Climate apocalypse is the new religion

Six MSM articles from this weekend (plus one from the day before and one older speech) - mostly British papers. Most of them are about the bad politics and religion of climate change.



WHAT YOU GET WHEN YOU MIX RED AND GREEN - A BAD POLITICAL CLIMATE - Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph, 1 April 2006

• If I am right, the politics of climate change are bad. They attract the self-righteous and the self-flagellating, the controlling, the life-denying, the people who don't like people, the people who, like Private Fraser in Dad's Army, think we're "all doomed". And when I listen to many of the scientists who join in the argument, I often hear in what they say not the voice of science itself, but of the bad politics, thinly disguised by a white coat.

ECO-APOCALYPTICISM IS THE NEW RELIGION - Matthew Parris, The Times, 1 April 2006

• Guilt, resentment and apocalypse. Prophets have since the dawn of history recognised the power they can unleash by linking these three. Elijah told of earthquake, wind and fire; Jeremiah of disasters unnumbered. Ignatius Loyola, Luther, Calvin, the Wesleys, Moses, Mohammad . . . and countless other seers, ayatollahs and divines, have called upon us tobail out of whatever version of Sodom and Gomorrah it has pleased them to paint, before those cities burn. The prophets of climate change are their inheritors, reclothing new belief in the metaphor of the old, reconnecting it to those ancient drives. So there you have it. The Friends of the Earth are Elijah's latest recruits. Eco-apocalypticism is the new religion.

In the article above, you learn that Dr. Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury, informs everyone that they will go to hell if they won't fight against "climate change". What you won't learn is that almost 30% of assets of his church are ExxonMobil stocks.




LET COOLER HEADS PREVAIL - George F. Will, The Washington Post, 2 April 2006

• So the debate is over ... While worrying about Montana's receding glaciers, Schweitzer, who is 50, should also worry about the fact that when he was 20 he was told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." ... Perhaps the problem is big crusading journalism.

JOBS COME FIRST: TONY BLAIR BLOCKED PLAN TO CUT CO2 EMISSIONS - Geoffrey Lean, The Independent, 2 April 2006

• Privately the Prime Minister shows little interest in measures to cut pollution, preferring international talks, where he increasingly mirrors the position of President George Bush.

REALITY CHECK: BRITAIN PLANS FURTHER EXPANSION OF AIRPORTS - Juliette Jowit, The Observer, 2 April 2006

• The air transport White Paper just two years ago predicted that passenger numbers would double by 2030. Now at least 10 airports plan to handle a growth even higher than that. The new growth figures mean the government faces an even tougher battle to curb greenhouse gas emissions blamed for climate change - less than a week after admitting it will miss its key target to tackle the problem.

PREPARING FOR NATURE'S ATTACK - Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger (those who proposed the Death of Environmentalism), The New York Times, 1 April 2006

• The authors think that the changing climate is a fact and one should not think how to prevent it but how to adapt to it, by introducing new laws. Of course, the idea of adaptation - or the idea of a rational reaction to the natural laws or environment, regardless of the detailed causes, for that matter - drives lunatics and mooneytics up the wall. ;-) Not only that: Chris Mooney argues that if something is natural, then it must be constant at longer timescales. Even the usual easy-to-be-manipulated readers understand that Mooney's statements are completely crazy (except Connolley, of course), which is why Mooney tries to pretend that it was just a typo what he wrote. It was no typo: the crazy idea that natural things are constant once you average over a "cycle" is a basic defining feature of the alarmists' scientific deficiency.

SOMETHING TO WORRY ABOUT - Nick Schulz, TCS Daily, 31 March 2006

• As evidence is building that the skeptics were always right that "fighting global warming" is a bad idea, you have something to worry about: the hysterical alarmists propose to cut your wealth ten-fold.

FEAR AND COMPLEXITY - Michael Crichton's speech, November 2005

• In 1998, Crichton originally wanted to write a novel about a global disaster. He was "disappointed" that the direct and indirect deaths from Chernobyl were exaggerated by 2-3 orders of magnitude. It turned out that the fear-mongering is more damaging than the hypothetical bad events themselves. He discusses how all these hysterical warnings have been wrong so far - population bomb, Y2K, and many others - and how the world is more complex than the authors of the simple scenarios want to admit.