While I’ve been avoiding posting on this topic for quite some time, when a UK court makes a ruling like this, and the UK Telegraph makes a headline like the one below, it becomes hard to ignore. We live in interesting times.
From the UK Telegraph:
Climate change belief given same legal status as religion
An executive has won the right to sue his employer on the basis that he was unfairly dismissed for his green views after a judge ruled that environmentalism had the same weight in law as religious and philosophical beliefs.
excerpts:
…
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”.
The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.
…
John Bowers QC, representing Grainger, had argued that adherence to climate change theory was “a scientific view rather than a philosophical one”, because “philosophy deals with matters that are not capable of scientific proof.”
That argument has now been dismissed by Mr Justice Burton, who last year ruled that the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore was political and partisan.
The decision allows the tribunal to go ahead, but more importantly sets a precedent for how environmental beliefs are regarded in English law.
Read the complete article here:
Climate change belief given same legal status as religion
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http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/religion.htm
Michael Crichton made this argument very effectively in a 2003 speech. It is well worth reading.
http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..”
As far as First Amendment issues, environmentalism has become very close to a state religion. While I don’t see them repealing the ESA, clean water, clean air acts, or shutting down the EPA on the grounds that they constitute a state mandated religion, they probably should be looked at in that context. It is certainly an act of faith that prosperity crippling proposals like cap n trade would be a good thing.
“We need to reveal the creative psychological, spiritual and ethical work that climate change can do and is doing for us…we open up a way of resituating culture and the human spirit…As a resource of the imagination, the idea of climate change can be deployed around our geographical, social and virtual worlds in creative ways…it can inspire new artistic creations in visual, written and dramatised media. etc etc”
Unfortunately, the consequence of this new climate change religion will not be expansive to the human spirit – quite the opposite. The whole ethos behind climate change as a belief system is to slap down the goals and visions that we have come to associate as essential to a flourishing and expanding civilisation.
Where J F Kennedy once looked to the heavens and built moon rockets, we have a president who is looking at polar bears and building windmills. Where our predecessors looked with pride at their achievements – great cities, air travel that spanned the world, industries that create everything that makes life bearable, agricultural that feeds billions of humans – the climate change religion lood upon all this as blasphemies against the nature. Pride is being replace by guilt, industry by de-industrialisation, progress by stagnation.
Climate change is not an enabling religion. It is disabling. And the art that this religion will inspire will not be the visionary, hopeful, excited art of the renaissance, but the dark, self flagellating art of the ascetic.
I see this more in terms of the drafting of an absolutely appalling piece of legislation rather than a specifically AGW matter. What can you expect from this government? It apparently protects those who hold beliefs that are not based on observation or experiment, including the totally irrational, but not those that are! Engineers might seem especially vulnerable!
So can we sue Hansens publisher to demand his books be retitled the “Gospel of St. Jim” and “Climageddon”??? Then there is Michael, Arcangel and Lord of Hockey Sticks…
St. Al is of course the Prince of Lies and Monsignor High Inquisitor of the Commie Union of the Faith…
This is what I think of Gore:
“There once was a young man named Phrost,
who had trouble with the Father,Son, and Holy Ghost,
He founded instead his own religion,-with himself as the head.
So now he numbers himself among the Heavenly Host.”
Gore being a failed Divinity Student…
How long before the Greenies start throwing Holy CO2 Hand Grenades at coal-carrying “death trains”?
This legal decision would be laughable if its possible economic consequences would not be so potentially devastating. Can a green-eyed Brit worker now sue his employer for any imagined non-green corporate offense, such as buying electric power from a coal-fired generating plant instead of erecting its own windmill? Can such idiocy be imported to the U.S. by the likes of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg who has stated that, while reaching its decisions, our Supreme Court can consider laws that apply elsewhere in the world?
Bob
tenet: a belief, principle or doctrine held to be true
tenant: someone who rents a dwelling or other property from an owner
Al Gore interview on BBC with Paxman
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8341908.stm
And now for something completely different.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5621226325041057058#
ben corde (09:52:13) wrote:
“Surely religious and philosophical beliefs qualify on the grounds of not being provable by science. Climate change CAN be monitored and causes proved by science so how can it be a ‘belief’?”
Greek and Roman mythologies were used to explain many things that ‘science’, once understood, explained a whole lot better. Until the science really explains it, however, interpretations of reality often become religious.
Someday, the causes of climate change may be totally understood by science, but that day is not today. We are currently unable to ‘prove’ any of the causes of climate change, although the circumstantial evidence points mostly to natural variability. To date, there is not one single bit of physical evidence that humanity is having a significant and dangerous impact on global climate. The entire concept is a series of assumptions, most of which are unsupportable. Consequently, the belief that humans are having a ‘dangerous’ impact on global climate is very much a religious one, with all the metaphors of saints and sinners, tithes and offerings, hellfire and damnation, securely in place.
It seems crazy…but the Judge is absolutely correct on this one. Global warming is a religion; a religion of the most dangerous kind…a government enforced religion! The judge has done the world a huge service by putting AGW in its proper place. Forget the science. ‘Cap and Trade’ can now be recognized as a form of religious persecution and we may yet gain protection from it under the secular law! Alleluia!
Great post!
This might not be all bad, If AGW is a religion and not a science, then any laws using AGW as an excuse can be challenged on the basis that religion cannot be legislated, and the state may not persecute(tax) non-believers.
‘The parallels between environmentalism and Christianity ‘
Are BUNK. Give me a Break.
But I do wonder if the new thought-crime laws- designed to silence Christians- can be used against the algorites?
I have a belief that natural climate variations are worth investigating in detail.
This belief has resulted in a lot of abrasive friction in my dealings with academic leaders, who probably see my lines of investigation as a political hot potato.
The discrimination I routinely face is iron-fisted. People have not even made an effort to camouflage it. Perhaps this media attention will result in a more subtly nuanced approach, such that negotiation can proceed in a more harmonious & civil manner …or alternately in an even more underhanded manner — it’ll be interesting to see which way group-think goes.
Do you think the internationalists in our courts will cite this ruling when deciding US law?
Don’t count on it! They only cite international court rulings when it suites their agenda. In other words, they just make things up as they go along and use whatever is convenient as grounds for justification.
I think we should all recognize that any rigid belief system can take the place of religion in a secular society. That’s the reason fascists and communists make the state supreme and raise the current leader to the status of an infallible messiah.
Yes! If we could now get this ruling in the US. With our laws of seperation of church and state, NASA, EPA and NOAA would have cut there ties to the church of AGW.
I understand AGW to be a legitimate concern, but this ruling is ridiculous. At least we “warmers” and “skeptics” can agree on that much I hope. Intriguing how the skeptics like to mention Gore as many times as they can when referring to AGW. As a scientists I do not care what Gore thinks. When did Gore last write a paper on climate science? Or Inhofe for that matter? How about we stop using “poster boys” to further our agendas and focus on the science?
I would caution people about extrapolating this ruling to apply to climate science and related disciplines. Besides, the radiative forcing of GHGs is independent of a human’s alleged religious beliefs.
The “image” of St. Gore brings out my iconoclastic tendencies …and also makes me want to puke.
I know, I know, ad hominem but sometimes …
I guess the anti-science label wasn’t working too well. Now you will be a racist if you criticize global warming.
In equating global warming alarmism to religion, the judge does serious disservice to Judeo-Christian beliefs.
Contrast the substantial objective historical evidence with the lack of evidence for anthropogenic alarmism.
e.g., See: New Evidence that Demands a Verdict and Climate Change Reconsidered
This judge is perhaps a bit more subtle than you think – I agree. Why,
* that puts AGW squarely in place
* it should give skeptics a chance to reclaim “science” on the strength of evidence alone, minus belief.
* no claim to act “under the influence of” any religion whatsoever legally permits harm to others.
* Now if the court has to decide which position actually causes “harm to others” then that gives room for evidence to be heard… re-running this judge’s original trial, in essence, but with amplification each time.
* And we know that the one thing AGW does not want is open debate over the basics.
I guess we’ve gone from deniers to demons.
Religion is more than belief, it also prescribes behavior.
There needs to be a bigger distinction made between faith and religion. I can accept that others believe different things than I do, but I cannot accept that they insist that I behave according to the rules of their religion. We have eco-missionaries now; expect the eco-inquisition later.