CONTRIBUTOR
What does it take to avert the end of the world?
For most of human history this has been a question for religion. And the answer has usually been that human beings must repent of their sins. They must surrender some comfort and luxury to appease angry gods. In primitive times worshippers might sacrifice a bull — or even a human being.
Today climate science provides an end-times prophecy that works in much the same way as the religious apocalypticism of old. Religion enchants the world, lending spiritual significance to every part of life. Climate change makes everything from charging your iPhone to skipping beef for dinner a potentially salvific act.
Cattle once again have to be sacrificed; they emit too much methane and CO2. And the dietary laws that climate science prescribes are as exacting as those of any religion. Every day is a fast day when you subsist on tofu and insect protein. (RELATED: BASTASCH: The UN’s Newest Climate Report Is A Woke Dumpster Fire Masquerading As Science)
Purity and ritual cleanliness are religious concepts that find a remarkable parallel in the way of life that climate science promotes. By default, Apple’s phones are now set to “clean energy charging” mode, which takes longer to recharge the battery but contributes in however small a way to saving us from the weather.
Well-educated liberals laugh when a televangelist claims a hurricane is God’s punishment for America’s acceptance of homosexuality. Yet liberals also believe that weather is a moral force, punishing Americans for the sins of capitalism. When the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded the New York subway, liberals assigned the deluge a cosmic meaning as a manifestation of climate change.
Bad weather is never simply bad weather anymore; every hurricane, flood or tornado is now imbued with deeper significance. Bad weather is humanity’s fault. We can only stop it if we live our lives a little more miserably.
Or much more miserably: If ordinary people are inconvenienced by climate ideology, true believers are prone to despair.
Climate “doomers” believe there is nothing to live for. They don’t want to have children, because who would want to bring children into a dying world? And since human beings are the cause of the climate crisis, inflicting more of them on the planet is morally wrong.
Last year on Earth Day one climate activist took his beliefs to their logical conclusion. Wynn Bruce burned himself alive outside the Supreme Court, a self-immolating martyr to climate ideology.
When the religious impulse is perverted, it turns from love of God to hatred for humanity. In 15th-century Florence the radical Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola preached apocalypse and called for penitent citizens to burn their luxuries. Savonarola’s “bonfire of the vanities” consumed priceless manuscripts and works of art.
Recently climate activists in Europe have targeted museums and glued themselves to famous paintings. Are museums a leading source of carbon dioxide emissions? Of course not. But like Savonarola, climate vandals want to show that they hold human genius in contempt and beauty is vanity when the fate of everything is at stake.
Every year the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that the end is nigh. This year’s report claims that global warming will pass a point of no return within the next decade.
That’s a smart prediction — not because it’s true but because it’s politically convenient. A 10-year deadline is close enough to stir up alarm but not so close as to be easily disproved when doomsday rolls around and nothing happens.
If Greta Thunberg follows the IPCC’s marketing strategy, she’ll save herself embarrassment. She recently had to delete a tweet from 2018 that said the world only had five years left.
The day of reckoning should always be just over the horizon, with no firm due date. “Within” 10 years does the job well. As in the Gospel, no man can tell the day or the hour when the world will pass away.
Anyone who knows the geological history of our planet is aware that over millions of years our planet has been much colder and much hotter than it is today. Our present era is one of steady warming, not because of human activity but because of the planet’s own long-range cycles.
If we cut all CO2 emissions tomorrow, the world would continue to warm. Floods and forest fires certainly would not cease.
The fact that the politics of climate science so closely mirrors religious apocalypticism ought to prompt some reflection.
End-times prophecy and the role of human guilt in the fate of the cosmos are not scientific concerns at all. From a purely scientific perspective, the world will keep spinning no matter how wicked or angelic humanity might be.
Climate ideology derives its power from its resemblance to religion. But it’s a poor substitute for a real faith, offering no hope of redemption by a benevolent God, but only punishment for our irredeemable sins; our lives will always have to get worse until the weather improves.
Daniel McCarthy is the editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. To read more by Daniel McCarthy, visit www.creators.com
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Nice editorial, but it’s not going to stop the climate zealots.
In two or three millennia archeologists will discover acres and acres of concrete blocks, each with a ring of iron oxide in the centre. They will conclude that it is the equivalent of a linear Stonehenge and clearly of religious significance. They will be right.
What does it take to avert the end of the world?
For most of human history this has been a question for religion.
christianity? nope there is no averting the end
buddism: world doesnt end or begin
eschatology varies wildly across religions.
look in frickin high school i had to take 3 years of comparitive religion, including having to
attend services in multiple religions.
you?
you had to google eschatology
At least with the religions of old (especially those that revolved around agriculture and, by extension, the weather and climate) had the excuse of having very little scientific knowledge of the earth’s climate. They didn’t know about volcanic eruptions half way around the world and their effects on worldwide weather. They didn’t know about El Nino/La Ninas. They didn’t know about solar cycles or sunspots. The best they could do was to pray and sacrifice to various deities and hope their crops didn’t fail. And hope the rains came when they were supposed to, and hope they didn’t get too much rain or snow.
What is truly sad today is that even with all of the scientific knowledge that has accumulated (much of it due to the industrial fossil fueled revolution which gave people more time to study such things and to build machines to aid in those studies) this kind of pseudo-scientific religion can still come about.
People who think that the end of religion (at least organized religions like Islam, Christianity and Judaism) will lead to a more peaceful world without the trappings of religion are badly mistaken.
It seems human nature, being what it is, will still cause people to gravitate to that which can be used as a tool to enslave and control others. Not saying all religions were/are like that, but, as history has shown, some were very much that way.
Daniel points out the ridiculous foolishness of the climate zealots superbly.
The fact that the politics of climate science so closely mirrors religious apocalypticism ought to prompt some reflection.
the real question is Why the notion of apocalypse is so pervasive across cultures and history
IT’S BUILT into our way of thinking, as every Jungian knows.
jesus even you guys tell fables about grid collapse and economic destruction.
you believe OIl is the fountain of youth
https://phillyjunginstituteblog.wordpress.com/2015/07/28/the-archetype-of-apocalypse-in-culture-and-dreams-a-jungian-perspective/
Climate is defined as 30 years of weather in a given area. So if you want to fight climate change, you have to change the weather for 30 years first.
I’m sure glad that scientists discovered that raising taxes is how to change the weather, aren’t you?
Climate religion is filling the void formed by the decline of monotheistic religion.
Weird times we live in for sure!
And with readers on this site being more science-focused than the average person on the street, it is hard to know how to combat it … as for most people , climate is not a matter of science but a matter of faith.
Excellent editorial.
There is something in human nature that requires a god, or at least a higher purpose to existence. In the west when you take away Judaism and Christianity you creep back into neo-paganism.
Another way to put it is: Calling climate science a religion gives religion a bad name.
Makes you wonder what would happen to society if the media honestly reported that there is no climate problem. What would all the fanatics do?
That’s the intermediate state of the meme. The end game is a néomarxiste plan far more evil and deadly than Marx’s stringent philosophy.
The genius in establishing the United States was the establishment clause.
The problem today is that our government and the people we rely on for intellectual guidance have succumbed to a religion.
Nowhere in our system of checks and balances do we have a remedy for this. The executive branch now rules by executive action because the legislative branch is deadlocked and filled with extremists. And the executive branch subverts the judicial branch by appointing more extremists.
This sort of thing has happened before, but the perfect storm, so to speak, is that our intellectual leaders have taken up anti-intellectualism in the name of equity (rather than its antonym, equality).
They’ve picked “climate science” as the religion part of this race to the bottom, but it’s just one mechanism within a larger part of what’s happening. Another round of Dark Ages approaches, and it’s not going to be dark simply because of the lack of electricity.
It’s worth remembering that Christianity (sorta rhymes with Insanity, doesn’t it) produced the Inquisition to punish non-believers, and criminalized natural truth such as that spoken by Copernicus and Galileo. The likes of Greta, and that pink-haired kid featured in a video on a recent post, plus the Belgian who recently committed suicide, are firm indications that humanity has flaws that can easily cause such inhumanity again.
All it takes is enough zealots to form a quorum, as it did in Rome. As a species, we’ve not advanced far.
On the religious theme, I was somewhat in there, but then I had my own epiphany, my own crisis on the road to Damascus and I unfortunately began to think, the ultimate sin to monotheism.
Once you read and think there is no going back
From the linked article – BASTACH – The UN’s Newest Climate Report Is A Woke Dumpster Fire Masquerading As Science
“Variations of the words “equity” and “inequity” appear 31 times in the 36-page document. Variations of “inclusive” and “inclusion” appear 17 times. The document even mentions “colonialism” and repeatedly refers to climate and social “justice” for “marginalized” groups.”
…And what does the UN push all the time? – renewables. Renewables manufactured from materials “mined” by slave child labour in desperately poor countries. The UN and IPCC is disgusting, its elite hypocrisy is obscene.
“But Religion” is boring as hell:
https://climateball.net/but-religion/
It’s not that ‘climate science makes a bad religion’, it’s that bad science + politics makes a bad religion.
“Wynn Bruce burned himself alive outside the Supreme Court, a self-immolating martyr to climate ideology.”
How much “carbon pollution” did his burning body produce?
religion- “the opiate of the masses”- Karl Marx
The climate change movement is nihilistic to the core. Nihilism is not religion by definition. The apocalyptical fear that the climate change urban-myth/hysteria preaches is; humans will destroy mother earth. (False messages always have a kernel of truth, people can destroy the human habitat….war, famine, pestilence, etc)
There is no belief in a deity that speaks or reveals itself to it’s believers. At best there is a highly speculative pantheism and in some cases a loose pagan mythology which is rooted in human a priori reasoning. It is not unlike the 20th century movements that trashed the world for decades. Eugenics is not a religion it is rooted in 19th century Hegelism….Darwin.
What looks and feels religious is how apocalyptical fear creates a new grid of self righteous behaviors, actions, thoughts and legalistic contingencies. Historically, religion seems to always pit people against people. It’s not religion per se, it is self righteous people with no humility or sense of humor that pit people against people. This sort of evil is as old as mankind and it has been a plague constantly at the door of the Christian Church, which is rooted in the Love of Christ not pitting people against people.