Professor Greenville Draper

January 10, 2011

Professor Greenville Draper
Department of Earth & Environment
Florida International University

Miami, Florida

RER: What do you have against Dante? – Some comments on your not quite snarky blurb on the Yahoos who don’t genuflect at the altar of Climate Change, nee Global Warming, nee Global Cooling, nee the “Of course the world is flat” school, as proclaimed by you in this morning’s Miami Herald.

My dear Professor,

Since Professor Paul Ehrlich, and by Crikey if there is a smarter guy anywhere I want to meet him, told the world in 1970 – 40 years ago – that the race was between starving to death and freezing to death with the finish line ending at the year 2000 I feel like I have been on borrowed time for the last 11 years.

Full disclosure requires me to tell you that I am “calorically challenged”. That 3rd Worlders are starving because of my insatiable desire for Blue Fin sushi, Kobe beef, Crème Brule, farm raised peccary, Big Macs, brown whisky and red meat, there can be no doubt. Alas, my need for inorganic endive and rugala, flavored pop corn, and hot house truffles [both black and white], all of which require inordinate amounts of fossil fuel to raise, will be on my conscience until my cholesterol levels cause my liver to explode.

You say, as only someone totally unfamiliar with the Trivium, that it, it being defined as someone who thinks the Wizard behind the curtain is full of ca-ca, “defied logic”.

#1 – As one of the capstones of Western Civilization logic should be Logic.
#2 – It can’t be “defied”; it can only be offended.

You say “skeptic” as if it were a four letter word. In case you haven’t noticed “skepticism” is what makes the dog hunt.

All scientific discovery is based on “skepticism”.



I know that in the Ptolemaic and/or Copernican universe the sun either revolves around the earth or it doesn’t because it does both but only in Age comfortable with Aquarius, and I still haven’t figured out which is witch and then Galileo came along and really queered the pitch [N.B. the play on words.] I do know that Columbus didn’t fall off the edge of the earth as the universally accepted science of the time said he would. The only thing I am sure of is that skepticism did not begin with the sudden realization that former Vice President Alpha Gump was/is/ and shall be a horse’s ass of Homeric proportions.

The History of Science, beginning with Aristotle, shows that someone saying “What if”, or “I don’t believe it”, or “Prove it”, is when palpable progress is made. Further, “correlation is not causation” is a lesson that must be learned over and over and over, and over again.

The supposedly unimpeachable science of the Autism and Measles vaccine connection is now in the same category as the Bermuda Triangle or tomatoes are poison. Children died because an alchemist in a white lab coat lied. What makes that worse is that the scientific world gulped and said nothing. Meryl Steep, noted chemist, biologist, and boob warned us of the dangers of Alar. Erin Brockovich made a fortune warning us of a danger that didn’t exist. Malaria, literally bad air, was essentially wiped out until Rachel Carson, one of the 20th century’s greatest quacks, doctored the books and got DDT banned. 2,000,000 sub-Saharan Black children die each year because fairly affluent White First Worlders feel warm and fuzzy about themselves. Donna Shalala, when she was a Clinton cabinet officer in 1996, told us that we would all be dead from AIDS in 10 years. At least she gave us 6 more years than Professor Ehrlich. Go Canes!

Cranberries, Phisohex, Saccharine, salt, incandescent light bulbs, diapers, Mark Twain, DWEMs, cigars, plastic versus paper, asbestos, leaded gasoline, waxing and waning ozone layers, drowning polar bears, Lysenko, Margaret Sanger and “culling the herd”. Who says Ned Lud is dead?

Weren’t scientific theses subject to independent replication and verification? At the very least wasn’t the discovery of a perpetual motion machine on the East Coast subject to some testing by neutral scientists on the West Coast?

Whatever happened to what was once called the scientific method?

The story may be apocryphal but Einstein was said to have posted all his work into the early 20th century universe of physicists. He knew he only had to be proved wrong once. If he were, or so he was supposed to have said, he “could get on to something new”.




A Senator from a profoundly crooked city, county, and state, a place where the pennies on a dead man’s eyes would not survive the first round of mourners, a place where no stove could be hot enough to keep a quarter on it when the “boys” are in the kitchen, told us that if we voted for him the oceans would stop rising and that the temperature would cool.. Your CV lists you as a Professor of Earth and Environment. If you had a first year survey student say that what grade would he earn?

I await the annual Jeremiad about the snows once again receding from Mt. Kilimanjaro. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but the snows have been receding since 1888. Can anything be made of the fact that 1888 was the first year that they were measured? One uptick here is that we may yet find out how those damned leopards got up there.

You say that you are “not a little annoyed with the Miami Herald publishing letters” preaching heresy. Although I am positive your litotes was unintentional I applaud you for the first totally honest thing you said.

The modern scientific community is made up of naked Emperors who twice a day commands the tide to bend to accepted truths. At least Canute knew his sycophants were full of “it”. In this instance “it” needs no definition.




Kevin Smith


PS – As to my throwaway line asking you what do you have against Dante I am sure you know that there was an upward spike in temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere 1100 years ago. Several things happened because of this. More land became arable. More protein was grown and consumed. Man got smarter. We had the Renaissance. Dante’s opening line was “Halfway through my journey I found myself in the dark wood of error”. Sound advice then. Sound advice now.