What does astrology have to do with global warming?
Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 11:00AM Does astrology have anything to do with global warming? It does if you ask Kevin Horrigan, a writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
On Sunday The Florida Times-Union reprinted a column by Horrigan with the headline, ‘Your day is going to be bogus.’ The T-U appropriately labeled the column run on pg. E-1 as ‘commentary.’ I was not able to find the article online although I admit I didn’t try hard. I read it in the print edition.
Horrigan addressed the subject of the horoscope controversy set off when a Minnesota astronomy teacher suggested the earth’s wobble and a bump in the alignment of the stars over thousands of years necessitate a shift in the zodiac. If you’ve thought of yourself as a Gemini all your life, you’d now be something else. Readers who take their signs seriously were perturbed, but the fracas settled down when those Horrigan calls “serious astrologers” realized everyone was confusing the sidereal zodiac (star-based) with the tropical zodiac (based on sun rays and tropics). In other words, you could stick with the sign you’ve traditionally claimed.
Horrigan, by the way, doesn’t think much of community and technical colleges where the astronomy teacher works. Horrigan wrote, “Right away we know we’re not talking Carl Sagan.” Ouch.
What’s interesting about Horrigan’s otherwise unremarkable column is a statement he worked into the second paragraph. He wrote, “Astrology is certainly less harmful than believing, say, that global warming is a hoax.”
Horrigan may not realize there’s been a change in terminology. Government agencies and universities getting those nice big fat grants to study global warming allegedly caused by man no longer call it global warming because those well-paid alarmist experts realized their data had become suspect.
So-called “experts” at those entities spotted vulnerability after ClimateGate. Agencies like the US Environmental Protection Agency (currently functioning as a de facto fourth branch of government) now refer to their alarmist agenda as ‘climate change.’ That one’s a no-brainer. If the climate hadn’t changed, there wouldn’t be a mountain on the planet—Mother Earth would probably resemble the environment in the film Waterworld.
Horrigan’s injection of a scientific controversy into a column about a silly little news blip barely noticed by people in the real world indicates the fanaticism that has resulted in billions of dollars spent on something many of us believe science has not actually settled. Yet that fanaticism has cost the US taxpayer and consumer dearly.
Furthermore if Horrigan believes limiting carbon emissions will address the real issues of climate change caused by overgrazing, the destruction of war, poor environmental practices in increasingly industrialized countries like China and India and others, the writer is misguided. I use the word 'misguided' because I am avoiding the heated rhetoric the socialist-progressive left engages in so often.
Global warming has nothing to do with astrology. Horrigan, I am certain, knew that when he yielded to the temptations of global warming dogma. Meteorologists are often wrong about the weather forecast, but select experts (not all alarmists are scientists) claim to be able to predict climate change a hundred years out.
Obviously, we’re “not talking Carl Sagan” in those ivory towers either.
Additional reading
Is the University of Virginia biased against professors that challenge...global warming?
The Daily Caller
Senators vow to strip Obama climate power
Breitbart wire story from Agence France Presse
Watts up with That?
(Commentary by Kay B. Day/Feb. 1, 2011)