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| “What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!” |
Last week, Hirhurim, a nice Torah blog by Rabbi Gil Student, published a guest post by Rabbi Yonatan Neril on the value of energy efficiency and sustainability. There was one section expressing concern about global warming.
A lot of right-wing Republicans would be reading that. Even as I began scrolling to the comments, I was already playing my “suit up” montage in my head.
Sure enough, two skeptical comments:
Here’s my first comment. I stated my viewpoint, but saved my ammo for their responses. I also posted my full name. I mean what I say, kids.Silly Mordechai: *Everything* is caused by global warming:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
To put it simply, there is no evidence whatsoever that hurricanes are caused or exacerbated by “climate change.” There have been far worse hurricanes and hurricane seasons in the past few centuries. We live in an era where we think we are somehow special. Of course, ’twas always so: Kohelet says so.
Sure enough, they came right at me:Mordechai and Nachum: Rabbi Neril is appropriately cautious regarding the impacts of global warming on Hurricane Sandy. His more general argument, that anthropogenic global warming is a progressing disaster, is undeniable. Follow Rabbi Neril’s references on extreme heat waves, storms, floods, and drought. Intense human suffering due to global warming is already here.
I find it tragic that so many American conservatives mock the threat of global warming. Their denial is empirically wrong and morally irresponsible. We urgently need to begin efforts toward mitigation and adaptation.
Yishar koach to Rabbi Student for giving a platform to Rabbi Neril’s kiddush ha-Shem.
He wasn't done:“that anthropogenic global warming is a progressing disaster, is undeniable”
It isn’t “undeniable” just because you say so. We’re not talking about the Holocaust here, much as people would like to say so.
Here’s a random fact: In the times of the dinosaurs, the planet was a lot hotter than it is now or will be for some time in the future. (We are technically in an ice age now, and will probably be in what’s commonly called an “ice age” in the near future.) And life on Earth was *booming.* Have you ever seen a brontosaurus? They managed, somehow.
Oh, and all those huge climate swings happened completely independently- there were no people around to have anything to do with it. And here people are panicked over computer models that *may* show a swing of a degree.
And then he got backup:“I find it tragic that so many American conservatives mock the threat of global warming.”
Maybe if so many of the “solutions” weren’t so blatantly political (and useless), they’d be less suspicious of the Cassandras.
“Their denial is empirically wrong”
Again, on your say-so.
“morally irresponsible.”
Whose morals? Perhaps micromanaging people’s lives is immoral.
“We urgently need to begin efforts toward mitigation and adaptation.”
To paraphrase Fiddler on the Roof, if China and India would agree…
I saw all this coming, and I had seen it many times before, but it still made my blood boil. I unloaded on “Nachum” Thurday night and I was still angry about it after the Shabbat night se'udah.Thanks Nachum, I knew I could count on you to weigh in and provide some sanity here. :)
Why doesn’t Rabbi Neri advocate that people get rid of their personal automobiles? Or is that set for a future post? If the threat is so serious and imminent, he should call for, at least as a ‘midat hassidut’, baalei nefesh immediately getting rid of gasoline powered vehicles, due to the many problems they leave in their wake.
I signed it “Best of luck” because I had no intention of following up. But Friday morning I saw his response:Nachum — it’s also the say-so of NASA, NOAA, AMS, NAS, AGU, ACS, and every other major scientific organization with an official position on the matter.
It’s also the say-so of this review of recent research on extreme weather, which concludes:
Many lines of evidence — statistical analysis of observed data, climate modelling and physical reasoning — strongly indicate that some types of extreme event, most notably heatwaves and precipitation extremes, will greatly increase in a warming climate and have already done so. […]History will render a clear judgement as to which of us is right, Mr. Nachum. I sincerely wish it would be you.
In 1988, Jim Hansen famously stated in a congressional hearing that “it is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.” We conclude that now, more than 20 years later, the evidence is strong that anthropogenic, unprecedented heat and rainfall extremes are here — and are causing intense human suffering.
As for the best course of action, my field is physics, not economics. David Frum made a strong argument for a carbon tax the other day, but I have no idea whether that’s the smartest way to reduce our carbon emissions. I just know that the problem is urgent.
Best of luck.
I took “easier to swallow” to mean that I had swayed him. That was enough to keep me in it to the end. And the suggestion that “the data was consciously fudged” was enough to make me angry again.Another thing that would make it easier to swallow would be if we didn’t know that the data was consciously fudged. “Hockey stick,” anyone?
I was worried that I might be going too far by accusing him of slander and not being a true conservative—not “too far” in the sense of being inappropriate, but in the sense of giving him an opening. But I posted it anyway, to let him know how he angered me.Nachum — “consciously fudged”? You really believe that tens of thousands of climate scientists are in on a hoax? You should be careful with slander like that.
If you’re still hung up on “climategate” from 2009, it might help to know that eight independent investigations of the incident found no misconduct by the involved scientists. And regardless of that, here’s how the AMS responded when the charges were first made:
The beauty of science is that it depends on independent verification and replication as part of the process of confirming research results. … For climate change research, the body of research in the literature is very large and the dependence on any one set of research results to the comprehensive understanding of the climate system is very, very small. Even if some of the charges of improper behavior in this particular case turn out to be true — which is not yet clearly the case — the impact on the science of climate change would be very limited.A true conservative would never trade an entire field of science for a conspiracy theory. Especially with the climate of the planet at stake, we have a moral responsibility to take this threat seriously.
He didn’t respond.
I’d like to think that, given the attitude he showed earlier, his lack of response is a sign that I crushed him.
Till next time...
First of all, there's no such thing as a brontosaurus, he meant apatosaurus. Apatosaurus evolved in a warmer climate. The eras of the dinosaurs also saw multiple extinction events caused by natural climate changes. As for today, our biosphere evolved in a certain range of temperatures, which mostly varied with changes in the Earth's orbit. We're now rocketing out of that range because of an anthropogenic greenhouse effect. And as the biosphere faces instability over the coming century, the planet will have to sustain about 9 billion people. We're playing Russian roulette with civilization.
According to the writer, hurricane Sandy came to due to ‘climate change’. Did that cause the great hurricane of 1938 that hit New York as well? As Rav Belsky shlit”a mentioned in the OU webcast the other day (app. seventy minutes into the event), we should introspect and examine if we have to do teshuvah, when we are hit with catastrophe, G-d forbid, as our tradition teaches. As the Rambam tells us, we should not ascribe such things to mikreh, as if they just ‘happened’ on their own, and that to do such is cruelty, אכזריות. Recently, the Governor of NY, the state which incurred the most damage from the storm, reacted angrily in a knee/jerk reaction when a Rabbi connected the storm hitting it to the immoral laws recently instituted there, pushed through by the chief executive’s arm twisting. Instead of admitting that he erred and invited Divine wrath upon NY, he blamed ‘climate change’. Similarly with the great drought across large portions of the US this past summer. On the other hand, in Tanach, the King of Nineveh took a strong stand and led his people to do teshuvah, repent, after they went ‘off the derech’, and thus saved them.
Let us please hold back a bit and not automatically always jump on the bandwagon of the environmentalists, as parts of their platform are problematic, even if this Rabbi and others like him want us to accept it in its entirety, lock, stock, and barrel, without question. We need to take it slower and examine things in accordance with our tradition, and with guidance from our gedolim, rather than just accepting the whole left wing platform, after it has been given a thin Jewish veneer, which can be quite shallow.