When you hear an expert on one thing talking about something else, you have to shelve whatever deference you might have had for the speaker and just listen to him like you would anyone else, skeptically.

I’ve known lots of brilliant engineers who couldn’t figure out cooking or baseball or hold a decent conversation about the arts. Stick to your strengths.

True, but you do not allow for that other human need – power and influence. Once you have a large number of people all thinking in a similar manner, you always have the possibility of dynamic and ruthless individuals stepping in and organising a personal power-base.

However, once a power base has been set up the institution often becomes largely self-perpetuating – transcending the goals of the original founders, and often existing merely for its own good and survival. And to facilitate that survival the organisation needs a dogma to stabilise its power base and authority.

Christianity was highly factional and impotent, until successive Roman Emperors enforced a common creed (dogma) which made it more powerful. Scientology appears to be a bizarre belief system to me, but has nevertheless become a successful self-perpetuating society, based on a strong core dogma. A core of determined believers with a strong dogma will always attract others, because they cannot all be deluded – can they?

Likewise, the Creed of Environmentalism has built upon the universal Gaia Deity perception, and mutated into a powerful self-perpetuating organisation with goals far in excess of the original ideals. The priesthood of the new Green Religion can now flex their might and feel world governments quake at their every proclamation. That is real power, and power brings great wealth and influence to the new high priesthood, so why not use that power to effect other goals too?

Political manipulation? Social change? Wealth provision? Population control? Economic ideology? One World government? You name it, a whole host of peripheral goals that are largely irrelevant to pure environmentalism are now within the grasp of the Green high priests – and since they have the power, they will certainly be tempted to use it.

But, like every religion, their power-base is founded squarely upon the creed. No creed, no religion. If it could be proven that Jesus did not rise from the dead, Christianity might topple. If a letter from Muhummad was discovered, detailing his purchase of all his texts at a local flea-market, Islam may falter. By all means, the dogma-scaffolding that supports the creed must be maintained.

With Environmentalism, that creed is now firmly affixed to Global Warming, and this is a crucial mistake by their high priesthood. Had the goal been a generally cleaner, more natural world, their task would have been easier in the long run. But linking the foundation of the Creed to GW has exposed the entire self-perpetuating edifice to undermining by any cooling trend. Hence we see ever shrill cries, to secure the foundations, with olives and dates being grown in the UK within 20 years, :

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6719157.ece

But the shriller the cry, and the more often these dire predictions fail, the more the foundations of the Green Creed edifice will be remorselessly undermined. I predict that the tipping point will be some completely absurd prediction that completely fails, and the entire population loose heart simultaneously. At that point, the Greed Creed and everything associated with it will collapse – which is a shame in a way, because we need a cleaner environment.

But the higher you build, the greater the potential fall.

“In many fields of science, this would have been considered as fraud. In many fields of endeavour, Mann would have been struck off the list of practitioners. In the field of climate studies, he was thrashed in public with a feather and still gainfully practises his art.”

A nomination for a future Quote…

“The slogan “Stop Climate Change” is a very public announcement of absolute total ignorance as it is not cognisant of history, archeology, geology, astronomy, ocean sciences, atmospheric sciences and the life sciences.”

Not a bad future Quote…

As it happens the world’s religions have three approaches to god (excuse the generalisation but I’m not about to ask you go read a dozen books just to verify this point). Those three approaches are, becoming god-conscious, having a relationship with god as a great other, and seeing god manifest as the whole natural world. People implicitly “know” these three aspects and tend to emphasize one or the other when they approach their faith, and even whole traditions can end up emphasizing one or the other. So Christians tend to see god as a great other, ie. as a being whom we have a relationship with. Zen Buddhists tend to go for god-consciousness. And just as it happens, as an example of how people implicitly “know” about these three aspects, one of my very atheist, liberal friends, said to me, without prompting, “if there is a god, it is nature”. In other words, she felt implicitly the third aspect of god, the god as “web of life”. And why not? Many people look at Nature, and they just feel amazed by the complexity and beauty, and end up with a feeling of awe.

So environmentalists themselves identify nature as god. Now where the usual references to religion get into trouble, is that most people equate religion with irrationality, dogma, myth and santa claus. When people attack religion, they’re tending to attack dogma, which they imagine all religion to be. But that’s more about the history of religion…. Before we had science, and reasoning for one’s self, we lived in the dark ages, in ancient times when most people were simply into beliefs and myths, because they didn’t have the scientific method, so a lot of stuff that was just myth became bound up with religion. But that is a far cry from someone today who is basically rational, looking at nature and feeling awe. Feeling awe is not dogma, it is simply an emotional reaction to the complexity of our universe. And maybe that feeling of awe evokes a feeling of care, and transcendence, and wanting to connect, and connect with fellow man. People can feel this to varying degrees, be it a walk on a sunday afternoon, or kids going to a festival in the countryside.

So generally, environmentalism does have a strongly “religious” component, but only in this specific sense, and it is not dogma in the old sense. Where it does get dogmatic is when people make errors in thinking, and make errors in their analysis. But that’s not religious, that’s just bad reasoning.

As this site has often made the point, many people who don’t identify as environmentalists, nevertheless actually work to help the environment, and perhaps even do more to serve the environment, simply because they care, and their reasoning is better.

So when we feel tempted to lambast something as religious, we could just ask, are we accusing them of faulty reasoning? Can we show them why their analysis is flawed? We could even express a feeling of awe for nature, whilst scrutinizing and picking apart their flawed logic and data?

The Peace Prize is a purely poltical prize and awarded by the Norwegian Nobel Committee. The members of this committee is nominated by the Norwegian Parliament (Stortinget) and this in turn is dominated by socialists.

“What I want to know is when will the civil war begin?”

After Krugman’s recent declaration of treason against US reps who didn’t support Waxman-Markey, I would have though the civil war was now, in effect, declared ?

It is simply that the alarmists, Malthusians and wanna-be totalitarians haven’t been able to co-opt the political class to deploy the state security forces against the dissenters – yet.

Perhaps the professional political class retains a shred of self-preservation in not allowing the zealots to get their hands on the levers of power and enforcement. You never know who the nutballs will turn the guns on at the end of the day – maybe the political class itself ??

In my case, the only way to deal with my friends and family is to not talk about it. While they’re lost in their stress-filled fantasy world of tipping points and unprecedented “warming”, I’m laughing at them (but not so they can see).

My brother, for example, called me “stupid” at a family gathering. I have yet to meet a more conspiracy-theorist non-scientific individual, and yet to him not believing in the AGW doctrine is “stupid” enough to attempt to ruin Thanksgiving. Not worth the effort.

I have long time friends that I just don’t talk to anymore. And as I’ve posted in the past, I’ve been through all this before with the whole Apartheid thing… my aunt and uncle were missionaries in Africa for 4 years, and I knew more from them about what was REALLY happening than all the musicians and idealistic 20-somethings that I was surrounded by could ever know.

Be aware, it will pass, especially now that our side (the realists) are fighting back. As with many here, I used to believe, really I did. It was actually quite a jolt for me when I discovered the whole thing was just plain untrue… I doubt many of my friends could have convinced me, since “skeptics” were then (as now) painted as fringe lunatics.

Gradually introduce people to the problems: surfacestations.org, JohnDaly’s site, lack of sealevel rise, lack of solar activity, lack of ocean warming, lack of upper troposphere warming, heck, lack of any warming for 8 years, and pretty soon they’re interested in what else you might know that they’re not hearing.

After all, the whole “I’m just asking questions” is used by the enemy to spread outright lies, we should be using the same technique to spread the truth.