Understanding the left and Paris
I could hold the wisdom of ten worlds in the palm of my hand, tuck the knowledge of all mysteries into the spaces of my mind, and still I'd be no closer to understanding how the cancer of leftism, in a symphony of scandalous asininity, manages to inveigle whole nations into third-world status, the people smiling as they march into that chthonic misery known as socialism.
So often does leftism venture into face-palming stupidity that one could be forgiven for not understanding its appeal. Of course, the folly is in treating leftism as strictly political. It isn't. It's more of a stand-in religion that thrives on creating feelings of despair with cynical victim narratives and other flavors of cultural Marxism. The goal is to politicize everything, to divide and conquer.
We saw it again last week.
Images of polar bears floating on ice cubes were splattered across social networking sites, and the chatter of mainstream media grew into an apocalyptic crescendo as the United States pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Everyone is the victim.
Putting aside that this agreement was unlikely to produce any measurable change in global temperature, or satisfy any need apart from the left's appetite for virtue-signaling, I'll focus instead on the crisis language that led to this agreement in the first place – namely, the factually unsound (read: plain wrong) alarmism of left-wing activists.
Simply put, there is no scientific consensus that human beings have contributed to climate change in any significant way. As time drags on, the number of scientists who believe that human activity is the primary driver of climate change actually decreases.
Between the years 1993 and 2003, 75% of papers found in the Web of Science database held that human activity is responsible for climate change. By 2008, that number plummeted to just 45%.
Naturally, the left attacks any explanation for climate change that isn't sexy enough to be politicized. After all, it's hard to campaign on natural climate cycles and solar activity.
I would be willing to take seriously the left's alarmism if only leftists took it seriously themselves. It seems strange for them to push fanciful solutions like wind and solar that can't come close to meeting global energy demand any time in the near future. So why aren't they supporting nuclear power? If disaster is just around the corner and all.
Then I remembered that this isn't about climate change, and it sure as hell isn't about science. It's about control. It's another issue by which to divide the country and pit citizen against citizen for the benefit of leftism.