The Modern Galilei Trial
Mark Steyn has given us a good example of what Rieff once called the postmodern “third world” based principally on fiction, as compared to the first world of antiquity which was based on fate or tragic and the medieval second world based on faith. But one could argue that all three Fs are involved if we speak of man made global warming. Steyn is not the only one to perceive the present state of mainstream Western consciousness as embracing fiction. Watch his brilliant presentation live:
At my last trip to New York I met quite a few serious thinkers claiming that US politics are in urgent need of a reality check.
For not only is fiction the leading, i.e. money grabbing, cultural genre in movies and novels, think of Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. The issue conservative intellectuals like the Catholic James Kalb (“The Liberal Tyranny”, 2014) are raising is that fiction is actually taken for reality. Fiction being a narrative is of course resistant to doubt. This seems to have affected the perception of natural science, given that the doctrine of man-made global warming remains unshakable in light of irrefutable evidence to the contrary. It has to be added that the complementary liberal narrative, having conquered the mainstream even faster than the climate dogma, is about gender advocacy denying human nature proper as much as global warming alarmism is about the denial of cosmic nature.
For instance despite serious demographic decline all over the West the overwhelming evidence supporting the natural family regarding all the parameters for health, satisfaction and achievement for parents and children alike, mainstream media coverage is hammering out the message that same sex love is what matters. This confusion between nature and fiction concerns what Pope St Francis just recalled in the Vatican’s first ever ecological encyclica: Benedict XVI’s affirmation “that there exists an ‘ecology of man…Man also has a nature that he must respect and which he cannot manipulate at his own pleasure.’
All the same, concerning cosmic nature and natural variability of our planetary system Mark Steyn stressed the absurdity that of all people those like himself, who happily acknowledge natural climate change, i.e. natural warming or cooling of planet earth, are incessantly castigated as climate or science “deniers”. As a matter of fact it is Dr Mann and his ilk, who avoid accounting for natural variability. In his typical hands-on presentation Mark Steyn explained that without the latest cycle, or dare we say “season”, of natural warming, which started in late 19th century, his home country Canada would not be what it is today.
Steyn reminded his audience at the Heartland Institute, hosting the 2015 climate conference, that no less than ninety percent of Canadians live within hundred miles of the northern United States border, simply because beyond it is getting rather cold. But more to the point Steyn pointed out that Canadian immigration and settlement happened exactly at the time and was partly due to the beneficial effects of global warming. Now the Pontifex Maximus of the radical green movement that keeps running the West into economic trouble, Dr Michael Mann, is a man of platonic as well as stalinist inclinations in Carl Poppers parlance. Not for nothing has Dr Mann become the epitome of positivist, meaning uncritical, climate research.
Not this is still not enough for his ego: he also has sued Mark Steyn on the charge of libel about four years ago refering to the “hockey stick” controversy. The trial is now pending before the courts in the District of Columbia which is why Steyn was given the opportunity to address the Heartland audience. All the auspices are pointing to a secular-gnostic re-run of the 1633 Inquisition against Galileo Galilei. All those who early on compared the pseudoscientific attitude of the “climate science is settled” crowd with religious bigots are poven right by the performance of Pontifex Mann.
One hilarious detail of the Chicago event is Steyn’s extremely funny exposure of Mann’s unconscious Spinozan mindset. For the Pope of climatology, the position Mann wants to occupy in posterity, thought it a brilliant idea to accuse Steyn of denouncing a living Noble laureat. This is simple based on the fact that the IPPC, the UN body responsible for some drakonian anti-warming regulations, had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Now Mann is certainly one of the more influential contributors to that institution, yet nevertheless the prize is a collective dedication.
For Mann to claim his personal smithereen of this Nobel Prize reminds us of an almost contemporary of Galileo: the Renaissance philosopher Baruch de Spinoza (born 1632) who is famous for having allotted to every single native of planet earth his divine sparkle. This is known as pantheism since Spinoza put literally “One in all” spreading divine bliss generously all over the planet. From this generosity Dr Mann did not want to be left out. Nothing could better illustrate the reckless ambition and narrow mindset of the Pontifex than this atavistic plunge into pantheism. Just as an aside: at the same time as religion or monotheism proper is experiencing a worldwide comeback so does pantheism, also known as the beginning of biblical criticism. I just attended a conference on Jewish epistomology in globally upmarket Berlin and almost one third of the lectures were dealing with the pantheist philosophy of Baruch de Spinoza of Amsterdam.
Now a new book on the actual evidence on climate change is just out, available from the the IPA in Melbourne, Australia (http://thefacts2014.ipa.org.au). The real bone of contention between Steyn and Mann is of course the infamous “hockey stick”. That is the divice that Michael Mann fashioned in order to demonstrate foolproof that there has never been global warming before the advent of capitalism and the sudden vertical surge of human CO² pollution, roughly at the end of the 19th century. This ominous eclipse of natural climate variablity is what Mark Steyn had called fraudulent in the first place. As already mentioned this was four years ago and Steyn lost his breadwinning Job as star columnist at the conservative Online Journal “National Review” as a result of Dr Mann’s libel charge.
It will be fascinating to follow the minutes of the court proceedings about this inquisitorial assault on free speech. Surely bets are already taken on the outcome. My best guess is to trust in the well documented variation of temperatures; beginning with the medieval warming period, interrupted by the “little ice age” roughly from the 15th till eraly 19th century, followed by another warming period that arrived in late 19th century. Incidentially we just celebrated the Magna Carta of 1215 at Runnymede, an event that certainly benefitted from the medieval warming period. Some semblance of the cooling and the sobering of vanity and conceit that the English barons dealt to King John in addition to cutting his tax prerogatives is what the climate Pontifex seems to be calling for.