UC Berkeley Prof — Ignoring Global Warming is Like Manslaughter
Like many liberals, the professor in the story below reduces his argument from science to the personal. Agree with me or people will die. Disagree with me and you approve of the death of innocent people.
Isn’t that the same argument the left used to promote the passage of Obamacare?
Patrick Seaworth of Ohio State University reports at The College Fix.
Professor: Ignoring Global Warming Akin to Manslaughter
A prominent UC Berkeley professor recently linked ignoring global warming with watching people die during a guest seminar at Ohio State University.
Citing monsoons and other extreme weather phenomenon on the other side of the globe, Kirk Smith, a global environmental health professor, said climate change is “a moral issue.”
Smith told an anecdote to the audience of a professor who ignores a drowning child on campus as he rushes to teach a class. He then tells his students about ignoring the child, and they are aghast. Later at home, the hypothetical professor opens his mail and throws away a letter from the United Nation’s Children Fund.
“No one thinks that is immoral, and why not,” Smith said of throwing away the UNICEF letter. “What’s the moral distinction? … Today climate change is a sin of omission.”
What’s more, Smith argued, those who ignore global warming and climate change are not just guilty of a sin of omission, they’re also teetering on the verge of a sin of commission.
“Every time I come back from a site in the Third World, and a $16 pizza would feed a family in Guatemala for an entire month … we’re not going and shooting kids in the head, but we are moving in the distinction a bit to the commission side,” he said.
A sin of commission is, generally and secularly speaking, purposely doing something wrong, while a sin of omission is considered standing on the sidelines and not doing something that’s right.
“There is this connection to the land, the land is a very broad, shared thing,” he said.
Smith is a highly decorated professor who “serves on a number of national and international scientific advisory committees, including the Global Energy Assessment, National Research Council’s Board on Atmospheric Science and Climate, the Executive Committee for WHO Air Quality Guidelines, and the International Comparative Risk Assessment,” according to a biography posted on his website.
Smith’s Ohio State seminar Nov. 16 was titled “Global Warming, Public Health, and Human Futures; Thoughts on Scheffler’s ‘Afterlife’ Thesis.”
Samuel Scheffler, a philosophy professor at New York University, has penned books such as “The Rejection of Consequentialism” and “Human Morality,” and is currently giving a series of lectures around the globe titled “The Afterlife.”
Comments
Hmmm. And what about the human suffering that will increase with the application of the warmist’s agenda?
Well, a more prominent Berkeley physicist, Richard Mueller, has plainly stated that, as least as far as the U. S. is concerned, there is nothing to be done about global warming. Please note that Dr. Mueller is a well-known acolyte of the global warming religion — which is not to say that he is incorrect.
An eco-wacko friend of mine, who was at one time President of the Geological Society of America, once bemoaned to me that the U.S. was “doing nothing” about global warming. I remarked to her that every study I had seen indicated that little or nothing could be done about global warming, assuming it was real. She sighed and stated, “I know, but it would make me feel better”.
This gives one an idea of the enormous amount of narcissism behind the liberal mind.