proposed that “solutions to the problem of knowledge are solutions to the problem of social order.” Both Boyle and Hobbes were looking for ways of establishing knowledge that did not decay into ad hominem attacks and political division. Boyle proposed the experiment as cure. He argued that facts should be manufactured by machines like the air-pump so that gentlemen could witness the experiments and produce knowledge that everyone agreed on. Hobbes, by contrast, looked for natural law and viewed experiments as the artificial, unreliable products of an exclusive guild.

The new approaches taken in Leviathan and the Air-Pump have been enormously influential on historical studies of science. Shapin and Schaffer found a moment of scientific revolution and showed how key scientific givens–facts, interpretations, experiment, truth–were fundamental to a new political order. Shapin and Schaffer were also innovative in their ethnographic approach. Attempting to understand the work habits, rituals, and social structures of a remote, unfamiliar group, they argued that politics were tied up in what scientists did, rather than what they said.

And, as Bruno Latour in his book We Have Never Been Modern writes:

Far from “situating Boyle’s scientific works in their social context” or showing how politics “presses in upon” scientific doctrines, they [Shapin and Schaffer] examine how Boyle and Hobbes fought to invent a science, a context, and a demarcation between the two. They are not prepared to explain the content by the context, since neither existed in this new way before Boyle and Hobbes reached their respective goals and settled their differences.

The beauty of Shapin and Schaffer’s book stems from their success in unearthing Hobbes’s scientific works – which had been neglected by political scientists, because they were embarassed by the wild mathematical imaginings of their hero – and in rescuing from oblivion Boyle’s poilitical theories – which had been neglected by historians of science because they preferred to conceal their hero’s organizational efforts. Instead of setting up an asymmetry, instead of distributing science to Boyle and political theory to Hobbes, Shapin and Schaffer outline a rather nice quadrant: Boyle has a science and a political theory; Hobbes has a political theory and a science. The quadrant would be uninteresting if the ideas of our two heroes were too far apart… But by good fortune, they agree on almost everything. They want a king, a Parliament, a docile and unified Church, and they are fervent subscribers to mechanistic philosophy. But even though both are thoroughgoing rationalists, their opionions diverge as to what can be expected from experimentation, from scientific reasoning, from political argument – and above all from the air pump, the real hero of the story.
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Boyle carefully refrained from talking about vacuum pumps. To put some order into the debates that followed the discovery of the Toricellian space at the top of a mercury tube inverted in a basin of the same substance, he claimed to be investigating only the weight of the air without taking sides in the dispute between plenists and vacuists. The apparatus he developed… that would permanently evacuate the air from a transparent glass container was, for the period – in terms of cost, complication and novelty – the equivalent of a major piece of equipment in contemporary physics. This was already Big Science….

While a dozen civil wars were raging, Boyle chose a method of argument – that of opinion – that was held in contempt by the oldest scholastic tradition. Boyle and his colleagues abandoned the certainties of apodictic reasoning in favour of a doxa. This doxa was not the raving imagination of the credulous masses, but a new mechanism for winning the support of one’s peers. Instead of seeking to ground his work in logic, mathematics or rhetoric, Boyle relied on a parajuridical metaphor: credible, trustworthy, well-to-do witnesses gathered at the scene of the action can attest to the existence of a fact, the matter of fact, even if they do not know its true nature. So he invented the empirical style that we still use today.

Boyle did not seek these gentlemen’s opinion, but rather their observation of a phenomenon produced artificially in the closed and protected space of a laboratory. Ironically, the key question of the constructivists – are facts thoroughly construced in the laboratory? – is precisely the question that Boyle raised and resolved. Yes, the facts are indeed constructed in the new installation of the laboratory and through the artificial intermediary of the air pump….But are facts that have been constructed by man artifactual for that reason? No: for Boyle, just like Hobbes, extends God’s “constructivism” to man. God knows things because He creates them. We know the nature of the facts because we have developed them in circumstances that are under our complete control. Our weakness becomes a strength, provided that we limit knowledge to the instrumentalized nature of the facts and leave aside the interpretation of causes. ONce again, Boyle turns a flaw – we produce only matters of fact that are created in laboratories and have only local value – into a decisive advantage: these facts will never be modified, whatever may happen elsewhere in theory, metaphysics, religion, politics or logic.

So you see, science, as a human practise, cannot be understood absent certain understandings of the role of an honorable “gentlemen” observer/fact recorder. But the “peer” is a necessary but not sufficient part of explaining the overall scientific process. A genealogy of “peer review” would have to start at least here though of course our understanding of the “gentleman” goes far back into the history of aristocratic values and their social roles. Anyway, consider that there is a fundamental difference between science and other forms of human-focussed knowledge in that anyone who has a great revelation into human nature can be, say, an artist or religious leader and make a genuine contribution. If those of us without scientific credentials or at least some serious amount of formal education, have a genuine revelation in the natre of physics or chemistry, there is really little we can do with it. No one will listen to us, because we will not know how to represent our little revelation in a way that makes it presentable to those in the field. We won’t know how to relate it to the established understandings and limits of present-day science. Science is ineviatbly a guilded discipline and has to have the honour code appropriate to such. Of course, this has to adapt to new technology and the increasing demands for tranparency and it has to know that it cannot have the final word on how we interpret the causes or socio-political-religious implications of its facts. But if science begins with facts, we need to be able to trust the integrity of those few with the resources and training to create them in the first place.

I chose the blogging name “truepeers” because it is inherently paradoxical; you can’t specify exactly what is a true peer. But, at the same time, you can’t engage in this world, or any human world, without adopting, as a base assumption, some form of the paradox. Which reminds me of something a friend writes (http://gablog.cdh.ucla.edu/) :

Perhaps the assumption that certain moral and ethical dispositions (certain patterns in the relations between ostensives, imperatives and declaratives) are required for a healthy political economy would help account for and benefit from exploring the one time and place in history, so far as I know, that genuinely approximated a free market: the 19th century Anglosphere, the U.S. and Great Britain (and Canada?) in particular. One of the greatest accomplishments of early modern bourgeois culture was the conversion of aristocratic into republican values, as notions like “nobility” and “virtue” came to be attached to action and character as opposed to being markers of social class. The “gentleman” and the “lady” were critical results of this process, and these figures eased the transition from status to individuality, maintaining their currency until very recently—only the cultural revolution of the 60s decisively dealt them their death blow (how long before the terms no longer even grace our public restrooms?). The gentleman and the lady domesticated ancient notions of “honor,” directing them away from violence perpetuated in the name of tribal and patriarchal prerogatives and protection towards a harmonious balance between public and private life, centered on the division of sexual roles in the nuclear family. My point here is not that we can revive ladies and gentlemen, but simply that no account of free market economics would be complete without them— without the assumptions of upward mobility and generational transmission through discipline and effort, including female responsibility for sexual deferral and “manly” self-reliance, implicit in these “categories,” the daunting rigors of Victorian laissez-faire economics would be unthinkable. An originary political economy today, then, would likewise have to study the novel forms of individuality and family life emergent today. An unsentimental and disinterested observation of today’s children and youth—if we can impose upon ourselves the discipline restraining us from either marveling at their supposedly splendid new qualities or flunking them due to their deviation from a more familiar model—would certainly be a good place to start, especially given the almost absolute independence and simulated internal coherence accredited to the world of teenagers in particular by the contemporary market. Maybe the representation of children holds at least one key towards unlocking today’s political economy.

Passover 2.0

Pharaoh threw the boys into the Nile; Obama, shooting sulphur into the upper atmosphere, may find his metier in transcending the "anti-science" (burned) Bush and realizing his own campaign claim: "“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that… this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal…”

Obama looking at cooling air to fight warming (via Belmont Club):

At first, [Obama science adviser] Holdren characterized the potential need to technologically tinker with the climate as just his personal view. However, he went on to say he has raised it in administration discussions.

"We're talking about all these issues in the White House," Holdren said. "There's a very vigorous process going on of discussing all the options for addressing the energy climate challenge."

Holdren said discussions include Cabinet officials and heads of sub-Cabinet level agencies, such as NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The 65-year-old physicist is far from alone in taking geoengineering seriously. The National Academy of Sciences is making it the subject of the first workshop in its new climate challenges program for policymakers, scientists and the public. The British Parliament has also discussed the idea. At an international meeting of climate scientists last month in Copenhagen, 15 talks dealt with different aspects of geoengineering.

It's easy enough to write all this off as some kind of insane ideology seeking massive control and power through various "scientific" pretensions to redeem a fallen humanity, as the people at Belmont Club are doing. While there is much to this argument when we are talking about the Obama crowd, more generally it's not simple, it seems to me. Once it becomes possible and unavoidable for man to influence global physical systems in measurably significant ways, as we are probably starting now to do; and once, as is inevitable, a science further develops to weigh risks and probabilities of various possible actions, will it be possible for humankind to just say "no", "no, we won't try to change conditions to avoid what may be present or foreseeable high risks and dangers (whether or not we are in any way responsible for the evolution of these threats to human life or ecological systems).

In other words, is it true that once you can, often you must, when life and death is in the balance? Even if one is maximally aware of the dangers of hubris (as I believe Obama and his people are not) is it not imaginable that some circumstance must in time arise with an imperative that demands we take some reasonable risk and try our best to influence climate or other geophysical systems? Is there an analogy to be made, for example, to our now common attempts to control ecological systems as we decide how much of a certain species of fish or game it is safe or a good idea to kill or consume, from the point of view of maintaining other species?

Left Fascist Control-freaks Want More Power Still: In Your Kitchen

Left religious fanatics want to control what and how much you eat, and they aren't going to be satisfied with merely lecturing you and demanding you conform to their dietary restrictions and food taboos: they want the government to control you at dinner time. The Left fascism extends this far so far, and tomorrow it will go further. There will be no end to the totalitarian longings of these people. They will devour the Earth and all its people in their rampage for the purity of poverty:

People will have to be rationed to four modest portions of meat and one litre of milk a week if the world is to avoid run-away climate change, a major new report warns.

The report, by the Food Climate Research Network, based at the University of Surrey, also says total food consumption should be reduced, especially "low nutritional value" treats such as alcohol, sweets and chocolates.

It urges people to return to habits their mothers or grandmothers would have been familiar with: buying locally in-season products, cooking in bulk and in pots with lids or pressure cookers, avoiding waste and walking to the shops - alongside more modern tips such as using the microwave and internet shopping.

The report goes much further than any previous advice after mounting concern about the impact of the livestock industry on greenhouse gases and rising food prices. It follows a four-year study of the impact of food on climate change and is thought to be the most thorough study of its kind.

Tara Garnett, the report's author, warned that campaigns encouraging people to change their habits voluntarily were doomed to fail and urged the government to use caps on greenhouse gas emissions and carbon pricing to ensure changes were made. "Food is important to us in a great many cultural and symbolic ways, and our food choices are affected by cost, time, habit and other influences," the report says. "Study upon study has shown that awareness-raising campaigns alone are unlikely to work, particularly when it comes to more difficult changes."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/30/food.ethicalliving

This is what we're up against. Sweet Reason? Maybe that won't be allowed under the new food regime.

Apocalypse Now, Damnit! NOW!

Melanie Phillips’s Diary » The global warming scam is a must-read. Any honest and intelligent person must surely come to the conclusion that there is no scientific consensus on global climate change and that those in control of many taxpayer-subsidized institutions who insist otherwise are motivated less by a grasp of any scientific certainty than by a desire for certainty taking the name of science, in a perverse misunderstanding of what science, a slowly-expanding field of knowledge in an infinitely complex universe, is really all about.

What those who take our tax money and lie to us are really all about is self-interested promotion and worship of another false god for those who have lost faith in humanity and its fundamental existential and transcendent truths. People who cannot live humbly and quietly in coming to terms with humanity's uneasy, uncertain, perhaps pointless, perhaps Divine, existential condition, need to make us and the "incredibly important time in which we live, our last chance to save ourselves," into something more, and less, than we and it actually are.

As we wait the inevitable decades for climate science to mature to the point where we can reasonably ground any sense of a consensus in hard-won facts, we must ask first the human question: why is there such a desire to believe in a coming, rather soon, apocalypse, for which there are no end of human scapegoats to blame? The desire for apocalypse is, like climate change, nothing new. It has always been with us. It is rooted in our existential condition, in the life of a species for whom the greatest threat to peace, mental health, and physical security does not come from mother nature but from our fellow men, as is our fate as highly mimetic and disorderly creatures who get on each other's nerves, to the point where many snap not having the ability to put their trust and faith in something higher, sharing in further truths about our transcendent Being, as the meaning of this tortured life.

In this respect, those who blame humanity as a whole for the apocalpyse that is supposedly soon to come upon us, have grown slightly, intellectually, above those who once blamed the wrath of the gods or the witches, or the Jews, etc. etc. But they have only grown slightly for in blaming all of humanity they are no the less willing to make of any particular person or group a scapegoat as they, in the name of "science", see fit on any given day. The duty of all of us in face of the continuing madness of the human race is to fight against all forms of apocalyptic and utopian thinking, promoting the faith that whatever changes come our way in the global climate, if we work together from love for our fallen humanity, we can find ways to adapt together and we need not put up with fear mongers who would destroy the economy in some hysterical fit of finger pointing, or destroy civilization in deference to a desire to return to some more primitive religion enforced on everyone.

At this blog, we have our Cassandra moments too. At times we suggest that the human future will not be bright, in the short to medium term at least, unless we get a grip on the various hysterias that characterize our age. Ultimately, dear reader, it is up to you to decide who are the true Cassandras. She may not be always right, but sometimes she is, sometimes civilizations and societies do fall apart. So, instead of looking for consensus, keep thinking, and ask yourself who, in the endless human games of criticizing the Other and the others, who is in reality most likely to be promoting the expansion of human freedom at the expense of those fear mongers who would put themselves in charge of whipping humanity for its sins. Have faith that there is a reality greater than any of us.

I sincerely believe that we here want you to be free; we don't want to grab the same centre of attention as, say, a David Suzuki or a BBC reporter pronouncing on the end of any legitimate doubt about climate change, and asking you to pay tribute to their centralizing elitist cause. We want to make the world into shared covenants of many little centres, with no more big taxpayer-subsidized men and women crying Apocalypse Now! We've been there, done that. Time to move on in reason and faith.