First, Kill All the Lawyers

Then, see if we still want to kill the cattle. Posted over at Anthony Watts’fabulous climate site is a fascinating story (written by David Deming at the University of Oklahoma) about the mass self-destruction of the Xhosa, a tribe in southeast Africa. Convinced that obliterating their society would allow them to rise up anew (and destroy the British colonialists), the Xhosa slaughtered all of their cattle and scattered their seed stocks. Almost half of the population starved to death, and the remainder was left docile and subjugated.

In similar fashion, our global warming alarmists want us to destroy ourselves, believing in a romantic rebirth of humanity, a la Rousseau. Here are the summary graphs:

Western civilization now stands on the brink of repeating the experience of the Xhosa. Since the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, Europe and North America have enjoyed the greatest prosperity ever known on earth. Life expectancy has doubled. In a little more than two hundred years, every objective measure of human welfare has increased more than in all of previous human history.

But Western Civilization is coasting on an impetus provided by our ancestors. There is scarcely anyone alive in Europe or America today who believes in the superiority of Western society. Guilt and shame hang around our necks like millstones, dragging our emasculated culture to the verge of self-immolation. Whatever faults the British Empire-builders may have had, they were certain of themselves.

Our forefathers built a technological civilization based on energy provided by carbon-based fossil fuels. Without the inexpensive and reliable energy provided by coal, oil, and gas, our civilization would quickly collapse. The prophets of global warming now want us to do precisely that.

A key distinction, though, is that the Xhosa didn’t believe that theirsociety needed weeding out—they didn’t think their Xhosan neighbor just needed to die.  Our AGW freaks would gladly see half the earth’s population wiped out, because WE are the enemy.  Of course, I suspect in their vision of Utopia, they are always the ones left.  It’s we pesky American Exceptionalists who need to go first. 

What is scary is how many normal people buy the bridge.  I find the exercise fascinating of just carrying the conversation with an average American who believes the global warmers to its logical conclusion.  Of course, the majority now are skeptical…I mean, who are you going to believe, Algor or your lying senses? 

I want a bumper sticker:  The Answer to Global Warming is Suicide—You First!