Guest essay by Andy May
The late Dr. Michael Crichton was wonderful writer. In 2003 he presented a wonderful essay in San Francisco equating environmentalism to religion. Nobel prize winning physicist Dr. Ivar Giaver makes the same point in a presentation here. In religion man is meant to be saved from the consequences of his sins. In the environmentalist religion the world was a wonderful, beautiful Eden until man and his technology came along. Man has eaten the apple and lost Eden. Now we must give up our “evil” technology and go back to nature, otherwise all is lost.
As Crichton notes:
“There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up … And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly, the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. … The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated…”
Environmentalists are horrible at predictions. We haven’t run out of oil, millions haven’t starved due to overpopulation, half of all species have not gone extinct, temperatures have not risen in over 18 years, total Antarctic ice and sea ice are increasing and on and on. But, it’s a religion, facts don’t matter. The bearded idiot on the street doesn’t put down his “end of the world is near” sign just because we pass the date he predicted we would all die. He just changes the date of destruction and carries on.
As Dr. Crichton explains, DDT is not a carcinogen, it did not cause birds to die and the people who banned it knew these facts. But, they banned it anyway and as a result tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, died. This was because of religion, not science.
The “Church of Global Warming” is probably the worst sect. The world has warmed from 288 Kelvin to 288.8 Kelvin in the last 135 years and not at all since 2002 according to the UAH satellite data. This is insignificant and very normal variability. The world is greener, food crops better and larger than ever, fewer people are hungry or in poverty, life expectancy is longer than ever before, and we have more arable land. There is no evidence that global warming is either man-made or dangerous and there is no evidence that carbon dioxide is either the sole cause of the minor warming we have seen or the dominant cause. We can show it is a greenhouse gas like water vapor, but that is about it.
We must get the religion out of environmentalism. We must get it back on a scientific basis. Too many organizations are simply lying, pure and simple. It started with DDT and has only gotten worse since. Science, especially environmental science, is becoming more and more politicized and this could have disastrous consequences.
Note: this post accidentally went up without Andy May’s byline. He is the author, not me. -Anthony Watts
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I grabbed these two cartoons about a month ago. They succinctly capture the nature of the beast!
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2016/08/23
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2016/08/24
“But, they banned it anyway and as a result tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, died. This was because of religion, not science.”
Banning chemicals does not need to fall under the category of Christian forgiveness and redemption, because that has to do with answering the question of where you go when you die (to Heaven), and how to live in the light of that place before you get there.
Here are more alternatives which provide interesting and even more accurate parallels for the environmental science:
1. It is similar to idolatrous, polytheistic earth religions, which used monthly rituals in order to guarantee the regularity of the seasons, the continued cyclical motions of the celestial globes, and which guaranteed the fecundity of crops and animals. This fits well with the fact that environmental scientists claim that if you don’t give up coal and oil, the spring season will not be on time, animals will go extinct, and crops will fail.
2. It is also explainable as a generational mania. The Boomer generation has a history of banning chemicals which are benign, beneficial, and which are even necessary to life and ubiquitous in nature. Examples include Bromine compounds, Nitrogen compounds, Chlorine compounds, and of course now the gh gases. Why that generation gets a sense of pride from banning useful chemicals is probably a case of replacement ethics, or false conscience.
Well good luck.
moderators,
Is redemption a wordpress-filtered word?
Climate change is never a religion. A religion has its members free to leave if they no longer believe.Only the more extreme cults force relatives to shun others who do not believe and even the more extreme cults do not try to get those not believing branded as criminals.
Chamberlin’s insight has gone far beyond geology, as Warren’s Biology and Water Pollution Control, now ancient (1971), but very good science, suggested. An Ecologist (Peters, R. H. 1991. A Critique for Ecology. Cambridge Univ. Press. 366pp.) applied the name “ad hockery” for studies that picked a paradigm and spent future research only
trying to verify it. Sounds familiar, and it seems sure that not all paradigms are simply ad hoc.
Good historical research, and geology has similar needs, tries to avoid ad hockery.
Also I have seen more recent marine research claiming to examine multiple hypotheses, but it was mostly cosmetic, as the warning above suggests.
I would also add another still relevant insight from a geologist of the period. “It seems to me to be evident that the position of a shoreline at any time and place is determined by an exceedingly complicated equation….” Shaler, N. S. 1895. Evidences as to change of sealevel. Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer. 6:141-166.
Also I wonder if someone has a good reference on “Logical Errors.” While rampant in politics, they do seem to have been increasing in science. Lots more types than just ad hominem. It might be good to point these out more often relative to the definition which is, well, logical, and not certainly not derived from politics.
Last phrase not logical, but too many nots.
Religious environmentalism is no different than other imaginary religions. This video by Dr Andy Thomson should be carefully watched by every sane human who can still reason for themselves, a shrinking population on the planet, it seems.