So in the last couple days, in addition to claiming that 600 year old violence by Christians defending themselves is the same as present day violence by Muslims to aggressively enforce their version of Islam, the Beloved President has apparently gone on record as saying that Global Warming is more of a threat than Terrorism (apparently not naming it Islamic Terrorism either).

He’s getting called out on this, and frankly I agree. I personally view Islamic extremism and the terrorism that flows from it as far more dangerous to the state of the world than I do Global Warming. Not because I doubt in Climate Change (which I do, but I’m willing to admit that Climate Change could be happening), but because I don’t think, really, that Climate Change is as terrible as they make it out to be for Humanity if it is, in fact, happening.

I’m going to start with Climate Change. Back when I first heard about it (as a kid, if that tells you anything) they called it Global Warming. Now, even back then when it was called this, the general idea was that the earth was going to go up a few degrees over all. This meant that the world would get warmer, the polar ice caps would melt, and vast areas of low lying lands would be flooded. Some maps I think went so far as to claim all of Florida would be flooded away and as far into the East Coast of the USA as the Mountains would pretty much go under.

Which, having visited Florida as a child on a yearly basis and having found it an utterly miserable place, I was not sure this was really a great loss to anyone. Sure, people would have to move, but even the most radical of Global Warmers said it was going to take years to get to that point, perhaps even decades so…really all that needed to happen was the people living there were likely going to live out their lives and everyone else…just didn’t need to move there. The rest of the area getting flooded sounded bad, but then, well, move. Yes, it’s hard leaving everything behind, but to my child’s mind if water is coming in, you gotta go. And yes, some Islands in the ocean were going to get flooded, but we could go in and help everyone rebuild from earthquakes and hurricanes, so I didn’t think it would be that big a deal to help these people move to higher lands. Heck, let them come here to America if it was going to be so bad.

Of course, that was back in the 90’s. Now, twenty odd years later, it’s not Global Warming. It’s Climate Change. Which means the planet is not, in fact, actually getting warmer. The Climate is going hot and cold, as if it can’t make up it’s mind. You have ships going around (in summer, no less) to find out if the ice is melting, and they, plus two more ships, get caught up in rapidly growing ice. So much for the ice melting.

So when I hear people screaming about climate change…it’s a bit hard to understand what they’re so panicked about. Back with global warming I could at least empathize with people losing their homes to the Rising Seas. But now…well everyone is still screaming about climate change, how we have to stop it, but…

Well, no one is actually saying what’s going to happen if we don’t. More CO2? And that’s bad how? Plants breath that the way humans do O2, and no one is saying the CO2 levels are going to get anywhere near a problem for any organic life to breath. So the only things that are going to happen is more CO2 and it may still get warmer, but no one is sure.

Which, frankly, sounds pretty awesome if you’re a plant. “Oh, more air I can breath and a longer growing season? Thank you good sir, I shall take it!”

So, a perfect environment for plant growth sounds like just what the Doctor ordered to restore all those forests we’ve burned and all those crops we need to feed 7 billion people. Heck, ice caps melting and a warmer environment sounds like a good recipe for more rain, which might help some of those deserts turn a bit greener and help people grow more food and find more space to live in. So again…bad?

Now I am, nominally, part of the Pagan community, which is all about the environment and protecting the environment and, largely, about stopping Climate Change. But, for all their talk…I still have no idea what we’re stopping beyond “more CO2.” Which, frankly, sounds really good for the environment if you’re a plant, at least that’s what my Bio 101 classes told me. Or that flooding, which may or may not be happening, though no one can say if it is, because we aren’t actually getting warmer. We’re just…having seasons? Idk, and Freyr won’t say.

On the other side of this, we have Terrorism. Which, really, when you look at it, is really just the code word for Islamist World Supremacy.

Now, unlike Global warming (which was supposed to flood the world in something like 20 years) Islamic Extremism has (in 20 years) actually formed it’s own God Damned Country (which might still be growing). It has brutally murdered thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people all over the world. It is enslaving women and girls all over the world. It is mutilating people, subjugating people, and if you count nations like Iran and Saudi Arabia who are on the stricter side of observance and who have been funding and arming these groups, consists of hundreds of millions of angry supremacists who want nothing more than to have their religion and way of life as the sole global existence.

And they are killing to make it happen. They are killing and enslaving every day to do just that. They have gone from a bunch of angry people living in caves to having their own country in ISIS and the lands it has taken and the government it has formed (though technically they had it with Iran, but different sects and so forth). A Government that is training spies to go and create terrorist attacks like Charlie Hebdo. A magazine, which by many accounts….actually support Islamist organizations like Hamas…which has been waging supremacist Islamic war for decades.

I could go on, examples like Rotherham, England. The legendary no-go zones that are supposedly in every major European city. The fact that Sweden went from the safest country in the world to the RAPE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. The stories coming from Deerborn, Michigan, or other places here in the USA or Canada. And each day, the stories get worse and worse. My father told me of a friend of his who has a Muslim friend, who told him “as long as we are the minority, there will be peace, but the instant we have enough numbers, you should convert or we will kill you.” This was a Muslim talking to his friend. Not even an extremist, by all accounts either.

So on the one hand, we have a change in our climate that is ill defined, whose effects are ill defined but might actually be positive as it potentially displaces some people. And on the other we have a rapidly growing religeo-political ideology of violence that in the same time period has drastically, violently, and in no way for the better, effect the world in far more radical ways than Climate Change has apparently had an effect.

So really, which is the threat I should worry about? Is a plant going to get high off warmer climates and CO2 and come kill me? Because my government still let’s me commit chemical warfare on weeds, and I have fire. And I haven’t seen any corn kernels screaming “soil is great” as they blow themselves up.

Because even if the climate changes…life will go on. It will continue to exist. But if Islamic supremacy wins out…all life but Islam will die. And then probably all life as one group of extremists try to blow each other up over who is the True Islam.