Posted on 12/07/2004 11:41:50 AM PST by Grendel9
Global Warming IS a Religious Belief Dec. 6, 2004
...this is a red letter day....
December 6, 2004
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
You know, folks this is a red letter day. I mean, I've gone through the news. How many times on this program, over the course of the last 16 years, have I said to you that the militant environmental wacko movement is just a bunch of displaced socialists who had to go someplace when the Soviet Union imploded, and how many times have I told you that the militant environmental movement is nothing other than a religion itself, that it is based in fear, that it is based on destroying American capitalism and technological advancement, et al, et al, et al? Well, I hold here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a piece from the CyberNewsService.com. An MIT meteorologist by the name of Richard Lindsen "last Wednesday dismissed alarmist fears about human-induced global warming as 'nothing more than religious beliefs.'" I mean, this is the Limbaugh Echo Syndrome personified. "'Do you believe in global warming?' That's a religious question. So is the second part: 'Are you a skeptic or a believer?' said Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindsen in a speech to about a hundred people at the National Press Club in Washington last Wednesday.
"'Essentially; whatever you're told is alleged to be supported by all 'scientists,' quote, unquote. You don't have to understand the issue anymore. You simply go back to treating it as a matter of religious belief,' Lindsen said. His speech was titled 'Climate Alarmism: The Misuse of Science,' was sponsored by the free market George C. Marshall Institute. Lindsen is a professor at MIT's department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences." For how long, we don't know, since he's gone public with this. "'Once a person becomes a believer of global warming,' quote, 'you never have to defend this belief except to claim that you are supported by all scientists, except for a handful of corrupted heretics,' Lindsen added. According to Lindsen, climate alarmists have been trying to push the idea that there is scientific consensus on dire climate change. 'With respect to science, the assumption behind the alarmist consensus is science is the source of authority, and that authority increases with the number of scientists who agree. But science is not primarily a source of authority. It is a particularly effective approach of inquiry and analysis.
"'Skepticism is essential to science. Consensus is foreign, and yet in global warming there's no skepticism whatsoever among the believers. It's total consensus. It is something that stands science by its definition on its head. Alarmist predictions of more hurricanes, the catastrophic rise in sea levels, the melting of the global poles, even a plunge in another ice age are not scientifically supported,' Lindsen said. 'It leads to a situation where advocates want us to be afraid when there's no basis for alarm. In response to the fear, they want us to do what they want,' Lindsen said. Recent reports of melting polar ice caps were dismissed by Lindsen as an sample of the media taking advantage of the public scientific illiteracy," and we did that story on this program. We went into it. This is submarine data, and it was mis-analyzed. They didn't account for the thickness of the ice that had somehow moved. There's no less ice than there was; it's just in a different place.
"'The thing you have to remember about the arctic,' he said, 'is that it is an extremely variable part of the world. Although there is melting going on now, there's been a lot of melting that went on in the 1930s, and then there was freezing. So by isolating a section of the arctic, these people are essentially taking people's ignorance of the past,' and, he says, 'repetition makes people believe it. The climate change debate has become corrupted by politics, media, and money,' he said. 'It's a sad story. You have scientists making meaningless or ambiguous statements about climate change they are then taken by advocates to the media who translate the statements into alarmist declarations. You then have politicians who respond to all of this by giving scientists more money. Agreement on anything is taken to infer agreement on everything. So if you make a statement that you agree that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, you agree the world's coming to an end, because carbon dioxide is destroying the atmosphere. You have to believe the world's coming to an end, there's no variable here. It's not true.'" He believes "the key to improving the science of climate change lies in altering the way scientists are funded." Alarm is their aim. Alarm is what they want in order to get more money.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here's Sue in Annapolis, Maryland. I'm glad you called, Sue, welcome to the program.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I listen to you a lot, loved hearing all your optimism during the election, and I want --
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: -- you to know that there is a conservative Republican environmental science teacher in the country, and that's me, and --
RUSH: Well, we're happy to have you with us.
CALLER: -- I'm applauding what you're saying, because I think it's going to take about 10,000 years before we know for sure, if humans had anything to do with climate change, or if it's just going to happen because that's what happens on earth, period. I try to tell my kids that.
RUSH: Sue, I just saw the other day -- it was in the Seattle Times -- it was last week, that the amount of pollutants, I think it was CO2, actually, or sulfur dioxide, something, that Mount St. Helens has polluted the earth's atmosphere more than all of the factories in the state of Washington in a whole year combined.
CALLER: Yep. I heard you talking about that the other day, and I was unable to get the reference so I could print the article for my kids.
RUSH: You know, doesn't that debunk the whole notion of human-caused climate change?
CALLER: Well, it does, and it tells us that we are only part of the issue on the planet. It's a huge planet. There's lots of water, there's lots of things happening, and you can't just pull out one single factor just to suit your purposes, which is what I think they try to do many times.
RUSH: You know what else? You know what has taken root out there is there has been clear cutting of the Amazon rain forest, which is a jungle. You know, this whole term, "rain forest" is to romanticize it. It's a jungle and nobody would want to be caught dead there except to be eaten alive by snakes and bugs and whoever knows what else, alligators. But nevertheless, there's this thing that's caught hold out there that we have clear cut the Amazon rain forest to the point that it's in a terrible state of disarray. Well, the truth is two things, and I mentioned this to the person who told me this, and this person just pooh-poohed it. You know what, I remember the story where we came out and talked about the acreage of the Amazon rain forest that had been so-called supposedly clear-cut, that same year the Europeans were alarmed and stunned at all of the new foliage they had that they hadn't seen in a while, and the conclusion the scientists made was the earth's climate system and the whole ecological system is something that if we think we have control over. We are vain like nobody's belief, that --
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: -- if there is a reduction in foliage, the earth takes care of it somewhere else, that the amount of water on the planet is constant, either in the oceans, in your bathtub; it's in clouds or whatever, but there's no new water that arrives here from a delivery truck from outer space, we have the water that we have here, you know, and we clean it and do what we can. It's a contained ecosystem. It is brilliantly put together. The idea that human beings living their lives can destroy it, is just vanity to the max, and then I find it contradictory. On the one hand we're on powerful and we're so vain and we're so huge that our cars can destroy our atmosphere and our ozone, which another thing that's not happening, the ozone layer is created by the sun. By the same token we're no different and better than a rat, and animals and trees need primacy because we're the ones destroying. The things these people come up with amaze me intellectually.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, it's complicated, and I don't think we should run around destroying it just because we can, but I just wanted you to know, there are a few of us trying to bring some reason to this destruction --
RUSH: I appreciate --
CALLER: -- you know, this discussion especially with kids.
RUSH: You're doing the Lord's work because you're out there against such things at Captain Planet and all these cartoon series, and that stupid movie, "The Day After Tomorrow." ( 1 | 2 ) I mean, how many...?
CALLER: My kids beg me to see that, yeah, they keep begging me to show it to them, and I'm like, "No, we're not going to waste our time."
RUSH: You need to. You need to go to Blockbuster. Be there first on a Friday rent it and show it to these kids and use it as a classic example of the paranoid extremism that the people who want people to believe this stuff actually think. It's valuable. It is valuable as it is.
CALLER: Well, I say to them things like, "You know, Vice President Cheney doesn't care about our air because he breathes different air and he drinks different water, right? Isn't that the way all Republicans think?" and they always laugh because they start realizing that we're all in this together --
RUSH: Exactly.
CALLER: -- and it can't all be that bad, and so it's going to work out, but thank you. I enjoy listening to you. Great to talk to you.
RUSH: Sue, before you go, quickly, I need to ask: Can you give me an example when you said, "We shouldn't destroy it," meaning the environment? I agree totally. Can you give me an example of how we do that?
CALLER: Like for example with the mining when they go blast the whole, you know, top of a mountain off and then all of the debris is in all of the streams and you have all the sediment. I mean, I live on the Chesapeake Bay. All you have to do is look at an aerial view and you see all the runoff and the pollution so we can have perfectly green lawns, and we don't have any crabs now. We're killing them in the bay. But we do do some things. We do do some things because we're not as careful as we could be --
RUSH: Now, but --
CALLER: -- but I think that the earth is bigger than that.
RUSH: Here my question for that. See, from our perspective, there aren't any more crabs, and you see a lot of debris, but are we actually destroying anything? In a pure sense, did we destroy anything by blowing up a mountain in mining? Did we destroy anything?
CALLER: Well, you've destroyed the things downstream because as you keep putting all of this junk into it streams that finally get their way into the bay then we destroyed the aquatic vegetation which all of the little crabs and little creatures need to live and to breathe in so we can have more crabs in the future --
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: - -and it's pretty clear. But 30 years' worth of talking about it hasn't done one thing to clean up the bay, not one.
RUSH: In thirty years of talking, who hasn't?
CALLER: Everybody. Everybody. Chesapeake Bay Foundation and all these environmental groups that run around carrying on and screaming and hollering about it but it's still just as bad as it's ever been, so --
RUSH: Well, my point is... I know it's going to be thought extreme but my point is that you're looking at this from our perspective. We like crabs. There aren't any crabs. We're destroying something. We like crabs. We like algae. We like little living rooms for growing organisms in the Chesapeake Bay but for whatever reason it's not there because we blew up a mountain to get to the coal or whatever was in there. My contention: We haven't destroyed anything. There are still crabs. We haven't wiped out the crab population. All we've done is rearrange things. There's all kinds of oddball life that is swimming around in that goo and that gunk. A nuclear weapon would not snuff out life. It may take a form we don't know, but in terms of actually destroying things? Now, I know from our perspective, yeah, we can destroy things that we need for ourselves. I'm not denying that, but the idea we're going to destroy earth and so forth I think is just so far over the top. If we had that power, we could create it -- and we can't.
I've been saying that since the Kyoto meeting.
Where is the transcript of the Charlton Heston narration ???
Interesting . . .
I don't believe Rush can post the whole transcript of Heston due to re-use guidelines. In fact I surprised that Crieghten allowed the whole original reading.
So it cannot be allowed in Public Schools?
ping
I remember Rush saying that 'more people have been killed riding in a car with Ted Kennedy than have been killed by golbal warming'
LOL
My contention: We haven't destroyed anything. There are still crabs. We haven't wiped out the crab population. All we've done is rearrange things. There's all kinds of oddball life that is swimming around in that goo and that gunk. A nuclear weapon would not snuff out life. Do we not have the responsibilty to be good stewards of the land? Yes life will go on with or without us but promoting sustainability only enhances our production and efficiency. We can produce more and healthier food in untainted soil, we can skip costly purification of water if we keep our water clean, etc. etc. etc. It's the enviro-wackos that have given the logic based environmentally minded people a bad name. There is a middle road- enviro-cons hoo!
BUMP
I loved that show (MST3K). Is it still on?
bump
I want to forward this to all my tree hugger buddies.
The religion of fear.... take 2.
I walked around last year in -10 degree weather saying,
"So - how do you like this Global Warming!? "
It's amazing that so many people buy this horse hockey!
The earth is bigger than all of us and she will change as she does without any direction from us.
It really irks me when I hear someone as influential as Rush pretty much mock being environmentally conscious. It just seems to fuel the radical environmental types-- people just don't care about the environment. There is a fine line between debunking the doomsayers and denouncing all environmentalism.
Cold is caused by global warming is what the wackos will say.
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