Gerald Warner: Weathering the true lies of global warming Newspeak - Scotsman.com News

A really great piece of journalism from Gerald Warner writing in The Scotsman on Boxing day 2010. There is so much cutting and satirical commentary on the now discredited Climate Change lobby it is hard to find a favourite part and you should read the whole article. But if I had to pick one it would be:

“Of the fragile construct of global warming mythology there is hardly a domino left standing. Declining polar bear population? Since 1970 the world population of polar bears has 'declined' from 5,000 to 25,000.”

Isn’t that wonderful? There is also an insight into the bias of the Met Office:

“Last week the Met Office was forced to issue a press release stating it "categorically denies forecasting a 'mild winter' ". In fact, in October, its long-range probability map predicted an 80 per cent probability of warmer than average temperatures from November to January in Scotland. It claimed Scotland, along with Northern Ireland, the eastern half of England and Cornwall, would experience temperatures above the 3.7°C average, more than 2°C higher than last winter.”

And this picture of the so-called melting ice-caps:

“The suggestion of a connection between "man-made" global warming and hurricanes has now been rejected by the scientist who first advanced it, Professor Kerry Emanuel, after further research. Melting ice-caps? When Lewis Pugh tried to paddle a kayak to the "ice-free" North Pole he had to stop 600 miles south of his destination and 100 miles short of where a canoeist had reached a century before. Even the IPCC has been forced to revise its forecasts of rises in sea level dramatically downwards. Global average temperatures reached a peak in 1998 and have been declining since.”

Maybe we should make a New-Year’s Resolution to find the facts and follow the evidence and perhaps insist governments stop wasting our taxes on impractical and unworkable “solutions” to a problem that doesn’t exist according to the man who first suggested it might.

Gerald Warner: Weathering the true lies of global warming Newspeak - Scotsman.com News

Thinking about Thinking

I have entertained a growing fascination for the way we think about things and have long believed that many of our difficulties as Christians, indeed as a general humanity, in dealing with the world would be more manageable if we simply determined to think clearly and fearlessly about ourselves and the world around us. I suppose this is philosophy and certainly the shortest and most helpful definition I have found for that field of intellectual enquiry is that philosophy is “thinking about thinking”. Some see no practical use for philosophy but given this definition it would seem difficult to avoid it if we are going to make sense of anything. I knew one pastor who had only derisory things to say about philosophy but who used many recognisable philosophical concepts in his sermons to help people think through gospel principles without any idea that he was being philosophical.

Norman Cousins observed that “It is nonsense to say there is not enough time to be fully informed...Time given to thought is the greatest time saver”. Blaise Pascal famously observed, “Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed”. Yet it has also been observed that, “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking” (Sir Joshua Reynolds). Yet, whatever the evidence to the contrary, Arthur Koestler’s pithy observation remains true, “We cannot unthink unless we are insane”.

Where people appear to be unthinking they are not altogether avoiding the thought process but simply lazy thinkers. They often allow the crowd to do their thinking for them and entertaining second-hand thoughts. This is illustrated by a conversation I had some years ago with a Christian friend. My wife’s mother had died and he asked me if she was a Christian. I told him that she was not but was a Spiritualist to which he replied, “Never mind. You will still get her under family salvation.” Of course, he was making reference to an event in the New Testament book of Acts in which the jailer of Paul and Silas asked, “Sir, what must I do to be saved?” Their reply was: “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved – you and your household” (Acts 16:31). The implication in my friend’s remark was that, by believing, this jailer would save his whole family as though by proxy.

Being a new Christian I found this a novel and strange concept and I asked him what he meant and why he thought that way. He explained, “I don’t know. I once heard it said at a conference!” A thorough reading of the text and a moment’s careful thought will show that his idea of ‘family salvation’ is not theologically correct. Paul and Silas “Spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house...then immediately he and his family were baptised.” (VV 30-34) Clearly, the members of his ‘household’ had individual responsibilities to hear, believe and submit to the gospel.

What is puzzling is that so many of us have a propensity for repeating something we have heard as though speaking from personal understanding gained by careful study and consideration and as though citing an authority that is unimpeachable. This is especially frustrating when we do so in the name of God and represent our non-thinking as gospel truth.

In E M Forster's 'A Passage to India' Miss Adela Quested is newly arrived in the subcontinent and reflects on the social scene she finds among British ex-pats. Recently engaged she contemplates a vision of her prospective married life, with its endless round of predictable social engagements and imperialist traditions while 'the real India' appears 'always as a frieze, never as a spirit'.

"But the tradition remained; the food of exiles, cooked by servants who did not understand. Adela thought of the young men and women who had come out before her, P-and-O-full after P-and-O-full, and had set down to the same food and the same ideas, and been snubbed in the same good-humoured way until they kept to the accredited themes and began to snub others.’ I should never get like that,’ she thought, for she was young herself; all the same, she knew that she had come up against something that was both insidious and tough, and against which she needed allies."

As Christians we can, in the instinctive effort to be accepted in this strange new world of faith, find approval in keeping to the accredited themes of our group and, like Forster’s heroine, we need to determine, 'I should never get like that'. But the pull of unthinking and predictable acceptability is indeed both insidious and hard to resist and we need allies if we are to resist. In Christian circles the monster Forster describes can be identified in the same way he identifies it in the book - by attitudes of unthinking conformity.

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself” (Archibald MacLeish)

It should be encouraging for any Christian determined to avoid those accredited themes and dare dissent and think for themselves that the Bible says:

“Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will” (Ro.12:2)

The Calf Path

This is just a favourite of mine and a reminder of the folly of blind tradition

One day through the primeval wood
A calf walked home, as good calves should,
But made a trail all bent askew,
A crooked path - as all calves do.
Since then three hundred years have fled,
And I infer, the calf is dead.

But still he left behind his trail -
And thereby hangs my moral tale.
The trail was taken up next day
By a lone dog that passed that way.
And then a wise bellwether sheep
Pursued the trail, o'er vale and steep,

And drew the flock behind him too,
As good bellwethers always do.
And from that day, o'er hill and glade,
Through those old woods a path was made.
And many men wound in and out,
And uttered words of righteous wrath,

Because 'twas such a crooked path.
But still they followed along that path
The first migrations of that calf,
Who through the winding woodway stalked
Because he wobbled when he walked.
This forest path became a lane

That bent and turned and turned again.
This crooked lane became a road,
Where many a poor horse with his load
Toiled on beneath the burning sun,
And travelled some three miles in one.
And thus a century and a half

They trod the footsteps of that calf.
The years passed on in swiftness fleet -
The road became a village street,
And this, before man were aware,
A city's crowded thoroughfare.
And soon the central street was this

Of a renowned metropolis,
And men two centuries and a half
Trod in the footsteps of that calf.
Each day a hundred thousand, no doubt,
Followed this zigzag calf about,
And over his crooked journey went

The traffic of a continent.
A hundred thousand men were led
By one calf, near three centuries dead.
They followed still his crooked way,
And lost a hundred years a day,
For thus such reverence is lent

To well established precedent.
A moral lesson this might teach,
Were I ordained and called to preach,
For men are prone to go it blind
Along the calf paths of the mind,
And work away from sun to sun

To do what other men have done.
They follow in the beaten track,
And out and in, and forth and back,
And still their dubious course pursue,
To keep the path that others do.
They keep the path a sacred grove

Along which all their lives they move,
But how the wise old woods do laugh,
Who saw the first primeval path.
Ah, many a thing this tale might teach -
But then, I'm not ordained to preach!

Attributed to Edward Fudge

Busy Little People

Busy little people
with seething little minds
haven't time for discourse,
they're not the thinking kind.

Looking down on mortals
who have to work things out,
they're glad the thinking's done for them ,
now they can gad about

and tell the world how right they are
and all the others wrong,
that evidence is just for wimps.
With feelings running strong

they know its true they feel its true
what feels good must be right;
they screw their faces up with faith
and put their doubts to flight.

The evidence keeps flooding back
discomfiting the weak,
but busy little people
simply will not let it speak.

They scurry to their meetings
where they're busy taking notes.
Prepared with glee to sieze
the anti-Mormon by the throat

they scurry to the internet
and publish what they've found
and find robust responses,
so they scurry underground

where they say they are too busy
and they really must get on,
not realising other folk
are closely looking on

and wondering if there's any truth
in what the "antis" say,
if not then why
have all the fly young Mormons run away?

Symposia don't affect them,
although some folk are impressed
with fancy names for meetings
where the myth is neatly dressed

and presented to the world as truth
in jargon meant to pique,
but look below the surface
and you find that reason's weak;

That the Mormon myth's a spinster
and can't marry into truth,
that family of verity
that wise folk love from youth.

The fact is the divide's too wide,
the families far apart;
for one lives from a manual
the other from the heart.

One works and works to enter heaven
"as a doorkeeper will do",
the other trusts, lives like a son,
inherits all that's true.

So lookers-on keep looking
the "antis" hold their ground
but busy little people
are nowhere to be found.

Thinking

I don't know who wrote the following and apologise for not being able to give the proper attribution but it is so very good I had to share it.


It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then to loosen up. Inevitably though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone - "to relax," I told myself - but I knew it wasn't true.

Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time. I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

Things weren't going so great at home either. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

I soon had a reputation as a heavy thinker. One day the boss called me in. He said, "I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me a lot to think about.

I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

"But Honey, surely it's not that serious."

"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver.

"You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently, and she began to cry. I'd had enough. "I'm going to the library," I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche. I roared into the parking lot and ran up to the big glass doors... they didn't open. The library was closed.

As I sank to the ground clawing at the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. "Friend, is heavy thinking ruining your life?" You probably recognise that line. It comes from the standard Thinkers Anonymous (TA ) poster.

Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Rambo".

Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home.

Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.