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Saturday, January 28, 2012

Global Warming in the Wall Street Journal



The WSJ has an article on global warming, but it is "Global Warming" - The Political Debating Point, and not the "global warming" which is being studied by science. In a time honored way, they have the signatures of sixteen scientists affixed at the bottom....
I assume these guys are agreeing with the article, because I did not get to read that far.

I do not really care whether global warming may or may not be proven; I do not care if it is influenced by the economies of mankind. I do not care what those 16 scientists believe, since I do not have their works in front of me, and I do not care what an equivalent group of 16 scientists opposed to the opinions of the first 16 might say: do not care.

No one involved in this dispute, neither the WSJ, nor the writer, nor the signing scientists, nor the far-from-insightful commenters has any take on the issue on the spiritual significance of the issue.
What is spiritual significance? Does it have to do with the Unseen? Spiritual significance covers a wide territory, and at least part of it deals with Tacit Cognition: things known and perceived, yet not expressed by the usual forms of language and images and mathematics, all of which we can see and hear.

When I ran 6 days a week back in to 1990's, I ran outdoors and ran anywhere from 4 to 10 miles, and this was an hour to 2 hours per day in the outdoors: nothing but me and nature. I found that as winter drew on, I had intuitions about the winter weather from December through the middle of February - sort of a running Farmers' Almanac. By November I made my winter weather predictions, and I found that I was correct 80% of the time, or 8 winters out of 10. This is a bit better than random guessing.
Did I have "tacit knowledge" of the oncoming weather? I don't know. I always assumed that there were probably cues and indications - woolly caterpillars and such - that must have been related to the coming weather, but I was never consciously aware of them. (I was also in a climate-sensitive industry, which explains the focus on my part.)

The Earth where we live has a spiritual significance in my life. God creates the garden, and it is man's duty to dress it, till it, manage it, and husband the resources in a continuous stewardship.

Look upon what we do in the world today: yammering for oil to run smack dab through the main aquifer of the country, oil in the Gulf, the toxic process of fracking...
Answer this: how long will we be able to conjure up fossil fuels?
Peak oil may not be tomorrow, nor next year, nor even 100 years, but when it occurs, we will have deplenished our children's and grand-children's inheritance, just as we have saddled them with debt while we either pleasure ourselves with wealth... or we torment ourselves with our poverty and inability to make ends meet! The 1% and the 99%! Neither is fulfilled.
We are ignorant of how to live with the Earth in a sustainable manner, but instead we live in a mad compound-interest of exploitation, getting higher and higher short-term returns which are clearly inimical to our long-term health.

Take genetically modified food as a paradigm: it is complex enough that we will see 30-pieces-of-silver scientists sign their names to a WSJ article soon saying that no genetically modified part of food can get into the bloodstream. (And this will be due to the fact that Chinese researchers have just shown that micro RNA from GMO foods does indeed survive the digestion process. Actually, this complot of scientists in favor of GMO foods may have happened already... years ago at the behest of 3M corporation. Caution: scientists may be hazardous to your health.)
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2 comments:

Unknown said...

On the positive side, I think a growing number of people, but hardly enough to matter, do indeed sense the spiritual significance of ecological balance and care for Mother Earth. There doesn't seem to be any violation of the planet big enough to wake the rest of humanity up. Amazing to think that the end of us will be the toxic residue of our continual incestual rape of our Mother.

Montag said...

As long as it isn't in our backyard, we do not seem to care.