Researchers - not data - change

The historical ("primary") documents that fuel this blog don't change - can't change - frozen in time from the Manhattan of 75 years ago.

But my contemporary understanding of them continues to change, evolve, regress, whatever.

For a long time I saw today's bad climate change deniers as the best single contemporary example of the once widespread pre-war belief that denied any limits to Man's ability to control Mother Nature.

But these sort of deniers were actually the weak case.

"Climate Hubrists" : deniers of any limits to human ability to control reality

I separate Holocaust deniers from Climate Change deniers, I really do.

Most Holocaust deniers deny that the event ever happened - and continue to deny that, even in their heart of hearts.

But Climate Change deniers only pretend in public that they believe human-originated harmful Climate Change isn't happening and won't happen.

What they really and not so secretly believe - in their particular heart of hearts - is that Man can easily solve any bad climate change, or indeed any other global disaster that might happen, as fast and as easily as any comic book Super Hero might.



The denier/hubrists don't really read the bible and they don't really read many books.

Climate 'hubrists' a more accurate term than 'deniers'

But if you do the arithmetic, you will see that all active "climate change deniers" (I prefer to call them "Climate Hubrists") under the age of eighty-five had to grow up reading super hero comic books.

Those super hero ideas and conceits (along with Fox TV News, Talk Radio and the commentators on the sports channels) have in practise become the common intellectual currency of our age for people of an anti-intellectual cast, replacing things like the Sears Roebuck catalogue and the King James Bible.

Why else would Googling Climate Change and Manhattan Project produce 1.5 million results ?

A new Manhattan Project can't stop any global environmental crisis : in fact the old one produced - via worldwide strontium 90 fallout from local testing - the very first man-made global environmental disaster we ever knew.

But millions - and probably ultimately billions of people world wide - still take it as a comforting solution to our current climate change crisis.

It is a pity then that the names Robert Jewett , John Sheldon Lawrence and H Bruce Franklin are not better known among those combating the climate deniers/hubrists.

I recommend to all of us who are wondering why we are losing the public battle of opinion over the existence (or not) of harmful human climate change to spend some time reading , in combination, Jewett's & Lawrence's many books and articles on the "American (superhero) Monomyth", together with Franklin's classic "War Stars", about the enduring belief in a single superweapon ending all wars.

(Geo-engineering, in this context, might be regarded as the latest high tech superweapon - this time against incoming weather rather than incoming aliens.)

Instead of looking to wartime Manhattan's nuclear Project, we need rather to look to wartime Manhattan's (natural) penicillin Project for a pathway showing how when we work with Mother Nature, enduring good things happen.

Work with Nature instead of against her  ? Unimaginable to denier/hubrists.

Because the only thing the deniers ever really deny is any limits to the human ability to control physical reality --- and that reads as Hubris in my book....

Since Manhattan Project caused first global environmental crisis, it can hardly solve the new one ...

If your baby isn't dying from an overdose of Strontium 90 from mother's breast milk , it isn't for want of trying on the part of the permanently teenage males who brought us the first Manhattan Project.

They would have polished and re-polished the turd that is atomic bombs , with their deadly atmospheric tests, until all of us were full of atomic fallout radiation - including themselves.
That's the thing about dumb fucks - they can't stop harming even themselves .

Thankfully some of them became enlightened before they died (and a wrathful God forcefully did it for them).

But what then is the excuse of the permanently twenty something male (once again !) down the street who emerges from his make believe world of super hero comic books just long enough to earnestly inform us that "... another Manhattan Project , maybe in geo-engineering , will quickly solve any climate problem - if that problem actually exists...".

Yes Virginia, there is such a thing as 20/20 non-hindsight ....