-Cp
02-28-2007, 05:59 PM
RUSH: Hey, try this headline. This is in the Scotsman, the UK Scotsman: "Russia to Analyze Yellow-Orange Snow in Siberia." What to a bet it's bears? What do you bet it's just bear urine? Everybody is out there just looking for a disaster because of global warming, they're out there looking for some sign that the apocalypse is here. It's bear pee.
RUSH: Gary in Post Falls, Idaho. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir.
CALLER: Good morning Rush. First time caller. Just two quick points on the global warming.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: What's your reasoning behind debunking so many different fields of science in this situation?
RUSH: Good question. I'm going to take the occasion of your call to jump into the whole little monologue here that I was going to do on this. In the first place, I don't believe that there is actual proved science. I don't believe that a hypothesis has been proved. In fact, I know it hasn't because if there had been a hypothesis proved, there would be no scientists who disagree with it.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: That's the nature of science. What we are getting instead of a "consensus" of, quote, unquote, "the world's leading scientists." We don't know how many of them are being paid. We don't know how many of them are getting research grants. They all need to make money. They're not private sector types. They need grants from foundations and governments to continue their work. They always like to say that their opponents are "being funded by Big Oil," as though that's some sort of a crime, but you can have a think tank that's liberal or a science organization or government fund these people and that's, of course, perfectly legitimate. But there can't be consensus in science. I know that I'm sounding like a broken record on this, but my answer to your question goes far deeper than just that. I got a great e-mail from a guy in Lafayette, Indiana whose name is Alan Niezabitowski. He said: “Dear Rush, you're quite right when you say there can be no consensus in science, but the reasons are far more basic than the ones that you've been giving.”
See, even when I'm right there are people in the audience who think I could be righter if I was only as smart as they are. “To be called science,” writes Mr. Niezabitowski, “things must stand up under a process called ‘The Scientific Method.’ Three steps are involved: One, observe a phenomenon. Two, devise a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon. Three, devise a test to prove or disprove the hypothesis. If the third step proves it, you have a scientific truth. Every global warming item I have read stops at step 2 or uses an argument like ‘It started at the industrial age, therefore the industrial age caused it.’ This is a common fallacy in logic known as ‘Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc’ (After it, therefore caused by it) which is utterly invalid as far as the scientific method goes. Flat earth theories were not abandoned because of a shift in consensus. They were disproved by step 3 of the scientific method, and our current globe earth science stands up to the method. Most pro-global warming people think the hypothesis must be true so it is true. Even when a disproving step 3 happens (there will be more violent and numerous hurricanes this year because of global warming).”
Now, this is key, Gary, and the rest of you. Remember last year's hurricane season? Starting on June 1st, the Drive-Bys had their cameras out there on the beaches of Florida and in New Orleans waiting for the next Katrina to come along and wipe us all out. The apocalypse. They said because of global warming it's going to get worse and worse and worse. We had no hurricanes to speak of in the United States last year. Therefore you can't say that the hypothesis according to step three has been proven.
“When Einstein’s theory of relativity was thought to be insane,” E=MC2, “Einstein provided a step 3 method of testing it involving an eclipse and how light would behave. Things happened like he said they would, and we now accept the theory of relativity as science. The point is, if global warming theories were scientific fact, no scientist would be able to dispute it,” and yet, thousands of scientists do dispute global warming. So if global warming and its supporters are not about science, then you have to ask, about what are they? Now, yesterday I read a piece by J.R. Dunn in the American Thinker. He has a follow-up today, and before I get into it, I want to go back some months, actually, to a question I got from somebody about this, and in my common man -- I'm not a scientist -- in my common man way, I explained to this caller why I do not believe in global warming. I gave as my primary belief that I believe in God.
I believe in the God of Creation. I'm not going to proselytize here, don't misunderstand. But I'm saying as a believer of a loving God and a God of Creation, that there is a complexity to all this that makes it work; that we cannot understand; that we cannot really control; that we cannot destroy, and that we really can't alter in its massive complexity. Yeah, we can dam a river and do all this sort of thing, but to actually affect the systems that keep the earth here, in whatever form, even if there are nuclear detonations left and right, life somewhere, somehow, will survive, and the whole process will begin again. We may not, cockroaches will. That means some liberals will. But I believe in the God of Creation. I believe, as such, we're insignificant in all this. I am, just as a human being, offended by the notion that the automobile I drive and the way I air-condition my home and the way I barbecue outside and the way all of you do the same things, as life for human beings has never, ever been better, I refuse to believe that a loving God creates creatures able to do everything we can be able to do, to solve various problems, to cure diseases, that that is going to lead to an apocalypse.
I can understand moral decadence and those kinds of things leading to it, but I cannot understand some of the most brilliant work by human beings ever on the face of the earth in this country and in some other countries to actually improve living standards, quality of life for millions of people. It has never, ever been better. I just, as a human being, imbued, created with a modicum of common sense, fail to see how that leads to destruction. Then I wonder, “How can others think that it does?” I came to the conclusion in this call some months ago that many -- not all, of course -- but many of the really activist global warming people do not believe in the same God I do. They are religious. Their religion is global warming, animal rights, all of these various causes that they get involved in. The similarities are uncanny. Global warming is, if I can say this without offending you, those of us who believe in a loving God believe in a hereafter. I, for example, believe that there is heaven. Whether the Bible gives me that indication or not, I want more than just faith.
Faith is what we use to take comfort in what we can't prove. I think humans are hot wired; we are made with a religious component to our souls, even agnostics and atheists -- which are forms of religion. I look at the people who say that there is no God or that global warming is their God, and I look at the similarities. They can't prove global warming, don't care what you heard on television today, I don't care what's in the Union of Concerned Scientists report, they haven't done the step three, there is not a hypothesis that they can prove. Therefore, there is no global warming in a scientific way, so what are they doing? They're relying on faith. Just as you and I rely on faith that there is heaven. The religions differ, of course, but they have the same set of basic principles. There is also sin in the environmentalist wacko religion. The sin is not recycling. The sin is not following your dog with a Ziploc bag. The sin is any number of acts that you engage in to pollute. The sin is secondhand smoke. The sin is any clear cutting, development that people don't like, destroying wetlands, those are the sins.
The beliefs are different, but the principles are totally the same, and, by the way, both rely feverishly on one thing to keep everybody in line, and that is the apocalypse, the last days, the day when hellfire and damnation will fall upon all of us who have sinned. For those of you in Christianity, we know what the apocalypse is. Some people believe that's found in the Book of Revelation. (I don't want to go there, but that's what it is.) To the environmentalist wackos, the global warming crowd, the apocalypse, the end days are: "Global warming! We've got ten years! We're doomed!" Look at the very stories you get every, every day about global warming. If there were science, there wouldn't be 20 different stories in 25 different days over what's happening with global warming and how long it's going to take to wipe us out. But the one common thread is it's going to wipe us out. Do you realize to these scientists who say nothing good can come from the warming, forget for a moment that the argument over whether it's caused by men or not, humanity or not, the simple notion that warming is going to destroy everything? Come on, folks. Why do most people live at the equator? Why do more and more people want to have winter homes?
Do you see anybody dying and moving north to live in frigid areas, if they don't have to? But somehow global warming is going to wipe us out? There's no science in that. Where are all the stories about all the good that will happen from global warming, the parts of the world that will be fertile, for agricultural and other things that aren't now, and that once used to be, such as Scotland. You used to be able to grow crops in a lot of Scotland, can't now. Where are these stories? I look at all this, and then I get into the science of it, after taking to it those basic spiritual and human beliefs and start breaking down the science and analyzing some of it and then looking at the history of this whole movement, which I will do next, thanks to the assistance of the brilliant J.R. Dunn at the AmericanThinker.com, and it will help you once and for all understand why I think what I think -- not why I FEEL what I feel, but why I think what I think -- about all this.
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RUSH: Before getting to Mr. J.R. Dunn's brilliant piece today, let me go back and remind you of elements, excerpts from a speech Michael Crichton gave not that long ago. It's his much better way of saying what I just said. “I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people -- the best people, the most enlightened people -- do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind.” I agree. As I say, it's wired.
“Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.”
It’s the same thing for global warming and militant environmentalism. But unlike Mr. Crichton, I will argue with people, not the environmentalists, but with those of you out there who get caught up in this as a political issue, I will argue. I will try to change your mind about it within the context and the framework of liberalism versus conservatism. Can I give you one more? I'm not going to have time to get to Mr. Dunn. I'll do that in the monologue segment in the next hour. Can I give you just one more illustration here of what I consider to be the differences in these two, quote, unquote, religions. I mentioned a moment ago that I believe in heaven. I believe in heaven not just because the Bible says so, I'm one of these people like Pascal, the French philosopher, I want more. He went nuts practically looking for proof, he was focused on the resurrection. “If I can prove that, I can believe anything,” he said to himself. Well, I don't have the brain of Pascal, but I can tell you this.
In the context of my belief that God is a loving God and created all that is for beautiful and wonderful reasons, and that we are turning this Creation into what it's never been before in terms of the quality of human life, I don't see how that can lead to destruction of what God created, but at the same time I don't believe that that loving God would create a being like me or you who could conceive of such a place as paradise or heaven or whatever you want to call it, if it weren't true. That would be an ultimate act of cruelty. On the other hand, the environmentalist wackos stop at the apocalypse. They go no further than that. They are a doom-and-gloom bunch without any of the accompanying, uplifting, upbeat, righteous aspects of religions of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Make no mistake: it is a religion. It is not science in the least.
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RUSH: Let me now get to J.R. Dunn, the American Thinker, with his piece on global warming today. It's got some really, really valuable things in it. It starts with a quote that pretty much buttresses and sums up the points that I made in the previous hour. It's by G.K. Chesterton. “A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.”
“The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West. For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it's not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in ‘the rock higher than I’ - a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy. … Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don't yet understand. … That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils.” And one of those devils would be me and anybody else who doesn't believe in their religion of global warming.
“Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse - and that's what global warming is all about. In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns. It's environmentalism's major element of concern, its chief attraction, and the center of discussion and speculation, in much the same way that some Protestant variants of Christianity are obsessed above all with sin. So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other, covering every last aspect of the natural world. If one don't git ya, the next one will. Green emphasis on the apocalyptic appeared early, accompanying the introduction of mass environmental awareness itself. Silent Spring, published in 1962, represents the first environmentalist scripture -- nothing other than a modern book of Revelations. Rachel Carson, a popular nature writer, was dying of cancer while writing the book, and Silent Spring became an outlet for her rage and grief. Carson predicted the imminent coming of a stricken world, a world poisoned by the synthetic products of the chemical industry, in which no birds sang and human children would not be immune. The early 60s were marked by fears of the consequences of atmospheric nuclear tests, and the suggestion that chemicals were just as deadly found a willing audience.
“Pollution - a word that itself bears many religious connotations -- became a byword of the era. That fact that the phenomenon encompassed virtually every aspect of technical civilization including car exhausts, household plastics, and power generation, guaranteed it a good long run. Truly grotesque stories, ranging from dioxins eating sneakers from children's feet to hushed-up epidemics of cancer, made the rounds. None were anything more than grist for Snopes.com, and the promised chemical doomsday never arrived. But Carson's work set the pattern for all the environmental apocalypses to come. The next example was overpopulation, its prophet the notorious Paul Ehrlich. His set of tablets was titled The Population Bomb and if anything, it was even more popular than Silent Spring. Ehrlich's thesis was that relentlessly burgeoning population would overstress the earth's "carrying capacity", use up all available resources, and lead to the collapse of civilization before the 20th century was out. The argument seemed irrefutable to those not familiar with the uncertainties surrounding demography (Thomas Malthus had made similar series of predictions early in the 19th century).”
This is the story I love to tell, Julian Simon, the great scientist, now late great scientist, made a bet with Ehrlich that at the end of the period of time Ehrlich thought we would all be destroyed, that there would be more resources and that their prices would be cheaper and they made a bet on various minerals and elements, and Simon won every one of them. Ehrlich could not have been more wrong. Didn't matter. He has never been discredited and still remains a disciple, a prophet, a god in the church of environmentalism.
“Countless offshoots of Ehrlich's book appeared, and overpopulation became one of the standard ideas of the late 60s, embraced by the counterculture, policymakers, academics, and the media. Even today, an era in which deflating national populations are the problem, it's by no means unusual to come across people still living in Ehrlich's nightmare world, much the same as the Amish or Mennonites have preserved their far more pleasant way of life into modern times. Ehrlich became quite wealthy, and the master of his own foundation devoted to the study of the ‘overpopulation threat’. To this day, he contends that his thesis is correct. The whole episode is begging for a detailed historical study. A variant combining aspects of both theories had a brief run in the early to mid 70s: the doctrine of universal famine. Pollution would poison croplands and stunt agricultural production, and overpopulation would do the rest. The problem here was the fact that proponents insisted that doom was imminent, with famine appearing as early as 1975 or 1980 at the latest. The experience taught the Greens to be a little more vague with dates.”
Now global warming, of course, is 50 years away, it's a hundred years away, or it's -- well, ten years away, depending on who you read day to day. But it isn't science, folks. It's religion. And who can forget acid rain? Remember how that was going to kill us? “The early 1980s saw a reprise of earlier fears of nuclear destruction. The nuclear freeze campaign, largely engineered by the KGB, took up much of the public attention devoted to environmental crises. But even this effort was given an environmental gloss when scientific impresario Carl Sagan put together a road show of ‘mainstream scientists’ to promote the concept of a ‘nuclear winter’.” Remember that disaster that never happened? “The firestorms generated by a nuclear strike would generate smoke so thick as to block out the sun across much of the northern hemisphere, causing a collapse of the terrestrial ecology. Nuclear winter never quite caught on outside of certain elite circles, in part due to flaws in the theory. Sagan's specialty was exobiology, the study of possible extraterrestrial life-forms, and it developed that the climate model he'd used was based on the atmosphere of Mars, a planet locked in an ice age for the past billion years. Nuclear winter faded with the nuclear freeze movement. All the same, just before his death Sagan made it known that he'd willingly accept a Nobel for his role in preventing World War III.
”Ozone depletion, the next environmentalist flurry, was a little too esoteric to generate the uncritical devotion accorded to pollution and overpopulation. … But ozone depletion did serve a useful Green purpose in drawing public attention to the atmosphere, and confusing people as to exactly what the problem was all about. But in fact, global warming has actually adapted elements of all previous environmental crazes. It holds that carbon dioxide (a naturally-occurring compound that comprises a large portion of the atmosphere) is a form of pollution, the same as Carson's detested synthetic chemicals. Like that involving overpopulation, the threatened catastrophe is universal, and implicated in everyday practices and institutions. As with the universal famine, the effects are concrete and horrifying, though the dates have been left vague - ‘in the coming century', rather than in a year or two. … The lessons of previous environmental panics have been carefully applied to global warming No other environmentalist program has been prepared with such detail, purpose, and conviction. A skilled cadre of scientists, activists, and publicists exist who have devoted entire careers to nothing else. A vast literature has appeared analyzing not climate as a whole, not the interactions of the entire system, but solely and uniquely global warming. In many ways, warming has become both more and less than an ideology: it has become an industry, one that with such financial elements as carbon offsets can easily support itself.”
The piece goes on and on and on. But let's never forget this. “The banning of DDT in 1971 resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in the developing world, most of them children, from insect-borne diseases such as malaria. … Yet no environmental group has ever made note of the fact, and all oppose the reintroduction of DDT for any purpose. The DDT ban places Rachel Carson in an exclusive circle shared only by Karl Marx as a writer whose work alone caused vast amounts of human misery. (Adolf Hitler was, of course, more man of action than writer. It's doubtful that Mein Kampf in and of itself could have triggered the same upheavals as Hitler's actions.)” It's the way you have to look at it, if you really want to understand this. If you want to go beyond just the surface reporting and the emotional grabs that they're making at your heart strings in the Drive-By Media, then you've gotta look at it this way.
“Increasingly strident rhetoric of the kind being heard from public figures such as Heidi Cullen and even Prince Charles may well result in a vicious circle in which public frustration leads to violent action leading to more frustration and on to the inevitable climax. Up to this point, environmentalist violence has been held in check by force of law - and only by force of law. How long this will remain the case depends on how much power the Greens are allowed to accrue.” Now, I might add, ladies and gentlemen, we do have terrorists in this country. In addition to the Al-Qaeda cells and whatever else they are, what is the most frequent, the most common form of terrorism in the United States? Ecoterrorism, from groups like Earth First to the Animal Liberation Front, to PETA or what have you, burning down whole automobile dealerships, trying to stop the logging industry over the spotted owl, all of these things.
I apologize for those of you not interested in this, but so many people have asked me to explain why I am constantly making fun of the global warming crowd. I decided to take it seriously and go in depth today to give you my full range of explanations and understanding. And remember, I still haven't touched on the fact that there is a great lesson here for any of you still undecided about liberalism and conservatism. There's a great lesson here, because the global warming crowd, the environmentalists are pure, unadulterated leftists, an assortment of communists and socialists who are also godless in the traditional sense, like Chesterton said, “If you don't believe in God, you'll believe in anything.” You'll make your own God, and that's what they've done. There's no science in it, folks, zilch, zero, nada.
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RUSH: Tim in Charlotte, North Carolina. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you?
RUSH: Good, sir, thank you.
CALLER: Good, good. Yeah, I was just talking to your guy there about a special I saw a few years ago, it was either History Channel, TLC, one of those, about what they refer to as the Little Ice Age ( pdf | html ), and it seems to me that between the 1400s, 1500s which is when it started which, by the way, they attributed to intense volcanic activity and then the ash being spewed into the atmosphere, and then cooling it down --
RUSH: It was actually the tenth century through the thirteenth century, and the acronym is the LOC, local optimum something or other, but I know what you're talking about.
RUSH: Well, these guys, they actually went as far as noting in the United States, the year with no summer is what they called it, in Virginia it actually snowed in June. So just as a follow-up, I talked to my kids and I said, “Look, why did the pilgrims, Jamestown, why did all those colonies seem to fail?” It was because of this very intense, very tough winters. And then I said, “Look, I said, do we think of Virginia as being just a brutal wintry climate as was discussed in those days, and of course the answer to that is no.” So it seems that the warming trend has been since early 1800s. Now, they go into causality on the cold, but they didn't go into causality on why things were warming up, which I think is one of the big issues that we're having now with all the scientists because they want to draw a correlation between the coincidence of the use of fossil fuels and then the warming of the temperature, but they don't explore in scientific methods used in --
RUSH: Of course, I just got through spending 45 minutes explaining it is not science. They cannot use science to disapprove this because there is no science here. The whole point is to try to convince as many people as possible that there is a direct relationship to the use of fossil fuels and everything else that leads to advanced lifestyles, technological improvement and so forth, and link that to global warming. In the religious context, that's the sin. We are sinning. We have to pay for the sin. The payment for the sin will be our end, our doom. It's the apocalypse. There's no science in this. (panting) Patience. Okay. If there were science, there would be no disagreement. Go to any area of proved hypothesis using the scientific method, you will not find any disagreement on anything proved. The fact that there's disagreement on this alone in the scientific community means nothing's been proved. So then you have to say, why do the pro side, the humanity is destroying the planet, particularly advanced humanity is destroying the planet, why do you have to stick with it? What's the point? There we get into liberal versus conservative.
The whole point -- and this is a fundamental element in many, many religions -- guilt. The militant environmentalists, the leadership of this movement is trying to make as many of you people feel as guilty as possible for destroying the ecosystem, via global warming, by virtue of your lifestyles, the cars you drive, the selfish nature with which you buy gasoline and pollute the planet, the other ways in which you don't clean up after yourselves. All of these things are designed to make feel responsible for the coming apocalypse, the doom and gloom, the end of the world as we know it. After that guilt has been sufficiently implanted in your brain and in your soul, it is then the theory that you will readily agree to higher taxes and more government control over advanced lifestyles as a means of making reparations for the sin. That's the endgame here. The endgame for the religion of these people is a bigger and bigger government with themselves in charge; less and less freedom for you; higher and higher taxes; far more restrictions on how you can live your life; where you can do this activity or not do that activity. If you just look around you, this is already happening. You can't do certain things like ride a snowmobile in certain national parks. You can't smoke at a lot of places now. You can't use your own property as you would like if there happens to be something called an endangered species or even protected species within sight of the horizon.
I mean, folks, it's all there to understand. You just have to open your eyes and look at it and see it for what it is. That's the liberal element of this, in addition to all of the religious contexts that I have laid out prior segments of this program today. It's all about making you feel guilty; all about making you willing to bend over and grab the ankles and get spanked for all of this destruction and on pollution your selfishness and greed has brought about. You can be redeemed, though. You elect the right people to office and allow them to raise your taxes, like Mrs. Clinton who said at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting today she wants to take Exxon's profits. They had the highest reported profit in American history yesterday. She wants to take it. Her words, grab sound bite 18, Mike. I remember the number of it. Let me know when it's slotted and ready to be heard. I would like to you hear it in your own words.
HILLARY: The other day the oil companies reported the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy alternatives and technologies that will --
RUSH: Stop the tape, stop the tape. It's not your money, Mrs. Clinton! You didn't earn it. All you're doing is getting in the way of it being earned. You didn't earn it, you don't know a thing about the oil bus, but it doesn't matter. She knows better than everybody else. By the way, look at the enemies list that the environmentalists have constructed: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Trans-Fat, Big Doughnut, Wal-Mart, look at who they're trying to put out of business. This is nothing more than a Hugo Chavez moment. He's nationalizing every company he can down in Venezuela, turning the place into a dictatorship. Folks, the global warming movement, if you'll open yours eyes, allows you to see virtually every means, theory, and desire liberalism has for humanity. Just open your eyes and look at it and forget science. It's not about that.
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http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_022707/content/global_warming_is_a_religion.guest.html
RUSH: Gary in Post Falls, Idaho. Welcome to the EIB Network, sir.
CALLER: Good morning Rush. First time caller. Just two quick points on the global warming.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: What's your reasoning behind debunking so many different fields of science in this situation?
RUSH: Good question. I'm going to take the occasion of your call to jump into the whole little monologue here that I was going to do on this. In the first place, I don't believe that there is actual proved science. I don't believe that a hypothesis has been proved. In fact, I know it hasn't because if there had been a hypothesis proved, there would be no scientists who disagree with it.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: That's the nature of science. What we are getting instead of a "consensus" of, quote, unquote, "the world's leading scientists." We don't know how many of them are being paid. We don't know how many of them are getting research grants. They all need to make money. They're not private sector types. They need grants from foundations and governments to continue their work. They always like to say that their opponents are "being funded by Big Oil," as though that's some sort of a crime, but you can have a think tank that's liberal or a science organization or government fund these people and that's, of course, perfectly legitimate. But there can't be consensus in science. I know that I'm sounding like a broken record on this, but my answer to your question goes far deeper than just that. I got a great e-mail from a guy in Lafayette, Indiana whose name is Alan Niezabitowski. He said: “Dear Rush, you're quite right when you say there can be no consensus in science, but the reasons are far more basic than the ones that you've been giving.”
See, even when I'm right there are people in the audience who think I could be righter if I was only as smart as they are. “To be called science,” writes Mr. Niezabitowski, “things must stand up under a process called ‘The Scientific Method.’ Three steps are involved: One, observe a phenomenon. Two, devise a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon. Three, devise a test to prove or disprove the hypothesis. If the third step proves it, you have a scientific truth. Every global warming item I have read stops at step 2 or uses an argument like ‘It started at the industrial age, therefore the industrial age caused it.’ This is a common fallacy in logic known as ‘Post Hoc ergo Propter Hoc’ (After it, therefore caused by it) which is utterly invalid as far as the scientific method goes. Flat earth theories were not abandoned because of a shift in consensus. They were disproved by step 3 of the scientific method, and our current globe earth science stands up to the method. Most pro-global warming people think the hypothesis must be true so it is true. Even when a disproving step 3 happens (there will be more violent and numerous hurricanes this year because of global warming).”
Now, this is key, Gary, and the rest of you. Remember last year's hurricane season? Starting on June 1st, the Drive-Bys had their cameras out there on the beaches of Florida and in New Orleans waiting for the next Katrina to come along and wipe us all out. The apocalypse. They said because of global warming it's going to get worse and worse and worse. We had no hurricanes to speak of in the United States last year. Therefore you can't say that the hypothesis according to step three has been proven.
“When Einstein’s theory of relativity was thought to be insane,” E=MC2, “Einstein provided a step 3 method of testing it involving an eclipse and how light would behave. Things happened like he said they would, and we now accept the theory of relativity as science. The point is, if global warming theories were scientific fact, no scientist would be able to dispute it,” and yet, thousands of scientists do dispute global warming. So if global warming and its supporters are not about science, then you have to ask, about what are they? Now, yesterday I read a piece by J.R. Dunn in the American Thinker. He has a follow-up today, and before I get into it, I want to go back some months, actually, to a question I got from somebody about this, and in my common man -- I'm not a scientist -- in my common man way, I explained to this caller why I do not believe in global warming. I gave as my primary belief that I believe in God.
I believe in the God of Creation. I'm not going to proselytize here, don't misunderstand. But I'm saying as a believer of a loving God and a God of Creation, that there is a complexity to all this that makes it work; that we cannot understand; that we cannot really control; that we cannot destroy, and that we really can't alter in its massive complexity. Yeah, we can dam a river and do all this sort of thing, but to actually affect the systems that keep the earth here, in whatever form, even if there are nuclear detonations left and right, life somewhere, somehow, will survive, and the whole process will begin again. We may not, cockroaches will. That means some liberals will. But I believe in the God of Creation. I believe, as such, we're insignificant in all this. I am, just as a human being, offended by the notion that the automobile I drive and the way I air-condition my home and the way I barbecue outside and the way all of you do the same things, as life for human beings has never, ever been better, I refuse to believe that a loving God creates creatures able to do everything we can be able to do, to solve various problems, to cure diseases, that that is going to lead to an apocalypse.
I can understand moral decadence and those kinds of things leading to it, but I cannot understand some of the most brilliant work by human beings ever on the face of the earth in this country and in some other countries to actually improve living standards, quality of life for millions of people. It has never, ever been better. I just, as a human being, imbued, created with a modicum of common sense, fail to see how that leads to destruction. Then I wonder, “How can others think that it does?” I came to the conclusion in this call some months ago that many -- not all, of course -- but many of the really activist global warming people do not believe in the same God I do. They are religious. Their religion is global warming, animal rights, all of these various causes that they get involved in. The similarities are uncanny. Global warming is, if I can say this without offending you, those of us who believe in a loving God believe in a hereafter. I, for example, believe that there is heaven. Whether the Bible gives me that indication or not, I want more than just faith.
Faith is what we use to take comfort in what we can't prove. I think humans are hot wired; we are made with a religious component to our souls, even agnostics and atheists -- which are forms of religion. I look at the people who say that there is no God or that global warming is their God, and I look at the similarities. They can't prove global warming, don't care what you heard on television today, I don't care what's in the Union of Concerned Scientists report, they haven't done the step three, there is not a hypothesis that they can prove. Therefore, there is no global warming in a scientific way, so what are they doing? They're relying on faith. Just as you and I rely on faith that there is heaven. The religions differ, of course, but they have the same set of basic principles. There is also sin in the environmentalist wacko religion. The sin is not recycling. The sin is not following your dog with a Ziploc bag. The sin is any number of acts that you engage in to pollute. The sin is secondhand smoke. The sin is any clear cutting, development that people don't like, destroying wetlands, those are the sins.
The beliefs are different, but the principles are totally the same, and, by the way, both rely feverishly on one thing to keep everybody in line, and that is the apocalypse, the last days, the day when hellfire and damnation will fall upon all of us who have sinned. For those of you in Christianity, we know what the apocalypse is. Some people believe that's found in the Book of Revelation. (I don't want to go there, but that's what it is.) To the environmentalist wackos, the global warming crowd, the apocalypse, the end days are: "Global warming! We've got ten years! We're doomed!" Look at the very stories you get every, every day about global warming. If there were science, there wouldn't be 20 different stories in 25 different days over what's happening with global warming and how long it's going to take to wipe us out. But the one common thread is it's going to wipe us out. Do you realize to these scientists who say nothing good can come from the warming, forget for a moment that the argument over whether it's caused by men or not, humanity or not, the simple notion that warming is going to destroy everything? Come on, folks. Why do most people live at the equator? Why do more and more people want to have winter homes?
Do you see anybody dying and moving north to live in frigid areas, if they don't have to? But somehow global warming is going to wipe us out? There's no science in that. Where are all the stories about all the good that will happen from global warming, the parts of the world that will be fertile, for agricultural and other things that aren't now, and that once used to be, such as Scotland. You used to be able to grow crops in a lot of Scotland, can't now. Where are these stories? I look at all this, and then I get into the science of it, after taking to it those basic spiritual and human beliefs and start breaking down the science and analyzing some of it and then looking at the history of this whole movement, which I will do next, thanks to the assistance of the brilliant J.R. Dunn at the AmericanThinker.com, and it will help you once and for all understand why I think what I think -- not why I FEEL what I feel, but why I think what I think -- about all this.
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RUSH: Before getting to Mr. J.R. Dunn's brilliant piece today, let me go back and remind you of elements, excerpts from a speech Michael Crichton gave not that long ago. It's his much better way of saying what I just said. “I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people -- the best people, the most enlightened people -- do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind.” I agree. As I say, it's wired.
“Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday---these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don't want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.”
It’s the same thing for global warming and militant environmentalism. But unlike Mr. Crichton, I will argue with people, not the environmentalists, but with those of you out there who get caught up in this as a political issue, I will argue. I will try to change your mind about it within the context and the framework of liberalism versus conservatism. Can I give you one more? I'm not going to have time to get to Mr. Dunn. I'll do that in the monologue segment in the next hour. Can I give you just one more illustration here of what I consider to be the differences in these two, quote, unquote, religions. I mentioned a moment ago that I believe in heaven. I believe in heaven not just because the Bible says so, I'm one of these people like Pascal, the French philosopher, I want more. He went nuts practically looking for proof, he was focused on the resurrection. “If I can prove that, I can believe anything,” he said to himself. Well, I don't have the brain of Pascal, but I can tell you this.
In the context of my belief that God is a loving God and created all that is for beautiful and wonderful reasons, and that we are turning this Creation into what it's never been before in terms of the quality of human life, I don't see how that can lead to destruction of what God created, but at the same time I don't believe that that loving God would create a being like me or you who could conceive of such a place as paradise or heaven or whatever you want to call it, if it weren't true. That would be an ultimate act of cruelty. On the other hand, the environmentalist wackos stop at the apocalypse. They go no further than that. They are a doom-and-gloom bunch without any of the accompanying, uplifting, upbeat, righteous aspects of religions of the Judeo-Christian ethic. Make no mistake: it is a religion. It is not science in the least.
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RUSH: Let me now get to J.R. Dunn, the American Thinker, with his piece on global warming today. It's got some really, really valuable things in it. It starts with a quote that pretty much buttresses and sums up the points that I made in the previous hour. It's by G.K. Chesterton. “A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.”
“The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West. For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it's not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in ‘the rock higher than I’ - a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy. … Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don't yet understand. … That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils.” And one of those devils would be me and anybody else who doesn't believe in their religion of global warming.
“Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse - and that's what global warming is all about. In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns. It's environmentalism's major element of concern, its chief attraction, and the center of discussion and speculation, in much the same way that some Protestant variants of Christianity are obsessed above all with sin. So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other, covering every last aspect of the natural world. If one don't git ya, the next one will. Green emphasis on the apocalyptic appeared early, accompanying the introduction of mass environmental awareness itself. Silent Spring, published in 1962, represents the first environmentalist scripture -- nothing other than a modern book of Revelations. Rachel Carson, a popular nature writer, was dying of cancer while writing the book, and Silent Spring became an outlet for her rage and grief. Carson predicted the imminent coming of a stricken world, a world poisoned by the synthetic products of the chemical industry, in which no birds sang and human children would not be immune. The early 60s were marked by fears of the consequences of atmospheric nuclear tests, and the suggestion that chemicals were just as deadly found a willing audience.
“Pollution - a word that itself bears many religious connotations -- became a byword of the era. That fact that the phenomenon encompassed virtually every aspect of technical civilization including car exhausts, household plastics, and power generation, guaranteed it a good long run. Truly grotesque stories, ranging from dioxins eating sneakers from children's feet to hushed-up epidemics of cancer, made the rounds. None were anything more than grist for Snopes.com, and the promised chemical doomsday never arrived. But Carson's work set the pattern for all the environmental apocalypses to come. The next example was overpopulation, its prophet the notorious Paul Ehrlich. His set of tablets was titled The Population Bomb and if anything, it was even more popular than Silent Spring. Ehrlich's thesis was that relentlessly burgeoning population would overstress the earth's "carrying capacity", use up all available resources, and lead to the collapse of civilization before the 20th century was out. The argument seemed irrefutable to those not familiar with the uncertainties surrounding demography (Thomas Malthus had made similar series of predictions early in the 19th century).”
This is the story I love to tell, Julian Simon, the great scientist, now late great scientist, made a bet with Ehrlich that at the end of the period of time Ehrlich thought we would all be destroyed, that there would be more resources and that their prices would be cheaper and they made a bet on various minerals and elements, and Simon won every one of them. Ehrlich could not have been more wrong. Didn't matter. He has never been discredited and still remains a disciple, a prophet, a god in the church of environmentalism.
“Countless offshoots of Ehrlich's book appeared, and overpopulation became one of the standard ideas of the late 60s, embraced by the counterculture, policymakers, academics, and the media. Even today, an era in which deflating national populations are the problem, it's by no means unusual to come across people still living in Ehrlich's nightmare world, much the same as the Amish or Mennonites have preserved their far more pleasant way of life into modern times. Ehrlich became quite wealthy, and the master of his own foundation devoted to the study of the ‘overpopulation threat’. To this day, he contends that his thesis is correct. The whole episode is begging for a detailed historical study. A variant combining aspects of both theories had a brief run in the early to mid 70s: the doctrine of universal famine. Pollution would poison croplands and stunt agricultural production, and overpopulation would do the rest. The problem here was the fact that proponents insisted that doom was imminent, with famine appearing as early as 1975 or 1980 at the latest. The experience taught the Greens to be a little more vague with dates.”
Now global warming, of course, is 50 years away, it's a hundred years away, or it's -- well, ten years away, depending on who you read day to day. But it isn't science, folks. It's religion. And who can forget acid rain? Remember how that was going to kill us? “The early 1980s saw a reprise of earlier fears of nuclear destruction. The nuclear freeze campaign, largely engineered by the KGB, took up much of the public attention devoted to environmental crises. But even this effort was given an environmental gloss when scientific impresario Carl Sagan put together a road show of ‘mainstream scientists’ to promote the concept of a ‘nuclear winter’.” Remember that disaster that never happened? “The firestorms generated by a nuclear strike would generate smoke so thick as to block out the sun across much of the northern hemisphere, causing a collapse of the terrestrial ecology. Nuclear winter never quite caught on outside of certain elite circles, in part due to flaws in the theory. Sagan's specialty was exobiology, the study of possible extraterrestrial life-forms, and it developed that the climate model he'd used was based on the atmosphere of Mars, a planet locked in an ice age for the past billion years. Nuclear winter faded with the nuclear freeze movement. All the same, just before his death Sagan made it known that he'd willingly accept a Nobel for his role in preventing World War III.
”Ozone depletion, the next environmentalist flurry, was a little too esoteric to generate the uncritical devotion accorded to pollution and overpopulation. … But ozone depletion did serve a useful Green purpose in drawing public attention to the atmosphere, and confusing people as to exactly what the problem was all about. But in fact, global warming has actually adapted elements of all previous environmental crazes. It holds that carbon dioxide (a naturally-occurring compound that comprises a large portion of the atmosphere) is a form of pollution, the same as Carson's detested synthetic chemicals. Like that involving overpopulation, the threatened catastrophe is universal, and implicated in everyday practices and institutions. As with the universal famine, the effects are concrete and horrifying, though the dates have been left vague - ‘in the coming century', rather than in a year or two. … The lessons of previous environmental panics have been carefully applied to global warming No other environmentalist program has been prepared with such detail, purpose, and conviction. A skilled cadre of scientists, activists, and publicists exist who have devoted entire careers to nothing else. A vast literature has appeared analyzing not climate as a whole, not the interactions of the entire system, but solely and uniquely global warming. In many ways, warming has become both more and less than an ideology: it has become an industry, one that with such financial elements as carbon offsets can easily support itself.”
The piece goes on and on and on. But let's never forget this. “The banning of DDT in 1971 resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in the developing world, most of them children, from insect-borne diseases such as malaria. … Yet no environmental group has ever made note of the fact, and all oppose the reintroduction of DDT for any purpose. The DDT ban places Rachel Carson in an exclusive circle shared only by Karl Marx as a writer whose work alone caused vast amounts of human misery. (Adolf Hitler was, of course, more man of action than writer. It's doubtful that Mein Kampf in and of itself could have triggered the same upheavals as Hitler's actions.)” It's the way you have to look at it, if you really want to understand this. If you want to go beyond just the surface reporting and the emotional grabs that they're making at your heart strings in the Drive-By Media, then you've gotta look at it this way.
“Increasingly strident rhetoric of the kind being heard from public figures such as Heidi Cullen and even Prince Charles may well result in a vicious circle in which public frustration leads to violent action leading to more frustration and on to the inevitable climax. Up to this point, environmentalist violence has been held in check by force of law - and only by force of law. How long this will remain the case depends on how much power the Greens are allowed to accrue.” Now, I might add, ladies and gentlemen, we do have terrorists in this country. In addition to the Al-Qaeda cells and whatever else they are, what is the most frequent, the most common form of terrorism in the United States? Ecoterrorism, from groups like Earth First to the Animal Liberation Front, to PETA or what have you, burning down whole automobile dealerships, trying to stop the logging industry over the spotted owl, all of these things.
I apologize for those of you not interested in this, but so many people have asked me to explain why I am constantly making fun of the global warming crowd. I decided to take it seriously and go in depth today to give you my full range of explanations and understanding. And remember, I still haven't touched on the fact that there is a great lesson here for any of you still undecided about liberalism and conservatism. There's a great lesson here, because the global warming crowd, the environmentalists are pure, unadulterated leftists, an assortment of communists and socialists who are also godless in the traditional sense, like Chesterton said, “If you don't believe in God, you'll believe in anything.” You'll make your own God, and that's what they've done. There's no science in it, folks, zilch, zero, nada.
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RUSH: Tim in Charlotte, North Carolina. Welcome to the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how are you?
RUSH: Good, sir, thank you.
CALLER: Good, good. Yeah, I was just talking to your guy there about a special I saw a few years ago, it was either History Channel, TLC, one of those, about what they refer to as the Little Ice Age ( pdf | html ), and it seems to me that between the 1400s, 1500s which is when it started which, by the way, they attributed to intense volcanic activity and then the ash being spewed into the atmosphere, and then cooling it down --
RUSH: It was actually the tenth century through the thirteenth century, and the acronym is the LOC, local optimum something or other, but I know what you're talking about.
RUSH: Well, these guys, they actually went as far as noting in the United States, the year with no summer is what they called it, in Virginia it actually snowed in June. So just as a follow-up, I talked to my kids and I said, “Look, why did the pilgrims, Jamestown, why did all those colonies seem to fail?” It was because of this very intense, very tough winters. And then I said, “Look, I said, do we think of Virginia as being just a brutal wintry climate as was discussed in those days, and of course the answer to that is no.” So it seems that the warming trend has been since early 1800s. Now, they go into causality on the cold, but they didn't go into causality on why things were warming up, which I think is one of the big issues that we're having now with all the scientists because they want to draw a correlation between the coincidence of the use of fossil fuels and then the warming of the temperature, but they don't explore in scientific methods used in --
RUSH: Of course, I just got through spending 45 minutes explaining it is not science. They cannot use science to disapprove this because there is no science here. The whole point is to try to convince as many people as possible that there is a direct relationship to the use of fossil fuels and everything else that leads to advanced lifestyles, technological improvement and so forth, and link that to global warming. In the religious context, that's the sin. We are sinning. We have to pay for the sin. The payment for the sin will be our end, our doom. It's the apocalypse. There's no science in this. (panting) Patience. Okay. If there were science, there would be no disagreement. Go to any area of proved hypothesis using the scientific method, you will not find any disagreement on anything proved. The fact that there's disagreement on this alone in the scientific community means nothing's been proved. So then you have to say, why do the pro side, the humanity is destroying the planet, particularly advanced humanity is destroying the planet, why do you have to stick with it? What's the point? There we get into liberal versus conservative.
The whole point -- and this is a fundamental element in many, many religions -- guilt. The militant environmentalists, the leadership of this movement is trying to make as many of you people feel as guilty as possible for destroying the ecosystem, via global warming, by virtue of your lifestyles, the cars you drive, the selfish nature with which you buy gasoline and pollute the planet, the other ways in which you don't clean up after yourselves. All of these things are designed to make feel responsible for the coming apocalypse, the doom and gloom, the end of the world as we know it. After that guilt has been sufficiently implanted in your brain and in your soul, it is then the theory that you will readily agree to higher taxes and more government control over advanced lifestyles as a means of making reparations for the sin. That's the endgame here. The endgame for the religion of these people is a bigger and bigger government with themselves in charge; less and less freedom for you; higher and higher taxes; far more restrictions on how you can live your life; where you can do this activity or not do that activity. If you just look around you, this is already happening. You can't do certain things like ride a snowmobile in certain national parks. You can't smoke at a lot of places now. You can't use your own property as you would like if there happens to be something called an endangered species or even protected species within sight of the horizon.
I mean, folks, it's all there to understand. You just have to open your eyes and look at it and see it for what it is. That's the liberal element of this, in addition to all of the religious contexts that I have laid out prior segments of this program today. It's all about making you feel guilty; all about making you willing to bend over and grab the ankles and get spanked for all of this destruction and on pollution your selfishness and greed has brought about. You can be redeemed, though. You elect the right people to office and allow them to raise your taxes, like Mrs. Clinton who said at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting today she wants to take Exxon's profits. They had the highest reported profit in American history yesterday. She wants to take it. Her words, grab sound bite 18, Mike. I remember the number of it. Let me know when it's slotted and ready to be heard. I would like to you hear it in your own words.
HILLARY: The other day the oil companies reported the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy alternatives and technologies that will --
RUSH: Stop the tape, stop the tape. It's not your money, Mrs. Clinton! You didn't earn it. All you're doing is getting in the way of it being earned. You didn't earn it, you don't know a thing about the oil bus, but it doesn't matter. She knows better than everybody else. By the way, look at the enemies list that the environmentalists have constructed: Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Food, Big Trans-Fat, Big Doughnut, Wal-Mart, look at who they're trying to put out of business. This is nothing more than a Hugo Chavez moment. He's nationalizing every company he can down in Venezuela, turning the place into a dictatorship. Folks, the global warming movement, if you'll open yours eyes, allows you to see virtually every means, theory, and desire liberalism has for humanity. Just open your eyes and look at it and forget science. It's not about that.
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