A Perfect Example of Global Warming Hysteria
Chicken Little yelled, “Help! Help! The sky is falling!” Our frightened Chicken could well be a “journalist” writing about Global warming, or a former Vice-President that can’t find anything else to do with his time.
The hysteria that is global warming is perfectly evinced in a recent story by the Independent newspaper from England.
Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island is so fraught with fear mongering and hyperventilation that it is no wonder that skeptics look to the Globaloney movement and laugh at their claims of “scientific” seriousness.
For some sidesplitting, hilarity, this particular story is as ridiculous as they come, replete with overly emotional rhetoric, ill chosen verbiage, and scientific boobery.
(I will bold some of the funniest stuff for emphasis)
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
“Obliteration”? This obliteration took many years. But using the word obliteration seems a choice to invoke a sudden cataclysm and a way to cause alarm and fear in the reader. Certainly, obliteration does mean to “erase from existence”, granted, but the word has a certain emotional carriage to it that is sure to cause alarm
And the Independent is somewhat misleading on the time line as well. Lochachara Island, for instance, has been gone for 20 or so years but here we have the Independent making it seem as if it just happened! As if Global Warming suddenly swamped the island.
Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university’s School of Oceanographic Studies, says “it is only a matter of some years” before it is swallowed up too. Dr Hazra says there are now a dozen “vanishing islands” in India’s part of the delta. The area’s 400 tigers are also in danger.
Another word used to scare: “inundated”. Inundation is generally a word to describe a sudden flood, not a slow, inexorable rising of water. We also use it to describe being overwhelmed, such as being “inundated” with email — again an emotional reaction results. But, these islands have taken many years to go away. The fact that they are disappearing is certainly nothing to scoff about, and, while the hyperbolic rhetoric adds a novelist’s flair, little scientific weight is brought to the story with such fear mongering.
Until now the Carteret Islands off Papua New Guinea were expected to be the first populated ones to disappear, in about eight years’ time, but Lohachara has beaten them to the dubious distinction.
Another sentence calculated to cause mere fear. It is interesting that, in the rush to sound all dramatic, the Independent is ignoring the fact that 8 years or more should be plenty of time for inhabitants of these low lying islands to MOVE to a place where it ISN’T slowly flooding! It would also be plenty of time to save the tigers worried about above.
Human cost of global warming: Rising seas will soon make 70,000 people homeless.
Again, 8 years or more… they have at least 8 YEARS to move. Such advanced notice does NOT cause people to become “homeless”! This word is again used as if this is a sudden conflagration causing catastrophic loss. It is not. It is something that people have all sorts of time in which to solve their housing problems.
A forest fire, an earthquake, even a real flash flood, those are sudden catastrophes that could cause people to become “homeless”. 8 years should be plenty of time to find somewhere else to live!
This grandiose flourish cries for some perspective to be called for here.
Refugees from the vanished Lohachara island and the disappearing Ghoramara island have fled to Sagar, but this island has already lost 7,500 acres of land to the sea. In all, a dozen islands, home to 70,000 people, are in danger of being submerged by the rising seas.
Nearly this entire sentence is filled with teary eyed, scaremongering! “Refuges”, “fled”, both are words usually used to denote suddenness. There is nothing sudden about the decades it is taking to submerge these islands, especially since Lohachara island has already been gone for 20 years.
Of course, these people are losing real estate and, yes, it will not be easy to move and start over. It never is easy to move and start over no matter what is causing the move. But, they will move and they will carry on. And they have many years to figure out how to do it.
And the last bit about being “in danger of being submerged”. More emotionalism that. There is no “danger”; there is just plain fact. And it is a fact that must be dealt with by leaving the area affected. “In danger of” implies that something can be done to stop it and there is not one much humans can economically do to stop these islands from being submerged or even global warming, if it is happening, from happening.
Now, whether global warming is, indeed happening or not is immaterial to the fate of these islands. They are absolutely submerging beneath the waves and will soon be but a memory. This kind of erosion is happening all the time all across the world and always has. Many islands have come and gone in man’s recorded history alone.
Worse, these scaremongers also fail to inform their acolytes that, if it is global warming, it is something that has happened many other times in Earth’s past — and in all those other times there WAS no man around to cause it. Man has not caused global warming. Man can do nothing to stop it.
Still, there is plenty of doubt that Global Warming is the cause. Dr. E. Calvin Beisner has written to me recently giving good reason to doubt that water levels have risen due to man’s interference in the environment. “Averaged over century-long periods, sea level has been rising on Earth ever since the end of the last Ice Age, and according to the International Union for Quaternary Research’s Sea Level Commission–the world’s most authoritative body of scientific work on the subject–there is no significant change in the rate of rise through the period when, according to global warming theory, human activity is supposed to have contributed significantly to the warming.”
But, in the end, I’d say that if people don’t have the sense God gave a rock to move off an island that has been slowly submerging for 8 years or more, then global warming is the least of their worries.
Globaloney hysteria strikes again.
| More from Warner Todd Huston
Stumble It!
December 28th, 2006 at 8:25 am
I don’t know which irritates me more — those who act like the threat of global warming is immediate. Or, those who act like they know for sure there is no problem and ridicule those who are concerned. The world is not going to flood today or tomorrow, but I think anyone who dismisses the issue as ludicrous is out of line.
There are plenty of reported indications of a problem from reasonably credible sources. Further, it makes some amount of sense that more than a century of industrialization would have an effect on the environment. Who is right?
One of the saddest observations from all this is how little credibility anyone has. No one believes the government anymore as an objective source of information. It is like this is a political issue. Who do you believe? Let’s do a poll. Which side do you vote for? No, this is a factual issue essentially scientific. Few people are credibly addressing it from this stand point.
I very seriously doubt that this will be a serious problem during my remaining several decades of life. I have no problem believing that it may be a problem for my great great grand children. We have a responsibility to them.
December 28th, 2006 at 10:14 am
snootfish, I’m going to annoy you.
The proposition that is being thrust down our throats is that our use of fossil fuels to elevate our lifestyle above that of desperate poverty and tragic infant and child mortality rates, releases enough carbon dioxide to affect the climate and weather.
Here are some numbers:
Amount of carbon dioxide generated annually by NATURAL processes: 440 trillion pounds.
Amount of carbon dioxide generated annually by the use of fossil fuels: 15 trillion pounds.
The variation in the natural production of carbon dioxide may be greater than 15 trillion pounds.
Possible cause of current warming trend: the Sun is generating greater energy output than a few decades ago.
Causing global warming on Mars.
Global warming, like a new ice age, and like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, are NATURAL phenomena that we can neither cause nor prevent.
What we CAN do is move to higher ground should the oceans actually rise and plant more wheat in the north end of Alberta should conditions warrant.
But a carbon trading scheme or other action limiting our freedoms because “we have a responsibility to our great great grand children”? That’s a scam.
Our responsiblity to our grand children is to get rid of big government liberalism and fight down the Islamic jihadists and not give up our civilization to either liberalism or to the Moon God Cult.
December 28th, 2006 at 11:25 am
This is a riot, as I love a good comedy, and the global warming bunch never fails to deliver.
Gore-style meteorology, specifically climatology as it concerns global warming, seems to be one of those rare sciences for which the percentage of accuracy of predictions rises as the distance from the date in question increases.
To buy into this scientific convenience takes the same blind confidence required to believe an archer who tells you he can put an arrow through a soda can at 500 yards — the same person who you’ve noticed can’t hit a bale of hay from 10 feet away.
Ask the night sweat-suffering global warming chicken littles what the world will look like in 100 years if the United States doesn’t sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, and you’ll be drawn a gloomy, and very specific, picture of our final days. Then ask them what the overnight low will be in Chattanooga two weeks from Thursday, and you’ll get an unresponsive stare.
December 28th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
It appears strange that this island just “disappeared” whether 20 years ago or now. For this to occur, it would almost have to be like a pie plate with the outer edges just at bare sea level and the inner regions below sea level. How high have the oceans risen over the past 40 years? Here’s what I found from a chicken little site:
http://forums.atlantisrising.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=15;t=000549;p=0
“(Lester R. Brown) During the twentieth century, sea level rose by 20-30 centimeters (8-12 inches).”
So what they’re saying is that the ocean rising by a FOOT basically trashed the whole island!!! Surely, this island must have been flooded several times over the past millenia as ice ages and global warming phases came and went…
December 28th, 2006 at 6:15 pm
Hey…there was an ice cap that just floated away from Canada! And under that ice cap is Oil! Oh no! No one saw the explosives, since it happened 16 months ago, and Al Gore has been worried about the bears! Someone call him.
Also Martha’s Vineyard will soon be underwater. Which means they might have to all move back to Jackson Hole. The middle class worries about making Credit Card payments, the rich worry about ice caps melting.
Who has more intelligence?
December 28th, 2006 at 6:42 pm
Well….the earth is 4,000,000,000 years old, give or take a couple hundred million or so, but who is counting. In that time, it seems reasonable to assume the Sun has had , at different stages, some effect on changing climates, weather patterns and the rise and fall of temperatures. To believe otherwise would be nieve, to me. In addition, does it not seem reasonable that the “possibility” excists that other civilizations came and went? We’re talking 4 billion years folks! What an amasing coincidence that at the very point in time that we are witnessing the distruction of the entire planet, by us no less, at the same we are blessed to have Al Gore here to save us. Think of the consequences if Al had been born just, Oh I don’t know say 100 years ago without the necessary technology to have been able to invent the internet. We’d be toast I tell ya. But I could be wrong!
December 28th, 2006 at 6:48 pm
Don’t let that ice-cap come anywhere near me. It has ‘things’ in it. I am so confused and terrified that I think I will scream. It’s the only reasonable thing to do. Shirley?
December 28th, 2006 at 6:50 pm
Just ad to my previous post, if I may. 4,000,000,000 years and I am living in the same 100 year time span as Oprah, Al Gore and flying saucers. You cannot make this up , I tell ya.
December 28th, 2006 at 9:24 pm
Mr. Huston,
You’re just as bad as those people who believe Global Warming is an immediate threat. The only difference is you think it took over 20 years for the island to be submerged under the “rising” seas.
The fact is, the seas haven’t risen. The islands disappeared because of EROSION, not rising water levels. Currents from the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers are washing the islands away.
And you said, “Now, whether global warming is, indeed happening or not is immaterial to the fate of these islands.” There’s no doubt that global warming is happening. As a matter of fact, the average worldwide temperature has risen a WHOPPING six tenths of a degree in the past 100 years! Good God! I’m roasting alive!
December 28th, 2006 at 9:32 pm
greree,
Your criticism of me is entirely invalid and without merit. I made no such contentions as you allude. In FACT, I didn’t take a stand on Global warming in the piece whether completely for or against. Though I did lean against it.
the point of this op ed was not to confirm or deny global warming, but to rip apart the Independent’s report.
Reading comprehension might be something for you to work on.
December 28th, 2006 at 9:42 pm
My post wasn’t so much about whether or not you agree with Global Warming. The point was that you agree with the report that rising sea levels were submerging the islands, i.e. “There is nothing sudden about the decades it is taking to submerge these islands…”
The islands aren’t being submerged. Erosion is washing away sand bars, which is what these “islands” are.
December 29th, 2006 at 12:11 am
… again, invalid.
I don’t care a whit WHY the islands are being submerged. My point was about the alarmism and overly emotive language that the islands are being somehow “suddenly” erased.
Scaremongering was the topic of the piece.
And I did no such thing as accept that global warming is submerging the island.
December 29th, 2006 at 8:09 am
WTH……..I got it. Your good to go.
December 29th, 2006 at 11:25 am
You certainly get upset when someone criticizes your articles. I guess you haven’t been doing this for very long. Don’t worry, though. You’ll get used to it.
December 29th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Don’t know why you think I’m “upset”. Does pointing out how wrong YOU are have to mean I am upset?
And the hate mail I get would curl your hair, pally.
Ha, ha.
December 29th, 2006 at 11:36 pm
First of all, you didn’t point out how wrong I was. You still keep saying that the islands are being submerged, which was my point.
Second, yes, you’re upset. I wrote a comment saying I disagreed with your article, and you respond with a personal attack about my reading comprehension. I’d say that indicates you’re upset.
December 29th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
Go on Warner Todd, get upset. I get mad every day. I rage. I fume. I shout at the screen. I shout so loud that the electons streaming out (surely a cause of global warming)at a rate of knots that can make your hair curl, all turn around and flee. hAHAHAHAHAHA. Whoops, hit a bum key. I especially rage at Al Gore, the supercillious, mendacious bastard. Get mad. It ain’t stress that gives you ulcers its the Helicobacter Pylori virus and I take a teaspoon of Manuka honey for that ! Gee, that feels better.