Letters to the Editor
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Actually, no
So that's the kind of debate you like, CamilleFan? You ignore the facts, throw out vague insult, and you think you've proved thousands of scientists wrong?
Proof that global warming is now a religion is the zealotry of its adherents and the truism that you can't argue someone out of something they have not been argued into. Future generations will only blame us for being silly for playing this children's game of scary stories.
Your argument is laughable. Because thousands of scientists strongly agree that we're causing climate change, that means they're wrong? And if, for the sake of argument, these scientists were all wrong, pray tell, what would future generations "blame" them for? Stopping the burning of coal? Stopping the subsidy of middle eastern terror states with oil money? Yes, these are terrible things our children will hate us for.
It's a fact that CO2 has never been more than 300 ppm, in all of geological history, until the industrial revolution. Now it's 380ppm.
Your pop arguments don't stand up to scrutiny, and are certainly no match for hard science. The earth's climate is a balancing act. A certain amount of CO2 can be absorbed by the oceans and by plant life. Any more than that, and you get excess, which is what we're seeing now. People like you sneered at the scientists who warned us that CFCs depleted the ozone layer, as well. Thank goodness we didn't listen. I guess our children will blame us for their hairspray bottles not being as powerful as they'd like it.
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And now, a message to Camille Paglia
Oh, shut the f*** up, you gassy old windbag! You once again have contributed nothing to these pages and you take up space that would be better used for better articles. (Or even those obnoxious blinking asses for the toilet ad.)
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Camille Paglia, enabler of the religious right
Seriously, does Paglia have any aim in life anymore, other than to prove that she's not one of "those" liberals? The founding fathers were deists. In the sense that they were not Jews, Muslims, etc., and that they probably attended church because it was expected for people of their station, they were Christians. But evangelicals today would regard them as heretics for their adherence to deism, and their rejection of such things as the Trinity, miracles, etc.
And what mainstream "liberals" regard religion as a social problem? On the contrary, I see them bending over backwards to show "respect" to the wackiest beliefs imaginable, so long as they are "religious" beliefs, and their adherents wear nice suits. Look at all the God talk in the Democratic race, for example.
Camille, you might try engaging the real world for a change when you have days off from being a Fox Liberal.
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More malaise in Italy ...
I had a chance to visit Como this summer in a whirlwind tour of the Continent. Hadn't been there in 29 years, but I have spent more than a few hours trying to figure out how I could spend 3 months a year living on the lake. There is still a magic that emanates from Italy.
You probably saw this link on Drudge -- who must be as big a fan as I, based on the number of times I see your links there -- from an International Herald Tribune piece on the decline of Italy. Just breaks my heart.
the link:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/12/news/italy.php
I have subscribed to Salon just to keep up with your vibrant writing.
very respectfully and warmest regards,
Gene Brindle
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This was an excellent experience in
reading so much intelligent writing.
Oh, yeah. This CP character, a rotting corpse, had an article here somewhere also.
If salon actually pays and expects any intelligence and legitimacy from anyone, then WE are the ones who deserve to be paid.
Signed,
Rotting butt, not dead yet.
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Why I no longer subscribe
Camille is one of main reasons why I, and likely many others, no longer subscribe.
I keep coming back for 2 things: Andrew Leonard and the comics.
Dump her and find someone less vapid.
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"Gennifer Flowers was one of the most radiant, charismatic people I have ever seen in my life."
That sentence is a prime example of Camille "I Jumped the Shark Years Ago" Paglia's shoot-from-the-hip writing style.
I guess we can expect repeated references to Gennifer Flowers and her unbridled "charisma" in future Camille Paglia columns.
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Challenge yourself to learn about Global Warming
Dear Camille Paglia,
As someone who has long enjoyed your literary and social criticism (I treasure, in particular, “Break, Blow, Burn”), I am somewhat disappointed to see that you have come down on the side of global warming skepticism. To get a sense of where you’re coming from with respect to this topic, I have recently reread all of your Salon.com writings that touch on it. Having done this, if you’ll pardon my psychoanalysis, I’d like to address what I think are your two main lines of reasoning.
The first line of reasoning seems to stem from simple, perhaps gut level, incredulity- albeit educated incredulity. (“…as a global warming agnostic.”) It is clear to me from your April 11, 2007 column that you are well informed about the broad outlines of Earth’s geologic and climatic history. It seems you also possess a deep, almost spiritual, sense of the vast natural forces of change and dynamism that are at work in nature. (“To conflate vast time frames with volatile daily change is a sublime exercise.”) Finally it is clear that you are, at heart, an environmentalist in the sense that you consider the careful human stewardship of nature as both a practical and an aesthetic necessity. (“This kind of outrageous negligence should not be tolerated in a civilized nation.”)
From these roots, you have developed a response to “global warming” that is at once both poetic and scientifically grounded (or so it seems) - a very satisfying consillience of heart and mind. Your rejoinder to the idea that humans are causing global temperatures to rise, if I may paraphrase, seems to be “Humans are just too puny against the vast forces of nature for us to say with any certainty that we’re having an impact.” and “The world changes. Deal with it.” (“Who is impious enough to believe that Earth's contours are permanent?”)
You write: “Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done” and “Man is too weak to permanently affect nature, which includes infinitely more than this tiny globe.” I couldn’t agree more. However, though the forces of nature are wily and powerful compared to the individual human being, the sheer mathematical heft of human beings’ combined presence on Earth is, too, an astounding thing in today’s world. Six billion is a large number. And while human beings will almost certainly perish from the Earth long before the planet is incinerated in the atmosphere of our bloated, dying, sun, this does not mean that humankind is incapable of making its own home into a miserable hovel for its short strut. That is, struggling to moderate our footprint is not without purpose- for us.
This is because, by most scientific accounts, we are actually having an impact on the Earth’s climate. The lines of evidence are vast and diverse and, in recent years, converging on a consensus. Ten years ago, the was still room for average climate scientists to hold out for more information. Today, however, given the orgy of research in the field, the vast majority of climate scientists now hold that mankind is not only capable of changing Earth’s climate in significant ways, but that this process is already well underway. There are only a handful (almost literally) of very noted (for obvious reasons) and noisy exceptions in the field- and, as time goes on, even these folks (most notedly Lomborg) are starting to hedge their bets.
Because I am unfamiliar with your educational background on the subject, I can’t directly address any scientific issues you may have- except those you indirectly allude to in your Salon.com notes. I will point out, however, that the most common, lay, criticisms of Anthropogenic Climate Change (popular in the blogosphere) have been well addressed in many quarters. To summarize just a few:
- The idea that the recent uptick in temperatures that we’ve seen is related to changes in solar output. It has been shown that, while solar output fluctuates naturally, and this has been the cause of all sorts of misery, the recent changes in solar output are far from enough to account for recent changes in climate. Very long term changes in solar output and in the Earth’s tilt (the Milankovitch cycles) result in more dramatic fluctuations, but operate on time scales that are much too long to account for the abrupt recent changes we see.
- Natural events and processes such as volcanoes and seafloor venting eject far more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than mankind could ever hope to. This is simply wrong. The combined greenhouse gas output of even large eruption like Pinatubo, barely registers a blip on the measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere. The combined emissions from humans can be roughly calculated, however, and they do match up nicely with the gradual rise in CO2 levels seen in the atmosphere. Moreover, the isotopic signature of the carbon in the our atmosphere’s CO2, which ever-increasingly matches that of our fossil fuels over that of geologic sources, gives further indication that mankind has become the primary agent for the increase in CO2.
-CO2 is somehow not related to climate change, as various lines of evidence suggest that rises in CO2 levels actually follow temperature changes. This does not, however, mean that CO2 is not a greenhouse gas and that increasing the level of CO2 won’t raise the temperature. (The chemical and physical properties of CO2 can be measured in the laboratory and are well known.) Solar cycles, unrelated to CO2, are more than adequate to get the a climate changing process started. Later, when the temperature has been warm enough, for long enough, to affect the temperature of the oceans, CO2, the solubility of which goes down as temperature goes up, comes out of solution and enters the atmosphere and provides an extra push to the temperature.