Wednesday, November 17, 2004

This guy thinks about this stuff more than I do.

I'm merely a "Market Fundamentalist." But the advocates for the Kyoto Treaty need to deal with these objections:
Global warming', as a semi-empirical entity, is thus an 'empty' phrase, fundamentally unverifiable and unfalsifiable in a strict 'scientific' sense, but one which can be empowered with meaning by those who have the motive to do so. Accordingly, and perhaps not surprisingly, since the early 1990s, this intrinsic linguistic 'emptiness' has been filled by a great Barthesian myth, especially in Europe, but by all those who feel the deep need for such a legitimizing 'science'. The myth asserts that current 'global warming' is both faster and worse than at any previous time, that it is not 'natural', and that it has to be be caused by human hubris, and that the main culprit must be, inevitably, America the Evil Empire. Here we witness one of the clearest examples of the 'culture war' so carefully analysed by Melanie's correspondent from Ohio. The concept has been translated into a matter of faith, transcending "the theoretical use of reason." For the good folk involved, following Kant again, 'global warming' has become neither a matter of knowledge nor of opinion, but wholly a matter of 'morality', nay, of religion. Paradoxically, where 'global warming' is concerned, it is the liberal European elite left that is 'evangelical' and 'fundamentalist', not much-abused Middle America. LEELs are desperate for 'global warming' to be 'true'.

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