It's been a discouraging and disconcerting few weeks on Planet Earth. What with the Melting Globe hysteria, and especially where our American foreign policy is concerned, our headlong plunge into the surreal has been checked only by the lack of a smiling pronouncement from Secretary Rice to the effect that , "Peace is at hand!". It won't be long now.....
So as an antidote, I've been reading Hafiz, my old friend, drunk, as always, on wine and God. (He was a Sufi master and poet, a contemporary of Chaucer.) And, curiously, by one of his usual zig zag paths, he extricated me from our current surreal nightmare. When he reflects, in one of his poems, on his eternal preoccupation with music, dancing, wine and the Beloved (God), he finds one reason in the poverty of spirit of his world:
"Because it is low tide,
A very low tide in this age
And around most hearts.

We are exquisite coral reefs,
Dying when exposed to strange
Elements."

Hafiz says that the element his age yearned for and missed was the gnostic experience of a transcendent deity, "God is the wine-ocean we crave....." Being also of the red hot gnostic variety (there are more of us now that burning at the stake has gone out of fashion), I, of course, agree with my old drinking buddy. Though cavorting in Hafiz' "wine-ocean" is not everyone's thing, one of the derivatives of the experience, a blissful sense of freedom, is an impulse and expression of the human spirit that is common to everyone. It is as basic to our survival and evolution as air is for our bodies. Yet, in much of the world, people must subsist without it's overt expression in their lives.
Americans live in great good fortune: we have, at every moment of every day of our lives, the incalculable gift of living in freedom -- to do, say, create, go, live, and become whatever or wherever we want. In our every public and private gesture we should be champions and exemplars of freedom -- of the infinite possibilities of creativity and happiness that blossom when the individual dignity that freedom engenders gets a chance to stand up and become central to the life of a nation. Only a country whose lifeforce is rooted in freedom of the human spirit could ever even imagine "the pursuit of happiness" as a right and national goal.
Freedom, human rights, the pursuit of happiness are central to our life as a nation. Should they not also be the central tenants of our foreign policy?
I can hear the chortles and chuckles over the teacups at the State Department and the CFR from here. Both these overlapping organizations suffer from institutional Alzheimer's. Not so long ago, America was not too shy, or embarrassed, or too steeped in self-loathing, or other therapeutic misadventures to boldly champion human rights, and freedom, and yes, even the pursuit of happiness -- and the world was better for it. Ask anyone living in a former iron curtain country who now enjoys a free society in their homeland. Ask the million Jews who were able to leave the Soviet Union and emigrate to Israel. Ask the former guests of the Soviet gulag. The list goes on.
For those in our government who may need a refresher course in history and how this freedom and human rights thing is actually done in ernest and with real gusto, I recommend a trip over to the Commentary magazine website ( [www.commentarymagazine.com/cm/ma...] ), and a careful reading of the wonderful 1977 essay by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The Politics of Human Rights", or of virtually any utterance by Jeane Kirkpatrick (but try her 1979 essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards"), or of the more recent acts and words of Ambassador John Bolton. It can be done, there just has to be the will to do it. For a start, it would have been good to have heard that our government had insisted upon, as a prerequisite to all other negotiations, an end to the forced labor camps so cherished by Dear Leader in North Korea. I, for one, am, frankly, tired beyond words of hearing about the depth of Vladimir Putin's alleged soul. It would be a great encouragement, however, to see the institution of a comprehensive program wherein all representatives of our government heartily decried, at every opportunity and in every forum, the erosion of free speech, freedom of the press, and property rights in Russia. It would be refreshing to see such a démarche widely, positively, and loudly reported in the press. One would experience new hope and pride for the future of our own country were our government to stand up against the thuggery as government paradigm that Mr. Putin has imposed over the dead bodies of the heroic Russians who dared to act and speak out as though they were free men and women who had a voice in their country's future.
Please forgive the distance I've rambled, but Hafiz wouldn't leave off dancing.....

Feb 17, 2007 11:38 PM

Oh cheer up.

There was a bright spot to the week - I don't remember hearing a peep out of Carter.

Feb 19, 2007 02:57 AM

The Newsweek article is a classic. Here are a couple of others:

Scientists Ask Why World Climate is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead
The New York Times, 5/21/75
"Sooner or later a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable…The drop in mean temperatures since 1950 in the Northern Hemisphere has been sufficient, for example, to shorten Britain’s growing season for crops by two weeks."
---------
Brace Yourself for Another Ice Age
Science Digest, February 1973
"Baffin Island, located in the Canadian Arctic, now is covered with snowbanks all year after having been snow free for 30 or 40 years prior to the temperature drop. Pack ice around Iceland has now become a serious hindrance to navigation. Warmth loving animals once found in abundance in the northern part of the American Midwest in the early 1900s are settling further south."

Feb 19, 2007 11:50 AM

Just a quick note: the beautiful translation of the Hafiz poem, "Why All This Talk?", from which I quoted some lines in my comment above, was done by David Ladinsky, who consistently captures both the luminous and playful elegance of Hafiz.

Feb 19, 2007 02:31 PM

On the other hand, you might want to look at actual greenhouse modeling. Nothing you speak of contradicts it. Weather still occurs, and the public knows that.

Feb 19, 2007 03:58 PM

Yeah, but it gets better . . . or worse . . .

I especially loved the bit about spreading soot on the glaciers to stop global cooling. What a wonderfully simple idea!

But now, we see its mirror image . . . a suggestion to stop global warming by dumping lots of tiny particles 80,000 feet up in the stratosphere.

I'm having trouble getting my head around all the implications here.

Brian

Feb 19, 2007 04:50 PM

Dirck,

The URLs you tried to use in your comment became corrupted, for reasons I know not (I've had the same problem).

My solution is to use Tiny.url. In this case, I had to copy the NYT address you provided to the box that Tiny.url provides, and it worked. So here's the NYT article Scientists Ask Why World Climate Is Changing; Major Cooling May Be Ahead.

And here's the article Brace Yourself for Another Ice Age (I notice this is a 7.7 meg pdf -- it takes a little time to download, but it's worth it).

In the event the URL I provided in my own comment won't open, here it is again, this time converted courtesy Tiny URL.

Thanks for the info.

Brian

Feb 19, 2007 06:10 PM

Don't look now, but it gets even better: U.N. urged to take action on asteroid threat

Feb 20, 2007 09:47 AM

Re: Iran
The IAEA is due to report to the Security Council tomorrow (21 February) about whether Iran has complied with the SC December resolution and shut down uranium enrichment. I think we've heard this tune before....
There was a fascinating interview with the IAEA's Mohamed ElBaradei in today's Financial Times. The scarriest part, for me, is that he truly seems to believe what he says.

Feb 20, 2007 10:26 AM

You might also enjoy this article, which documents the first climate change scare in 1895. That's not a typo, it was over a hundred years ago, and they've basically been switching between cooling and warming every few decades.

Feb 20, 2007 12:05 PM

Brian,

Thanks for the advice and free debugging.

Cheers,
Dirck

Feb 20, 2007 05:49 PM

The reason America abandoned principal's of freedom and dignity is because IT IS CONTROLLED BY SOME OF THE WORST THUGS TOO! Corporate elitists and international bankers! When you can just print currency out of thin air, is theyr'e anything or anyone you can't buy???It's a pretty simple deduction!

Feb 20, 2007 06:14 PM

It's important to remember that Newsweek is not a scientific publication, and they recently admitted that that article was a mistake.

For more info consult:
[www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=...]

Now all scientific bodies who study the climate have issued statements saying that anthroprogenic global warming is real. None did so for global cooling.

It's a shame this myth keep gets repeated.

Feb 20, 2007 09:21 PM

Rick:

Thanks for proving how correct you are. You use the same tactics as the GW lobby to prove your point - BY SHOUTING! It must mean you have a concensus? If you hate America so much, go live in Russia, or China, or Burma where you can protest as loudly as you want all the way to, and in, jail.

Feb 20, 2007 11:53 PM

"It's important to remember that Newsweek is not a scientific publication.... for more info consult:
[www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=...]

It's a shame this myth keep gets repeated."

It's also important to remember that realclimate is not a scientific publication, but a shill for the climate terrorists. We are glad to see that the 1970s cool fright got debunked - we look forward to the 1990s hot fright going the same way.

Feb 21, 2007 12:02 PM

Boris,

(1) It's great that 30 yrs after publication, Newsweek "admitted that that article was a mistake." We all knew that was the case long ago. How is that relevant?

(2) "It's important to remember" that RealClimate is also "not a scientific publication." One difference, between Newsweek and that RealClimate is that (according to you) Newsweek can at least admit to it's past errors.

Feb 21, 2007 12:27 PM

Boris wrote:

It's important to remember that Newsweek is not a scientific publication, and they recently admitted that that article was a mistake.

I think that's the point -- it was a mistake. While the article itself wasn't a peer reviewed article, it did quote the opinions of well-respected scientists.

I'd be more persuaded that the global cooling thing was purely the figment of the overactive imaginations of a few loopy fringe players if I could find some evidence that those proposing it were roundly criticized by their more sober and learned scientific brethren. It appears to me that the scientific consensus had not much to say in opposition.

Was the scientific consensus back then as critical of those championing Global Cooling as the contemporary scientific consensus is of those renegades who now question the anthropogenic importance of Global Warming?

Boris continues:

For more info consult:
[www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=...] Now all scientific bodies who study the climate have issued statements saying that anthroprogenic global warming is real. None did so for global cooling.

I'm not a climatologist, but I did read the article, and the comments as well. It's a really interesting site, and some really smart people contribute to it. But the notion that all "scientific bodies who study the climate have issued statements saying that anthroprogenic global warming is real" is demonstrably false.

1) Richard Lintzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, is one body who has raised serious questions about several aspects of it (link and link).

2) More recently, Timothy Ball, whose credentials are also impeccable (Ph.D. in Climatology, with "an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition") is another such body (here's a recent article entitled Global Warming: The Cold Hard Facts?.

3) And then, there are those 60 plus Canadian scientists ("accredited experts in climate and related scientific disciplines") who wrote Prime Minister Harper to inform him that GW data is not so secure as lay people have been led to believe ("Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. Yet this is precisely what the United Nations did in creating and promoting Kyoto and still does in the alarmist forecasts on which Canada's climate policies are based.") Read the whole letter.

I could go on, but why beat a dead horse?

I would also like to add that scientific consensus is hardly infallible. Michael Crichton, dismissed out-of-hand at realclimate.com, makes that point in spades, pointing to scientific consensus choosing to ignore dispositive evidence that it (the consensus) was wrong about both puerperal fever and pellagra. (I myself am familiar with a contemporary case in which a theory that was inconvenient to the one preferred by scientific consensus was pointedly ignored, in spite of dispositive evidence of it's validity.)

My point is that science is not subject to the democratic process, and that scientific consensus and scientific truth are two quite different animals.

Boris continues:

It's a shame this myth keep gets repeated.

It may well be that it is a myth to say that there was no scientific consensus about Global Cooling. But so what? Scientific consensus is not infallible; there were experts who sold Global Cooling as plausible; and as far as I know, unlike those who question GW today, there predictions weren't greeted with a firestorm of criticism.

Brian

Feb 22, 2007 12:13 AM

Boris...It's not a myth! The article was actually printed in a major news magazine and distributed throughout the world. It's very similar to that silly "Be Afraid! Be Very Afraid!" article put out by Time Magazine not so long ago. That wasn't a myth either, although it was a shame!
Cheers....theoldhogger

Feb 22, 2007 02:01 AM

Dodgy said:

"It's also important to remember that realclimate is not a scientific publication, but a shill for the climate terrorists."

Well, I never said it was a scientific publication, but the myth of a "global cooling scare" hyped by the majority of climate scientists is plainly and provably false. But I guess someone who thinks poeple who study the climate are "terrorists" it might be a hard thing to grasp.

gh.

Brian said:
"But the notion that all "scientific bodies who study the climate have issued statements saying that anthroprogenic global warming is real" is demonstrably false."

You then argue against my claim by showing individual scientists. Well, Brian, you can find individual scientists who think HIV doesn't cause AIDS or who think evolution is a hoax. I'm talking about things like the AGU, the NOAA, the EPA, the Royal Society, the NAS. Scientific bodies, like I said.

"in spite of dispositive evidence of it's validity."

That may be true for whatever theory you are talking about, but there is no alternate theory to AGW that is not easily disprovable with observations or basic physics.

"It may well be that it is a myth to say that there was no scientific consensus about Global Cooling. But so what?"

So why do people repeat this myth? Why are they desperate to have it believed?

Feb 23, 2007 04:37 PM