BRATTLEBORO — At the risk of being ostracized by the region's dilettante trustafarians, and also, I fear, by Globalists worldwide, I am compelled to note the glaring flaw in the rationale underpinning the newly launched “Connect the Dots” Warmist initiative.
“Connect the Dots” is not, as it sounds, an attempt to prove that the moon landing didn't happen. (Although it's certainly in that ballpark.)
Rather, it is a desperate and misguided political tilt at reconstituting the (mercifully) rapidly evaporating global Warmist cult, by invoking the Shamanic divinations of weather-related signs, signs of imminent, climate-caused apocalypse.
These signs - e.g., a washed-out bridge in Vermont, flooded plains in Pakistan and Thailand - are apparently portents of Gaia's final reckoning for Mankind's profligacy and inherently Nature-hating evil.
The flaw that bedevils the Connect the Dots meme is the startling lack of scientific evidence supporting its central - allegedly scientific - claim that “climate change” caused the Tropical Storm Irene–related storms that whopped Brattleboro and the region.
Indeed, Eric Blake, a hurricane expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), is quoted on Politico as saying exactly the opposite when asked about Irene:
“I think the state of the science is such that you cannot link any singular event to global warming,” said Blake, a hurricane specialist at the National Hurricane Center near Miami, several days before the storm.
Besides, Blake added, “there's nothing new about a hurricane hitting the Northeast” - even if it's rarer than a storm that whacks Florida or the Gulf Coast.”
In fact, the Dotties should not even refer to Irene as a hurricane, since NOAA downgraded Irene from being a hurricane to being a tropical storm before it landed.
The only proven connection between Irene and alleged global warming is the demagogy of Warmist cult hardliners, who, to stay relevant, must elevate anecdote, alarmism and populist illogic over empirical, scientific investigation.
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For example, southern Vermont's self-appointed and bug-eyed High Priests of Warmism - who, I'm sure, all walked with a joyful carbon-free skip to their Warmist revival on the site of the Bartonsville covered bridge - say they have read the tea leaves, rolled the bones, and dunked the witch.
All the signs are in.
The divination is over.
There can be no doubt.
Weather, as we all suspected, is the Antichrist, and, if we don't cast it from our Eden - right now - the End is Nigh! And we shall all be damned for eternity to burn in Hell. (Or, at least, some of us might want to consider moving a few miles inland and grow our own grapes.)
The 800-pound-gorilla lack of scientific legitimacy sitting on the Dotties' apocalyptic claims does not concern them.
Rather, the absence of science - the eternal sworn enemy of cult-think - supporting their divinations and pontifications actually enhances the Warmist High Priests' reputation among Disciples of the Dot as being seers and soothsayers.
Our local Warmist High Priests crave the self-indulgent, blind adherence to anti-scientific political dogma that High Priests of other cults demand.
For example, Corporatist High Priests Karl Rove and Dick Cheney famously insisted that their truth - despite its incompatibility with reality - is the truth, that that their Math trumps actual math, Archimedes be damned.
Similarly, our homegrown High Priests of Warmism glibly construct and proselytize their own math, based on the revealed wisdom issued forth from “climate” computer modeling software that is paid for by, and programmed to empower and enrich, the world's carbon-trading and carbon-tax-collecting global banking interests.
Warmist High Priests consider this proprietary wisdom to be so inspired and so divine that it transcends any need for the tiresome authentication of rigorous scientific investigation.
It's their truth.
You will accept it.
End of story.
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Of course, the way to stop pollution is not, as the High Priests preach, to waste time aimlessly connecting dots, so that we can draw anti-scientific conclusions based on dubious proprietary computer modeling. And all to what end?
Rather, we should enforce and enhance current law, so that major corporate polluters are shut down and their officers are locked up for life and, if they cause death, face the death penalty for their actions.
Nation-state polluters can be embargoed and boycotted by other nations.
But a law-based program of fighting pollution is not going to satisfy the High Priests of Warmism.
What use to them is a Bible - a widely available and robust body of strictly-enforced law preventing and punishing pollution - that the peasants can read and interpret for themselves?
Like the early clergy, our modern High Priests of Warmism depend for their occult power (which, historically, is always derived from the contemporary ruling banking elite) on their privileged access to and comprehension of divine signs of revealed truth.
Absent this revealed truth, Disciples of the Dot must abandon any claim they have to being vibrant and progressive political activists; they quickly become, for example, a clutch of well-intentioned, misinformed malcontents huddled on a bridge.
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So, sure, let's Connect the Dots; we can pretend that every weather event that has ever occurred and that will ever occur in the world, is just one more sign of the coming climate Apocalypse.
But let's not forget that, while our climate-change-connectin' crayon manically twitches from connecting one arbitrary weather-event dot to the next arbitrary weather-event dot, what we'll be producing is nothing more than a Rorschach Inkblot.
The Warmist high priests will stare solemnly and knowingly at this scribbled blot - they might even go into an eye-ball rolling trance - and they will surely divine in it a blueprint for humanity's impending and certain self-immolation, from which only they can preserve us. And, even then, only if we all commit unquestioningly to the mysteries of their Warmist cult.
The rest of us, however, will stare at the crayon-connected dots and discern ... well, nothing more than an incoherent mess of dots and lines that wouldn't look out of place taped to our fridge door.
Some of us might even quietly lament the unnecessary waste of an otherwise perfectly good sheet of paper.