Science…kills itself when it adopts a creed

Thomas Henry Huxley, 1885

(Personal trans.)

Since the priests and believers of the new cult, which I have called the Great Green Leap, need a place for prayers, confessions, blessings and anathematisms, I believe that the Green Church of Climateism would be most appropriate. The idea of ​​this church was suggested to me by the case of the famous economist Julian Simon (University of Maryland), who won the famous bet with the pseudo-apocalyptic prophet Paul Ehrlich (Stanford University).

Speaking at an environmental forum, Professor Simon asked: How many of you believe that the Earth is becoming more polluted and that our natural resources are being depleted? When almost everyone present raised their hands, Simon asked again: Is there evidence that might change your mind? Complete silence. Simon was not afraid and continued: Is there any evidence I could give you that would make you reconsider these assumptions? After more silence, Professor Simon concluded: Well, sorry. I’m not dressed for church.

The existence of the Green Church is an answer to a question that appears in various forms in my previous articles: how to explain the fact that much of the Western world, especially Europe and the United States, has succumbed to the collective madness that is climateism. or, in other words, the climate change orthodoxy? An honest answer cannot avoid the conclusion that this new-style orthodoxy has effectively become a new religion with priests and parishioners marked, among other things, by the intolerant zeal that has so often plagued religion in the past, sometimes even today.

The Green Church of Climate Change is based on several pillars:

1. The planet is warming due to certain human behavior. Sopermanent and pronounced human influence on the climate.

2. This influence it can only be a disaster, marking the end of the world (climatic Armageddon). Any aspects positives or GOOD QUALITY anthropogenic influence is not of interest to the climate community.

3. Thanks to powerful computers, we can predict what the climate will be like in 20, 40 or even 100 years.

4. Furthermore, based on these all-powerful computers, we believe that if we eliminate just one component – ​​the burning of fossil fuels – we can prevent climate change for as long as we want.

5. The climate problem (or crisis or emergency) can and should be solved through global governance. A possible Messiah or even a (young) climate saint would greatly accelerate the rescue of the poor climate from anthropogenic calamity.

Those who read my latest book, Climate Change Torn Between Myth and Fact, were able to discover the mythological and religious aspects of the cult that the Green Church supported:

Climateism has the makings of a new secular religion in which nature has become the new God and climate change will be the new Apocalypse. Thus, sins against God were replaced by crimes against nature. And the priests of the new religion? Of course, it’s “97% of experts who agree with anthropogenic global warming.”

The myth of the righteous nature or primordial Alma Mater

In Climate Change – The (Sometimes) Politically Incorrect Guide I called it the Eden Myth or Nostalgia for a Lost Paradise. In this conceptual system, the climate is considered a symbol of the natural, wild environment, a manifestation of Mother Nature, who was originally pure and righteous and was to remain so, untouched and defiled by humans. The Edenic nature of this myth is evident, for it describes a fiction called Paradise or the Garden of Heaven, from which the first men were banished for committing original sin. And climate change is synonymous today lost nature an idea with deep resonance in many cultures.

Ideology of wild and righteous nature is a secondary, but by no means insignificant, pillar of the Green Church of climate change. This type of climate ideology is the opposite of Babel – we pride ourselves on having conquered and mastered Nature: instead of trying to appropriate and dominate, we are now dealing with the deification of nature, namely the climate. “The world remained in the desert“, said Henry D. Thoreau, thus signaling that the wild nature, whose climate is not altered by man, is a kind of delicate and righteous sanctuary that should be preserved as it is, far from any human intervention . Thus, the climate also becomes something fragile and needs to be protected or conserved, as is the case with natural landscapes or plant and animal species.

Here we can easily distinguish the ideals that have fueled Romanticism, the Enlightenment, and more recently the environmental movement for two or more centuries. As a result, the concept of appeared in the imagination of mankind Mother naturethe ideological umbrella under which environmentalism, global warming and climate change have found refuge.

But there is nothing more false to nature than to be a mother to men. There is no such climate in which a person would be perfectly adapted, in the sense that he would be guaranteed a decent quality of life. Mother nature he doesn’t want us to have a life expectancy of 75 years or an infant mortality rate below 1%. Nature, as the totality of everything that exists on Earth, does not care about people in any way and constantly attacks us with bacteria-infected waters, excessive heat, lack of rain or floods, earthquakes, storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, insects and more. disease-carrying creatures (like the recent SARS-Cov2, still active), large numbers of predators, etc. Today, we perceive the death of a person under the age of 30 as a tragedy; in more “natural” times it was life expectancy.

The main consequence of this climate myth is that because of climate change, because of the loss of the wild nature of Eden, people not only diminish themselves, but also change something outside themselves. This mythic position of nostalgia is a hard and deep characteristic of climateism.

However, the myth of a pure, wild nature – a primordial paradise from which man would be banished – has been a persistent mode of discourse in recent centuries. Losing their wild and righteous nature through the taming and taming of nature, some people develop a guilt complex, feel directly responsible for what happens to nature/climate, and will act accordingly. The Green Church welcomes lost souls in search of false gods.

In other words, a pseudo-reality was created – Optimal character – which is sometimes well hidden behind the current climate change debate. A quasi-religious notion that the planet it was delivered in perfect working order and cannot be exchanged for a new one[1]as Emory Lovins and others argue, reflects what climate economist Robert Mendelsohn (Yale University) calls an unspoken myth in ecology that natural conditions should be optimal. I mean, we should be at the top of the hill now.[2] The peak is 0.041% of CO2 molecules in the entire atmosphere…

The radical wing of the Green Church and climate change reject one vision anthropocentric world, based on the central position of man, in favor of vision ecocentric, in which Nature prevails. But, continuing my previous explanations, nature does not give us a stable and safe (optimal) climate, which we change by making it dangerous. This effectively presents us with a dangerous, ever-changing climate that we must make safe and adaptable to our needs. And the engine of huge economic, social, cultural, medical, etc. progress. humanity over the past 200 years, the one that gives us reliable buildings, affordable heating and air conditioning, drought relief, and all the other things that protect us from the climate. cheap, redundant and reliable energywhich comes at about 80% from fossil fuels.

A parallel between climate and religion

Over time, the weather and its vagaries became an important part of the religious spirit. In primitive societies, extreme weather phenomena were explained as the punishment of the gods for human sins. In the Old Testament, a notorious example is Noah’s flood. In our time, the sins are represented by the industrialization and rapid economic development of mankind after the industrial revolution, as irrefutable proof of which is the increase in the concentration of CO2 from ~0.028% (somewhere around the 1800s) to today’s ~0.041%. Currently, any major weather event (hurricanes, droughts, floods, thaws, fires, landslides, etc.) will immediately have an attribution study released, telling us that we are thus being punished for directly, albeit unintentionally, distorting the weather. And due to black and white trickery, weather change will become climate change, although these two phenomena do not temporarily overlap on a 1: 1 scale. Read the full article and comment on Contributors.ro