Perhaps an analogy, think of every boxcar of coal going by as another bucket added to a swimming pool?

I think the testimony was great, but I'm at a loss as to how you might better involve a public wearied by the deluge of information out there on a daily basis. Certainly the testimony is good for policy makers.

Cheers

Thanks, Jon, for the link to Revkin's blog.

The 15th comment makes it very clear that with certain readers at least, Jim Hansen is simply not going to be able to explain himself to their satisfaction.

And if anything, the Krystalnacht analogy only makes it worse.  Once again, those of us with ears to hear understand exactly what Hansen is saying, on the one hand, and on the other cannot understand why it should be offensive, to Jews or anyone else.  But evidently, once again, there will be some who misinterpret Hansen's analogy to mean that he heartlessly fails to appreciate the absolute uniqueness of all that the Jews suffered during the legitimized, institutionalized anti-Semitism in Europe during the 1930s and '40s.

That misinterpretation strikes me as a case of remarkably woeful illogic.  To say that "A is like B, in this respect," is, after all, not at all equivalent to saying, simply, "A is B."  Is the sense of "There is no sorrow like unto my sorrow" so persistently powerful and overwhelming, that there can be no hope for a return of the logic-loving faculties?

In the same way, as a supporter of animal rights, I like very much Revkin's commenter from Britain, who was reminded of the countless train cars crammed with animals on their way to slaughter in Chicago.  But to suggest that there is any kind of moral equivalence between the suffering and death of those animals, and the suffering and death of human beings taken to the death camps, would certainly provoke outrage -- and that too, in spite of the often-quoted observation by the renowned and beloved Jewish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, to the effect that our relation to the animals that we eat is exactly analogous to the relation of the Nazis to the Jews.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

seems like an appropriate metaphor to me. For some people, though, nothing can ever be compared to the holocaust, and it's too bad it distracts from the urgent message here.

Not of coal cars, but of Hansen, Gore and friends.

For those not religiously inclined you can skip this...

I had some time to be browsing around the Old Testament last night and noticed something about the old story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal in the book of Kings. If you remember, Elijah challenged them to prove their god was real, himself against 450 of them. 1 Kings 18:24:

"And call ye on the name of your gods, and I will call on the name of the LORD: and the God that answereth by fire, let him be God. [...]"

A similar challenge applies in this debate: who is right about the implications of coal for global warming and life on Earth: Hansen and Gore and Dave Roberts and company, or the coal executives? Each side calls on their scientists for evidence, proof. And overwhelmingly, the truth falls on one side, not the other.

1 Kings 18:38-40
"Then the fire of the LORD fell, and consumed the burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The LORD, he is the God; the LORD, he is the God. And Elijah said unto them, Take the prophets of Baal; let not one of them escape. And they took them: and Elijah brought them down to the brook Kishon, and slew them there."

You would think Elijah had won. Overwhelming proof. The defeat of many opposed to him. The people on his side. A Nobel prize in the modern debate. And yet his opponents were still in power:

"Then Jezebel sent a messenger unto Elijah, saying, So let the gods do to me, and more also, if I make not thy life as the life of one of them by to morrow about this time. And when he saw that, he arose, and went for his life [...]"

"[...] there came a voice unto him, and said, What doest thou here, Elijah? And he said, I have been very jealous for the LORD God of hosts: because the children of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thine altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away."

Jim Hansen, Al Gore, our modern-day Elijah's - it is still a long hard fight ahead of us. Don't run, keep strong, and we will prevail.

AP,
a "religious inclination" is most certainly not required for reading the Bible.  Every educated European, and every educated resident of a land colonized by Europeans, should be acquainted with the contents of the Bible -- just as they should be acquainted with Homer, the tragedians, Plato and Aristotle, Virgil, and Greek and Roman history.  And every educated person everywhere should be acquainted with some basic information about all the major religions of the world, as well as world history, the history of philosophy, the history of science, and the history of the arts.

There! -- no problem.  Ain't curriculum design fun?

And yet: The Bible!  How I hate that book!  How I want to stomp on it, to throw it against the wall, to tear it to pieces!  Well, OK, not the book itself, but the false idolatrous concept of it, as though it were some evenly, irresistibly, ever consistently beaming monolith.  How harmful and destructive that wicked concept has been to true Christianity!

How I hate the Books of Kings!  Could I possibly worship the God of Elijah, who stirred him and empowered him to massacre 450 ignorant men?  Never!  Could I ever sit still in a pew next to the wild, savage old Israelite who wrote that dreadful story?  God forbid!  Do I not wish that all the art and all the literature that the brilliant cults of Baal and Astarte must have inspired had survived, and had not been put to the torch and the mallet by those monotheistic fanatics maddened by their horrible anthropophagous desert deity?  With every breath I take!

And yet: How I love the Books of Kings too!  The writing is just so good!  Yes, the stories are horrible, but they are wonderful, and beautiful, and fascinating too.  One of my very favorites is the story of the anonymous "man of God out of Judah," and the lion and the donkey, in 1 Kings 13.  The gross irony of how the man is killed, and the hideous criminality of God, leave me gasping.  How I hope and pray that that story is not true!  But also, how I wish I could write a story half as good!

For a different reason, your turning our attention to the Elijah story is very well done.  One of the greatest and most famous works of literature ever written by an American, a major document of American religion, American industry, American business, and Americans' relationship with wild animals, is about the voyage of a whaling vessel named Pequod; and the captain of the Pequod is named Ahab, after the ancient Israelite king against whom Elijah prophesied and who in turn drove Elijah into the desert.  The book is "Moby-Dick."  What does Herman Melville want us to know, when he named his remarkable character after that king?  He wants us to read the Books of Kings, evidently, to begin learning what he means, even as he wants us to read the Book of Genesis in order to understand, if we can, why he names his narrator Ishmael, after the patriarch Abraham's inconvenient and ill-served first son.  But why?  Why does he do this?  Why does Melville think that in order to understand this story -- which is about Americans, about ourselves: so, rather, in order to understand ourselves -- , we need to read the Bible?

It might be interesting to know how Jim Hansen, Al Gore and Andy Revkin would answer those radical questions.  But let us not urge them too strongly at present.  Meanwhile, if it suits us to think of Jim Hansen as the Elijah of our time and our land, one who is alone master of a supreme truth, and lives in fear for his life in the midst of his enemies, well, fine.  The analogy may not be to everyone's liking, though.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

One of the hard and essential things for an advocacy movement to do well, is to get the right balance between the vision of what needs to be done to solve the problem and that which will happen if the problem is not solved.

Christianity has its heaven and hell.  It's like the mafia; you get an offer you can't refuse, the bribery of heaven and the blackmail of hell.  That is one reason Christianity is so successful.

Some have argued like the authors of `Breakthrough' that you only need to articulate the good vision of what needs to have happen, like Martin Luther King jr speech in 1963, `I have a dream.'  People will then see a vision of a better future and work towards that. Some will claim that that is the reason for race improvements in America.  What they forget are a few other things that happened at that time.

The race riots of 1964 in Harlem and 1965 in Watts.  Nothing like a little rioting to get people to understand that you are angry as many blacks were at this time, much of it very justifiable.  

So that gave people a choice, the `I have a dream' speech of Martin Luther King jr where people can work together to solve problems or the rioting of Harlem and Watts.  The `I have a dream' seemed like heaven compared to the rioting.  That was some of the reason Congress was able to pass the civil rights acts as well as many others.  The heaven and the hell of a problem were considered.

Which is why we can't just proclaim a vision to a clean energy future, we have to describe the hell as well.  Maybe Hanson's analogy was a little to specific for people who were actually a part of those events, but the hell of runaway global warming has to be described if not with this analogy then other's.   The hell is as much or more of the story as the heaven.

It also gave me some hope that there is more than cold calculations on the scientists minds, that there is the reality of what it means to the animals and humans dying.

Steve,

  let's say we are walking out over a cliff edge, on a plank of wood held down by rocks. Most of us refuse to look down, most of us refuse to notice that the plank is starting to bend, and its abrupt end not far ahead is shrouded in mist. A few lone voices cry out to pay attention, but they are scoffed at and condemned. Those rocks holding it down look so big, we feel so small, the plank looks so long, we're safe, right?

We have choices that will save us, but they cannot be made individually - we're all bonded together on this one, and only collective action by a united world will succeed. How do we get that to happen?

A wonderfully well-put metaphor..... and even better questions.

I suppose we begin by raising awareness among our many brothers and sisters in the family of humanity.  Think of this as a first step on a new path of beginning to determine how we are going to adequately move forward.  Once our message of humanity's distinctly human-induced predicament has been reasonably and sensibly shared widely and generally understood, not simply within a solid majority of humankind but many more than that, then we have an opportunity to put to good use the many wondrous, and occasionally unique, gifts God has granted to our splendid species for the purpose of responding ably to whatsoever challenges present themselves to humanity and to life as we know it.

Sincerely,

Steve

Well said Jim! Yeah some people are quick to point inappropriate anologies for lack of any counter evidence. My dad liberated the camps, but a death march is a death march. The most offended are the ones who want coal to remain cool. Offering positive solutions as you have is the way to the future. Keep up the excellent work!

Marky48