By Andrew L. Urban.
Three intolerant, dictatorial belief systems active in the West – Climatism, Islam, Scientology – share defining characteristics and are doing great harm each in their own way. One of them – Climatism – is blindly embraced and generously funded by politicians of all stripes, causing deep social division, vast waste of resources and contributing to the destruction of confidence in science.
All three are effectively cults. (Cult: a social group defined by their religious beliefs, or common interest in a particular personality, object or goal. – Wikipedia)
Each is of human provenance, two of them founded by self aggrandising individuals and the third propagated by one.
Each of these belief systems claims for itself a superior moral authority.
Each of them claims infallibility.
Each imposes severe penalties on non-believers and apostates. In the case of Climatism, the penalties include public vilification and career damage, whether in science, academe, politics, most of the media … and in many corporations who have signed up to the cult.
Each tries to enforce its belief system aggressively in any society that allows it to thrive.
None of them countenance dissenting views and arguments; in the case of Islam dissent is deadly; in the case of Climatism, science is actively abused to falsely support it (see below); in the case of Scientology dissent provokes intense harassment.
Each of them labels its (peaceful) opponents with threats and derogatory excess.
None of them tolerate satire and generally lack a sense of humour.
None of them are a benefit to the planet or humanity.
Climatism is included with the two belief systems that are referred to as religions because faith is essential; it relies on a willingness by its adherents to accept the prevailing view or ‘the consensus’ without question. And – tellingly – because of the evident fervour of so many of is adherents that is indistinguishable in its manifestation from religious fervour.
Climatism – that belief system which holds that the earth is warming and overwhelmingly blames the emission of CO2 by human activity for it – and insists on aggressively (recklessly) attempting to reduce such emissions. This belief gained popularity in the wake of Al Gore’s award winning 2006 documentary (and world tour), The Inconvenient Truth and the now discredited and infamous ‘hockey stick graph’ developed by Michael Mann’s team in 1999 that was featured in the film.
The theory – still a theory in search of evidence – that man made emissions probably contribute to global warming is accepted at some level by many scientists – but it remains uncertain and unmeasured. If it cannot be measured, how can we change it? Models relying on the theory have been consistently wrong. The planet may indeed be warming – as it has in the past. The 20 year long respite from measured warming is confounding scientists. But Climatism fuses the possibility of warming to human emissions – without the backing of science, yet claims to be scientifically proven. The unanswered, unknown question at the heart of Climatism – and which is the basis for the ‘faith’ – is whether human-made carbon dioxide emissions are such as to represent a threat to the well being of life on the planet.
Vast amounts of public money around the Western world is dedicated to Climatism in pursuit of policies that are developed on the mere say so of a (heavily funded) scientific community captured by an ideology. The ready acceptance of the consensus demonstrates the failure of reason. Ask any Minister responsible for climate related policies where that notion that there is a scientific consensus comes from. My question along these lines has gone unanswered. So has the same question put to the Chief Scientist. For the miserable answer, see ‘The Con in Consensus’
In Mark Steyn’s extensive debunking of the consensus and in particular targeting Mann’s hockey stick graph, A Disgrace to the Profession (September 2015), there are nearly one hundred highly qualified scientists quoted who, far from supporting any consensus on global warming, raise their dissenting arguments and their concerns about misleading information.
Randomly opening the book, I find Professor William Happer, PHD Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton, recipient of the Davisson-Germer Prize in Atomic or Surface Physics, Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
On February 25, 2009, Professor Happer testified before the US Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee 28:
“The existence of climate variability in the past has long been an embarrassment to those who claim that all climate change is due to man and that man can control it. When I was a schoolboy, my textbooks on earth science showed a prominent “Medieval Warm Period” at the time the Vikings settled Greenland, followed by a vicious “Little Ice Age” that drove them out. So I was very surprised when I first saw the celebrated “hockey stick curve,” in the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. I could hardly believe my eyes. Both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period were gone, and the newly revised temperature of the world since the year 1000 had suddenly become absolutely flat until the last hundred years when it shot up like the blade on a hockey stick… The hockey stick was trumpeted around the world as evidence that the end was near. The hockey stick has nothing to do with reality but was the result of incorrect handling of proxy temperature records and incorrect statistical analysis. There really was a Little Ice Age and there really was a Medieval Warm Period that was as warm or warmer than today.”
He noted: “There was no explanation of why both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, very clearly shown in the 1990 report, had simply disappeared eleven years later. The IPCC and its worshipful supporters did their best to promote the hockey-stick temperature curve.”
As he says — ‘worshipful’. Incoming US President Donald Trump appears not to be worshipful …