Rationality where you can find it

I was in Powell’s yesterday, looking for the latest issue of Skeptical Enquirer magazine. I wanted the latest issue because the cover article is about global warming. I was recommended the article by Jim while discussing climate change in the cigar room at Kell’s a few weeks back. We were in the cigar room, which is really a narrow room in the basement of the building, because I wanted to smoke a cigar. I did and enjoyed it, damn you. Since it was an Irish pub we were in, half and halfs were consumed as well.
The irony of discussing climate change while puffing on a stogey in a room full of smoke is not lost on me, but I say suck it, that’s what freedom is all about, baby.

Anyway, Jim was telling me this article discusses the role of solar activity on our climate. That was apropos to the post I did a while back, so I finally purchased the mag yesterday to read it. It’s a rather dense article, written by a chief scientist at NASA. Clearly, climate change is a subject that requires the consumption of many dead trees.
The magazine racks are in a section of the massive store that has the latest releases, so I wandered over to see if anything came out that I’d want. In the twenty minutes I spent browsing the racks, I noticed that a goodly portion of the newest non-fiction deals with climate change and what we should do about it. Most of it was pretty harsh to the developed world and advocated some variation of going back in time to before the Industrial revolution when the world was pristine, the air clear, and the water clean. I’m sure the irony inherent in the amount of dead trees consumed to tell us how much we all suck is lost on the authors.

That’s the fantasy anyway. No one seems to want to bring up the shorter life expectancy, the higher infant mortality rates, the diseases like smallpox and cholera and the bubonic plague, or the mounds of horse shit that littered the streets. Not to mention the lack of iPods and Starbucks.

Read this. It’s rational.