The key message of today’s environmentalists is: Accept our worldview, submit to our solutions – or else. This is, let us be blunt, a death threat. It is the voice of an extortionist.

The Guardian is a UK-based newspaper. Some time ago it decided that its job wasn’t to inform the public about what’s going on so that said public could make its own decisions.

Rather, it decided its real purpose was to spread a particular philosophy far and wide. This philosophy amounts to: HUMANS ARE A PLAGUE ON THE PLANET AND CAPITALISM IS A CONSPIRACY TO RAPE AND PILLAGE MOTHER GAIA.

Today the Guardian has published a column by a gentleman whose online bio reads as follow:

Jonathan Jones writes on art for the Guardian and was on the jury for the 2009 Turner prize.

(Wikipedia helpfully explains that the Turner Prize is presented annually “to a British visual artist under the age of 50.”)

Even though Jones’ usual beat involves Roman-era mosaics and the latest installation at the Tate Modern, in today’s column he casts his net wider. With environmental catastrophe firmly on his mind, he presents “the most frightening picture you will ever see.”

It is comprised of two photographs snapped by NASA satellites four days apart – on July 8th and 12th. According to Jones:

The information expressed visually here can be summed up in three words: change or die.

Change or die. This is, indeed, the key message of today’s environmentalists. Do as we say – or else. Accept our worldview, submit to our solutions – or else. There’s nothing restrained or measured about this message. This isn’t the voice of a loving parent threatening you with a time-out or a loss of television privileges. This is, let us be blunt, a death threat.

This is the voice of a bully. Of an extortionist. This is the voice of a fundamentalist who countenances no uncertainty, who believes salvation comes in one package only and that anyone who worships differently is damned. Change or die.

Jones’ column admits that the widespread – and wholly superficial – “surface melt” depicted in the second satellite photo is known to occur every 150 years. He even quotes a NASA expert who acknowledges that “this event is right on time.”

In other words “the most frightening picture you will ever see” reveals nothing at all unusual. Nevertheless, here’s how Jones spins it:

we know this is not the only evidence that the Arctic is losing ice. This picture of sudden change does not come out of the blue, or the white. It is the kind of thing alarmists have been predicting for years. Yet here it is, blunt fact. It is the sceptics who are irrational, revelling in delusion. [backup link]

So let me run through this one more time:

  • The images show Greenland ice behaving in a perfectly normal, cyclical manner.
  • Despite being fully aware of this, Jones nevertheless insists that the images represent one more piece of “evidence that the Arctic is losing ice.”
  • He then interprets this event as somehow validating longstanding predictions by climate change alarmists (his word).
  • Ergo, it is climate skeptics who are “revelling in delusion.”

According to Jones, the satellite photos represent “clear and spectacular evidence” of “global warming caused by human action.” Except that they don’t. This sort of melt has been taking place every 150 years – for apparently the past 10,000.

He then goes on to lament “the human ability to ignore evidence.” Believe me, I share his pain. His bewildering ability to ignore the quiet, calm fact that these images depict nothing out of the ordinary makes me want to go bang my head against a brick wall.

Here’s how Jones ends his logically and morally incoherent column:

once you look at the colour coding and absorb what it means it is a mapping of potential catastrophe. The picture is clear. Can we bear to look? And can the evidence of our eyes make us act?

This man says we must change or die. Why? because inside his twisted brain satellite photos of a perfectly normal event aren’t really that at all. He has waved a magic wand and decided they are something else entirely – a warning, a glimpse of the eco-apocalyptic future he firmly believes is heading our way.

This, ladies and gentleman, is the face of contemporary environmentalism: emotionally overwrought, childish analysis – and death threats.

See this post at WattsUpWithThat for more info about the Greenland ice melt.

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