"The science is clear ... ":

 

Hey! ... No one Mentioned the 2'nd Coming included this!

"The science is clear: we need to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees by the end of the century,” the UN Secretary-General has declared.

Oh. Well then; glad that's settled. Of course, that's been settled since the Reagan era, but has changed nothing, well, alright, it has. It has accelerated the rush by every OECD nation to allocate to itself the remaining stores of fossil fuels so that their citizens can lord it over the rest of humanity. 

The science is clear all right.

I still remember my first so-called "holy" Communion as a 7-year-old little Catholic boy. My mother was explaining the drill. I'd had frightening dreams the night before and she was trying to  assuage my trepidation, completely baffled by my hesitancy at participating in such a bloody ritual. Pre- Pope John the XXIII, Catholic dogma wasn't the loose arrangement it is today. The year before I had witnessed Rosemary Casey walking down the aisle and, finding the taste of the Eucharist not to her liking, spat it out. The panic and consternation of the adults around her was frightening ... the priest had to halt the service and performed an entire ritual complete with holy water and ablutions along with brandishing the censers burning church incense to purify the area and to pacify the deity so as to atone for the blasphemy a seven-year-old had committed. You see, in Catholic dogma to this day, the bread and wine are not symbolic; they are, through the miraculous process of transubstantiation, the bread made flesh and the wine turned into the blood of the Christ, your holy redeemer.

Even in 1959 we had TV. Saturday morning TV meant my parents could have a break from the kids who were transfixed by the new medium (my Mom was pregnant with her seventh by the time I was 7). But although Saturday morning cartoons became a fixture, it was Tarzan we really liked ... swinging through the trees on those vines, he could traverse huge swaths of jungle and arrive as though by magic in the midst of the startled natives who somehow had never devised, nor copied, this mode of transport. What he had swung down to stop the Saturday before my first communion was a group of predatory white folk from being boiled in a pot for the cannibals' evening meal.

And there was Mom telling me with astonishing sangfroid that the next morning I was to ingest the flesh of a dead man who was god ... somehow. In an effort to comprehend why, and how this was a good thing, I asked the simple, and, to me, obvious question, "But isn't that cannibalism?" 

I had no idea how I'd ended up on the floor halfway across the room until I felt my cheek smarting and my mother towering over me reaching down to grab me by the scruff of the neck and bestow a hail of blows while her face, red with rage, was distorted into a mask of malevolence. Why, I had no idea. All I'd done was asked a simple question.

Well, like today, in 1959, the science was clear. Outside of Tales from the Crypt, the deceased don't get up and sashay forth from the tomb. Should they do so, it can only be because they had been buried alive. And should that be so, you can't take a piece of bread and turn it into a lump of flesh, and even if you could, you wouldn't/shouldn't be chowing down on it.

But none of that mattered.

Yes, the science is clear. But that doesn't make the science rite, and rite is might, so parents across the globe still tell their children the same stories, still beat their little helpless bodies if they question the absurd "truths" they impart that make no sense to a child that is trying to form a picture of the world and reality and piece together the puzzle that is Nature and its relationship to it.

The science is clear.

But if children try to comprehend it, and try to make clear how fairy tales of supernatural beings living in their midst, sitting on their shoulders and telling them, tempting them, or guardian angels protecting them invisibly although they're denizens from a celestial realm, doing battle for your soul, why is never exactly explained (what do they get out of it? the praise of the yahweh?). What good is this god they're always talking about when he is the reason your parents, who you thought loved and protected you, throw you around the room like a rag doll if you wonder why this being would want you to eat his flesh and drink his blood? Activities, it was apparent from the Tarzan films, that only primitive savages indulge in?  

You may say that that was then, this is now.

Really?

A group of maddened zealots, adults, mind you, not feeble-minded children, fed on tales that a lard-assed pot-bellied, balding conman, liar, convicted fraudster and tax cheat, is the second coming of that same Christ who my mother couldn't understand why I wasn't relishing the thought of taking a nice chunk of his flesh to chew on (we weren't allowed a swig of his blood in those days, that was a privilege only the priests enjoyed), laid siege to the Nation's Capital with all the maniacal relish of a medieval mob hurling stones at a heretic that took the name of the lord thy god in vain.

Hordes of humans rallied to this blasphemous (even to a lapsed catholic, the very idea of The Donald as The Christ is so off the chart, I can think of no other word for it than blasphemy) apostate, and the "fathers" of the evangelical churches simply laughed up their sleeves. There came no outraged howl against this heresy; au contraire, they welcome the news that this bully Christ, now so weighed down by corpulence that a crucifixion would be impossible, is walking amongst us.

And the UN Secretary-General thinks that because "The science is clear", the human race will somehow curtail its self-immolation on the altar of Greed? Greed that has replaced God in the churches around the world, so much so that the very term christianity now means the freedom to crush entire countries, as GW Bush proclaimed he had been instructed to do, again without the least outcry from the so-called religious community, into the dust to satisfy religion's lust for gold and thirst for oil, conquest and rapine?

Millions of ADULTS, without it having to be beaten into them, have adopted the belief that the Christ came to earth, and as Commander-in-Chief of the largest military machine mankind has ever amassed, dropped a tonnage of bombs on the helpless heads of innocent women and children to the tune of, by 2018, one bomb every twelve minutes (well after he declared that ISIS was "Completely destroyed"), according to Lee Camp as published by Truthdig. Yet grownups, who believe they are holier than thou, fully embrace this murderous mayhem as the Will of God, while an ocean away in a different country a teacher is stalked through the streets of Paris and his head savagely hewn from his body because yet another true believer, of yet another religion, has been affronted by science.

Yet despite all this, it is not the people of faith who are the most egregious in their rejection of science, but the corporatized citizenry, the Corporate suits, the corporate-bought legislatures of the world, who all excel at rejecting the scientific truths staring them in the face as they rush to, in the exact same way they did after 9/11, use a calamity to further cement in place the future we have baked into the yellowcake.

Even as I type this scribes are writing articles bemoaning the dearth of computer chips that is holding up the manufacture of this years' plethora of automobiles. With barely a pause, they are champing at the bit-coin to exceed 2019's output of 92 million motor vehicles with which they hope to burden the well-paved roads of the world, which already carries an estimated 1.4 billion cars and trucks: an additional total of close to 100,000,000, of which not even two per-cent (2%!, lol; I doubt that it's even 1%!) will be their much ballyhooed EV's. No, the vast majority will be ICE machines, and the science is clear: without those ICE machine being driven willy-nilly all over creation, the economies of the OECD nations will shudder to a devastating collapse. Financial instruments as high as Mt. Everest are leveraged on the manufacture and maintenance of not only the machines themselves but on the assumed liabilities of their purchasers and the entire oil industry, along with the vast military infrastructure necessary to assure the uninterrupted flow of the fuel necessary to power both them, and the vast war machine itself, thereby consuming more than a thousand billion liters of fossil fuel every year.

The science is clear; that even as the combustion of oil has been somewhat curtailed by the impacts of the corona virus, the burning of the "bridge fuel" of natural gas has substantially increased (with two of the largest petro-states, Russia and the USA, simply flaring an ever-growing amount of it, to no productive purpose, into the atmosphere), and the burning of coal, by economies not as well-situated as those of the OECD nations, is likewise on the increase, as underdeveloped nations struggle to pay the debts amassed during the pandemic. Straight-jacketed into the growth paradigm, utter collapse can be averted only by  burning up coal, and burning down rainforests, the combustion of which has already started to accelerate, the accelerant being the unrest of their unfed and unhoused citizens, their lives already being savaged by the ravages of a climate-changed weather regime that promises to make a mockery of their most desperate efforts to "Build Back Better".

It wasn't until I saw, as an adult, the scene from "Raisin in the Sun" when the mother in that movie did pretty much the same thing to her adult daughter as mine did to little me, that I realized how widespread and acceptable physical violence in the name of a godhead, who could care less about the blasphemy only humans react to so viscerally, was. Their beliefs allow them to inflict punishment on those innocent of not knowing that an all-powerful entity is capable of being affronted by the words of those trying to understand its nature. It is the violence in the name of god that is the blasphemy, not anything uttered by an apostate.

Similarly, it is the words of the Secretary of the UN that inflicts real harm, as it makes it sound as though, since the science is clear, things will change; that we'll halt, even reverse, the continued growth in the amount of combustion of the only sources on the earth of such densely-packed stores of energy.

But just the opposite has proven to be the case:

Three decades after the the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that committed state parties to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, based on scientific consensus (ie, "the science was clear") the world's most advanced countries with the most modern economies continue to vie with one another to be the top automobile manufacturer, the top airplane manufacturer, the premier petro State, the largest hi-tech hub, the hottest tourist spots (completely dependent on the geo-engineering flights of speeding metallic hulks crammed with humans, burning jet fuel at 30,000 feet, creating a veritable rain of carbon down to the troposphere in which dwell billions who will never sit fuming on a tarmac, but will be sentenced to a shortened lifetime from inhaling the airborne pollutants produced by their clueless "betters"), while one nation stands alone as the largest predatory military Empire in world history, igniting vast stores of fossil fuel to attain the unreachable goal of being able to fight a fantasized three adversaries on three fronts simultaneously, even while citizens, living in the very hub of fossil fuel extraction and production, succumb to hyperthermia in their own homes from lack of electricity because the state of Texas, the state that burns off daily enough natural gas to provide electricity to the entire state, hadn't enough natural gas to generate juice for a cold spell that the science made clear would happen, and so had predicted, weeks ago. 

They did nothing. Why would they? The predicted outcome only had them whetting their teeth for the sky-high profits they knew such an event would enable them to squeeze their customers for. 

So believing that because "the science is clear", mankind will suddenly reverse its behavior now, despite its knowing that the same science was clear three long decades ago, and will henceforth start to decrease, when all it's done so far has been to increase, the global release of carbon dioxide, is every bit as delusional as thinking a piece of wafer is magically transformed into the flesh of a man that died more than two millennia ago. But it is a far more deadly delusion. 

It would do well to remember, that when you hear the term, the Green New Deal, that it was coined solely to deceive you and fleece you by preying on your lack of knowledge every bit as much as Trump University was; and to recall that, at the heart of the like-named Green Revolution, flamed just as large an increase in the sustained combustion of fossil fuel as World War Two. And much like that War, the Green Revolution was only the beginning of the world's economies enslaving themselves to unsustainable energy-dependence. Bound to the mast of a sinking ship, the world's human cargo has refused to acknowledge the iceberg it has struck, pretending the music they hear isn't being played by a band that knows their future is taking on water faster than a Texas basement in an electric power outage. One gander at the "Savior" elected in 2016 by the world's Soulless Super Power to lead them to the Promised Land should be enough to wake you up to the reality show you're playing a bit part in. One in which no matter how good a job you do, no matter how hard you try, the boss will scream in your face with a scowl on his own heavily made-up face that , "You're Fired!"

And you will get no empathy from your co-workers, who will chortle and sneer up their sleeve at your fate. Because they blandly accept the adage that the price of freedom is eternal violence.

Which the silence of science in the face of Fallujah, or Mosul, or Idlib, or Aleppo, or ... makes clear (and, like Climate Change, made possible).