Greenies hate civilization. Ergo, the Green War on our W.C.s.
Think about it: There is no greater symbol of civilization than the toilet and its various accoutrements. From Mohenjo-Daro to the Roman Empire, civilized life has gone hand in hand with running water and underground infrastructure to wash the refuse of humanity away from our homes and cities. Fire may be the most widespread symbol of Man’s rise from the Serengeti to Starbucks, but the most important is the plunger.
Thus, the Greenies desire to become the commodores of our commodes, from trying to tell us to use one square of toilet paper (which may be enough if all you eat is granola, but is wholly inadequate if your diet consists of, you know, human food), to the so-called “low flush” toilets that are designed to save water but end up wasting water because you have to flush the things a million times to properly exorcise your tank.
Now, those tiger-apologists at the World Wildlife Fund have targeted toilet paper itself. A new WWF report titled “Don’t Flush Tiger Forests: Toilet Paper, U.S. Supermarkets, and the Destruction of Indonesia’s Last Tiger Habitats” claims that, “Americans who use Paseo or Livi brands of toilet tissue are contributing to the destruction of the Indonesian rainforest and tiger habitat,” according to the Environment News Service.
“Consumers shouldn’t have to choose between tigers and toilet paper,” proclaims the WWF’s Linda Kramme. “We’re asking retailers, wholesalers and consumers not to buy Paseo or Livi products until APP stops clearing rainforests in Sumatra.”
Two things. First, tigers kill people. Regularly. Last year in one region in Bangladesh, 53 people were attacked by tigers, with 34 killed and 19 severely injured. In one week the tigers of this forest killed seven people. Shame on the WWF for defending these murderous beasts.
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In 1841 a Scottish journalist named Charles Mackay published a landmark study of mass hysteria and sociopsychosis titled “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.”
Mackay painstakingly analyzed a wide variety of popular pathologies in his entertaining tome, including financial panics, medical quackery, pseudoscience like alchemy and astrology, and witch crazes. He wanted to know why so many people choose to believe so much that is not only not true, but also potentially deadly. His answer:
“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”
Conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves—I could not help but think of global warming as I was re-reading Mackay’s words. How he would have delighted in the strange, self-flagellating notion that is anthropogenic warming. He would have recognized it as kin to his own numerous and insidious subjects—superstition masked as science; Western guilt over having conquered the world manifesting itself as hatred for the technologies that made it possible; apocalyptic yearning in the guise of political enlightenment.
In fact, global warming is the most widespread mass hysteria in our species’ history. The fever that these legions of warmists warn of does not grip the globe, but rather their own brains and blinkered imaginations.
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So much for consensus.
For years, climate change cultists have attempted to shut down public discourse over global warming by assuring us that “the debate is over,” that scientists are in lockstep agreement that Man is steam-frying his own planet.
That was always bunk, of course. For one, if the scientific debate was really over, no one would have to say it. There just wouldn’t be any debate. No one these days goes around saying “the debate is over” about heliocentrism. That’s because no one questions the fact that the Earth revolves around the Sun – there is literally no debate.
Second, the fact that it was so often politicians and/or celebrities (or a bizarre hybrid of the two like Al Gore) intoning the “debate is over” canard, instead of actual scientists, was a major clue that something was amiss with the “consensus” claim.
(The Washington Post famously reported on Gore’s scientific acumen: “For all of Gore’s later fascination with science and technology, he often struggled academically in those subjects. The political champion of the natural world received that sophomore D in Natural Sciences 6…and then got a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118 his senior year.”)
Sadly for Gore et al, a growing number of scientists are publically expressing skepticism about anthropogenic global warming, emboldened by a flood of new data that casts doubt on the whole “climate change” paradigm (I address some of this new data in my latest piece for the Washington Examiner).
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The world is not warming.
According to enviros, only Luddites and lunatics would believe such a ridiculous statement. Well, now government scientists must be added to the list of the so addled: Here it is, straight from the (high tech) horses mouth, a NASA report titled “Global Temperature in 2011, Trends, and Prospects”:
“Global temperature in 2011 was lower than in 1998.”
Oops. There’s an inconvenient truth for you.
You can almost feel the disappointment seeping through their ink as major media outlets around the world are forced to report on a flurry of new data showing – horror! – the world may not be going up in flames after all. Yet still they cling to the hope that maybe we will burn up, that maybe this new data is just a fluke, a blip, an unnatural respite from Man’s descent into unnatural global conflagration.
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In my (only slightly) satirical column for the Washington Examiner today, I take aim at the hypocrisy and futility of the street-harassment/eco-activism that many of us encounter so often as we try and get to and from work. The question, really, is this: Do green activists do any good at all, or are they merely part of the (alleged) problem? From the column:
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Climate scare-mongers love to hide behind the alleged scientific “consensus” that man-made carbon emissions are an imminent threat to the planet. But to paraphrase Bertrand Russell, the number of scientists who believe a theory is irrelevant to its truth. In fact, scientific consensuses have a long history of coming to ignoble ends, as I discuss in my column for the Washington Examiner today:
Once it was the unshakable belief of experts that the Sun revolved around the Earth.
This Ptolemaic model of the solar system, so-called after the 2nd century A.D. Roman astronomer who cemented the hypothesis in the Western mind, was for centuries considered so obvious and uncontroversial that to even suggest otherwise was to be accused of insanity, stupidity or heresy.
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It’s no secret that actors have superhero-sized egos – especially when they actually play a superhero. Case in point: Mark Ruffalo, who picked up an Academy Award nomination for his role in last year’s Oscar-bait The Kids Are All Right, and who has now thrown himself into the role of his career – The Incredible Hulk.
Ruffalo will be the latest actor to portray Marvel Comics’ Jolly Green Giant in next year’s big budget spectacular, The Avengers, which will bring the cinematic versions of Marvel’s characters, including Robert Downey, Jr.’s Iron Man, together to save Earth from an intergalactic menace.
But Ruffalo the actor has an enemy in his crosshairs more insidious than any supervillain: Hydraulic fracturing. Yep, the process by which natural gas is extracted from rock via pressurized fluid, commonly known as “fracking,” has aroused the especial ire of the environmentalists, Ruffalo included. On November 30th The Capitol reported:
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In Saturday’s New York Post, I give a brief history of natural global warming and its inevitable benefits to humanity. From the column:
“You can be forgiven if you didn’t know that we’re in the middle of an ice age right now, what with all the talk about global warming. But it’s true. We’re in what geologists call “the Quaternary glaciation,” an ice age that’s lasted for the past 2.5 million years.
Ice ages last a very long time, with periods of extreme cold punctuated by warmer periods, or interglacials. We’re in such an interglacial right now: The Holocene epoch began about 12,000 years ago. It’s best thought of as a brief respite from the most severe ravages of Quaternary ice.
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File under: “D’oh!” From Discover Magazine’s 80 Beats blog:
“A new study published in the Journal of Climate claims that painting rooftops white—a method championed by energy secretary Steven Chu and others to combat climate change — only minimally reduces local cooling, and actually causes a slight increase in overall global warming.”
Yes, I know it’s hard to believe, but a harebrained, government-promoted scheme to alter the climate of the Earth with paint brushes may be backfiring. Why? Apparently, the global climate model used in the study (adorably named GATOR-GCMOM) found that;
“[W]hite roofs means less surface heat in cities (which is obvious enough to anyone who’s sat in a car with a black interior in the sun). Lower local temperature means less water evaporates and rises up to eventually form clouds, says lead author and Stanford University researcher Mark Jacobson. The decrease in clouds allows more sunlight to reach the Earth’s surface, leading to higher temperatures overall.”
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The most consistent and nauseating feature of the environmental movement is its profound narcissism, which manifests primarily in two ways:
1) The belief that the mean global temperature of the current (or last) century is “the” correct state of affairs, any deviation from which is abhorrent and unnatural, and which must be maintained in perpetuity.
2) The belief that they, the environmentally anointed, can understand – and effect – something as intricately complex as the climate of the entire planet.
Imagine some beings living some 635 million years ago when the entire planet was covered in ice, a recurring condition in Earth’s history known as “Snowball Earth.” Imagine these beings saying, “This planetary ice cube is the natural state of the Earth, we must make sure it stays this temperature forever!”
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