The Daily Mail just published this story about Al Gore’s global warming claim:
I thought the “science” was settled.
The only science we can trust is the science that doesn’t conflict with the truth found in the scriptures.
I [Wisdom] was there when he set the heavens in place,
when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,
when he established the clouds above
and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,
when he GAVE THE SEA ITS BOUNDARY
SO THE WATERS WOULD NOT OVERSTEP HIS COMMAND,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth. (Proverbs 8:27-30)
See also:
Why Virginia Heffernan is Right to Side with the Scriptures Over Science
The Christian Foundation of the Scientific Revolution
Evolution’s Insignificant Impact on Modern Medicine
And for a response to those who say that there’s a “consensus” among scientists concerning climate change, the Cornwall Alliance (an evangelical Christian organization concerned about the effect that policies which will supposedly thwart climate change will have on the poor of the planet) has written an interesting piece:
THE FAITHFUL CHURCH 
This is more for your information than a critique.The Daily Mail is rarely a reliable source on anything. Seriously. I don’t believe them without checking independent source even if I happen to agree with their take on something. Just from memory, here’s one example. They went absolutely crazy about waste of tax-payers’ money, reporting fury over “Muslim-only public toilets,” which, erm, weren’t Muslim-only, and over which there was no fury; until they told everyone these non-existent Muslim-only toilets existed, at which point lots of people believed them, and the “fury” part became a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyways, the sea-ice:
What’s actually happened is that within a long-term trend of yearly ice-loss, there has been a short-term (two or three years) trend of an even larger loss. We appear to have reached the end of that short burst, but the over-all trend is that loss at the long-term rate is still happening. They’ve chosen the range of years covered by their graph very carefully, in order to make it look like hardly any loss at all.
The long-term graph:
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You’re right, Daz. Not really a good source. But the fact remains that Al Gore’s prediction of doom was wrong. Cities around the world aren’t under water–or even seeing water levels rise. Perhaps this is why there’s been a subtle change in name from “global warming” to “climate change.”
I’m not an expert, but it seems to me that believers in climate change often have pagan religious beliefs and/or anti-capitalist views that hurt those at the lowest end of the economic ladder.
As in ages past, science can be used to harm the “least of these.” Scientific racism and social Darwinism are two examples of the failures of science. One was used to justify slavery and one was used to justify colonial expansion.
Climate change is used as a political tactic to challenge capitalism and promote socialist/communist government which always brings about poverty and harm to the poor–and horrible destruction to the environment.
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Al Gore is not a scientist. For what it’s worth, what he seems to have done is taken the most scary scenario and presented it as the most likely. I can see why he did it—no one was paying attention to the more likely but less attention-grabbing predictions—but I think it was unwise.
Take a look at the graph above. If that was a graph of a company’s profits, would you be willing to state that they don’t have a problem?
Social Darwinism is not a failure of science. It is a failure on the part of people to understand the science, and/or willingness to misrepresent it. The theory of evolution by natural selection (not “Darwinism” as it is so often misnamed) is concerned with biology, not economics or sociology. Attempts to apply it to those subjects are as silly as trying to apply the theory of relativity to basket-weaving.
I take it you can prove this? I also take it you can prove that global temperatures on average, are not rising? There are decades’ worth of individual studies, mountains of data, pointing to the conclusions that they are rising, and that they are doing so because of human interference. Do you think we can burn millions of barrels of oil per year and not have that make a noticeable difference to the atmosphere? Where do you think all that carbon monoxide goes? If you want to talk about “horrible destruction to the environment,” look no further.
Socialism and communism are not merely weaker and stronger versions of the same thing. I am a socialist. I believe that things like roads, police services, law-courts, hospitals, education, all the infrastructure which makes society possible, should be paid for on a communal basis by all, by way of taxes, and available free at the point of use, to all. I don’t reject capitalism, I reject unbounded capitalism, in the same way that I reject unbounded freedom of travel (IE, neither you nor I has the right to ignore traffic lights, speed past schools at 100mph, etc). (This, by the way, is the polar opposite of “Social Darwinism,” which would have every person scrabbling for what they could get for themselves, and no-thank-you-Bob to any communal funding, which it views as pure theft.)
I am in no way a communist. (Short version of my rejection of communism: “From each according to ability to each according to need” is a great, even charitable, ideal, provided we ignore the fact that it has to be applied to human beings not ants.)
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Science, just like religion, can be misapplied. You’re right about Gore–he’s a politician. That’s one reason why I believe global warming is a ruse to bring about a political goal. There are those who want to bring about John Lennon’s dream, and this global problem needs a global solution. That’s why it’s a popular cause for communists and socialists.
The problem with Gore’s ideology is that it opposes the scriptures that say God controls the boundaries of the sea. (Proverbs 8:29, Jeremiah 5:22) This is similar to other times in history when science tried to overrule the scriptures as the source of truth.
For example, abolitionists stood on the scripture in Acts 17:26, which said all nations came from one blood. Frederick Douglass, the Clapham Sect, and many others held up the truth of the Word to counter what was being taught at Harvard and promoted by the National Academy of Science.
Social Darwinism promoted the view that the darker races were less evolved and it was the white man’s burden to civilize them. This was a scientific endeavor. Study the Chicago World’s Fair and learn about the White City.
“To lend anthropological legitimacy to their enterprise, Chicago’s exposition directors placed the Midway under the nominal direction of Harvard’s Frederic Ward Putnam, who had already been chosen to organize an Anthropology Building at the fair. Putnam envisioned the Midway as a living outdoor museum of “primitive” human beings that would afford visitors the opportunity to measure the progress of humanity toward the ideal of civilization presented in the White City.” (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1386.html)
Putnam would go on to become a professor at UC-Berkley. He was a well-respected Ivy League anthropologist. He was sent there as a scientific authority who was sharing the truth about Darwinism and its impact on the human race. This attitude wasn’t embraced by a few flukes, it was accepted by nearly all of the intellectual giants of its day. Those who believed in it could read like a “Who’s Who” of Victorian Society.
Global warming is the same kind of foolishness. It goes against the scriptures. Scientists who supported it came into a lot of money in the form of research grants. There’s a reason scientists hop onto those kinds of bandwagons.
My concern is for those who would be harmed by global warming/climate change policies.
By the way, they say hindsight is 20/20. Since you only stand on human reason and scientific evidence, I wonder if you would have opposed polygenism or social Darwinism. You seem to be convinced of the truth of global warming even if it opposes the scriptures and hurts the poorest in the world. (Many of them being the darker races.)
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You believe this, you believe that… where’s your evidence? All those conversations we’ve had regarding my claim that religion is harmful? This is a huge example of why. Without the slightest regard for testable evidence, you and other religious people are happy to ruin the planet, because a millennia-old book tells you to ignore any evidence that you are doing so. You ignore massive harm done and, irony of ironies, claim that attempts to fix or mitigate the problem will cause harm.
Forget Al Gore. Lay the politics and the religion to one side. Look at the science. Look at the evidence.
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What do you think is going to happen to the world because of global warming/climate change?
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Doesn’t matter what I think. Like you, I’m no scientist. If I had to point to the one thing that I think will have the most effect, it’s the knock-on effects of increased ocean acidity.
A short overview.
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Doesn’t matter what I think either. 🙂
The only point I was trying to make was that there was a historic precedence for science being wrong (when it conflicts with the scriptures) and the consequences being very harmful to humanity.
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This post touches on several aspects of this conversation.
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I think she may be right. Abortion has been a silent holocaust of the “least of these.”
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Did you ever see an ultrasound, Daz? I have on several occasions. I just saw one yesterday and discovered that my new little grandchild is a girl. (Lucy!)
The ultrasound technician said that she weighed about a pound. She was sucking her fingers, kicking her legs, hiding her face with her arms, and arching her back. She did NOT like to be disturbed. She had a strong heartbeat. Her little legs and arms were fully formed and active. We even used 3-D technology to show her facial features. It’s so exciting to see the new little life that will be coming into our family.
According to our Milwaukee abortion clinic website, a surgical abortion could be performed on Lucy. They do surgical abortions up to 22 weeks.
I don’t think that’s right. I think we are killing a living, human entity. In this case, it would be my little grandchild, Lucy. When an abortion is performed a human being is killed. Period.
The reasons and justifications for abortions can be argued, but these little ones are human beings. They’ve been destroyed using horrendous methods that are cruel and painful. Science has advanced to the point where we can see into the womb, but the human heart hasn’t advanced at all. It can still justify and promote the killing of the most innocent and precious among us.
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Uhuh. How did we go from global warming and blaming the holocaust on “Darwinism,” to abortion? But okay…
Okay, let’s pretend that that unformed, brainless blob of cells is a fully-formed human being, who should be granted all the rights given to other human beings. (Let’s just not stop to wonder why, if this human being is so well-formed, with fully functioning brain etc, it needs another several months in the womb in order to develop, erm, something we’re pretending it’s already developed.)
Name me any circumstance where we allow someone to whom we’ve granted all the rights of a human being, to demand the use of another person’s body. I can be dying for the lack of them, but cannot demand your kidney, your lung, your blood or any other body part. Your right to bodily autonomy trumps my right to life every single time.
Why are you demanding that the foetus, even if it’s the tiny little person you imagine it to be, be given more rights than you would extend to any other person?
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You sent me to a link about the Duggars and science. The controversy is about a comment Jessa made comparing abortion to the holocaust. ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/30/jessa-duggar-abortion-holocaust_n_5909310.html )
Of course I agree with her comments about racism and science also. 19th century science was no friend to the darker races. First it was polygenism, then it was social Darwinism. And all those views came about because science claimed to be smarter than God and his Word.
Yes, slavery was around since the beginning of human history, but science did nothing to ease suffering, it only contributed to it. While in England, William Wilberforce, an evangelical Christian, and the Clapham Sect (also a group of evangelicals) led the charge in Parliament to overthrow slavery in the British Empire. They eventually succeeded. Science was their enemy. The same thing happened in America. Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and other evangelicals fought against science in order to abolish slavery.
I know this must be shocking to atheists to hear that science can fail while those hick Christians go around standing on the scriptures as a greater authority (and looking back they were right) but this is the record of history.
When Al Gore claimed the polar ice caps were going to melt and the rising waters would flood the coastal cities of the world, I knew he was wrong because the scriptures say differently. Let God be true and every man a liar.
P.S. Your views on the baby in the womb shocked me.
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Diana, you believe that hailstones are kept in big magical warehouses?
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