Of Pancho Villa, Global Warming, the End of the World, and Other Tall Tales

David Nabhan:

Many long-established families in El Paso and Juarez have stories about Pancho Villa to relate—mine is no different. My great uncle, Massoud, brought before the generalissimo either before, during or after the Battle of Juarez, was given thirty minutes to run through the desert and across the Rio Grande back into El Paso after Pancho relieved him of his boots. Massoud was a mathematical genius and it was in deference to my great uncle’s former professorial chair in Lebanon that he was given the reprieve rather than being shot on the spot. It’s a good story; too bad it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. There were very, very few Americans in Juarez around the time of the battle—since El Paso is literally yards away from Juarez, as close as Minneapolis is to St. Paul. The only Americans foolish enough to remain in Juarez as Villa’s forces approached would have been drunks, lunatics and freebooters. Of course, no family member has ever asked why Uncle Massoud didn’t simply stroll across the bridge—still wearing shoes—days or hours before the battle.

That’s hardly unusual though; people want to believe good stories, even those that make no sense at all.

Take the end of the world, for example. One might be fairly stunned to note how often its coming has been foretold—at least a thousand times over the last few thousand years. The list is almost interminable but includes 1000 AD, 1666 AD, when Halley’s Comet’s tail passed through the atmosphere in 1910, due to the chaos wrought by Y2K in 2000, or in accordance with the Mayan Long Count in 2012. All of these goofy episodes of human foolishness have added up to the same thing: nothing. One might expect that after five thousand years of embarrassing doomsday flops sophisticated people in the twenty-first century wouldn’t sit still for it anymore. Think again, however, for the end is coming, yet again. This time it’s unlike the previous thousand, it’s real. Forget Heaven’s Gate, the Fifth Monarchists and all the rest, it’s “global warming” that’s going to get us when all the other mega-disasters produced ridiculousness. This one, though, is the McCoy.

Except that’s almost certainly not true at all. Global warming most probably is going to wind up in the same trash heap of history with all the rest. It’s a good story, for those eager to look forward to some impending catastrophe, but alas, just like my great uncle’s spine-tingling encounter with desperados, far, far too many things simply don’t add up. And just as one need not be an US/Mexico expert, an historian, a boundary commissioner, a mathematician or a boot maker to realize that Uncle Massoud’s story is most likely a tall tale, likewise, climate scientists and all other such specialists are not required to weigh this particular head-scratcher: only pure, simple common sense is required. And nothing the global warmers say passes that bar.

Where, for example, is the hue and cry to extinguish coal seam fires? For the average person who has been completely taken in by the “climate change” mantra, this is most likely the first time the topic has been seen to be raised in public. And that is odd in the extreme, stunningly strange, in fact. There are 10,000 coal-seam fires burning out of control worldwide. Those fires pump out massive amounts of carbon dioxide — equal to 20% of the entire carbon footprint of the US. Hollywood schedules no concerts to “Put Out the Fires,” even though it would fit nicely on a T-shirt, and no one in Washington has said the first word about it. If common sense rules the argument, decades ago that would have been the first thing on the agenda: extinguish the coal seam fires. How odd that the activists of the world leap-frogged over this astoundingly obvious target and decided that dismantling the West’s industrial infrastructure would be a better place to start.

Most “activists,” however, won’t deign to answer that question, or any other. Their self-assurance is beyond debate. They’ve declared this matter “settled science,” not bothered that the rest of us realize that it took several millennia for humanity to even get the fuzziest picture of the Earth’s true place in the cosmos. It doesn’t trouble them that there are only the very rarest of scientific facts that weren’t gleaned by no less than centuries of endless toil, trial and error by the greatest minds. Their “settled science,” indeed, harkens to a different age, one in which the Earth didn’t spin, when leeches were part of physicians’ medical kit, when plague was kept at bay by pleasant aromas, when Inquisitors did the “settling,” and “science” could get one roasted alive. Unfortunately, nothing correct came out of that epoch, so if the climate change activists turn out to be right, it be will recorded as the most enormously implausible outlier: for only once then in human history will a great truth have been pulled right out of the hat, ipso facto, and required nothing further. This will be the first time something so beautifully and sublimely true had been seen that it didn’t require the normal and customary vetting demanded of everything else: the scientific method. This one exception will have surpassed Newton’s papers on gravity and Einstein’s work on relativity, since both are still to this day being tested and probed for any sign at all of some exception, some error, some nuance—but, not “global warming.” It will never have lingered in the realm of hypothesis, nor waited to be promoted to theory. This incredible and incomparable work of genius will have shot straight to the highest rung of the temple of science, and immediately. It will be law, and all accomplished within the span of a few short years—not decades or centuries or millennia. We are all witnessing something grand taking place…or much, much more likely, something our descendents will use to look back on us to wonder how such gullible people managed to pull up their pants properly.

There are many good and decent people who have been taken in by the faux-altruism peddled by the climate changers, many millions who imagine they’re on the right side of this question, but who might also open their minds to the possibility that they may well have been deceived—and monumentally. Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner, former Chairman , International Commission on Sea Level, calls the entire business “the greatest fabrication in modern history.” The most pre-eminent living scientist on Earth, Freeman Dyson, colleague of Einstein at Princeton, not only doesn’t buy the canard, but has posited that the moderate increase in carbon dioxide over the last decades has contributed to what he calls a “great blooming,” pointing out something that every sixth grader knows, that carbon dioxide, the piston of photosynthesis, is the great engine of life on Earth. A titan such as Dr. Dyson is far from alone: the list is long and impressive. It includes Nobel laureates—such as Dr. Ivar Giaever, of super-conductor fame—and progressive, yet unbrainwashed voices like former president of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore. Insofar as the childish and absurd tactic of pretending to count up how many scientists say “yes” and how many say “no,” this is probably the greatest indication that something other than science is taking place. We’ve all heard the “97% of scientists” fable; as someone who has spent the last two decades exchanging correspondence with “scientists” on four continents, this is proof positive, for me at least, of the surest sign of a propaganda lie.

Read more