RUSH: Here’s Dan in Springport, Michigan. Welcome, sir, to Open Line Friday on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you.
RUSH: You bet.
CALLER: In the past you?ve played a speech from Charlton Heston in which he speaks about how impossible it is for humans to destroy the earth. With all of the talk of global warming, I was hoping sometime you could play that again.
RUSH: Yeah. Your call has been on the board for a while. We had a chance to find it. What it actually is, I think, is a forward or an intro in an early chapter in a Michael Crichton book. I think it’s from Jurassic Park. Charlton Heston called here one day and asked to read it on the air — and, you know, when Moses calls you and is really passionate about something and wants to read the tablets to you, you get out of the way and do it.
CALLER: That’s right.
RUSH: We have it. We’ve kept it. It’s in our archives. Thanks, Dan, for the call and the reminder about that. We have so many things in our archives, it’s impossible for all of us to remember everything that’s there, but this really is powerful, and it goes great today with all of this hysteria on global warming and destroying the planet. Here is Charlton Heston from the opening chapters of Jurassic Park as written by Michael Crichton.
HESTON: You think man can destroy the planet? What intoxicating vanity! Let me tell you about our planet. Earth is four-and-a-half-billion-years-old. There’s been life on it for nearly that long, 3.8 billion years. Bacteria first; later the first multicellular life, then the first complex creatures in the sea, on the land. Then finally the great sweeping ages of animals, the amphibians, the dinosaurs, at last the mammals, each one enduring millions on millions of years, great dynasties of creatures rising, flourishing, dying away — all this against a background of continuous and violent upheaval.
Mountain ranges thrust up, eroded away, cometary impacts, volcano eruptions, oceans rising and falling, whole continents moving, an endless, constant, violent change, colliding, buckling to make mountains over millions of years. Earth has survived everything in its time.
It will certainly survive us. If all the nuclear weapons in the world went off at once and all the plants, all the animals died and the earth was sizzling hot for a hundred thousand years, life would survive, somewhere: under the soil, frozen in arctic ice. Sooner or later, when the planet was no longer inhospitable, life would spread again. The evolutionary process would begin again. Might take a few billion years for life to regain its present variety. Of course, it would be very different from what it is now, but the earth would survive our folly, only we would not. If the ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet radiation sears earth, so what? Ultraviolet radiation is good for life. It’s powerful energy.
It promotes mutation, change. Many forms of life will thrive with more UV radiation. Many others will die out. You think this is the first time that’s happened? Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine.
When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself. In the thinking of the human being a hundred years is a long time.
Hundred years ago we didn’t have cars, airplanes, computers or vaccines. It was a whole different world, but to the earth, a hundred years is nothing. A million years is nothing. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can’t imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven’t got the humility to try. We’ve been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we’re gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us.
RUSH: That’s the key: We haven’t the humility. This wraps up this whole global warming argument. We so lack in humility — and it’s a contradiction, too. On the one hand, the environmentalist wackos consider us irrelevant. We’re no more important than the average rat or dog or insect, and in the other moment we are so powerful and we’re so negative and we are so destructive that we, humans, are destroying the planet. Don’t get confused. Global warming people, they’re not worried about what it will do to humanity. That’s not the way they pitch it. They pitch it that the world, the fragility of our climate is in crisis.
Of course, Charlton Heston, reading from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, puts this in a great perspective. In fact, that passage is one of the things that helped form my whole thinking on the concept of the complexity of all of this that is our planet and the impotence that we really have to do anything about it. The idea that by improving our standards of living, that those characteristics of our existence will destroy us, is, frankly, just absurd. I contend you cannot believe in God and believe what the global warming crowd believes.
You can’t. The two do not go hand in hand. You have to actively not believe in God and believe in something else as a replacement, in order to hold this catastrophic climate crisis view that they all have.