Free Viagra

One of the many things that cause me to wrinkle my brow is the reaction of a few people to the coming global heat catastrophe. I don't mean the energy company stooges, they are getting paid, and like all traitors through the ages, 30 pieces of silver to consign your planet to the flames of hell apparently seems like the bargain of a lifetime to them. Poetic justice, but little consolation, in the thought that they are also consigning themselves to the fiery furnace that the once comfortable Planet Earth is about to become. No, forget about them for the moment, counting and recounting their silver, and consider the useful idiots who are doing the work of the energy companies for nothing.

Some of them you can see on this very distinguished Huffington Post, as they sit, waiting impatiently for another article by a million climatologists describing work analysing hundreds of thousands of years of records, and leap to the keyboard to be the first to post and say, yet again, with no evidence whatsoever (except perhaps that their grandfather told them that there was a very hot day in Chicago in 1922), that this is all nonsense. And then there are some foolish people, scientists of various kinds, who know nothing of climatology or ecology or paleontology, but who nevertheless create web sites and petitions to criticise the work of scientists who do know what they are talking about, and provide more fodder for ignorant teenage trolls on HuffPo.

What is this all about? They haven't been bribed and seem not to need to be (it reminds me of the poem, about there being no cause to bribe a scientist considering what they will do unbribed. Or was it journalists?) so why, oh why, are they behaving like this?

Even if you wanted to deny the reality of the work done by some of the finest minds on the planet, and pretend that you thought the Earth wasn't warming up as a result of rising CO2 levels, why would you say so? And say so so vehemently and angrily? Remember the famous Pascal wager? He said, if I am right about global warming and do something about it then I will be saved, if I am wrong and do something, I will have lost nothing.

But these foolish greenhouse deniers seem to think that somehow they will lose everything if America changes from an economy creating energy by burning coal and oil to one using renewable energy sources, and from one mindlessly wasting energy once created, to one that uses more efficient cars, has insulated housing, better designed cities, and so on.

It couldn't be, could it, that these fellows want America to not merely be the most massive producer of Greenhouse gases, but to be perceived to be so, that this is some kind of virility measure to thumb their noses at the rest of the world. We have the biggest army, the most bombs, and the most CO2, whaddya gonna do about it, they seem to be saying - big CO2 production big prick. Nothing else makes any sense does it? But surely it would be cheaper just to give these people free Viagra and let the rest of us get on with saving this fragile planet?

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