Oh Dear Sweet Practical Joking Lord: Gore Effect Strikes Copenhagen Like Frigid Clock; Blizzard Dumps Snow on City

As you probably know, I do not believe in God (nor disbelieve, particularly), as His existence cannot be proven.

Well...

World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.

“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.”

...

Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years, under the DMI’s definition, and only had seven last century. Temperatures today fell as low as minus 4 Celsius (25 Fahrenheit).

Are you kidding me?

This is something like an argument about the existence of God in the Hitchhiker's Guide -- proving God doesn't exist.

With some alterations...

The pratical upshot of all this is that is that wherever Albert Arnold Gore, Junior, chief evangelist for the Cult of the Virgin Gaia, goes, spreading his Gospel of a rapidly-warming earth, the weather suddenly takes an intense turn to the frigid and starts dumping snow on every SUV and private jet in his carbon-throbbing vehicular entourage.

Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly ironic could happen, and continue happening, and happen and happen and happen and then happen again some more, purely by chance, and without some Divine Hand manipulating the cosmic weather machine, that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

The arguement goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove I exist,' says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

'But,' says Man, 'the Gore Effect is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not possibly be a coincidence that this continues happening. It could not possibly happen so many times that meteorologists now forecast the weather half by Doppler radar and half by Gore's travel secretary. It cannot be that everywhere this man moves, the clouds start pouring snow over the landscape like OJ pouring out DNA all over Rockingham. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguements, you don't. QED.'

'Oh dear,' says God, 'I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

'Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

Most leading theologians claim that this arguement is a load of dingo's kidneys, but that didn't stop Oolan Colluphid making a small fortune when he used it as the central theme of his best-selling book Well That About Wraps It Up For God.

Or, as Depeche Mode said:

I don't want to start any blasphemous rumours
But I think that God's got a sick sense of humor
And when I die I expect to find Him laughing ...

Well they're liberals. They would find it sick. I think it's pretty awesome (in a sick, but deservedly so, sort of way).

The Lord works in hilarious ways.

Pascal's Wager: Rand Simberg, in an article last night, was talking up how the left's favorite new argument is a variation of Pascal's Wager.

Pascal said: Look, there is such low cost to believing in God, and the costs of not believing in Him, if He in fact exists, are so high (eternal damnation), that any rational person should just believe as a hedge against eternal calamity.

Simberg noted that this is flawed, because, for example, it could be that some other religion's God is the real God, and by believing in the wrong god, you are condemning yourself.

In other words, Pascal's Wager is wrong because it posits that if there's any chance of calamity, you must take effort to avert it, without considering the possibility that your actions invite a different calamity.

Anyway, this is the left's new argument with global warming; Oh dear, the world could end, so given this possible calamity, even if we don't know it will happen and even if we cannot even calculate the odds of it happening, we must believe, believe in Global Warming for only by the grace of the Virgin Gaia will we be saved.

Note that this is wrong, again, for it doesn't take into account the non-zero possibility we're actually scheduled for a naturally-occurring Ice Age, and that what we really need to do is start pumping out carbon like there's no tomorrow, or else there might not be.

You can't just take some possible thing and say because it's possible we need to take action against it without having some sensible idea of what the odds are -- or what the odds are of inadvertently causing a different calamity by your attempts to avoid the first one.

At any rate, bringing this around to Gore:

If I were him, I really would start thinking about the flaw in Pascal's Wager.

Because it seems to me there is some evidence of a non-zero sort of chance that the Earth sorta hates his puking guts.

Maybe he should stop worrying about what we're doing to the Earth and start worrying what the Earth might do to him if he doesn't stop this nonsense at once.

Timeline: The Gore Effect. It really is -- I mean -- it's uncanny.

It's a little creepy, man. It's like one of those super-dumb premises that Steven King comes up with, almost as if it's a bar bet, something so utterly dumb that you almost giggle at and say Oh that can't possibly be made scary, and then, just to prove that he can, he makes it scary.

Like-- Steven King's The Man in the All-Weather Parka.

Or, I don't know: The Devil's Mittens.

Thanks to Chainsaw Chimp for that.

Why Do They Keep Tempting Fate and Scheduling These Confabs Around Christmas? I hope no one will be offended if I note the early Christian calender scheduled observances around the time of pagan observances, to make conversion an easier transition.

So why do these conferences always seem to happen during Yuletide?

When it makes so much more sense -- and there is less a chance of blizzardry embarrassment -- to schedule them in the summer?

See what I'm getting at here?

Do I believe this?

Nahhhh... Well. Who knows. I'm an agnostic. Who knows what the hell I believe.

I know Steven King's got a new book coming out about a snowman magically animated to life who then goes on a torso-killing spree.

Or he should, at least.

posted by Ace at 05:24 PM

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