Why climate catastrophism is a cult, and why that should worry you.
This program will be archived in WUWT Climate TV, a collection of over six hundred videos, featuring new interviews and analysis, and covering dozens of media sources discussing, debating and analyzing the latest in climate science, climate politics, and energy policy, including topics concerning temperature, sea level, polar bears, ocean acidification, extreme weather, censorship, wild fires, and more.
Faith, Hope and Cataclysm…
After Trump re-election, UK will lead efforts to save Cop29, says Miliband
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/09/after-trump-re-election-uk-will-lead-efforts-to-save-cop29-says-miliband
The man is 1 amp current short of a Fruitcake. In what alternative universe is quadrupling demand management Energy Security.
He needs a room with rubber wallpaper…
It’s the universe of the zealot, they know that their beliefs are true, they know that renewables at 4x the price of gas/coal will lead to lower energy bills, that “demand management” (power cuts) equals energy security, and nothing can shake them from that belief.
These people need psychiatric help, they certainly shouldn’t be running the country.
The partying by the conferees, known as COP29, has begun but with the official gavel banging on the 11th. This is Veterans Day in the USA and only a tiny percentage of US citizens and few politicians will notice this UN disaster is happening.
Trump has nothing to do regarding COP29 as its failure is already apparent. He becomes President about mid-day on January 20th,, 2025 {late afternoon in England}. Someone tell Edward Miliband!
Further, the senile Biden (who, what, where?) is AWOL with respect to such things. Original Climate Czar John Kerry was replaced with John Podesta in early March. Podesta has been knocking around the halls of Washington since 1976. He will be leading folks from 20 U.S. departments in Baku, Azerbaijan. “Where?”, he said. He and they will have no role or influence after January 20th.
This video is completely wrong and worthless. I am so weary of these deconstructive discourses on the supposed “myth” of this and the “religion” of that, all predicated on the same exceedingly shallow materialism and Darwinism, which themselves should have been discredited long ago.
The climate change agenda is not a religion. It is a very sophisticated bureaucratic coup d’etat designed to seize control of government institutions and corporations so as to advance the Leftist policies of revolution and redistribution. It is all very pragmatic, even Machiavellian. It is no hope of transcendence that motivates the Green Horde, but the very terrestrial desires for wealth and power, pursued with the scheming wiles and sleepless energy of the outsider and the upstart. They are motivated by jealousy and ambition, not ideas and visions. The political wing of commonsense climate “denialism” will need to understand this and act accordingly.
I hate to break it to you, but no-one is capable of organizing a conspiracy on that scale.
Just don’t call it a conspiracy then. Give it another name. They organized 71 million people to vote for a candidate with zero credentials to be the US President. About that same number would have voted for a man with senile dementia too. These people are good at what they do. Fortunately, shown to be not good enough last Tuesday.
Who is “they”, and how did they organize it?
That’s a great question, so I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted.
How they organized it is definitely public information – controlling the so-called “mainstream” media here in the US, was a huge part of it. In some of “their” post-mortem videos that I’ve seen, they suggest that they underestimated the power of 30+ information sources that didn’t chant the same message. In these cases the “they” do have names. They’re underlings and useful idiots, but who is pulling their puppet strings …. I don’t know, but it’s obvious why they want to stay invisible, or behind the curtain.
The “String Pullers” would have to have a Lot of money.
Oh yes, indeed.
They do have a lot of money, they control the money supply and all major banks. They also control the central banks, the price of gold, the media and IT companies, etc, etc.
Wake up, and stop being so lame.
It’s not a conspiracy. It is a confluence of interests.
Each group has an agenda that can be furthered by a “climate crisis”, even if they care nothing about the environment or climate.
However, the part that to me seems closest to a conspiracy is the “lawfare” against the Oil & Gas industry we’ve seen all over the country.
If we wish to have a “scientific debate” on this (or any other) subject we should probably try to use scientific jargon instead.
Instead of “myths” and “religions” how about “conjectures” ?
That is one conjecture worth evaluating, though personally I find it falls foul of “Occam’s Razor”, i.e. it is very complicated and requires a lot of (mostly) unverifiable assumptions.
.
Alternative conjectures that I personally would give more credence to include :
1) Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
2) In the vast majority of cases “Cock-up theory” beats “Conspiracy theory”.
3) What I call “convergent interests”, where people and groups who do not know each other do the same things because they personally will benefit / profit from those actions.
4) People are incredibly stupid … except when they are working out ways to avoid paying taxes or receive government subsidies.
POint about the government subsidies. People do not have to lift a finger to get a subsidy. The government is 1 erg shy of forcing it on people.
It is a multi-layer 3endevour. At the political top is a coup d’etat as you say. At the bureaucratic level beneath that it is just government apparatchiks that know what side their bead is buttered on. Academia ranges from the deluded true believer to the grant money and status rent seeker. The corporate world is just in it for the subsidies and to not be totally destroyed should the coup be successful. But at the populace level it is the brainwashed following with cultish abandon.
For the elites, ,yes. For the masses, the resemblance to a religion are too strong to ignore.
Tedious, long winded, lots of irrelevant material, endless portentous music…. Don’t bother.
The argument, that climatism is arguably a secular religious cult, would take about a half page to set out succinctly, but this video takes 20 rambling and often content free minutes to make its point. Culminates at the end, where there are several minutes of chanting or wailing in an unfamiliar language. No citation of course, no idea what its doing there.
Is it a correct analysis? And is it a useful one?
Yes, climatism (if one can call it that) does have many similarities with both religious and secular cults of the past. One key similarity is the gap between the policy prescriptions and the alleged problem they are supposed to be directed to.
A classic instance is the flagellants. Suppose there is a problem, how is flagellating ourselves going to solve it? Or have any effect on it? Most (all?) of the climate and energy measures the activists demand are irrelevant to the scale of global emissions. And they are also impossible, as with the demand to move electricity generation to wind and solar.
No however, the analysis is not very useful. What we are confronted with is a series of large scale policy proposals which are impossible in themselves, and which will have no effect on global emissions. We are also confronted with micro proposals which may be possible, but which will also have no effect.
A classic example of this is the proposal within the UK National Health Service to change anesthetics to ones which don’t contain greenhouse gases. Or the Climate Change Committee’s proposal to lower meat consumption.
It is true that these initiatives have a strong smell of religious mania about them, a sort of irrational obsession with either small amounts of CO2 emissions or minute amounts of GHGs. But the argument that they are cult-like isn’t going to help. The only thing that will help is the tedious task of pointing out why the objections are irrational. The focus needs to be on the merits and effects of each proposal. That’s the only way to get back to rationality in energy policy – and anesthetics too!
It has been one of the great achievements of climatism to focus the debate on climate trends and physics, as if it could be taken for granted that if you accept that, the energy policies advocated are obvious and unquestionable.
In fact this is really not about the truth or falsity of global warming. Its about energy policy. The case against UK net zero for instance is not that its a quasi religious cult. Its not that a global warming disaster from human emissions isn’t real. Its that you cannot run a country on intermittent power sources. As we have seen for the last week of winter wind calms.
In the end the video, and similar material, isn’t any use. It doesn’t convince the faithful, and it bores and irritates the skeptics. Oh well, I watched it so you don’t have to. But put your efforts into energy policy, not this stuff.
“. . . content free . . . .”
Shades of Dilbert come to mind. Scott Adams is no dummy.
“But put your efforts into energy policy, not this stuff.”
How do you do that? It seems to me that one has to influence how people vote to get a rational energy policy.
Serious question – how are you putting your efforts into energy policy?
What a long winded use of words that add up to zero contribution.
…There is nothing new under the Sun… (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
… Perhaps we just want/need to believe we are the first to realise stuff …
This shows the irrational nature of climatism, which is important in understanding why so many believe it. They claim that it is based on sound science, going back to Svante Arrhenius. But they fail to point out that he viewed warming as a good thing, and that man’s CO2 might actually help keep another ice age at bay. He was correct in the first instance, but wrong on the second, and he later realized this and corrected himself. But then along came a toxic mixture of people of all stripes who thought that pushing the idea that “carbon is bad” would be useful to them in terms of power and even careers, a la The Goreacle and Mikey the bad Mann, along with countless other bad actors.
The best description of Climatism is that it is a memeplex, with many moving parts, all of which help to reinforce it. Warming, they discovered, wasn’t either happening fast enough and/or wasn’t alarming enough. So, their latest meme has to do with what they call “extreme weather”. This puts Climatism on an even more irrational footing, but it appeals to the ignorant masses. What better way to scare people into Believing? And then of course we have the so-called “Green Energy” industry, which, if there wasn’t the Alarmist memeplex to support it, would barely even exist.
I think that conflating climate studies with energy provision should be addressed as the main problem.
Climate cranks are really no different to ubiquitous cranks about all measure of perceived “annoyances”.
Climate cranks can safely be left to be cranky about the weather as long as their delusions don’t metastasise into harmful impacts on energy provision.
Energy provision (or lack thereof) is truly the existential challenge that humanity needs to surmount for now and forever.
(that, and how to feed ~10 billion Earthlings in 2050)
Nice article. It looks like an interesting discussion by very intelligent commenters, however, I can’t read the comments due to the advertisements flickering. Make it stop.
turn on your ad blocker
THe BBC claims the UK has cut its emissions by 50% since 1990 but would have to increase this to81% by 2035 to make an appreciable difference, and it admits the current figures don’t include emissions from imported manufactured good nor those from international aircraft fights or shipping. So the numbers are obviously skewed to make it seem as though much has been accomplished when the reality is a lot less.
Despite what’s been said previously in response to this post, I would contend that belief in Climate Change (caps. deliberate) IS a religion because it shows all the characteristics of one.
Firstly, the need to believe without proof. Secondly, the unquestioning acceptance of everything the high priests say. Thirdly, the villification of unbelievers.
It was realising this many years ago that convinced me that this was a cult and that any claims to it being based in science were false.