Free Republic

I'm sorry, JoJo Gunn, I didn't mean to imply that you or anyone else was a hypocrite for supporting capital punishment while opposing abortion. I was only talking about my own heart, my own coming to understanding on how I feel about two extrememly important issues. There's enough hypocrisy in my own life that I can't go accusing it in others. It was my mistake for not making that more clear.

Am I a troll? I dunno. Depends on your definition. I think the modern conservative movement is in danger of stagnating with too much "me too!" and not enough of asking why we individuals believe the things we do. The two threads I've posted to are things I believe passionately about with beliefs not held by a large number of people here. I can see that people hold their beliefs very dearly, but less clear is why they hold the beliefs they do, beyond the "I'm just right, they're just wrong" rhetoric.

It's certainly possible that other people's views make more sense than my own, and I want to see that. However, if FR is meant to be a place where unified conservatives can discuss things without outside intrusion by dissenters, that's wonderful. I'll fade into oblivion, everyone will say "good riddance" and life will be back to normal by Inaguration Day.

As for writing too much, well, that's a habit I've always had. My views are very important to me, and I want to set them down as clearly as possible. I can't persuade anyone with just a sentence.

Thanks for the welcome, OSHA.

It can't. One is undeniably more heinous than the other. Adultery tears apart families, yes, but not in the way of a double murder with a pickaxe.

However, a long time ago, I started asking myself how I could reconcile my opposition to abortion with my acceptance of capital punishment. Yes, unborn children are as innocent as anyone could ever be. Yes, death row inmates are proven in court to be guilty of an abhorrent crime. To many, it seems like a clear distinction, and that's fine. I don't think anyone who feels that way is evil or hellbound or anything like that.

But I personally couldn't reconcile that inconsistency in my own heart. When I say that I'm pro-life, I want to say that I'm for all life. Life starts at conception, but it doesn't stop at birth. Slowly, I came to understand that in good conscience I couldn't oppose one without the other. This is what works for me, and others are free to believe as they will on this issue.

I pray that I won't have to face the ultimte challenge to this belief. If someone I cared about were murdered, this opinion would be shaken to the very core of my soul. I can talk all day about what I "would think" if that were to happen, but there's no way to understand how I'd actually believe until it happened. I like to think that I'd remain steadfast in my belief, though. I'm called to forgive, to turn the other cheek and above all to love. I don't want to hold my religious and political beliefs only when they're convenient. I can only say that I truly believe in something when I still hold on to it when it's difficult or inconvenient. To do otherwise would make me a hypocritical John-Kerry-like flip-flopper.

(There, did that last sentence help win me some credibility around here? (grin))

Thanks, Gingersnap, for an insightful response to my question about casting stones. I certainly see where you come from on this. To me, this passage says tells me that I should try to live my life with that same compassion that Christ does. He knows that I try, but Christ also knows that I certainly do fail.

(There's an old Catholic joke that starts out with this story. After Jesus says his "...cast the first stone" thing, a rock comes flying out of the crowd and knocks the woman to the ground. He turns around and says, "Mom! I'm trying to make a point here!")

This is not to say that I don't support punishment for criminals. Obviously, if at the very least for my own safety, I want them locked away for a very long time. I just think that the ultimate punishment should be used by the Ultimate Judge. No jury of men could be that perfect. Christ didn't expressly condemn the law, but He certainly didn't actively support it, either.

I certainly respect your interpretation, though.

"Yet even though the death penalty was widely used in his day, [Jesus] didn't say a word about forbidding it."

Umm...I'm just a lowly Catholic and so I don't have the bible memorized chapter and verse. But in the Gospel According to John, did't they capture a woman in the act of adultery? Didn't they bring her to Jesus? Didn't they ask Jesus what they should do? Didn't they want to stone her just like the Old Testament law prescribed?

And didn't Jesus respond that "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her"?

That sounds like a pretty strong condemnation of captial punishment to me. But then again, I'm just a lowly Catholic who doesn't have the bible memorized chapter and verse.

(Bible quote is from the King James Version as to cause a mimimum of consternation from the more evangelical members on this board. I prefer the more classic "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.")

Let me start by saying I'm no climatologist. I'm just a mesoscale meteorologist. I don't study long-term trends; I merely research the formation and structure of severe storms. In the course of my work, I deal a lot with upper-air observations as well as with the role of solar and terrestrial radiation in our atmosphere. It's interesting stuff, really. During the course of my education (undergrad at Oklahoma, currenty grad school at Wisconsin) I've only had passing contact with climate. I've never had a professor actually state that I had to believe that global warming was true, and so I've been free to make up my own mind on the issue. Since I'm not a climatologist, I'm not exceptionally qualified to talk about the issue, but I'll give it a go anyway.

I've always thought that the meteorological and climatological sciences overemphasized the use of computer models. One of the fundamental wrongs about the science today is that the new operational meteorologists are primarily being taught how to diagnose what the models are saying, rather than actually learning how to forecast. Therefore, what the global circulation models (GCMs) are saying about warming has no bearing on my opinion. I also recognize that actual quantitative observation data is relatively new, and it too can't necessarily be trusted.

But not all data comes from the thermometer. I would like to call your attention to a paper that woke me up, appearing in the 8 September 2000 issue of Science. Here's the citation. Try googling the title and you probably will find a copy out there somewhere. I'd post links, but I'm not sure if you aren't able read them but I can because I'm using a university computer:

Magnuson, John J. and coauthors, 2000. "Historical trends in lake and river ice cover in the northern hemisphere". Science, vol. 289, p. 1743-1746.

In lakes and rivers all over the hemisphere, people have been keeping track of when they freeze and when they thaw. There is a certain, undeniable trend toward shorter times of ice cover, implying higher temperatures.

The so-called greenhouse effect (a misnomer, as actual plant greenhouses don't work this way) is not inheriently bad. Without it, the average global temperature would be ~255 K, or around 0 F. Clearly, if this were the worldwide average, life would pretty much be impossible for most of the continental United States. We need greenhouse gases to survive.

The thing is, this greenhouse effect is very carefully balanced. It's really easy to get too much of a good thing. Like a microphone next to a guitar amplifier, feedback is a very important part of the climate process. Imagine a situation where the temperature is perturbed upwards. This could even be due to a natural cause like increased solar output or a combination of the well-understood Milenkovich planetary orbit oscillations. So, the temperature on this planet is increased. This will result in a melting of snow and ice on the planet's surface. Now, here's where the tricky part happens. Snow and ice have a very high albedo, meaning they reflect much more radiation than they absorb. Now that there's less reflection, more solar radiation is absorbed, and the temperature goes up. That means more icemelt and less frozen precipitation, lower albedo, higher temps. While a runaway effect as espoused by the more extreme global warming adherents isn't necessarily true, it's still within the realm of possibility.

Global dimming is a relatively recent area of research. This theory states that increased fossil fuel consumption puts more soot and particulates into the upper atmosphere, where it serves the role of cloud condensation nuclei. Clouds have high albedos. Therefore, this implies that a warming trend (which I do believe exists) isn't as bad as it could be. The Earth may be correcting itself somewhat, but not entirely.

My question is simple: why do we want to keep messing around with delicate balances? Obviously, the current climate is ideal for human survival. When you consider the drastic changes between winter and summer here in the midlatitudes, certainly we all can agree that a slight change in our climate could be disasterous for our survival. No one wants the whole earth to become Saharan or Siberian, do we? If we can even take the smallest course of action to avoid setting off a chain of dominoes, even if the debate is raging about whether or not there's a problem shouldn't we? Oughtn't we be good stewards of the earth that our Creator of choice was so kind to provide us with?

Just because we don't agree with a scientific finding, that doesn't make it wrong or bad science. If my car stalls on the railroad tracks and I hear the locomotive horn and see the lights flashing, I don't say to myself, "Whew! Lucky me. These railroad tracks are abandoned because I don't see any train." No, I get myself off those tracks as soon as I can.

What I really want to see is more research on the standard deviation of temperature observations. To me, the day-to-day variablity in temperature is much more extreme (and problematic) than it used to be. After all, it's freeze-thaw cycles that wreck our roads, for example. As per Crichton, if a medical doctor is considered a climate expert, then I can't wait for the world to call me a brain surgeon. That being said, I want to read his book as soon as it comes out in paperback. Us research meteorologists don't make a lot of money. Yet another reason to be a surgeon, I guess.

P.S. I'll make the snippy responses for all of you, so that you don't have to: "Oh, he's a meteorologist, he's used to being wrong!" "He said he was a student in Wisconsin. Stupid hippy Madison liberals." Uh..that's all I've got. I know the rest of you can do better.