Mayans and the end of the world

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Mayans know - but if they were so smart, why didn’t they predict their own demise?

On 21 December 2012 the Mayans said the Earth and its inhabitants will undergo a ‘physical or spiritual transformation‘, which includes, but is not limited to, being consumed by a black hole. It was ever thus.

Neither side of the global warming ‘debate’ has been well served by the media. The media on the one hand, aims to trivialize the issue while on the other, depicts the worst case in apocalyptic terms.

It’s one of the great post-modern conundrums that even though we have more mediums to transmit news and information, we have less intelligent content. It’s as if the public domain has been seized by FM radio jocks, whose pranks and cackling laughter, remind us that there were good reasons why we didn’t hang around the class idiot at school.

With the decline of text and the rise of the image; with the abandonment of reason in favour of opinion, we have created our own Camelot. We live in a time when divination and the personification of data to ‘prove’ an ideological point have produced ‘magical media facts’. These ‘facts’ congregate and become ‘proofs’ for a vision of a dystopian future or no future, as the case may be.

I have no idea whether the world is getting warmer or getting colder. Does anyone know how a carbon emissions trading scheme works? Is what was reported as fact yesterday, still a fact today or has it been crushed by a louder and more exciting opinion? What would George Orwell, who had such a keen eye for cant and humbug, made of this?

In the last 15 years there has been considerable work done on global weather patterns but we are still a very long way from understanding the mindboggling complexity of these systems. Even so, there appears to be enough science to make some reasonable calls based on probability. The most consistent is a rise in temperature over the next century of about 2C.

I have been skeptical about global warming because much of the debate has been hijacked on the pro-warming side by the anti-population and anti-immigration lobbies. Both display overt anti-democratic and far right ideals.

Over the last few years there have been some large claims made by the global warmers and their ilk and they include:

• Recently the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research Climate experts updated their predictions saying that sea levels will rise an average of 3.2 millimeters (0.125 inches) per year causing global devastation.

• Millions of thriving colonies of bees have been disappearing every year without leaving a trace. Seemingly healthy communities fly off never to return.

• A spate of small earthquakes in British Columbia’s remote northeastern corner were caused by a controversial technique called Fracking used to extract natural gas from shale rock, says a report by a Canadian newspaper.

• Human population growth is a major contributor to global warming, given that humans use fossil fuels to power their increasingly mechanized lifestyles.

• Half of the world’s population could face severe food shortages by the end of this century as rising temperatures shorten the growing season in the tropics and subtropics.

• NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent and severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth's climate warms.

• A warmer world is producing a sicker world, health experts reported citing surges in Kenya, China and Europe of such diseases as malaria, heart ailments and dengue fever.

• The drought in Texas in 2011 and the heat wave in Russia in 2010 are among weather extremes that “certainly would not have occurred” without global warming, according a U.S. government climate scientist.

• A study finds two-thirds of the world's polar bears will be killed off by 2050 because of thinning sea ice from global warming in the Arctic.

The link below was posted on the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association and pretty much sums up the catastrophist point of view.

http://www.nswnma.asn.au/news/33356.html

The choice proffered by the hardliners, is that we dismantle the capitalist means of production in favour of more agrarian pursuits, or be trampled underfoot by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalpyse.

Over the last 20 years there has been a shift in radical thinking. The hardliners in the environment movement realised the era of revolutions was over and the era of catastrophes had begun.

They took Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History (1992) to literally mean the end of history rather than the end of a dialectical tussle between capitalism and communism. With the communists vanquished. The idea of progress lay dormant.

In what must still be one of the strangest pairings in modern ideological history, the now bored far left put down their highly abstruse books by French post modernist writers and joined forces with the far left of the environment movement. Their mission? To save the world. The enemy? Capitalism.

Their ‘meta’ thinking – of rolling psychology, systems thinking, sociology, biology, climate analysis, Chaos theory and Marxist economics in to one discipline to explain everything - is an embarrassing nonsense.

This intellectual summer pudding can only be understood in the context of a far wider and profound retreat from reason throughout the west. Across a broad range of issues, progressive intelligentsia and commentators have dumped the rules of evidence, objectivity and rationality in favour of fantasy, irrationality and up side down thinking.

Why do the hardline environmentalists have such a monopoly on virtue? This is usually the preserve to charlatans and the Catholic Church. Anyone who opposes the new guard is a right-winger and a neo-conservative. In other words, these are not propositions to be debated in a rational way, but are seen as self-evident truths with the infallibility of religious dogma.

As Paul Tillich wrote more that 50 years ago in The Courage to Be, we live in an anxious age at a time when the Church is at its weakest and where much media attention and anxiety is paid to the global movement of people. From a sociological perspective, it is not unusual that some have created Mother Earth as their new deity. But this modern day ‘Cult of Reason’, has some decidedly unreasonable aspects.

While I recognize the precautionary principle of acting as if global warming was real, I am also keenly aware that the most vocal heralds of this new Gaia are not conservatives in the Edmund Burke sense but rather in the visage of Robespierre.