Letters to the Editor

• Paglia, global warming, and hot air

  [Read the article: Real inconvenient truths]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I was sucked into reading this article because I wanted to know why Camille Paglia is a "global warming skeptic." So I read through four pages of same-old-same-old political chatter ("Iraq is a disaster, we're creating new jihadists every day" -- yes, we all get that, thanks!) to find out what informs Paglia's skepticism. Here's what she has to offer:

  Paglia:

  "As a native of upstate New York, whose dramatic landscape was carved by the receding North American glacier 10,000 years ago, I have been contemplating the principle of climate change since I was a child."

  Ummmm...yeah. I'm glad you're proud of where you grew up. Can we get back to why you are a "global warming skeptic"?

  "Geology and meteorology are fields that have always interested me and that I might well have entered, had I not been more attracted to art and culture. (My geology professor in college, in fact, asked me to consider geology as a career.)"

  Wow, a geology professor once gave you a nice compliment. Can we get to the part about why you're skeptical of global warming now, Camille?

  "To conflate vast time frames with volatile daily change is a sublime exercise, bordering on the metaphysical."

  Wow, Paglia, so science is, like, a spiritual quest? Groovy. So why are you a global warming skeptic?

  "I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue."

  Oh, so here it comes. Camille Paglia is a skeptic about a scientific issue because she has a distaste for environmental politics. Great. After all, if there are people you don't like behind an issue, there must be something untrue about it.

  "As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area."

  Right. So basically what Camille Paglia is saying is that if there were a bunch of dogmatic "spherical earth scientists," Camille would be skeptical about the round shape of the earth. Why else are you a skeptic, Camille?

  "Too many of my fellow Democrats seem peculiarly credulous at the moment, as if, having ground down organized religion into nonjudgmental, feel-good therapy, they are hungry for visions of apocalypse."

  I see. So because some democrats, somewhere, are discussing what they feel to be an important issue in a grave, serious tone, that somehow indicates that something about the issue must be scientifically false. Right Camille? Good to see you're concerned with facts and enthusiastic scientific inquiry!

  "From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved."

  Hmmm, Camille, I wonder what your perspective could be? How about you tell us which "major claims" are lacking in evidence? Would those include the major claims about the C02 levels being 4X greater than they've ever been throughout all of the earth's measurable history? Or what?

  "Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into Earth's system. Cooling and warming will go on forever."

  Gee, thanks, Camille. You're using the old, "climate change is natural and cyclical" argument as if it somehow invalidates the evidence for global warming. Yet you completely ignore the fact that cyclical climate change is factored into global warming theory and what scientists have examined shows changes well beyond what could be expected due to natural fluctuations of temperature.

  "Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done."

  Hmmm. I guess this is Camille's "everything going to shit anyway so we might as well not care" defense.

  -------cont---------

  Permalink Wednesday, April 11, 2007 03:06 AM