Archive for the ‘World View’ Category

Proverbs: The Importance of Trade-OffsJuly 15th, 2009 by E. Calvin Beisner

“Where no oxen are, the manger is clean, 
      But much revenue comes by the strength of the ox.”

In Proverbs 14:4, the wise Solomon expressed with simplicity one of the most important principles of creation stewardship: trade-offs are both important and unavoidable in the real world. 

That verse came to mind lately while contemplating Michael Abbaté’s interesting book Gardening Eden: How Creation Care Will Change Your Faith, Your Life, and Our World. Abbaté, a landscape architect and urban planner, sensitively discusses a variety of environmental challenges from a Christian perspective. While he often overstates such problems as global warming and species extinction, accepting alarmist claims uncritically and showing little awareness of the scientific controversies involved, he successfully demonstrates that Christians have a responsibility to be good stewards of the planet.

What brought Proverbs 14:4 to mind was not what the book said but its appearance. Aesthetically, it’s a lovely paperback–slightly oversized, with wide external margins in which a leaf pattern surrounds the page numbers, considerable space between lines of text, open word and letter spacing, and a chapter title page followed by a blank page at the start of each of its 13 chapters. Clearly the publisher sought to deliver an aesthetically pleasing and comfortable physical reading experience. 

For comparison, Unstoppable Global Warming–Every 1,500 Years, by climate realists Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, is printed in denser type, with less space between lines, with slightly narrower margins. Abbaté’s’s book, then, puts about 41% less text on each page. With the design used for Singer and Avery’s book, and eliminating the blank pages between chapters, it could have been printed on 161 pages instead of 271–saving 41% on trees and the fuel needed to transport the heavier books (not to mention saving consumers’ money).

Why didn’t Abbaté and his publisher use the more ecologically efficient design? Perhaps because they considered the aesthetics worth the extra paper and fuel–and hoped readers would consider it worth the extra money.

Nothing’s wrong with that judgment in principle. But environmentalists should keep that in mind the next time they jump to condemn what they consider an overuse of natural resources.

Gore’s Case for Global Warming: Science or Psychobabble?July 15th, 2009 by The WeGetIt.org Team
  Gore: Science or Gore's case for global warming--science or psychobabble?
 

Video: Al Gore invokes spirit of Churchill

Former Vice President Al Gore, who has become the world’s most visible advocate of urgent action to stop manmade global warming, lately shocked at least one attendee at his speech at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment in Oxford by giving what blogger Geoff Brumfiel called  “a pop neuroscience lecture.”

Saying climate change is “ultimately a problem of consciousness,” Gore, as reported by Brumfiel, said evolution had trained humans “to respond quickly and viscerally to threats. But when humans are confronted with ‘a threat to the existence of civilization that can only be perceived in the abstract’, we don’t do so well.” Why? Because ”the connecting line between amygdalae, which he described as the urgency centre of the brain, with the neocortex is a one way street: emotional emergencies can spark reasoning, but not the other way around.”

Aside from dubious neuroscience, Gore–who first demonstrated his willingness to mix science, New Age religion, and pop psychology in Earth in the Balance: Psychology and the Human Spirit (1992)–seems to be saying there’s some genetic inability for us to recognize and respond properly to global warming. Yet he thinks he and fellow alarmists can do so. They must be more highly evolved. And the rest of us must be suffering from a mental disorder.

That’s a scary thought. In the old Soviet Union, to oppose the Communist Party was evidence of mental illness–and therefore ground for involuntary confinement in the Gulag for “psychiatric treatment.” Would Gore, who in the same speech said growing awareness of manmade global warming would drive change “through global governance,” embrace such treatment? The totalitarian vision of a “Global Marshall Plan” outlined in the last chapter of Earth in the Balance suggests he wouldn’t be opposed.

President’s Science Advisor Promoted Coercive Population ReductionJuly 15th, 2009 by The WeGetIt.org Team

Gore’s totalitarianism may be implicit, but not Gore’s fellow global warming alarmist John Holdren’s.

Science advisor to President Barack Obama, Holdren, in the 1977 book Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment, which he co-authored with Paul Ehrlich (author of 1968’s The Population Bomb, in which he falsely predicted famines killing hundreds of millions around the world in the 1970s), prescribed as cures for overpopulation

  • forced abortions,
  • introduction of sterilization drugs into drinking water and food,
  • implanting contraceptive capsules in women at puberty and permitting their removal only “with official permission,”
  • forcing single mothers to have abortions, or seizing their babies and giving them to couples,
  • compulsory abortion or sterilization for people who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e., who are genetically inferior–the old eugenics view of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and Adolf Hitler), and
  • a transnational “Planetary Regime” to control economies and individual lives through an international police force.

In defense of legal limits on child bearing Holdren wrote, “. . . no one may lawfully have more than one spouse at a time. Why should the law not be able to prevent a person from having more than two children?”

The Planetary Regime’s powers would be vast. It could ”control the development, administration, conservation, and distribution of all natural resources, renewable or nonrenewable, at least insofar as international implications exist. . . . regulat[e] all international trade, . . . including all food on the international market.” It could “determin[e] the optimum population for the world and for each region and for arbitrating various countries’ shares within their regional limits. Control of population size might remain the responsibility of each government, but the Regime would have some power to enforce the agreed limits.”

In light of low birth rates among secularists, religious conservatives, who tend to have more children, might be a little disturbed by this suggestion by Holdren:

A legal restriction on the right to have children could also be based on the right not to be disadvantaged by excessive numbers of children produced by others. Differing rates of reproduction among groups can give rise to serious social problems. For example, differential rates of reproduction between ethnic, racial, religious, or economic groups might result in increased competition for resources and political power and thereby undermine social order.