The recent climate skeptic witch hunt, even against people like Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., who ISN’T a climate skeptic but has presented some data on severe weather losses that contradict the current meme of “severe weather caused by global warming”, prompted Josh to pen a new cartoon.
He gets right to the source of the whole fossil fuel problem.
Thanks, Josh. Great!
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
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Insightful and funny.
I had a good friend who as the years passed become ever-more environmentally radicalized, to the point where he could no longer be around me and my … evil ways.
His hypocrisy was so complete that I could never cover it all here.
But one dimension that I found utterly mind-boggling was that he could — in the same sentence(!) — say that he hated organized religion, but that Nature (yes, with a capital N) was his religion, and that he was prepared to die for It / Her.
Gaia figure.
OMG … Folks have compared the witch hunt for skeptics to Joseph McCarthy’s antics in the 1950s.
The CBC lampooned McCarthy with a brilliant radio play called
The Investigator in which McCarthy arrives in Heaven and accuses God himself.
I’m glad I didn’t have a mouth full of coffee when I saw Josh’s cartoon. Most excellent!
“Breaking: all human knowledge called into question …”
The Russians have a saying “in every joke, a little bit is joke and the rest is true”.
Human knowledge and humanity itself are, in fact, really at stake here.
The process that brought us humanity and sentience can be reversible.
The most striking evidence for this is a controversial (among conservative palaentologists) but nonetheless plausible hypothesis made by Gribben and Cherfas some decades ago in their book “The First Chimpanzee”:
http://kirkwood40.blogspot.be/2013/09/john-gribbin-jeremy-cherfas-first.html
The basic idea, backed up by molecular genetic evidence (and likely to be true) is that both humans and chimps/gorillas evolved from a common HOMINID ancestor. Think about what this means for a moment. The close resemblance of human and chimp dna convinces most people of a generally close evolutionary relationship between us and the Pongidae (chimps/gorillas). But people generally assume that an ancestral ape branched into the line leading to humans and another staying ape-like and ending with chimps. But there is another, somewhat disturbing, possibility. A human-like ancestor had already evolved 4-7 million years ago, and this hominid then branched into two lineages. One of these led to us. However the other led to the chimps / gorillas. This has a striking implication. That is that human-like attributes such as large brains, manual dexterity, upright posture, intellect, can be LOST in primate evolution as well as gained. That the evolution of human traits is REVERSIBLE.
We know that extreme environmentalists and CAGW believers have profound misanthropic feelings, e.g.:
http://www.vhemt.org/
The organization VHEM even goes as far as to articulate a desire to wipe out humanity entirely (and still gets taken seriously by the liberal chattering class). This objective does not have to be reached by a violent extermination. What if the momentum of evolution of humans were to be put into reverse? What if rigorous intellectual activity were to carry a penalty of social punishment and reduced reproductive success? What if emotion-driven dishonest and illogical narratives such as CAGW were to win out over reasoned scientific investigation of climate history and dynamics? What if discussions such as about nuclear energy and genetic modification were also to be determined by predjudice and emotion and dishonest arguments, and rational intellectual analysis in these areas was always punished? This tendency could spread quickly to human politics and general social behavior and become reflected in the reward structure determining the course of human genetic drift.
Thus an anti-intellectual anti-science agenda is in the end a genocidal anti-human agenda with the possible outcome of steering human evolution back to the jungle and the “dark side of the sun” of non-sentience. We need to look at what we have in humanity and decide if it is worth saving. Personally I believe strongly that it very much is worth defending and saving. The spark that “gives songs in the night and makes us more than the beasts which perish” (book of Job) should be treasured, not given up without a fight.
some people think the bit is a 1, some people think it’s a 0.
The engineer checks the reference voltage.
Well everyone waxed philosophical. We should have Ug back sometime soon.
An excellent range of comments, very enlightening.