O despertar das consciências
Nelleke Noordervliet é uma escritora e artista muito popular dos Países Baixos. É conhecida pela participação activa na revolta estudantil da Universidade de Leiden de 1968. Escreve com regularidade na revista mensal “Historical News Bulletin”.
Até agora ninguém lhe conhecia qualquer posição que pudesse servir para a considerarem uma tenebrosa “céptica”. Mas escreveu muito recentemente um artigo que é talvez mais incisivo do que muitas demonstrações científicas de que vivemos o maior embuste da História da Ciência.
Como Nelleke também cita o caso do espantalho do gelo do Árctico, vem a propósito publicar no MC uma tradução para inglês do seu artigo que acaba de causar uma enorme sensação nos Países Baixos, até pelo inesperado de provir de uma personalidade tão popular.
The big FiddleDeeDee
No ice at the North Pole!!! Argentina's large Perito Moreno glacier sheds a huge amount of ice!!! Western European temperatures of 104° F in 2100 will not be unusual!!! These will all be records and it appears that they will all be historic firsts!!!
The media have almost daily alarmist news of one kind or another, such as global warming, melting polar ice, disappearing glaciers, rising sea levels, in other words we are looking at a new biblical deluge scenario and guess what? It is all our own fault!!! So repent, seek salvation, the end of time is near!!!
Apocalyptic concerns have been part and parcel of Jewish and Christian traditions. In 1997 Marius Elling collected a number of these apocalyptic texts and in his introduction he said:
"We are really an eschatological culture. We see our final days as the purpose of life. We belong to a part of Eurasia that believes that the universe is only a temporary phenomenon with time just an island in a timeless ocean. One may argue about the length of time before this island sinks, nor is the concept of doomsday necessarily virulent, but it will go under, that's a fact!!! It is also very much part and parcel of our Christian Church confessionals and lastly it is at the base of our views about science and historic perceptions."
Notwithstanding the fact that religion and Biblical predictions are viewed somewhat more leniently and liberally by us today than in earlier times, the need for some kind of "Big Fiddledeedee" is still very much in our bones. We you consider the predictions of a number of historic doomsayers today as so much naive nonsense---mostly because nothing of what they said occurred really---they nevertheless took pains to relate their thoughts to whatever then current scientific information might be helpful, just to maximize their own credibility.
Consequently, their contemporaries could always find something familiar in these predictions. After all, during my own life, we have been through the terminal fear for "the bomb", for AIDS, for the wholesale dying of our forests, for bird-flue, for Nile virus, and a few other scares. And now we have our Global Warming prophet Al Gore who, as American Vice-President had no charisma at all, but suddenly has become the great castigator of mankind acquiring an almost messianic stature leading him last year to a most undeserved Nobel Prize for Peace.
Be that as it may, I am rather less interested in Al Gore's truthfulness or in the climate-changes discussed by the IPCC, although much could be said about that. But what I am really very interested in is the responses to all this by media and public.
Every little incident, storm, mudslide, whatever, is tainted a climatic color and presented shamelessly by news media as a next step on the road to final doom.
But if you take the trouble to do a minimum of research you can quickly find out that our North Pole has been without ice a number of times during the past 2000 years or so. When Roald Amundson set out on one of his polar expeditions in his ship Goja in 1903-1906 he completed the North West Passage on water. No large frozen ice masses to contend with. In 1959 a US submarine broke through a "thin" layer of ice at the North Pole. Ice at the North Pole, floating in water, is always moving. In the reported very cold winter of 1951, the Argentinian glacier Perito Moreno nevertheless shed a large ice mass. And during the Middle Ages the glaciers in Switzerland were a lot shorter.
It must be recognized that history is being maligned and misinterpreted when the complexity of our climate system is systematically being denied. It is also being denied that our climate system has been going its own capricious way long before we were conscious of it and certainly long before we started doing any systematic studies of its behavior. Sometimes warmer, like figs and grapes in Northern England during the Middle Ages and sometimes colder like in the 17th century when skating was popular on lakes and streams never before known to freeze over.
It is undoubtedly true that our climate changes, just think of 6 or 7 billion people merely breathing day and night may have some effect, but a normal, unemotional scientific discussion about cause and effect is impossible when people's cultural urge is to blame themselves for their perceived sinful existence bound as it is to end in their promised demise and as a result refuse to think clearly and unemotionally about the actual facts of the matter.
Até agora ninguém lhe conhecia qualquer posição que pudesse servir para a considerarem uma tenebrosa “céptica”. Mas escreveu muito recentemente um artigo que é talvez mais incisivo do que muitas demonstrações científicas de que vivemos o maior embuste da História da Ciência.
Como Nelleke também cita o caso do espantalho do gelo do Árctico, vem a propósito publicar no MC uma tradução para inglês do seu artigo que acaba de causar uma enorme sensação nos Países Baixos, até pelo inesperado de provir de uma personalidade tão popular.
The big FiddleDeeDee
No ice at the North Pole!!! Argentina's large Perito Moreno glacier sheds a huge amount of ice!!! Western European temperatures of 104° F in 2100 will not be unusual!!! These will all be records and it appears that they will all be historic firsts!!!
The media have almost daily alarmist news of one kind or another, such as global warming, melting polar ice, disappearing glaciers, rising sea levels, in other words we are looking at a new biblical deluge scenario and guess what? It is all our own fault!!! So repent, seek salvation, the end of time is near!!!
Apocalyptic concerns have been part and parcel of Jewish and Christian traditions. In 1997 Marius Elling collected a number of these apocalyptic texts and in his introduction he said:
"We are really an eschatological culture. We see our final days as the purpose of life. We belong to a part of Eurasia that believes that the universe is only a temporary phenomenon with time just an island in a timeless ocean. One may argue about the length of time before this island sinks, nor is the concept of doomsday necessarily virulent, but it will go under, that's a fact!!! It is also very much part and parcel of our Christian Church confessionals and lastly it is at the base of our views about science and historic perceptions."
Notwithstanding the fact that religion and Biblical predictions are viewed somewhat more leniently and liberally by us today than in earlier times, the need for some kind of "Big Fiddledeedee" is still very much in our bones. We you consider the predictions of a number of historic doomsayers today as so much naive nonsense---mostly because nothing of what they said occurred really---they nevertheless took pains to relate their thoughts to whatever then current scientific information might be helpful, just to maximize their own credibility.
Consequently, their contemporaries could always find something familiar in these predictions. After all, during my own life, we have been through the terminal fear for "the bomb", for AIDS, for the wholesale dying of our forests, for bird-flue, for Nile virus, and a few other scares. And now we have our Global Warming prophet Al Gore who, as American Vice-President had no charisma at all, but suddenly has become the great castigator of mankind acquiring an almost messianic stature leading him last year to a most undeserved Nobel Prize for Peace.
Be that as it may, I am rather less interested in Al Gore's truthfulness or in the climate-changes discussed by the IPCC, although much could be said about that. But what I am really very interested in is the responses to all this by media and public.
Every little incident, storm, mudslide, whatever, is tainted a climatic color and presented shamelessly by news media as a next step on the road to final doom.
But if you take the trouble to do a minimum of research you can quickly find out that our North Pole has been without ice a number of times during the past 2000 years or so. When Roald Amundson set out on one of his polar expeditions in his ship Goja in 1903-1906 he completed the North West Passage on water. No large frozen ice masses to contend with. In 1959 a US submarine broke through a "thin" layer of ice at the North Pole. Ice at the North Pole, floating in water, is always moving. In the reported very cold winter of 1951, the Argentinian glacier Perito Moreno nevertheless shed a large ice mass. And during the Middle Ages the glaciers in Switzerland were a lot shorter.
It must be recognized that history is being maligned and misinterpreted when the complexity of our climate system is systematically being denied. It is also being denied that our climate system has been going its own capricious way long before we were conscious of it and certainly long before we started doing any systematic studies of its behavior. Sometimes warmer, like figs and grapes in Northern England during the Middle Ages and sometimes colder like in the 17th century when skating was popular on lakes and streams never before known to freeze over.
It is undoubtedly true that our climate changes, just think of 6 or 7 billion people merely breathing day and night may have some effect, but a normal, unemotional scientific discussion about cause and effect is impossible when people's cultural urge is to blame themselves for their perceived sinful existence bound as it is to end in their promised demise and as a result refuse to think clearly and unemotionally about the actual facts of the matter.
posted by Rui G. Moura at 08:23
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