The Truth About Comic Book Movies

I don’t care how many films about costumed heroes Hollywood regurgitates, the truth of the mater is Hollywood hates comic book superheroes and they have nothing but contempt for those of us who love them. Hollywood thinks comic book characters are silly. This is true because most people think they are silly, this is a fact those of us who don’t think they are silly have learned to live with.

Most people don’t read comic books, never have, never will. Most people look at Superman and ask, “Why can’t everyone see that Superman is just Clark Kent without the glasses?” So when a person who doesn’t really like Superman makes a Superman move, he makes sure to show that in the “real world “ Lois Lane would have no problem discovering Superman’s identity, getting the full story on her own with very little effort.

This may in fact be more realistic, but it sure isn’t any fun, that is unless your name happens to be Diogenes. I never picked up a superhero comic book expecting to find anything remotely related to the real world—that’s rather the point of superheroes. This should be OK, but it isn’t.

Hollywood reinforces the notion with every superhero film they make, that superheroes are intrinsically silly, so we will change them so they can be more readily accessible for a wider audience. I have no problem with this attitude, I would just prefer you apply it to your own creations.

If you think it’s absurd that Oliver Queen calls himself Green Arrow, then create your own urban crime-fighting archer and call him “The Hood” or the “Vigilante.” But if you are going to do Green Arrow do Green Arrow. You are after all counting on me as a fan of Green Arrow to watch the show. Green Arrow has been around as long as he has, because people like Green Arrow, not the Hood.

It is Hollywood’s way of trading on beloved character’s brands while denouncing the genre. No other industry allows their brands to be similarly misused. You can’t be a bottler in Detroit who decides to change the formula of Coca Cola because you think the general public will like your formula more and still put it in a Coke bottle.

Just as a person who buys a bottle of Coke expects Coke—A comic book fan wants to get the Mandarin he grew up reading about when he goes to see Iron Man 3 not an out of work drunken British actor with no powers. You see, Hollywood really thinks people go to see a superhero movie because they care who plays Iron Man.

That’s why they don’t put Jeremy Renner in a mask when he plays Hawkeye or they choose not to put a helmet on Thor. It’s why they continuously have heroes unmasked in every movie and why most of the time Iron Man has his mask flipped up so we know that Downey is playing Tony Stark. or we see his face inside the helmet constantly in the middle of every fight scene.

It’s not that Hollywood has a problem with asking movie patrons to suspend belief. We watch cars do things in the latest iteration of Fast and Furious that defy physics and the survivability of the person behind the wheel—They didn’t care if people thought it silly that Neo could learn Kung Fu by plugging him into a computer via a spiked USB cord that would destroy his brain stem and probably sever his spinal cord and there seems to be a lot of room between the mask and Tony Stark’s face.

No, the biggest problem Hollywood has with comic book superheroes is that they are not their own idea, so each director’s ego follows it’s own prime directive to leave a mark of their own on characters already fully fleshed out.

When you make Spiderman’s webbing organic and not a brilliant feat of chemistry combined with mechanical engineering, you downplay one of Peter Parkers most important characteristics, his incredible genius and wherewithal. It was that very genius that leads him to the science exhibition, which lead to his encounter with the radioactive spider in the first place.

But what guides the disdain for comic book superheroes in film and even in the contemporary comics themselves—is the concept of hope they represent. No character embodies hope and wholesome American idealism more than Superman so they had to darken him up.

Liberalism makes much ado about “hope”; they just can’t stand it in the framework of hope attached to a set morality. They particularly abhor the idea of hope tied to faith or patriotism—So Superman can no longer represent “Truth, Justice and the American Way,” but rather a nebulous ill defined hope unattached to any real philosophy…a sort of hope…ishness. Hollywood likes the idea of hope, just don’t tell them what hope is.

As a life long comic book purist, I loathe the overwhelming majority of the comic book based movies Hollywood produces. The audience for these films fall into two categories: Those of us who love superhero comic books and those of you who could not care less about comics or their history, you go because they are there.

The latter may manifest in a person just wanting to see the latest blockbuster, your boyfriend dragged you, or whatever motivates a person to see any other movie, maybe you like popcorn in the dark.

I am an unapologetic nerd! I never hid the fact that I loved comic books from girls or anyone else—I had friends who would shush me if we were talking comics and a girl walked up. Meanwhile I was never at a loss for attractive female companionship in my single days. It didn’t hurt that I was co-owner of three comic book stores back then, you see, we turned our obsession into a business, girls like that sort of thing.

Most of the filmgoers have no idea why these movies are bad in the purist’s view,  it is just a spectacle, lots of special effects and explosions… You don’t know that Batman would never give up being Batman because some villain made a threat as portrayed in Dark Knight. But I freely confess I find it perplexing that someone can claim to love the superheroes they grew up with while offering apologetics on behalf of filmmakers who utterly mutilate them.

Superheroes, invented during some of the darkest periods in America’s history, the Great Depression, World War Two... were created as an escape from reality featuring characters representing what was best in America, the ideal and the hope that whatever crisis we faced, ultimately good and the USA would eventually prevail. You didn’t become evil to vanquish evil—you overcame evil and you found a way to do it with honor. It may not have been realistic but it was good and it was inspiring. When did striving to reach an ideal become quant and old fashioned?

What are bloodthirsty characters like Wolverine and The Punisher with their gritty realism inspiring in our kids? When you saw the bad guy in the comics I grew up with being lead away in chains courtesy of “Your friendly neighborhood Spiderman.” Or a villain meeting his just desserts after falling victim to his own scheme, justice had been served and it reinforced the rule of law as a worthy notion.

We now live in a period where the ends justify the means. This is a very deadly state to be in when the “Ends” and what we seek to accomplish, are so poorly defined. So I reckon a Man of Steel who summarily snaps the neck of the bad guy is precisely what we should expect from a culture that thinks hope springs from pretty speeches and rhetoric, as opposed to immutable ideals and unalienable rights granted to all by a Creator. Now we look to privileges dolled out by flawed men.

The Disciples of Christ were falsely accused of lying to spread the gospel and the question was asked whether this was OK if it leads people to the truth of God? The answer was concise:

What if some were unfaithful? Will their unfaithfulness nullify God’s faithfulness? Not at all! Let God be true, and every human being a liar. As it is written:

“So that you may be proved right when you speak and prevail when you judge.”

But if our unrighteousness brings out God’s righteousness more clearly, what shall we say? That God is unjust in bringing his wrath on us? (I am using a human argument.) Certainly not! If that were so, how could God judge the world? Someone might argue, “If my falsehood enhances God’s truthfulness and so increases his glory, why am I still condemned as a sinner?” ⁸ Why not say—as some slanderously claim that we say—“Let us do evil that good may result”? Their condemnation is just! Romans 3:3-8

These are the values I would prefer my kids were exposed to, and that is the morality heroes like Superman used to represent, not the relativistic Bizarro world Superman of the new hope paradigm. Why is it suddenly wrong to hold up the ideal? Why does a guy with a red cape, an “S” on his chest who flies need to reflect the real world? That the question needs asking is what is truly absurd and breathtakingly sad.

Digital Publius
(Official First Appearance of "The Geek Who Sits On High")

Fatherhood, Fear or Largesse?

Originally posted Wednesday, July 29, 2009

My mother died when I was six years old. I don’t remember much about her in a physical sense, I remember she was pretty and she always smelled good. The way she made me feel is what I remember most strongly about my mother, I remember the warmth and love she exuded were almost palpable things, always compelling me to seek her side of my parent’s bed in the mornings so it would be the first thing I experienced everyday.

My father I had until I was twelve. I was very close to my dad, he had his failings like we all do, but he was what a father ought to be. He was filled with love for my older sister, and me. He was certainly the person I most wanted to hang around with when I was a boy. A boy could not have had a better fellow for bolstering the old self esteem than my dad, he would always brag in front of his friends and say things like; “Look at my son, he’s got arms like truck tires. But when he laid down the law...

My father was one of the most intimidating people who ever lived, he had piercing deep set eyes which seemed to glow with a red hot severity whenever he was upset or intensely serious about an issue. He wasn’t physically imposing, he wasn’t a large man, but he had a native potency that just seemed to give one pause in his presence. I saw men twice his size deferring to him and it always seemed they did so naturally.

It takes my older sister to tell some of the best stories about his effect on her dates. Even the most arrogant of her suitors withered under his gaze, enduring his scrutiny for what must have felt like an eternity before being granted permission to date my sister. On occasion, he would even arrange to be cleaning his M1 carbine when meeting a potential beau for the first time. I have a 30-06 in reserve for the same employment.

My dad didn’t have to repeat himself, when he told me to do something I did it. This was learned behavior, as I had suffered the consequences of having to be reminded to do something, the lesson learned in the seat of my pants stuck. But, being a boy, a boy with BB guns, a Ruttman mini bike, a love for explosives and an imagination fueled by comic books and a few too many trips to literary places like Barsoom and Pelucidar, I had quite a few lessons never repeated after the rod of correction.

Eventually you begin to count the cost, should I do this thing which may be fun while it lasts and suffer the inevitable wrath I’m sure to face, or should I seek more paternally approved diversions? If you are wise you opt for the latter. It is at this point your relationship with your dad begins to change, or at least it should.

Just about a year or so before my father's death, he stopped spanking me.

I wish I could say he stopped because I had ceased all the activities I had an affinity for warranting a heaping serving of “hot cakes”, I hadn’t. He told me I was old enough to know right from wrong, at this point, I began to obey my father not out of fear of the corporeal ramifications of my actions, (which I had begun to understand took an emotional toll on him to have to mete out) but out of the love he showed me every time he forgave me. You begin to recognize you both feel better when he is bragging on you and proud of you, than when he is punishing you.

I dialog with agnostics and atheists fairly often on a variety of subjects. When the opportunity to discuss morality arises with them I am fascinated by a recurring theme I have heard from more than one non-believer. The idea Biblical morality is predicated on the fear of displeasing the God of the Holy Bible, rather than what they believe to be the (self evident) natural desire to do good or to treat others well because it is what is best for society in a purely naturalistic sense.

It is true the Bible states without equivocation:

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Proverbs 1:7

I agree with this statement, we should fear the Lord in my opinion. It goes on to say in verse 8 and 9:

“My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother:  For they shall be an ornament of grace unto thy head, and chains about thy neck.”

Fear of the Lord is the beginning, not the end, the beginning of knowledge. This is why God structured the family the way He did, it is a type of the relationship we should seek to have with Him. A child should fear his father in the beginning, it is the fear of a good father in early life that forms the foundation for and is integral to learning the behavior that will stand the individual in good stead throughout life and is the plumb line proving an orderly society.

As you study the Bible you get to know the God of the Bible, He should be feared, but just like a healthy relationship with your father changes throughout life as you mature from one of fear to deep admiration, appreciation and love, so too does the portrait of the Biblical Father. We find Him making a provision through His Son to reconcile even the vilest of us to Him.

We see over and over again throughout scripture His deep desire to have and maintain a close and meaningful relationship with all of us. He promises when we accept His Son and His sacrifice, no matter how much we screw up, He will call us righteous. This is not a license to do wrong, but a promise not to reject His children, because He knows we can never measure up to His standards.

So, yes, after reading the Holy Bible in it’s totality and fully apprehending His teachings, I would have to say the God of the Holy Bible is wiser than me. His rules are better and far more complete than anything man left to his own devices has managed to come up with.

There is a plague of boys in this nation that grew up, or is growing up without the fear of a father because the father was not, or is not there to instill it.

Far more tragically those fathers are not there to lead their families to the heavenly Father who writes His laws on the hearts of believers. Subsequently we have prisons filled to the bursting with children who are following their (self evident) natural desires.

It is not a mistake we find in the media the father is so often portrayed as a buffoon or a brute, and liberalism and secularism does so much to downplay the importance of fatherhood in modern society.

Whether it be through the grim promotion of abortion on demand, absolving men from familial responsibility by removing the child from the world all together, the advocacy of gay marriage and blurring the rolls of men and women, or the creation of the welfare state making it unprofitable to have a father in the home, they are all eating away at the moral foundation undergirding America and they serve formidably as surrogate attacks against God himself!

So I ask my agnostic and atheistic friends this question: As we banish the Biblical, fearful God, our heavenly Father, more and more from the public square by removing the Ten Commandments from municipal buildings, or banning prayer in schools... As we edge ever closer to a secular America and the protean largesse of men, are we better off?

Digital Publius

Who Dares Call It Murder?

Just over a month ago, the nation celebrated the rescue of Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus, and Michelle Knight. These three young women endured a decade long captivity at the hands of a bestial man who mercilessly raped, beat, starved and humiliated them at his leasure.

Thankfully, this dispicable man will soon be made to suffer his own forced imprisonment as he pays for the indignities heaped upon his victims. Yesterday the reprobate was indicted on over 300 counts of rape, kidnapping and assault.

Interestingly enough, he is also being charged with two counts of aggravated murder. These charges stem from the criminal having beaten one of the girls who was with child so severely he forced her to miscarry. The man is being held accountable for the murders of his own unborn children.

As most things do, after reading the charges this man now faces I was reminded of the Words of God in the Holy Bible, Exodus 21:

22 ¶If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman's husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.

“No mischief,” if the child is delivered prematurely due to the harm that came to the mother, but the child is born alive and healthy—then the culprits are only accountable for the assault on the woman.

23 And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life,

If the child dies, it is the same penalty for murder meted out for a full-grown person—death—a life for a life. That God in the Holy Bible considers the unborn persons is obvious to anyone who has studied His Word. It ascribes personal attributes to the unborn Psalm 51:5, it uses personal pronouns when speaking of children in the womb and it assures us that God knows us personally whilst still in your mother’s body, Jeremiah 1:5.

However, this truth is best exemplified by the advent of our Lord into the world:

ҦNow the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.

Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a publick example, was minded to put her away privily.

But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.

And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins.” Matthew 1:18-22

If this tableau were played out in contemporary America, His mother would likely be counseled to terminate her inconvenient pregnancy discovered not long before her impending nuptials and Joseph ridiculed for standing for it. But it is clear that God is declaring Jesus is a child, a person at His very conception.

So it would seem the Cuyahoga County grand jury responsible for bringing charges against the allegedly murderous Cleveland kidnapper have taken a page out of the Holy Scriptures—perhaps unwittingly, but nevertheless…

What is most passing strange in my eyes though, is how it is murder when caused by an outside force—yet a question of “Women’s health” when the mother decides to do away with her child for convenience sake. It is not “Mischief” if the mother decides infanticide is more desirable than motherhood; it is “Choice.”

How wretched we must look to God these days in our society. Is it any wonder why so many of our children have turned to the barbarous behavior we see evidence of daily? Our nation subconsciously tells them constantly their existence is a matter of choice, subject to a mother’s caprice, rather than a blessing from God bestowed on a loving husband and wife.

All too often in today’s society children are not the result of God’s order regarding marriage but the result of a degenerate culture that has changed the beauty of sexual relations between committed, wedded husbands and wives to a recreational activity free of spiritual and temporal meaning beyond self gratification.

This is the sort of nation we have become. We have a President who asked God to bless Planned Parenthood, one of the leading enablers of Biblical “Mischief” on demand, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children each year. And a media that turns a blind eye towards the horrors perpetrated by a murderous doctor whose actions would cast a pall across a woman’s beloved right to choose death for her children in the womb.

All this while shedding tears for the victims of Sandy Hook, followed by base affectation, proposing useless laws they claim are designed to protect the innocent. Draconian empty laws to protect a few, while protecting laws that destroy the lives of millions, this is the modern American teradiddle, the pretentious lie that we can both care about innocent life and not care about innocent life as long as we can parse what life is and isn’t.

Yet the murder charges against the kidnapper of Cleveland show a kink in the liberal’s amoral armor. We as a society know in our hearts how inconsistent such indictments are in light of our free wheeling access to abortion on demand. Yet we have chosen darkness over the light, it is our nature. We continue to sacrifice the unborn to the god of forces so we are not “Punished” by the unwanted children conceived by our lusts.

Yet we pretend to care for the ones who are born, even as we teach them the meaninglessness of their existence by the way we live our lives and the laws we make. Our spirits war against our flesh and all too often the flesh wins—Again I am reminded of Scripture:

“And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye between two opinions? if the LORD be God, follow him: but if Baal, then follow him. And the people answered him not a word.” I Kings 18:21

Digital Publius

Climate Change Hysterics are Hypocrites

Originally posted Tuesday, January 5, 2010

I hope this is the last article I write on this subject as the ideas making it necessary die. At this writing, the first ten items on drudgereport.com, all decry a winter season without mercy. Havoc wreaked on a “global” scale as humanity is buffeted by record low temperatures and unprecedented snowstorms. People dying, crops in danger, travel restricted, baby it’s cold outside.

The hysterics continue to cite global warming, or the new catch all term, “climate change”, I simply call it winter. The very term climate change promotes a sense of bemused weariness in most people. It came into use when the hysterics realized it was becoming increasingly difficult to sell people on the idea they need to have fewer barbecues on vacation and eat less meat to combat the scourge of global warming, while they are using their neighbors four wheel drive SUV to extricate the hybrid they bought last summer to aid in the battle from a huge snow drift.

I posted an article last week from sciencedaily.com highlighting the fact that there has been no rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide in 150 years. As I have pointed out in earlier articles on this subject, the majority of the Co2 produced is consumed by the oceans and plants, which is then converted to oxygen. The article points out, only about 45% of produced Co2 remains in the atmosphere.

A friend on facebook who falls decidedly amongst the hysterics in this contemporary narrative, in an effort to show how wrongheaded my denial of global warming is, began to cut and paste from an article he’d read, numbers that on the surface sound impressive. He posted:

“To put it in terms that you may be more familiar with, consider that carbon sinks are a discount on the 'cost' of CO2, a discount of around 57%. That means that of the around 1,000,000 metric tonnes of CO2 that Swaziland emits every year, around 430,000 stays in the atmosphere, and the rest is absorbed by forests, oceans...etc. If they industrialize and produce 2,000,000 metric tonnes of CO2, that means that 860,000 tonnes will be added to the atmosphere: The *percentage* stays the same, but an increase in CO2 is still an increase in CO2.

Okay, homework: If this study is correct, and 43% of the produced CO2 remains in the atmosphere, how much of the 5,752,289,000 metric tonnes of CO2 generated by the USA in 2006 remained airborne?”

My answer, who cares? 430,000 metric “tonnes”, 2 billion metric “tonnes”, it all sounds so formidable, so harrowing that we are dumping all this Co2 into the atmosphere. That is until you examine the numbers found only in the all to revealing big picture.

The amount of Co2 in the atmosphere stands at 0.038% NASA.GOV says 0.01-0.1% Period.
 

Co2 is still measured in parts per million of 1% of the atmosphere regardless of the hysteric’s number juggling. Again my question to the hysterics is:

What are the mechanics of a trace element in our atmosphere allowing for so disastrous an effect on weather patterns?

Here’s the thing--the earth's atmosphere  has a mass of about five quadrillion (5x10 to the 15th power) metric tons (since I'm a Yankee I'll use tons instead of tonnes). As the numbers my hysterical facebook friend likes include the entire ecosystem, the earth has a mass of 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000.0 metric tons.

That's 5 sextillion, 973 quintillion, 600 quadrillion. A far cry from the hysteric’s insignificant 6, 7 even 10 figure numbers, no matter how you slice it. I have been accused on many occasions of using “bar napkin” mathematics when proving my points, my accusers never offer more substantial chalkboard work to counter my points though.

The Science Daily article concludes by validating my point, man's activity has not changed the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere, so the idea of anthropogenic (man made) climate change is a joke. A joke that is about as funny as a root canal, when you consider the ramifications of the policy changes the Democrats want to and have implemented to deal with a non-existent problem.

The weak apologetics offered by the left and bolstered by the mainstream media for the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit’s less than honest hacked emails, are trumped only by liberal global warming hysterics hypocrisy. No one likes a good whistleblower story more than the left. As long as it attacks big business or some other leftist cause célèbre.

They’ll give you an Oscar for “Erin Brokovich” and Celebrate “Silkwood”. You’ll find “Thank You For Not Smoking” in the must see section next to “Roger and Me” and “All the President's Men”, as you pass copies of “Redacted”, “Valley of Elah” and “rendition”.

The CRU hackers are "just criminals." Never you mind they uncovered one of the greatest scientific scandals ever! It doesn’t fit into the politically correct; nature good, man bad reports so popular with the left.

This is the same pattern being followed by the Obama administration when it comes to securing the nation against terrorists. When you constantly ignore the big picture to advance a politically correct narrative, you are placing the narrative above people. The philosophy becomes more important than the people it is meant to serve and enlighten.

The truth is, there are literally millions of Islamic terrorists hellbent on killing anyone who disagrees with their faith. Calling them extremists, or isolated individuals doesn’t change the reality of the danger they pose to America and the rest of the world. Failing to recognize you are in a shooting war with forces that hate you, is as stupid as forwarding the notion that man can effect climate.

Both ideologies establish a pattern of liberal self deception in the case of those who are merely unwilling to think for themselves. Out and out prevarication ensues when Democrats are confronted with hard questions and they practice down right deceit when it advances the liberal agenda.

“It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that no one has heard before”, This is a less than comforting old saw considering todays political and philosophical struggles. The liberal media is certainly doing it’s part to make it so. We need to think!

“If a ruler hearken to lies, all his servants are wicked.” Proverbs 29:12

Digital Publius

Brrr... This Global Warming Sure Is Cold.

Originally posted, Sunday, November 23, 2008

No where can the “icy” grip of the mainstream media’s liberal fascism, be felt with more “chilling” effect, than the “freeze out” of contrasting data in regards to man made global warming orthodoxy. it would appear to the casually and mostly uninterested public; that man made climate change is as accepted by the scientific community as the law of gravity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact the public is so ill informed on this issue is very dangerous; as many public and private policies are being formulated based on specious assumptions. The fact there are data and logic contradicting the concept of anthropogenic climate change is almost completely hidden from view by the mainstream media.

For example: in 2007 the US Senate released a report from over four hundred scientists, from twenty-four countries, many of whom are, or were participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. 

Just a few quotes from the report:

Netherlands: Atmospheric scientist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, and an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes, “I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting – a six-meter sea level rise, fifteen times the IPCC number – entirely without merit,” Tennekes wrote. “I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached."

Norway: Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, a professor and head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the UN IPCC: “It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction.”

New Zealand: IPCC reviewer and climate researcher and scientist Dr. Vincent Gray, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990 and author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001: “The [IPCC] ‘Summary for Policy makers’ might get a few readers, but the main purpose of the report is to provide a spurious scientific backup for the absurd claims of the worldwide environmentalist lobby that it has been established scientifically that increases in carbon dioxide are harmful to the climate. It just does not matter that this ain't so.” 

Denmark: Space physicist Dr. Eigil Friis-Christensen is the director of the Danish National Space Centre, a member of the space research advisory committee of the Swedish National Space Board, a member of a NASA working group, and a member of the European Space Agency who has authored or co-authored around 100 peer-reviewed papers and chairs the Institute of Space Physics: “The sun is the source of the energy that causes the motion of the atmosphere and thereby controls weather and climate. Any change in the energy from the sun received at the Earth’s surface will therefore affect climate.”

USA: Dr. David Wojick is a UN IPCC expert reviewer, who earned his PhD in Philosophy of Science and co-founded the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie-Mellon University: “In point of fact, the hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The GHG (greenhouse gas) hypothesis does not do this.” Wojick added: “The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates.”

Canada: IPCC 2007 Expert Reviewer Madhav Khandekar, a Ph.D meteorologist, a scientist with the Natural Resources Stewardship Project who has over 45 years experience in climatology, meteorology and oceanography, and who has published nearly 100 papers, reports, book reviews and a book on Ocean Wave Analysis and Modeling: “To my dismay, IPCC authors ignored all my comments and suggestions for major changes in the FOD (First Order Draft) and sent me the SOD (Second Order Draft) with essentially the same text as the FOD. None of the authors of the chapter bothered to directly communicate with me (or with other expert reviewers with whom I communicate on a regular basis) on many issues that were raised in my review. This is not an acceptable scientific review process.”

Note: there were only 52 scientists that participated in the UN IPCC summary. The over 400 skeptical scientists featured in this new report outnumber by nearly eight times the number of scientists who participated in the 2007 UN IPCC Summary for Policy makers. The notion of “hundreds” or “thousands” of UN scientists agreeing to a scientific statement does not hold up to scrutiny. The senate report is in stark contrast to the consensus claims made by the mainstream media and man
made climate change proponents, as illustrated by the following:

CNN’s Miles O’Brien (July 23, 2007):  "The scientific debate is over," O'Brien said. “We're done." O’Brien also declared on CNN on February 9, 2006 that scientific skeptics of man-made catastrophic global warming “are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually.”

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC view on the number of skeptical scientists as quoted on Feb. 20, 2003: “About 300 years ago, a Flat Earth Society was founded by those who did not believe the world was round. That society still exists; it probably has about a dozen members.”

The Washington Post asserted on May 23, 2006 that there were only “a handful of skeptics” of man-made climate fears.

ABC News Global Warming Reporter Bill Blakemore reported on August 30, 2006:  “After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such [scientific] debate” on global warming.

Andrew Dessler in the eco-publication Grist Magazine (November 21, 2007):  “While some people claim there are lots of skeptical climate scientists out there, if you actually try to find one, you keep turning up the same two dozen or so (e.g., Singer, Lindzen, Michaels, Christy, etc., etc.). These skeptics are endlessly recycled by the denial machine, so someone not paying close attention might think there are lots of them out there -- but that's not the case."

Source, US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Mr. Blakemore and Mr. Dessler may need to reassess they’re career choice as reporters, I always believed that the ability to dig up facts and people was a prerequisite for sound reporting. Over 31,000 scientists have signed the Global Warming Petition Project. Including 9000 with PhDs. How many scientists does it take to constitute the “lots” that Mr. Dessler is looking for?

I submit good readers--that it does not take a scientific degree to reveal the absurdity of the concept of anthropogenic climate change. Just a little time, curiosity and as Carl Sagan used to put it; a well oiled “baloney detector”. The earths atmosphere is comprised of 78% Nitrogen, 21% Oxygen and everything else makes up the last 1%. The amount of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere is 0.0384 of 1%. In other words the amount of Co2 in the atmosphere is measured in parts per million of a single percentage point. Yet we are being asked to accept so infinitesimal an amount of Co2 can have so profound an effect on our planet.

The earth is not a closed system. According to Mr. Desslers Grist Magazine website 2% of the earths surface is covered with man made cities, towns, villages and roads. I have seen other sources that say it is 3%, be that as it may, it would follow that less than one percent of that man made space is used for industrial use, factories that produce Co2 and machines like trucks, cars, trains...Yet 20% of the worlds land mass is covered with oxygen producing and Co2 consuming grass, and 29% is covered with even larger trees. Not to mention 70% of the earth is covered with water, teeming with plant life that produces the majority of the earths oxygen. Yet though the earths atmosphere is 99% colder gases, those gases are overcome by a millionth of a percent of Co2? What are the mechanics of such a feat? People really don’t have an appreciation for just how large our world is.

I think a good illustration may be that if you took a glass and filled it with water, and put it under a faucet with the tap open, water constantly filling it, and you took a dropper that would dispense a drop of hot sauce 1% of the glasses volume every time you squeezed it. You then squeeze the dropper every minute or so. then give it to a thirsty friend, do you think it would burn his mouth? He wouldn’t even know the hot sauce was there.

So man’s creation of high levels of Co2 is causing a catastrophic rise in the earths temperature according to “todays expert scientists”  But what did the scientists just some 30 years ago think that a rise in man made atmospheric Co2 would portend? Lets take a look shall we?

"The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population. Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man", (1971)

"I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000_ - Paul Ehrlich in (1969)

"This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century" - Peter Gwynne, Newsweek 1976

"There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon... The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it." Newsweek, April 28, (1975)

"This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000". - Lowell Ponte "The Cooling", 1976

"If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000...This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age."- Kenneth E.F. Watt on air pollution and global cooling, Earth Day (1970)  Source, Writer John Breyer

Scientists for over a hundred years believed that in conjunction with the classical four elements of the Greeks there was a fifth element called phlogiston. it was theorized that phlogiston was contained in all combustible materials and released during combustion and was supposed to explain oxidation processes like burning and rust. Those 17th and 18th century scientists also comprised a consensus.

And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie: That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. II Thessalonians 2:10-12

Digital Publius.