Reflections
Clouds over global warming
Sorry but this hullabaloo over climate change and global warming is getting my goat.
I admit that I'm no science guy, and much less a techie. But precisely because of this, the dummies, short for the rest of humanity and me, expect our scientists and intellectuals to get their act together and stop confusing us. Doom-watching is not a favorite pastime for many.
What is it really? Are we supposed to be alarmed by an impending calamity? Why this all-of-a-sudden, hysterical blame on man as cause of this coming catastrophe? It's like our emitting carbon is now a sin!
Or are you, the brighties, supposed to study more, gathering more data, sifting through them, analyzing, comparing, discussing among your clever selves to come out with more educated and realistic consensus?
It's not good that the scientific debate be selective and tilted to favor the alarmists. We have had enough doomsday seers through the years, and hardly any of them turned out to be prophetic.
I still remember the population explosion scare. The only thing that exploded was their wild extrapolations. In fact, in many places, especially in the developed countries, what we have is depopulation.
To date, the global warming doomsayers have made a number of false and inconsistent claims.
Some forecasters said that the year 2007 would be the hottest so far. It turned out not to be so. The lowering and rising of ice levels in the Arctic and Antarctica are at best inconclusive. We should not fuss about them.
I read somewhere that before Al Gore got his Nobel Peace Prize, the English high court ruled that his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, could not be shown in schools without teachers providing additional materials to correct nine "significant errors."
Among the errors: that Pacific atolls are being evacuated because of rising sea levels and that polar bears are drowning because they have to swim up to 60 miles to find ice. The court found no evidence to support these claims.
So far, most findings are largely speculative, derived from computer-simulated models that hardly match with facts.
It would also be interesting to look into the business aspects of this issue. Those peddling doom are generating lots of moolah due to the scare, and are now into heavy venture capital investing.
There's reason to suspect that many scientists are colluding with big business. Also, that this scare is to prime and herd us to some kind of global government.
Making things worse are the inflationary factors infused into the issue by some sectors of the media and a few Church figures. They give their two-cents worth without having a good grasp of the matter.
It seems that some people get riveted to this issue because they would have another battle cry against their favorite culprits—the rich, the powerful, the government, the Establishment, Western world, etc.
In our case, for example, since we are still skirmishing about the population issue, rendering the global warming issue in terrorizing tones would favor those who are for population control.
It would relieve the tired ploys of population controllers of such guises as reproductive health, freedom of choice, women's rights, etc. It would certainly expose the evil of bearing carbon-producing babies.
Also, I would not be surprised if some people end up blaming the President for global warming! That would not be first time. The issue, given a spin, can be another opportunistic swipe at the President.
For my part, I think we all need to remind ourselves to pray. We'll do everything to get to the bottom of this question, using whatever human means we have, but we should never forget to pray.
If there's any grain of truth to the gloomy prognosis, then by all means let's do everything to prepare. But with prayer, we transcend earthly and temporal conditions. We go beyond human fears. With prayer, hope, not disaster, is the ground zero.
But let's really see whether there's rational and scientific basis for the tempest this issue has spawned. Let's avoid "scientific" stretches used to fuel a world terror.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@hotmail.com)