Rather than a celebration of the Earth, I believe that this day has become more of a celebration of humankind and all the vast power we hold in our hands – power to impact and mold and shape and even destroy the planet…the planet, mind you. This has become mankind’s new Tower of Babel.

You remember the first Tower of Babel, don’t you? Genesis chapter 11? Where they were building a huge structure to “make a name for ourselves.” That’s exactly what’s happening now with the global warming rhetoric.The power that humanity holds is enormous…if you believe the standard rhetoric.

A video on Yosemite National Park that I’ve shown in my classroom surveys the various forces of air, water, lightning, and fire that acted together to form the great Yosemite Valley. Toward the end of the video, after touching on some comments related to global warming, the narrator ominously intones, “Man is now the ultimate force in Yosemite.”

Believing that we hold that much power in our hands allows us to ignore science, or at least interpret it in such a way that the data fit our analysis. We can ignore the power of the sun and its fluctuations in determining climate change. We can ignore the hundreds of years of data that indicate that CO2 levels increase hundreds of years after (not before) temperatures increase (generally as a result of the oceans being able to contain less CO2 at higher temperatures). And we can also ignore the fact that we’ve been in an 8 year cooling trend, or that back in the 70’s Newsweek magazine was ringing the alarm bell for global cooling.