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 italicize 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.
5 users commented in " A Perfect Example of Global Warming Hysteria "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackThis is the most cold-hearted, cynical and ignorant expressions of anti-scientific indignation I have ever read. Because global warming is a slow moving process, Warner Todd Huston has no sympathy for the victims. Because a handful of professional global warming skeptics distort and misrepresent the science, Mr. Huston is sure that humans have no responsibility for global warming. Climate has always changed. That tells us nothing about the causes of current global wamring. Scientific research does tell us. We know that all of the increase in greenhouse gases are of human origin, and that greenhouse gases measurably warm the climate. Rising sea levels are accelarating, in line with expectations from oncreasing levels of greenhouse gases. Finding humor in the misfortunes of these island dweellling people, whose lives have been forever changed by global warming, is inexplicably cruel.
Hi there,
You’ve noticed in others a misrepresentation of the whole truth which is fine. However, you seemed to overly downplay the situation in the ‘homeless’ part of your article. Do you really mean to portray the situation as being synonymous with a person in a normal situation, who has 8 years to move? Do you honestly think, if people know the home will be under water in 8 years, that these homes will sell? And if so, for anything near what it would cost to purchase a new home? I think you’re missing a key factor here.
In His grace,
Korey Loughry
P.S. I am a Christian – Youth & Outreach Director at a church in Kent, Ohio. – politically conservative in general
As global warming propaganda cranks up, I can’t check out of Whole Foods, for eg, without staring out the windows of elementary school painted measages of “fight climate change” and images of wind turbine messiahs (which incidentally are slicing up endangered species on the east coast whose migratory path they cross). Indoctrination usually starts young. Your essay is a blessing among all the junk science and fear mongering.
Your critical commentators here seem to not really be responding to what you say, but prevaricating and injecting emotionalism. Mr. Seward, for example, we don’t know that humans are responsible for the increase in CO2. Just as there is no real scientific consensus of global warming. Such is kind of like the Republicans saying there were WMDs in Iraq. (Before you attack me politically know that I depsise both parties.) Before you say that it’s only oil co.s that are sceptical, Shell and BP are some of the biggest contributors to global warming activism. What we do know is that the world has been getting warmer since the beginning of recorded time. For example the medeival period was actually the warmest. Moreover anyone who remembers the ’70s knows that magazines of that era such as Time ran panicked warnings about a coming 2nd Ice Age. Can you say fad?
Keep up the good work. I hate the scare mongering my generation is manipulated by. And don’t get me wrong this IS about fearmongering and the subsequent control over the populace that engenders. The biggest irony is how facist environmental policies-i.e. the ones that citizens like you and me didn’t get to vote on, actually do much real damage to the environment and people. For example the aditives in the gasoline that were supposed to make fuel burn cleaner that now pollute our water supplies, forcing us to use flourescent bulbs, which, unlike incandescents, contain mercury and can’t be safely recycled or thrown away. Or now, bans on plastic bags so more trees will be cut down. This is really all about control and the erosion of individual rights.
Ms. Loughry, It’s wonderful that you have so much compassion. But I think the example of the “vanishing” island and “homelessness” was used by this author as an example of how environmentalists grossly distort and deform issues such as these, in order to create emotional propaganda. A Goal this author has assomplished well. It’s important that people become informed about environmental realities, and think for themselves, rather than twisted into fear and indoctrinated by environmental correctness.
While writing this, I actually had to get up three times to change my TV channel because I just couldn’t take all these priviliged jet setting celebrities talking about their oscar gift of “carbon offsetting.”
why we have a global warming,in what way we we will prevent it,?
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