"JPG" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 1 Aug 2006 19:31:20 +0100, "Lawrence Jenkins"
wrote:


"JPG" wrote in message
groups.com...

wrote:
Hi. I'm in the United States and interested to know what some of you
British weather enthusuasts have to say about your own perception of
global climate change. Perhaps a non-American perspective might prove
enlightening to me. Here, in contrast to Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient
Truth', there seems to be a strong anti-opinion held by a sizeaable
minority that global warming is either hype and/or a conspiracy put on
by the left, allegorized in Michael Crichton's novel 'State of Fear'.

For the American Christian right, science in general produces a number
of inconvenient truths, not least Darwin's Theory of Evolution by
Natural Selection. Of course this is "inconvenient" because it is
contrary to a literal reading of Genesis to which, according to recent
statistics, more than half the population of the US subscribe.

Karen Armstrong in the Guardian wrote a very good piece on the
anti-science attitude of Bush and his neocon cronies yesterday. The
article is he

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...833794,00.html

What I found particularly scary from her article was this passage,
particularly the last sentence:

"The fundamentalists' rejection of science is deeply linked to their
apocalyptic vision. Even the relatively sober ID theorists segue easily
into Rapture-speak. "Great shakings and darkness are descending on
Planet Earth," says the ID philosopher Paul Nelson, "but they will be
overshadowed by even more amazing displays of God's power and light.
Ever the long-term strategist, YHVH is raising up a mighty army of
cutting-edge Jewish End-time warriors." They all condemn the attempt to
reform social ills. When applied socially, evolutionary theory "leads
straight to all the woes of modern life", says the leading ID ideologue
Philip Johnson: homosexuality, state-backed healthcare, divorce,
single-parenthood, socialism and abortion. All this, of course, is
highly agreeable to the Bush administration, which is itself
selectively leery of science. It has, for example, persistently ignored
scientists' warnings about global warming. Why bother to implement the
Kyoto treaty if the world is about to end? Indeed, some fundamentalists
see environmental damage as a positive development, because it will
hasten the apocalypse."

Of course, Karen Armstrong is putting her own, left-biased slant on it,
but I would think most people can see many, very scary truths in it.

If most Americans can deny a scientific theory (TOE) that is 150 years
old and has been accepted by nearly all scientists, most churches and
all other western nations, and it is backed up by evidence in the form
of fossils, common descent and genetics amongst others, then they will
have little problem denying a theory (AGW) that has considerably less
evidence and provenance - particularly as they see it threatening their
standard of living and individual wealth.

Martin


Oh and you think India , China, Pakistan, the Middle east and so on are
going to be fantastic green stewards of mother earth? Grow up.


What have India, China etc got to do with what I was relaying and
commenting on, which was a possible explanation for the behaviour of
the American government regarding AGW? And why did you feel you had
to personally insult me?





Yep you are right. I was a tad over the top, please accept my apologies.