Global Warming: An Innoculation Against Religion

[Straha]

I get daily e-mails from a Mormon magazine. Usually they're tame. Today, they sent me a real howler.

Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris had only been missing a few hours before someone declared that the doomed jet was a victim of global warming.

What won’t they blame on it next?

When global warming enters the scene stage left, fingers point in all directions:

* Hard science or theory?

* An urgent reason to rein in greenhouse gas emissions or the nothing-to-panic-about ups and downs of normal climate cycles?

* An opportunity to save the planet from disaster and win the Nobel prize or an opportunity to institute massive cap-and-trade taxes to fund new government programs?

Or … an opportunity to cleverly inoculate mankind against the messages God intends for us prior to the Second Coming of the Savior?

Christ has told us of many physical phenomena that will occur in the last days. No secrets here. The whole world could know them if they would but read the scriptures:


* Earthquakes in many places
* The earth will reel to and fro
* Seas will heave their bounds
* A great hailstorm will destroy the crops of the earth
* The sun will be darkened and the moon turned to blood
* Fires and drought
* A desolating sickness
* A plague of flies
* Marvelous signs in the heavens

Why the physical tweets? To warn God’s misbehaving children and to prepare a righteous people to meet Christ at the Second Coming.

So what would someone do if he wanted to thwart the impact of these warnings – to prevent someone from connecting the dots and getting God’s message?

There are three ways:

Deny the event
Deny the source
Deny the meaning

The first denial – “What earthquake?” – is obviously a non-starter. No one who suffers one is dumb enough to say it didn’t happen.

The second denial – “There was an earthquake, but it wasn’t caused by God” – provides a comfortable way to avoid thinking about messages.

The third denial has a yes-but twist: “Yes, it happened, and yes it came from God, but the message God is delivering is not what you think it is.”

How to get people to buy in to at least one of these denials? Patient inoculation over many years – the process of conditioning people to view anything and everything through a comfortable, politically correct set of glasses.

To a boy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To Americans in 2009, everything looks like global warming.

The strategy is simple. If people can be brought to believe that mankind is the cause of global warming, which has been drummed into us for two decades, then whatever disaster may be sent from God will be interpreted in global warming terms – it’s our own fault – and people will feel justified in ignoring the wake-up call, if they even pause to think in did-it-come-from-God terms.

So when these prophesied disasters happen, people will not see them as signs to turn their hearts to God:

* Earthquakes? “That’s what global warming can do.”
* Hailstorm? “Obviously the fault of global warming.”
* Seas heaving their bounds? “Our carbon emissions caused it.”
* Sun darkened? “There’s that global warming again.”
* Plague of flies? “It was our use of fossil fuels.”
* Fires and drought? “Ho-hum, just global warming.”

So intense has been this focus, that when the Savior returns to the earth, the Los Angeles Times headline will probably read, “Savior Ushers in Millennium; Impact on Global Warming Undetermined.”

In the smothering news coverage of global warming, many who deign to grant God a possible role in the prophesied physical phenomena are more likely to interpret His message as “don’t buy SUVs” than “don’t commit adultery.”

A monkey wrench in the inoculation plan is that the global warming theory is losing luster. As more experts acknowledge that global warming models cannot reverse-predict this year’s climate from yesteryear’s data, some scientists are even saying we should now be concerned about global cooling, a return to the fears of a new ice age so much in vogue in the 1960s and 1970s. Maybe they’ll soon claim that global warming causes global cooling.

Recent events illustrate the inconvenient data – the coldest June on record in Chicago, the first June snow in North Dakota in 60 years, frosts in Brazil, and even a snowstorm in Saudi Arabia.

So what’s it to be – global warming or global cooling?

What about both? Let’s be alarmed if the temperature rises and let’s be alarmed if it drops. Let’s fear … climate change.

Head for the hills. The climate is changing! The climate is changing!

How silly is this going to get? Since when has the climate not changed in this direction or that? Are we doomed to live in constant alarm?

The author of the inoculation against the signs of the last days would hope so.

Knowing not what they do, the inoculation folks dutifully bang the climate-change hammer against the bottom of society’s canary cage to keep us in a constant state of agitation. The result: a people dulled to perceive the true intent and message of the coming physical phenomena.

Perhaps not all climatic events will contain a specific message from God, but when He tells us that He will send certain signs to warn His children to shape up, we would be well advised to err on the side of careful thought rather than automatic denial.

Global warming and climate change – convenient excuses to ignore God’s intended messages.

I'll leave this here without comment for you all to enjoy.

Added "Religion" to title, as per request below. ~S

[Straha]

Could some passing mod add "Religion" to the end of the title. I meant to add it but apparently forgot.

[OsirisLord]

How stupid are these people?

* Earthquakes in many places - Earthquakes happen all the time all over the world since forever.
* The earth will reel to and fro - What does this even mean?
* Seas will heave their bounds - Again, what does this mean? Nothing, and such it can mean anything.
* A great hailstorm will destroy the crops of the earth - Hailstorms? Destroying crops? What a perfectly natural phenomenon.
* The sun will be darkened and the moon turned to blood - You mean lunar eclipses and solar eclipses?
* Fires and drought - Which happen all the time. Usually at the same time.
* A desolating sickness - Again, a vague "prophecy" that predicts nothing until you fill in all the blanks.
* A plague of flies - Like the kind Africa has?
* Marvelous signs in the heavens - More vague mumbo-jumbo.

If these predictions are to be correct we have been in the end times since the earth was formed.

[Johonebesus]

How stupid are these people?...

* Seas will heave their bounds - Again, what does this mean? Nothing, and such it can mean anything....

If these predictions are to be correct we have been in the end times since the earth was formed.

Actually that does mean something, even if the construction is a bit archaic. It means the seas will violently rise and flood dry land, as with a tsunami. This could loosely be interpreted as a general rise in sea levels. It doesn't change the fact that the list is B.S., but it irks me just a tiny bit when people dismiss slightly archaic language as meaningless or vague just because the words used seem "fancy" to us.

[Akkleptos]

Should we then await the saviour anytime soon? From the people that believe the words of the reputed American con artist, Joseph Smith?

Regardless, the heaving seas seem to be really happening nowadays, and at an accelerated rate. Of course this doesn't mean a thing about divine entities, but the rising of sea levels might be closer around the corner than we thought.

Scientists alarmed: climate is changing faster than predicted
By ELLALYN B. DE VERA
June 27, 2009, 1:45am

Some 2,000 international scientists warned that “climate change is picking up pace,” as new evidence of the climate phenomenon has been discovered.

The 36-page report summarized from 1,400 studies by some 2,000 scientists showed that there is new scientific evidence that ocean temperatures, sea levels, extreme climate conditions and the retreat of the Arctic sea ice have picked up more pace than experts predicted in the 2007 report by the United Nations (UN) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

It said huge stores of gases such as methane trapped for hundreds of years in the Arctic permafrost due to human activity “may be starting to leak into the atmosphere.”

Scientists said methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, which has been known to have contributed to the “speeding up of the (global) warming process.”

“The natural capacity of the oceans and forests to absorb CO2 created by the burning of fossil fuels has also been compromised,” the research showed.

The summarized report from 1,400 studies, which were presented at a climate conference last March in Copenhagen, was written and reviewed by many of the scientists who compiled the benchmark IPCC report in 2007.

The condensed study was released last June 18.

“The world faces a growing risk of abrupt and irreversible climatic shifts,” scientists warned.

The experts pointed out that “deep and early emission cuts” are critical to slow down the warming process.

“Rapid, sustained and effective mitigation is required to avoid dangerous climate change,” they said, as they convinced world leaders who will convene in Copenhagen, Denmark in December to make serious efforts to formalize a new climate agreement before the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.

The Kyoto protocol is an agreement among countries that set the standards for cuts in carbon emissions to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The Philippines proposed a cut in greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30 to 40 percent from 2013 to 2017, and more than 50 percent from 2018 to 2022 from 1990 levels.

The new table of emission reductions will be agreed upon and presented by parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change during the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

United Nations (UN) officials stressed that renewable and clean energy offer the world hope not only in combating climate change but also in reversing the global economic crisis.

“The prospects for renewable energy have never looked better, even in the face of recession," UN General Assembly President Miguel D'Escoto said.

Also, considering methane is 296 times worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas...

[The Duchess of Zeon]

If it's really 296 times worse, then why don't we just set it on fire as it outgasses from the perma frost? It's just hydrogen and carbon. We'll release a lot of CO(2) of course but we'll also pump lots of soot into the atmosphere if we just start burning Arctic bogs, which will counteract the warming effect nicely.

[FireNexus]

Your grace, why is fire your solution for everything?

More seriously, that's actually a good idea if we can determine a way to do it effectively on a large scale. I'd be much more satisfied with finding a way to mine it, but wholesale elimination of the problem is good enough, barring that.

[Alerik the Fortunate]

Wouldn't this entail covering ungodly expanses of (formerly) permafrost surface with some sort of collecting membrane to concentrate the methane enough even to maintain combustion? I image that it would not outgas at such volumes as to be flammable in open air naturally, though if it were, wouldn't much of Siberia become an ongoing fire hazard? Maybe the surviving parts of Russia will garner money from tourists come to see the Burning Steppes from a safe distance.

The Mormon church is just being stupid as any other fundamentalist Christian organization about being threatened by science, but it still won't buy them acceptance by more mainstream protestants.

[frogcurry]

Its worth mentioning that methane has a relatively shortlived half life in the atmosphere (on a scale of single digit years), so its leakage isn't such a big issue as it might sound at first, given that you need to keep emitting methane at the same rate to have the same effect, unlike carbon dioxide which is stable and inert. Otherwise our bovine friends would have doomed us all long ago with the built-up quantity of their methane by-products.

I'm very, very dubious about the idea of this methane leaking into the atmosphere. I get suspicious when the word "scientist" is assumed to equal "expert" for several thousand unnamed people on any large, highly complex subject, you have to question how many of these people aren't just jumping on the funding bandwagon by adding their signature. If its in the artic permafrost then they are referring to methane hydrates, water-gas clathrate-like structures that are pretty stable and form deposits ~500m below surface level. You don't dissociate large quantities of hydrate that easily, it needs both an input of heat and a means of releasing pressure to start dissociating any substantial quantities. The total temperature rise that has reportedly occured so far due to global warming is fairly small (a few degrees celcius at worst) and so nowhere near enough to cause significant dissociation of these deposits. The hydrate that is still there today has remained in its stable zone through the temperature swings in earths history for the last few million years since it formed, so whats left today should be well into its stability zone with several degrees of subcooling at least between its current temperature and the point where dissociation starts, so you've got to overcome that just to get the most unstable methane atom out first. Plus the ability of temperature changes on the surface to have such a large effect down below (where geothermal factors dominate temperature significantly more than solar and atmospheric affects) seems pretty unlikely, I'd have to check my textbooks for the temperature slope in permafrost but I'm 98% sure its actually hotter that far down than it is on the earths surface.

As for the OP subject, lets just innoculate these people against breeding for the good of humanity.

[Akkleptos]

If it's really 296 times worse, then why don't we just set it on fire as it outgasses from the perma frost? It's just hydrogen and carbon. We'll release a lot of CO(2) of course but we'll also pump lots of soot into the atmosphere if we just start burning Arctic bogs, which will counteract the warming effect nicely.

It being more effective at preventing heat from escaping Earth's atmosphere does not imply it being more flammable. Also, a high concentration would be a requisite to successful ignition in open air, largely-flat and windy environments such as tundra.

Otherwise our bovine friends would have doomed us all long ago with the built-up quantity of their methane by-products.

Exactly. Cows burp and fart methane all the time. Considering how extensive cattle keeping has become since human population began its boom, you can imagine there'd be quite a bit added methane to the atmosphere.