Jihad; n. a holy war or pious quest – Webster’s Dictionary
I am reticent to even use this word, as it has been abused so much in today’s world. From my own experience, when anyone uses the word it has little to do with any concept of a “holy war”, whatever that might be.
Well, that’s the word Cal Thomas uses in a recent blog post at TheCitizen.com (feel free to go there and check it out if you like; I am not giving this guy or the site that publishes him the favor of an incoming link. I have little doubt that the feeling is mutual).
Thomas blathers on with the same tired arguments, never once mentioning any real science except for when he, rather belatedly as this is old news by now, blasts NASA for the errant data that put 1934 as the warmest year on U.S record by two hundredths of a degree Celsius over the previous record-holder of 1998. Except he forgot to mention the two-hundredths of a degree or only in the U.S part.
Look, we’ve been through this here, and I won’t belabor the NASA data thing (read my last post if you’d like more information about it).
But not only does Cal heap poor argument on scorn and vitriol, he sprinkles the whole pile with generous doses of the word “jihadist”.
What possible good can this sort of bellicose posturing serve, if not to the very same type of dogmatic, entrenched, and irrational agenda for which he accuses those he calls “jihadists”?
To be sure, Cal Thomas is just a tiny bit player in the mass hysteria that ensues over global warming. And to that I do agree, people are wildly hysterical about this issue, and it seems to be getting worse. But it is those whose cry of “hysterics!” echos through the blogoshere and mainstream media who are hysterical.
To Cal Thomas and all the others who continue to hammer anyone within reach over the head with their vague and generally inaccurate notions of the actual science and ongoing research on climate change I say take a deep breath.
Ahhh, wasn’t that nice? Did you notice how pleasant that sound of silence was? Good. Hold onto that feeling and let the real scientists get some work done.
And when you think you need to use a divisive term like “jihadist” to support your argument, you might want to take a closer look at your argument.