Showing posts with label The Gallic Gadfly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Gallic Gadfly. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Pascal Bruckner's "Fanaticism of the Apocalypse" - A Citizen's Response

This turns out to be one of my most visited pages.  Makes me wonder how someone who's so wrapped up within his own mind while remaining oblivious to the physical planet around himself has found such a large audience.  But, guess I shouldn't be surprised at all - mind games and disconnect from the realities of our life giving biosphere is that name of the game in this brave new world - isn't it.

I tried contacting Pascal Bruckner, but it's a black hole on the other side of this computer, Though considering the popularity of this post, if anyone that reads this has a real email address for the man please do share it.


cheers, CC  8/20/14

(did some touch up edits while rereading this.)
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I've made a fresh attempt to evaluate Bruckner's machinations, this time using an article he wrote for The Chronicle of Higher Education: "Against Environmental Panic" and ironically printed the day before I posted this original look at Bruckner.  Considering my efforts are as much about my own personal learning process as it is about sharing information, I'm hoping it's a bit more concise and cleaner than this effort.


Watching Flames, Pascal Bruckner Fiddles (August 24, 2014)

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Pascal Bruckner a professional thinker who's been described as the "Gallic Gadfly" and "a goad, a self-declared man of the left who considers the influence of leftist ideology on contemporary France to have been, by and large, disastrous..." {see The Gallic Gadfly }.  

Thus it was odd to see Anthony WUWT embracing him, but who knows what's going on at WUWT these days.  In any event, I'm tired of stuff like this going unopposed so here's another critical review together with a few selected educational videos and links to sources that help describe some of the scientific aspects of climatology that Bruckner seems unaware of.

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"http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/17/essay-carbon-footprint-as-original-sin/ 
Essay: carbon footprint as ‘original sin’
Posted on June 17, 2013 by Anthony Watts
 
"Anthony Watts' writes: 
"This essay appears today in The Chronicle Review and it makes an interesting claim:
What is the carbon footprint, after all, if not the gaseous equivalent of Original Sin, the stain we inflict on Mother Gaia?
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Here Anthony inserted a <250 word quote from Bruckner's 4000 word long essay, then he tippytoes away from the scene, leaving it to his fans to have at it.

As for me, by the time I was finished looking through the full essay I was irritated enough that I felt compelled to give it another look and offer Pascal Bruckner a reply to his "Fanaticism and the Apocalypse" which is anything but a rational evaluation of our real world situation.

I will reproduce Bruckner's entire text, though vast tracks of wasteland will be reduced to small font.  I haven't changed any words but have introduced some highlights and paragraph breaks where appropriate.  

Bruckner's words are in courier font
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4000+ words
The essay can be found at:

In Jesuit schools we were urged to strengthen our faith by spending time in monasteries. We were assigned spiritual exercises to be dutifully written in little notebooks that were supposed to renew the promises made at baptism and to celebrate the virtues of Christian love and succor for the weak.