Global Warming Science: www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming

Climatism – Belief in Anthropogenic Global Warming as a Religion

[last update: 2012/06/22]

Climatism is the belief in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and its doomsday effects, without resort to rational thought or full examination of the scientific evidence. This is part of a recent trend in eco-religion in Western society, where science is ignored but scientific words are used as cover as part of the belief system.

In the United Kingdom: "In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that "a belief in man-made climate change ... is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations".

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6494213/Climate-change-belief-given-same-legal-status-as-religion.html]

[Update: 2012/06/22]

Twenty years later after the creation of Agenda 21: Rio+20, the latest UN Earth Summit was a failure (success) – nothing meaningful was accomplished (50,000 believers had a nice vacation).

“Green guru James Lovelock [creator of the Earth as Gaia theory] was right. He warned last week that “the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion.” Now at the U.N. Earth Summit, even the image of Christ has been made a forcible convert to the eco-faith, as the city of Rio is bathing the iconic statue of Christ the Redeemer (Christo Redentor) in green light:”

[http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/303379/christ-turns-green-un-earth-summit-literally-david-rothbard]

Also present at the Rio+20: Maurice Strong, the originator of the global warming scare (for a detailed account of Strong’s role, see http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_History.htm)

“Strong is the closest thing to global environmentalism’s patron saint--or, to conservative critics, the foremost grey eminence of the movement to expand "global environmental governance"--which is once more on the international agenda at Rio + 20. His presence adds another dimension of historical luster among fervent environmentalists”

[http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/06/20/godfather-global-green-thinking-steps-out-shadows-at-rio-20/]

[Update: 2011/05/24]

Stephen Jay Gould, in “Nonoverlapping Magisteria” (in “Science and Religion” edited by Paul Kurtz, Prometheus Books, 2003, p. 193): “The lack of conflict between science and religion arises from a lack of overlap between their respective domains of professional expertise – science in the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives.”

Since the belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming lacks empirical evidence and relies solely on computer models, along with the resulting admonitions from alarmists as to how we need to behave as they frame it in moral and ethical terms, global warming belief falls into the religious category.

[Update: 2010/10/08]

Environmentalism as Religion

That is the title of an article in The New Atlantis – A journal of Technology and Society [http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/environmentalism-as-religion] “For some individuals and societies, the role of religion seems increasingly to be filled by environmentalism. … To better understand the future of climate policy, we must understand where “ecotheology” has come from and where it is likely to lead.”

From the article:

• “environmentalism is progressively taking the social form of a religion and fulfilling some of the individual needs associated with religion, with major political and policy implications. … We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe. … Selling indulgences is out of fashion these days. But you can now assuage your guilt by buying carbon offsets. … The sheer volume of vicious language employed to recast social and cultural trends in terms of their carbon footprint suggests the rise of what Allenby calls a dangerous new “carbon fundamentalism”.”

• “faith, in Kierkegaard’s original formulation: the act of believing in something without, or in spite of, empirical evidence. … Of environmentalism increasingly being faith-based, [James] Lovelock says, “I would agree with you wholeheartedly. I look at humans as probably having an evolutionary desire to have ideology, to justify their actions. Green thinking is like Christian or Muslim religions — it’s another ideology.”

• “A deeper concern is the expansion of irrationalism in the making of public policy. … The data-driven and exploratory processes of science are choked off by inculcation of belief systems that rely on archetypal and emotive strength.... The authority of science is relied on not for factual enlightenment but as ideological foundation for authoritarian policy. ”

• “the empirical approach arose in no small part to mitigate the dangers of zeal — to keep blood from flowing in the streets. A strict focus on fact and reason whenever possible can avert error and excess in policy. But can someone who has made a faith of environmentalism — whose worldview and lifestyle have been utterly shaped by it — adapt to changing facts? For the one fact we reliably know about the future of the planet’s climate is that the facts will change. It is simply too complex to be comprehensively and accurately modeled.”

Freeman Dyson, (a retired Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University) wrote a review of a couple of books on global warming (“The Question of Global Warming”, New York Review of Books [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/12/the-question-of-global-warming/?page=1]) in which he stated:

• “Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion. And the ethics of environmentalism are fundamentally sound. Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future. Environmentalism, as a religion of hope and respect for nature, is here to stay. This is a religion that we can all share, whether or not we believe that global warming is harmful.”

• “Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment. The skeptics now have the difficult task of convincing the public that the opposite is true. Many of the skeptics are passionate environmentalists. They are horrified to see the obsession with global warming distracting public attention from what they see as more serious and more immediate dangers to the planet, including problems of nuclear weaponry, environmental degradation, and social injustice.”

(For more about Freeman Dyson, see: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/TheExperts.htm)

Repent for Your Environmental Sins

An article in Canada Free Press [http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/28434]:

• “like so many other political faiths, environmentalism also a thoroughly hypocritical belief system, preaching a creed that its own elite do not practice. If the sin is consumption, then its proponents are the guiltiest of us all. Every time Al Gore or other environmental leaders jet around the world to promote the dangers of a large carbon footprint, the rest of the world is reminded that a belief system with a hypocritical clergy is rotten all the way down.”

• “Environmentalism has become the theology of the left, fusing neatly with class warfare and abandoning technological progressivism, for Luddite moralizing. But its only true creed is that of power. Behind the drumbeat of its invective, one may easily spot measures for control, for funneling money into “Green Products” and “Green Jobs”, and for educational programs that indoctrinate this creed into the mind and soul of every child.”

As displayed at treehugger:

[http://www.treehugger.com/galleries/2009/06/coolest_environmental_advertis.php?page=1]

10:10 Creates Totalitarian Video

[http://blogs.forbes.com/warrenmeyer/2010/10/07/why-blowing-up-kids-seemed-like-a-good-idea/]

[http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2010/10/al-gore-meets-movie-gore-climate-alarmism-jumps-the-bandersnatch.html]

Greenpeace Hitler Youth Pushing Totalitarian Vision

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf53N1CR_XU

[Update: 2010/04/11]

Is climate change a moral issue? What would God say?

That is the title of an article in USA Today [http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2010/04/is-climate-change-a-moral-issue-what-would-god-say/1] “What would God do? A rising chorus of voices is framing efforts to fight climate change in moral and religious terms -- from the pope to a leading climatologist.”

The “leading climatologist” is James Hansen, master manipulator of data: “"The predominant moral issue of the 21st century, almost surely, will be climate change, comparable to Nazism faced by Churchill in the 20th century and slavery faced by Lincoln in the 19th century," writes James Hansen” (who won a $100,000 prize for his alarmism). (See also: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/Hansen_GlobalTemp.htm)

The Pope: “Pope Benedict XVI, known to many as the "green pope," has increasingly spoken out about protecting the environment, which he sees as God's creation. … Pope Benedict XVI, who has guided the Vatican toward installing solar panels and joining a reforestation project to offset its carbon emissions, denounced the failure of world leaders to reach a new climate change treaty.”

Framing the question in this way creates a dilemma for the climate crusaders. Since the scare was escalated in the 1990s there has been no further warming – either God doesn’t believe in anthropogenic global warming (or already did something about it), or he doesn’t exist (or exists and is powerless).

Evidence of AGW as A Religion

An article at the EU affairs news site EurActiv entitled “EU R&D efforts hampered by 'eco-religion'” states: “Europeans are not embracing innovation because their view of the role of science has changed "from a force of good to protect us from the evils of nature to, suddenly, a [...] technological machine that big businesses brought in and which is destroying and polluting nature". Ecological rituals to recycle and to lessen one's ecological footprint are all "very strong religious symbols which add meaning to our lives," he continued. Climate change represents Armageddon and "good and evil depends on whether we live our lives sustainably or not," Zaruk said. He also noted that both religion and environmentalists tend see science as a threat in the same way as the Catholic Church had done.” [http://www.euractiv.com/en/science/eu-rd-efforts-hampered-eco-religion/article-184484]

The Institute for Science, Innovation and Society of Oxford University has a paper entitled “How to get climate policy back on course”. It states: “climate policy has come to serve many other political and social functions beyond its declared formal objective. Thus, undeclared political, religious, ethical and wider lifestyle and social purposes are being fulfilled… Because climate policy performs so many other sorts of political, religious and psychological work, it has tremendous momentum within it.” [http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/mackinderProgramme/pdf/ClimatePolBackonCoursePRODUCTIONFINAL060709.pdf]

The Tyndall Centre in the UK is a large promoter of the AGW scare. One of their papers: “The Social Simulation of the Public Perception of Weather Events and their Effect upon the Development of Belief in Anthropogenic Climate Change” provides insight as to why the official term was changed from “global warming” to “climate change” The paper states: “To endorse policy change people must ‘believe’ that global warming will become a reality some time in the future. Only the experience of positive temperature anomalies will be registered as indication of change if the issue is framed as global warming. Both positive and negative temperature anomalies will be registered in experience as indication of change if the issue is framed as climate change. We propose that in those countries where climate change has become the predominant popular term for the phenomenon, unseasonably cold temperatures, for example, are also interpreted to reflect climate change/global warming.”

[http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/sites/default/files/wp58.pdf]

Carbon Credits serve as indulgences: “both carbon credits and religion deal in guilt, fear and redemption. Indeed it was religion that established the pattern for carbon credits. The idea in both cases is to sell forgiveness to sinners.” [http://www.canada.com/saskatoonstarphoenix/columnists/story.html?id=31989503-ead6-4a40-90c0-28117e4dbc91]

New York Times headline: “Therapists Report Increase in Green Disputes”. The article: “As awareness of environmental concerns has grown, therapists say they are seeing a rise in bickering between couples and family members over the extent to which they should change their lives to save the planet. While no study has documented how frequent these clashes have become, therapists agree that the green issue can quickly become poisonous because it is so morally charged. Friends or family members who are not devoted to the environmental cause can become irritated by life choices they view as ostentatiously self-denying or politically correct. “The danger arises when one partner undergoes an environmental ‘waking up’ process way before the other, leaving a new values gap between them,” [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/18/science/earth/18family.html?hpw]

Founders of the AGW Movement

At the UNCED plenary session address, Earth Summit Secretary-General Maurice Strong directed the world’s attention to the Declaration of the Sacred Earth Gathering, which was part of the pre-Summit ceremonies. “The responsibility of each human being today is to choose between the force of darkness and the force of light. We must therefore transform our attitudes and values, and adopt a renewed respect for the superior law of Divine Nature." The ceremony program said that the sacred earth drummers would "maintain a continuous heartbeat near the official site of the Earth Summit, as part of a ritual for the healing of our Earth to be felt by those who are deciding Earth’s fate." [http://www.un.org/geninfo/bp/enviro.html].

In 1994 Maurice Strong launched a new Earth Charter Initiative along with Mikhail Gorbachev, who was president of Green Cross International. Over the next few years, the Earth Charter was developed, in consultation with religious and spiritual advisory groups [http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf]. The Earth Charter Commission was formed in 1996 under the leadership of Strong and Gorbachev along with various religious members. The Commission appointed Steven Rockefeller (a professor of religion and ethics) to chair the drafting committee. In 1999 consultations on the Earth Charter were held at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Cape Town, South Africa and in 2000 the final version was issued following a meeting at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. “The protection of Earth's vitality, diversity, and beauty is a sacred trust. … The spirit of human solidarity and kinship with all life is strengthened when we live with reverence for the mystery of being.” [http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/Read-the-Charter.html]

The “Ark of Hope” was created in 2001 as a “place of refuge for the Earth Charter document … handwritten on papyrus paper”, as well as a refuge for the “Temenos books” – books “filled with pages of visual prayers/affirmations for global healing, peace, and gratitude”. The ark resembles in size the biblical Ark of the Covenant, complete with carrying poles that “are unicorn horns which render evil ineffective”, and with sides with paintings representing earth elements (i.e. “scientific” elements such as earth, air, fire, water and spirit). “Symbols of faith from traditional religions and indigenous societies surround the top panel of "Spirit"”. At the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Ark of Hope was ceremoniously offered to the world. [http://www.arkofhope.org/].

Greenpeace Co-founder, Patrick Moore

Patrick Moore, Co-founder of Greenpeace, is Chairman and Chief Scientist of Greenspirit Strategies.

“The environmental movement has lost its way, favoring political correctness over factual accuracy, stooping to scare tactics to garner support. Many campaigns now waged in the name of the environment would result in increased harm to both the environment and human welfare if they were to succeed. Beginning in the mid-1980s, Greenpeace, and much of the environmental movement, made a sharp turn to the political left and began adopting extreme agendas that abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism. … The Prognosis: Environmentalism has turned into anti-globalization and anti-industry. Activists have abandoned science in favour of sensationalism. Their zero-tolerance, fear-mongering campaigns would ultimately prevent a cure for Vitamin A deficiency blindness, increase pesticide use, increase heart disease, deplete wild salmon stocks, raise the cost and reduce the safety of health care, raise construction costs, deprive developing nations of clean electricity, stop renewable wind energy, block a solution to global warming, and contribute to deforestation. How sick is that?” [http://www.greenspirit.com/logbook.cfm?msid=83]

Post-Normal Science

Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre, and Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (UEA), prepared climate scenarios and reports for the UK, UN, WWF and the IPCC. He was coordinating Lead Author for the chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC, as well as a contributing author for several other chapters. Hulme has been a champion and exponent of post-normal science for some years to serve his own socialist agenda, and this is what he has to say about post-normal science:

“It has been labelled “post-normal” science. Climate change seems to fall in this category. Disputes in post-normal science focus…on the process of science – who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy…The IPCC is a classic example of a post-normal scientific activity. Climate change also teaches us to rethink what we really want for ourselves…mythical ways of thinking about climate change reflect back to us truths about the human condition … the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs. The idea of climate change can provoke new ethical and theological thinking about our relationship with the future….We will continue to create and tell new stories about climate change and mobilise these stories in support of our projects. Whereas a modernist reading of climate may once have regarded it as merely a physical condition for human action, we must now come to terms with climate change operating simultaneously as an overlying, but more fluid, imaginative condition of human existence.”

[http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/]

Globe and Mail Investment

“If you think that calling global warming an irrational mania is a bit harsh, consider this: Say that a pharmaceutical company's researchers were caught fudging their tests to make their drug look effective; then, when found out, conveniently lost the non-fudged data. If a doctor prescribed for your child the fraudsters' drug, would you let her take it? If you said yes, would we not be justified in saying you are acting irrationally?

This, in effect, is what's happening now: global warming has become a near-religious test of civic virtue  ... And now, even though you can't trust the climate change data, the Copenhagen conference still goes on and promoters including Al Gore are out begging the public to give the scientists the benefit of the doubt. This is the same Mr. Gore who is profiting from tax credit-based environmental investments.

Oh, yes, tax credits. If there's one area to watch out for, it's a virtuous industry needing tax credits to make it viable. In the 1960s, the Club of Rome concluded (based on some other dodgy data) that the world was running out of resources. So, the Canadian government gave inventory tax credits to mining companies. The result was overproduction, bankruptcies and low resource prices for years. There was a similar panic about oil in the '70s, so huge tax breaks were offered for drilling the polar icecaps.”

[http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/investment-ideas/features/the-buy-side/dont-let-climategate-melt-down-your-portfolio/article1389653/]

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic

Klaus is also the author of a book titled “Blue Planet in Green Shackles” (available in 15 languages). He is an outspoken critic of the climate alarmist movement and has used the term climatism.

He considers environmental alarmism to be similar to communism: “compare communism with the ideology of environmentalism or the ideology of global warming alarmism … they are against individual freedom, they are in favor of centralistic masterminding of our fates, they are structurally very similar in telling us what to do, how to live, how to behave, what’s to eat, how to travel, what we can do and what we cannot do, and so on. There is a huge similarity in this respect – but the similarity of ideologies.” [http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?=YjQyZDM0MmJlYWMzYjMyNjBkOTUxNDc4N2YyZDY3NmM=]

“environmentalism and its most extreme version, global warming alarmism, asks for an almost unprecedented expansion of government intrusion and intervention into our lives and of government control over us.”

[http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/2529]

“The ambitions look more noble, more attractive and more appealing; they are also cleverly and very efficiently oriented towards the far away future and thus practically “immunized” from reality, from existing evidence, from available observations, and from standard testability. They are almost religious. I consider environmentalism and its currently strongest version – climate alarmism – to be, at the beginning of the 21st century, the most effective and, therefore, the most dangerous vehicle for advocating, drafting and implementing large scale government intervention and for an unprecedented suppression of human freedom.”

[http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/1206]

Belief in Models

Nature magazine inherently admitted there is no real empirical data supporting the theory that anthropogenic CO2 has been the main cause of the 20th century warming. “Denialists often maintain that these changes are just a symptom of natural climate variability. But when climate modellers test this assertion by running their simulations with greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide held fixed, the results bear little resemblance to the observed warming. The strong implication is that increased greenhouse-gas emissions have played an important part in recent warming, meaning that curbing the world's voracious appetite for carbon is essential”. That’s it – an implication based on models.

(For more about the Nature article, see: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/NatureRag.htm)

Science is based in empirical evidence to confirm / disprove a theory. A strong belief in something that has only models and a lack of empirical evidence is not science, it is religion.

Climatism is also the name of a new book by Steve Goreham, which also covers science

(see book review here)