Sarah Hoyt thinks not.
When I was thirty one, I sat on my back porch on a lovely summer day, reading Reason magazine. The issue was devoted to debunking global warming. And suddenly, like a weight lifting, I realized there really wasn’t proof. That it wasn’t preordained that my generation would be the last to have a decent life on Earth. That my kids and grandkids (I only had one kid at the time, and he was still nursing) wouldn’t necessarily be doomed. That the future wasn’t all doom and gloom.
And I realized my entire life I’d lived in the shadow of the fear of decay and death. First there was the cold war, and sooner or later, the bombs would fly. We’d die screaming. Then there was overpopulation. If we escaped the bomb, we’d all starve to death. Or thirst to death (thank you, Paul Ehrlich!) Then there was global cooling. We were all going to freeze in the ice age. Then there was global warming. Amid all these threats, how could we escape. To watch the thing debunked and to see it pointed out that even the proponents of AGW don’t live like they believe in it lifted a weight from my heart.
Since then I’ve been skeptical of the end of the world prophecies.
RTWT
The original Global Warmmongering prophecies were that there would be modest anthropogenic warming, concentrated in high latitudes, in winter, at night. This obviously wasn’t very scary; much of Britain, for instance, would be glad to have fewer winter mornings of scraping ice off the windscreen.
So instead it was all beaten up as an imminent disaster. Is one allowed to say “lying bastards” on a family-friendly blog site like this?
When God was bored God created the laws of Physics and said “Let there be light!” Some of this energy converted into matter, and the bits of matter clumped together and eventually God was pleased. Then God created life and God created evolution so that the life could spread through an ever changing universe. And God was diverted.
Life and the universe will continue on until God gets bored and tries something new. Our job is to be entertaining or else…
We got a glimpse into the dogmatic motivations of the Climate Catastrafarians when Rajendra Pachauri, former head of the IPCC was forced to resign a couple weeks ago because of sexual harassment allegations. In his resignation letter he lays it out:
For me, the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems, is more than a mission,” Mr. Pachauri wrote. “It is my religion and my dharma.
Unfortunately, his protections cover all species except for young female research assistants.
Fr Raymond de Souza, a priest and columnist for the National Post pointed out in his column yesterday that Pachauri’s idea of religion, like his science, is flawed
Likely what he meant was that he places ecological matters at the heart of his worldview, evaluates all other data in light of that, and therefore derives an economic and political program that needs to be imposed on the global social order.
He likely thinks that what a religion is. But that is the world of ideology, not the world of religion, especially not of biblical religion in the Christian tradition.
Religion is not an ideology, though it can be corrupted to become one. Religion treats as fixed those points of revelation that have as their object that which is unchanging, namely God. Yet their application to the social order precisely requires a response to changing circumstances, including the insights of other disciplines, including economics, politics, history and the environmental sciences. That’s why there is no such thing as Christian tax policy, or trade policy or climate policy. For example, Christians have it as a matter of divine revelation that concern for the poor is not optional, but essential. How to best assist the poor remains a matter of differing circumstances and consequently competing policy choices.
Religion which presents a complete model of the social order, rooted only in principles generated from within itself, has in fact become more of an ideology than a faith open to the truth of the world, both revealed (theology) and observed (science). That actually sounds more like the IPCC today than the pulpit.
Grurray….as C S Lewis put it: Christianity tells you to feed the hungry, but when it comes to learning how to actually do it, you don’t need a Christian, you need a cook.
During the 2003 power blackout in NYC, someone who was listening to a NPR program said several callers made comments like this:
“I’m glad when things like this happen. It teaches us a lesson, because we’re so wasteful”