Junto Boys

SPORTSWRITERS FIND ENLIGHTENMENT TOO

I couldn't let pass this Sports Illustrated article linked by Drudge. Writer, Alexander Wolff, finds a way to get the global warming issue into a sports magazine by noting a couple of true-believers running their cars on bio-diesel and plans for new carbon-neutral stadiums. What I like is that the scientific community may be split (click here), but Sports Illustrated has closed the question.

Global warming is not coming; it is here. Greenhouse gases -- most notably carbon dioxide produced by burning coal, oil and gas -- are trapping solar heat that once escaped from the Earth's atmosphere. As temperatures around the globe increase, oceans are warming, fields are drying up, snow is melting, more rain is falling, and sea levels are rising.

You'd think a major magazine owned by a giant media conglomerate would have a fact-checker who would explain the difference between Global Warming purported to be the rise in temperature of 1 degree per 100 years and El Nino, a weather pattern that is the cause for the recent warming.

Global warming is also leading to more dramatic swings in the weather in some areas.

Really? Well Mr. Scientist, why only some areas if the whole planet is effected? Does that mean that global warming doesn't impact the whole planet?

A warming planet doesn't create hurricanes, but it does make them stronger and last longer. Tropical storms become more powerful over a warmer Gulf, turning a category 4 storm, for example, into a category 5, like Katrina, which transformed the symbol of sports in New Orleans, the Superdome, into an image of epic disaster.

Nice that he got the Superdome angle in there. It is a sports magazine remember? But if there was any question whether this was reporting or advocacy, let's note that he presented Katrina as a Category 5 storm that destroyed New Orleans when, in fact, the storm was only a category 3 when it reached land, less powerful than Andrew and even Opal. New Orleans was destroyed almost a day after the storm when the levees broke. And other than some wind damamge to the roof, the majority of damage to the Superdome was due to the people living inside it.

Unlike many other pressing environmental concerns -- pollution, water shortages, overpopulation, deforestation -- global warming is by definition global. Every organism on the planet is already feeling its impact.

Every organism is feeling it? I'm an organism and I don't notice it. Maybe he should have said sensitive organisms.

"There are many important environmental battles to be fought," says Bill McKibben, the Vermont-based writer, activist and passionate cross-country skier. "But if we lose this one -- which we're doing -- none of the others matter. It's crunch time."

Think about how closely this quote resembles Pat Buchanan's culture war speech at the 1992 convention. In fact, you could use Pat's issue by simply changing a few words. It's old-fashioned country preacher with a vision of Armageddon. The difference is that Buchanan was defending American culture, something the elite media doesn't value. The current preachers keep the approach and insert secular socialist ideas. They don't even hide it.

"In the environmental movement there's way too much preaching to the choir," says Ken Rakoz of Centralia, Wash., who built the first biodiesel-powered dragster. "There are people sitting on the fence, and Joe Sixpack doesn't really know about [biodiesel] until we do something like racing."

See, the man is a missionary trying to convert as many heathens as possible. In the old days, we gave the savages shiney objects and eventually firewater. Today's eco-church presents the firewater right away.

It seems like the current cult is trying to influence our government policy and so blatantly that it must violate the separation of church and state provision that I always heard about when Buchanan spoke.