2011:
As you probably know, I’m skeptical of the Global Warming hype, not least because its marketers and packagers keep changing the name. First, it was “Global Warming,” then “Climate Change” (as if climate does anything besides change) and lately it’s “Global Climate Disruption.” I’m also skeptical that it is man made, and I think the dishonesty of some of the scientists in the field, not to mention the packagers and marketers, leaves me cold (clever pun, eh?). So, for instance, when I see evidence of rising sea levels that doesn’t always refer me back to the same remote island nobody knows anything about except that it might be a case of erosion and not rising sea levels, I will begin to take our melting ice caps more seriously.
Go here to read the rest.
June 1, 2017:
American Right Wing Id Monster joins Nicaragua and Syria in rejecting Climate Accord–just for spite.
And just days after Francis gave him a copy of Laudato Si, begged him to listen, and Trump lied that he would read it. (It’s longer than 140 characters and Trump’s name is not in it anywhere. Boring.)
Me: I boringly think wisdom lies with listening to the Holy Father. But of course, the kneejerk response of the revanchist Trumpified Catholic is “Francis is not speaking infallibly, you know! We’re talking about Prudential Judgment! You can ignore him on climate change! It’s not like he’s a climate expert!”
Go here to read the rest.
Anyhow, it’s all virtue signal and no truth.
That (Mark who vs. Mark who) sounds like a battle of wits wherein both antagonists enter the field unarmed.
FYI – The climate models consistently have been wrong. In 2008, Algore shrieked, “The entire North polarized’ cap will DISAPPEAR in five years.” That would have been four years ago in 2013. FYI up there it is still frozen.
Recent headlines on the net.
8 May 2017: New study finds Earth has not warmed for the past 19 years.
4 May 2017: Top physicist says, “‘Climate Change’ is no more credible than magic.” After studying 15 years of the lack of it, so-called climate scientists are more convinced than ever of global warming. because it’s religion not science.
20 April 2017: Save Mother Earth! Screw The Middle Class. Instapundit: “Expensive power and gasoline disproportionately hurts poorer families and other lower-income groups since the poor tend to spend a higher proportion of their incomes on “basic needs” like power.
“When essential goods like electricity or gasoline becomes more expensive, the cost of producing goods and services that use electricity increases, effectively raising the price of almost everything. The higher prices are ultimately paid for by consumers, not industries.”
Mark Shea v. Mark Shea: The epic Battle of the Blowhards!
Mark Shea is a nice cautionary tale. He is one iteration of what you can become when truth no longer matters.
Comment of the week F7! Take ‘er away Sam!
I’ve often said that I would buy tickets to a debate between Mark Shea c. 2005 and Mark Shea today.
I’ve often said that I would buy tickets to a debate between Mark Shea c. 2005 and Mark Shea today.
Promoted by Vince McMahon.
Mark Shea is a nice cautionary tale. He is one iteration of what you can become when truth no longer matters.
I don’t think so. A dozen years ago, I’d have told you he was a satisfactory producer of magazine journalism when he had Brian St. Paul editing his work. Unmediated, he often said very ill-considered things, something Amy Welborn did not do. Shea’s more a cautionary tale about what happens to a man when his inner life has crucial features in common with Rosie O’Donnell’s. My mother used to say what happens to you as you age is that you turn into a caricature of yourself. Shea, like Rod Dreher, is an ’emotions-based’ writer. It’s just that his most salient emotion is rage rather than social anxiety. No clue what he’s so angry about at age 60.
He’s a sad guy who needs prayers. Totally muddled thinking, name-calling, and as this post points out, extremely inconsistent and often contradictory in his positions, Mark would have benefitted greatly from an education that taught him *how* to think, argue, and persuade.
Speaking of Mark, could someone please interpret this post for me:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2017/06/words-gop-favors-death-panels.html
I pulled up the referenced doc, and couldn’t find what the tweet was referring to. Plus, I saw nothing in the tweet or the doc that suggested anything about race. If it was anyone other than Mark, I’d assume I’m missing something. But I still want to make sure.
Its in the March scoring footnote F:
https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/115th-congress-2017-2018/costestimate/americanhealthcareact.pdf
“f. Consists mainly of the effects of changes in taxable compensation on revenues. CBO also estimates that outlays for Social Security benefits would decrease by about $3 billion over the 2017-2026 period.”
I assume lower social security benefits would be due to fewer baby boomers. I am 60 and in 26 I would be 69. A lot of boomers will have trooped off behind the Grim Reaper by that time. Of course none of this has to do with race and how Shea interprets this as the bill killing people off is beyond me.
Of course none of this has to do with race and how Shea interpret this as the bill killing people off is beyond me.
You do wonder if he’s blotto when he writes some of this stuff.
Ah, footnote. I didn’t notice that in the tweet that it was a footnote. Knowing Mark’s disdain for people who get hung up over things like footnotes when it comes to Amoris laetitia, I didn’t think to look there. As for the gist of it, I have no clue where the WaPo reporter or Mark came up with the spin. That has got to be one of the most false and meanest interpretations one could come up with.
Art: Many people are angry with God for creating them.
How does Mark think there’s ever going to be any kind of socialized healthcare without death panels? Money isn’t infinite. One quickly gets the impression he was never much of a math major.
How does Mark think there’s ever going to be any kind of socialized healthcare without death panels? Money isn’t infinite. One quickly gets the impression he was never much of a math major.
I think you mean econ. Scarcity and cost are economic concepts. AFAIK, the biographical blurbs on Mr. Shea’s books are opaque about how he earns a living or ever earned a living and about what he’s studied over the years. Others who write vocationally or avocationally (under their own name) tend to be more transparent about that.
“Art: Many people are angry with God for creating them.”
Yep, and for giving them free will.
Mark has now answered apparently. The popes did it.
I am surprised he acknowledged that he changed his mind because for Mark the past tends not to extend much beyond his last post on any subject. The idea that the opinion of a Pope on a scientific question is of any great significance is foreign to Catholicism. Mark appeals, with his reference to the discredited 97% of all scientists agree on global warming, to a scientific consensus that simply does not in reality exist:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425232/climate-change-no-its-not-97-percent-consensus-ian-tuttle
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/#4cef5267485d
The most alarming aspect of the global warming/climate change movement is that it has all the attributes of a religion in that any facts which tend to argue against it are simply ignored or shouted down. The term “global warming denier” is meant to shut down debate and apes the term “Holocaust denier” thus implying that those who dispute Global Warming are to be treated with the same contempt as those who deny the Holocaust deservedly receive. The mantra that “the science is settled” is particularly disturbing since science is never settled being ever open to modification as our knowledge grows. Such aspects of the global warming/climate change movement are not the methods of science but rather the mode of heresy hunters, both religious and political, down through the ages. In regard to his comments about the withdrawal from the Paris Accords, that is precisely how Mark is sounding.
Mark from August 2014:
Back before it was called “global climate disruption”, “global climate change”, or even “global warming” it was called the greenhouse effect and we were all assured 2000 was going to inaugurate the environmental Judgment Day:
The conclusion, conveyed with great authority by several big-league climatologists from government and private research organizations, is terrible: by the year 2000, the atmosphere and weather will grow warmer by several degrees and life – animal, plant, human – will be threatened. The experts say that melting ice caps, flooded cities, droughts in the corn belt and famine in the third world could result if the earth’s mean temperature rises by a mere two or three degrees.
I am constantly struck by how the climate change argument perpetually arrays itself in the language of faith and not science. Priests in white lab coat vestments utter prophecies “with great authority”. Apocalyptic language abounds. People perpetually speak of their belief and disbelief in global warming. Indulgences called carbon credits are offered. As somebody who knows little of the science but something of the language of faith, I find it fascinating. Nobody ever asks me if I believe in hydraulics or jet propulsion
https://quinersdiner.com/2014/08/19/climate-apocalypse-forecast-in-1986/
Mark now holds as heretics the people who hold the same views on global warming that he held less than three years ago.
The most alarming aspect of the global warming/climate change movement is that it has all the attributes of a religion
Disagree. It has all the attributes of fashions among teenagers, like a great many things on the progressive laundry list. It defines in-groups and out-groups among a certain sort of bourgeois.
I have no doubt there are serious scientists who think the data says this is a problem. The trouble is, academic is a social monoculture and among everyone they know it’s a mark of being low-class to dissent. Dissenters are people so prominent in their field other academics can’t touch ’em (Richard Lindzen), or are tarred by the media as oil-industry stooges (Willie Soon), or decide to leave academe (Judith Curry), or work in industry (Steve McIntyre). You’d think the scandals out of the University of East Anglia would give people pause, but they do not.
Here’s an interesting question: who is paying Michael Mann’s legal bills? Very few people would ever file a defamation suit against an opinion journalist in response to a random insult. E. Howard Hunt once said after his one experience with a defamation suit, he would never get involved with another one no matter what someone said about him. My wager is that some portion of the sorosphere is bankrolling Mann’s lawyers for essentially political reasons.
As a left coaster and an eco-wacker, does Mark Shea support carbon free nuclear? He cannot even say or write the word! The only thing he merits is being ignored as an ignoramus.
I don’t know that your two points are mutually exclusive, Don & Art. Religions can be fashionable.
My problem with the ‘consensus of good people’ argument is that, aside from sniffing of unchristian teaching, it defies common sense. I’m supposed to believe that all of the scientists who accept MMGW are pure of heart, while all who question it are necessarily rotten to the core? That’s just stupid. Who would believe that? Other than almost everyone who argues for MMGW, Mark, and, IIRC, Pope Francis. That, to me, is a problem.
“The idea that the opinion of a Pope on a scientific question is of any great significance is foreign to Catholicism.”
True, but all too common amongst many Catholics today.
For those curious, Mike Flynn has a worthwhile post on this matter.