Excellent comment. It pulls together some interesting observations in a brief, clearly written analysis that suggests a background in serious journalism. Forgive me for possibly being intrusive, but who are you and what else might you have written?

The Chinese and Indians don’t seem to believe this apocalyptic green nonsense- if we choose to cripple ourselves with regulation,they’ll still carry on.

Don’t forget that during this same period, any number of religious groups, large and small, have issued repeated predictions of armageddon, the last judgement, the rapture, and/or the apocalypse with much the same conviction, the same record of failure, and the same refusal on the main part of the faithful to abandon belief in their particular prophet just because he or she was wrong.

For the record, I do not deny that the earth is warming to some extent. It has been in a general warming phase since the well documented end of the disastrous “Little Ice Age” around 1800. Since then, the world’s average temperatures have warmed and cooled according to complex patterns that I do not believe we clearly understand or can explain.

What is the greatest commonality to be found in all these predictions of imminent disaster, both religious and scientific?

That the behavior of human beings is to blame, that human beings have been judged, either by a deity or by nature, and found to be culpable of sinful actions and erroneous beliefs, all of which must be changed immediately to accord with the will of the lord, or the prerogatives of nature as discerned by those more in tune with that universal force than we ignorant peasants, who need to be guided to the promised land.

Human beings need something to believe in. Human beings seem to have a distinct need to believe that their fellows are sinful, and that their society is collapsing into some form of well deserved hellish abyss.

I am often reminded, when I hear these never ending predictions of disaster here and calamity there, of the scene in the movie “Apocalypto” when the hero and his group are led to the altar of sacrifice. Just as Jaguar Paw is being readied to have his heart cut out and offered to the sun god, an eclipse occurs. The high priest then calls on the god to return, and when it does, tells the people that their deity is finally satisfied with all the hearts it has been given, and that all is well in the kingdom.

There is a look exchanged between the priest and the king at this point which suggests a shared acknowledgement that they both know this is all utterly bogus, but that it’s okay because the faithful are ecstatic with their explanation, and that’s all that really matters.

It has been mentioned in other contexts that the predictions of doom would be much more convincing if the prophets acted as if they believed it themselves by stopping many of the wasteful, “warming” behaviors they condemn in others. But, then, there are very few Jeremiah’s in the world, wearing skins and eating locusts, and a great many gurus in Rolls Royces and private jets.

There is a strain of self hatred running underneath much of the theology of deep ecology that I find troubling and dangerous. All too often, in the past, and in the current case, humanity has been duped into believing the claims of leaders whose goal is not the pursuit of happiness, but the judgement of sin, and the enactment of punishments against those found to be guilty of whatever transgressions are the vogue of the times.

In our modern social/cultural context, the vogue seems to be that anyone who values independence of thought and action is suspect, if not beyond redemption, while those who chant the approved chants, and chastise themselves with the approved flails, shall rule the earth.

The key is that this is not science, but faith. And, as in any dispute in which dogma is being questioned, it is the heretic who is in the most danger.

It is not the judgement of god, or nature, that I fear, but the delusions of those who claim to know what that judgement is, and are determined to exact the punishments their visions have demanded.

I’m with you 100% on that, Matt.

It is?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/05/AR2009040500021.html

They are still tilting at that particular windmill, just that it isn’t on the front burner anymore. Probably due to the fact that the USSR is no more, and the biggest nuclear threats are North Korea and Iran. No big headlines for standing up to piss-poor pissants who need the nukes to be taken seriously.

You forgot the major scare we all grew up with – Thermonuclear War! This is the first Democrat government that doesn’t preach about disarmament. Why? Is it because book sales and lectures about Thermonuclear war don’t sell anymore?

Al Gore will soon be a billionaire. His genius was enlisting the scientific community by creating government grants for any academic, foreign or domestic, to study global warming. I have a friend who has a grant to study the effect of global warming on romantic poetry. I love global warming. I am developing beach front property on the artic ocean.

Reminds me of a famous article by Paul Johnson in National Review ca. 1992, that with teh fall of Communism, the new reigning -”ism” in the West was going to be “Pessimism.”