Liberal heretics and other satanic demons

Ogres Politics and Views has a typical rightwing rant about unenlightened environmentalists:

Oh dear. The environmental lunatic lefties are going to be mad at this one. According to "real scientists," new research suggests that the coming and going of major ice ages might result partly from our solar system's passage through immense, snakelike clouds of exploding stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Ogre shows his low hand before all the cards have even been dealt. Notice the hedging in "suggests" and "partly." Of course, ice-ages are caused by a number of factors that are difficult to completely account for and predict, things like reductions in the heat of the sun and so on. I've never heard any environmentalist anywhere say that the only factor associated with ice-ages or global warming is SUV emissions.

Oh my. If this is even remotely true, the lefties are really in trouble. The article was published in the far-left San Francisco Chronicle, so they did start out trying to bash the results before they even reported them -- the very first words of the article are "It might sound preposterous..."

Why are "lefties in trouble"? If it turns out that automobile emissions don't affect the environment and are actually beneficial, or that fossil fuels last forever, or that believing in things makes them true, this lefty will be the first one cheering.

You see, the entire leftist religion (and yes, it IS a religion), is based on man being primarily evil and bent on total destruction of the earth. People like al gore actually believe one of the worst creations of man was the internal combustion engine. They spend their lives trying to prove how many insects are killed by exhaust fumes. The spend billions of dollars of taxpayer money trying to prove global warming, and trying to prove global warming is the fault of YOU for being so greedy.

Ogre's right, of course. The Earth (that is to say, the rock and molten lava that makes up most of the planet) isn't being destroyed. Most species on the planets thin exterior, on the other hand, have been destroyed. This isn't some leftwing fringe lunatic conjecture. This is solid fact agreed upon by everyone in the scientific community. As Leakey points out in his book The Sixth Extinction, we're currently right smack in the middle of one of the biggest and quickest mass extinctions this planet has ever seen. Given enough time, evolution will probably correct this problem but by that time, homo sapiens will have either evolved into a completely different species or will have destroyed themselves. So hopefully everyone's happy about this since it's already been done. At any rate, there's no going back at this point. The rightwingers (evidently troubled by all those animal and plant names that appear on biology tests) have gotten their way. And the rest of us have gone along with the project.

If there is evidence that alleged global warming might be caused by cosmic events, the entire religion of the left is gone. Get ready for this one to be squashed, discredited, ignored, and the scientists that are proposing this had better not have any adopted children...

I think Ogre's got this backwards. If global warming, like everything else, has causes and scientists can discover these causes and rationally discuss their implications, then the left (or to be more exact, the liberal environmental movement) is right on track. If global warming is to be attributed to the divine will or some other unknowable factor and if we're better off just ignoring it until our SUVs run out of gas, then the rightwing has hit on the ideal approach to large-scale problems that affect all of humanity.

P.S. Ogre's rebuttal to my rebuttal (along with my rubuttal of the rebuttal's rebuttal) can be found here.