Archive for the ‘ACT Contributor’ Category
My latest blog is always available at: https://donallan.wordpress.com. To make direct contact e-mail me at: dca@netspeed.com.au
Global warming evangelist hits his straps
I think ‘hits his straps’ an apt way to describe public intellectual Professor Clive Hamilton’s recent statement about global warming. The phrase sprang to mind when I received a short e-mail from a sceptic that said ‘Right now (9.20am Sunday 27 April so13) Professor Hamilton is on ABC Radio National (846) advocating a campaign of civil disobedience to force people to believe in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming!
Horses as you know have four walking styles – walk, canter, trot and gallop. Over the years Dr Hamilton in his Green racing colours, has adopted each of the four styles when inveighing against people who do not share his view about global warming.
Indeed with his call for civil disobedience not only has Professor Hamilton hit his straps he seems to have become an environmental zealot. His statement is reminiscent of those religious zealots who, over the centuries, predicted the world was doomed if both sceptics and unthinking unbelievers did not abandon the use of fossil fuels.
Like all zealots, Professor Hamilton’ is dogmatic about global warming: he and people who think like him are right; everybody else is wrong. He argues also that to believe anything else is to deny climate change truth and engage in wishful thinking.
Among Professor Hamilton’s many qualifications, although he seems to have spent most of his time working in the political field like many other oracles on global warming, are history, psychology, pure mathematics and economics. Like other people of Green political convictions and despite his many qualifications Professors Hamilton’s vision of the future seems one dimensional: doom clouds his horizon.
Helping to formulate that view is that I find it strange that a man who has spent a great deal of his working life in the political economic field seems blind to the fact that it is unlikely he and his fellow Green believers would be here today enjoying the fruits (read progress) grown by past wishful thinkers. Stranger still is the suggestion of the Greens that the landscape be polluted with monstrous wind turbines whose capacity to provide energy is limited and their suggesting that the roof of every house be covered with solar panels.
But perhaps the strangest thing of all is that I have yet to hear Green economists like Professor Hamilton, suggest that as doomsday approaches how will they save all species of fauna and flora current at the time. I wonder why? Perhaps it’s because their vision of the future is limited by their lack of imagination. Is there no wishful thinker like Noah among them? It seems not.
But of the people among them some are people of influence whom I would describe either as hard wired for alarm or hot gospellers for calamity and catastrophe. As unlike optimists as chalk is to cheese, they are perpetual pessimists who, having spent so much time opposing sensible ideas about global warming from informed sceptics, of whom there are many, that they now can’t see the wood for the trees.
Let me end by saying that despite the doom laden predictions of zealots from the past, who allegedly had God on their side, the world is still with us.
Comment welcome
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