The Most Endangered Species - The Honest Man - Will Still Survive Annihilation

Here is a web-exclusive question and answer from Newsweek, a talk with Eric Chivian, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, on the recent announcement that evangelical Christians are going to work together with scientists on the issue of “global and environmental climate change.”

There’s an anesthetized phrase for you - “global and environmental climate change.” Remember when it used to be called “global warming?” The way we sanitize the language here in America to make everything sound less horrible than it really is is just one of the many things comedian George Carlin has been right about over the years. I don’t know if he has ever actually used global warming in his skit about how we have changed what we call things in this country, but here’s one he has used, by way of example. “Post-traumatic stress disorder” used to be called “shell shock,” until the prescription drug companies figured out how they could make money off of it if they gave it more syllables, and a hyphen. (The first part is George's - the swipe at the drug companies is mine.)

Anyway...the evangelicals and the scientists are going to work together to, well...actually the Q & A doesn’t actually offer up many specifics, apart from the fact that the two groups are going to start working together. Apparently this means showing the world that the two nearly diametrically opposed groups of hominids can, in fact, agree on at least one thing. It also appears as though they plan to meet with “a bipartisan group of members of the Congress.”

It sounds like a good idea. The web site for Harvard’s CHGE, linked to above, has a number of links related to this story - including the press release, letters of support from Senators such as Richard Lugar (R - IN) and Barack Obama (D - IL), and various kinds of contact information.

I started to write some pretty cynical commentary on this story - such as the timing of the announcement of the plan and the somewhat empty nature of the rhetoric in the press release. Politicians and Christians are oh-so-good at talking without actually saying anything - and that makes this somewhat hard to swallow. I also can’t help but wonder if we ever would have heard about anything like this if the Republicans had not lost in November and Ted Haggard had not been caught soliciting sex and meth from a big burly guy.

But I’m going to hold back, for now, on the most scathing comments, and see how this one plays out. The science of global warming is nigh on overwhelming, but there are still far too many Appalachian-Americans (and their ilk - the Appalachians not, obviously, being transcontinental down the long axis of the country) whose only experience with books is with The Good Book. And for every Al Gore who goes on tour with the truth, there is a Michael Crichton who is only trying to sell books.

Okay, that got a little bit cynical. I guess I can’t help it. But it could have been worse. What I wrote originally had a bad 9/11 joke in there, along with a Deuce Bigalow reference (to the sequel, no less). I’m really going to try to be positive about this. Of course, I was positive about the sequel to Jurassic Park when I heard about that project. Ah well...