The Climate Change Cult

We have heard it so often that we believe it’s true.

We happily accept that global warming, or better, anthropogenic climate change is real because all scientists believe that it’s real.

Given the state of today’s marketplace of ideas, anyone who disagrees publicly with this statement will receive threats to life and limb.

Liberalism uber alles!

No one mentions that scientific fact is determined by experiments, not by taking a poll of scientists.

But, what do the true believers do with the fact that the former head of the climate science lab at MIT, Richard Lindzen, thinks it’s all a bunch of crap. (Via Maggie’s Farm) Of course, they send him threatening voice mails:

“I think people like you should actually be in jail,” the male caller told him, “because you must know where this is all leading now… the people you support and take your money from to make these outrageously anti-human comments (also ‘know’)… In other words, you’re a sociopath!”

One would be hard-pressed to declare so distinguished a scientist a crank. But, in a world where the belief in global warming has become dogma, true believers are doing just that.

According to Lindzen, global warming alarmism has become a cult. He explained it to Howie Carr on the latter’s radio program:

“As with any cult, once the mythology of the cult begins falling apart, instead of saying, oh, we were wrong, they get more and more fanatical. I think that’s what’s happening here. Think about it,” he said. “You’ve led an unpleasant life, you haven’t led a very virtuous life, but now you’re told, you get absolution if you watch your carbon footprint. It’s salvation!”

One might say that once predictions prove unfounded, once the hypotheses do not produce confirming evidence cult followers will insist that the facts have been skewed against them. They are so convinced of the rightness of their belief that they mistake intense conviction for truth. Thus, they call on their followers to ignore reality in favor of a higher truth. 

Sometimes they insist that eventually their prophecies will come to pass. In the meantime, they cherry-pick the data to find facts that seem to support their beliefs.

Speaking of skewed data, last week the government announced that 2014 was the hottest year in history. Howie Carr explains:

Last week, government agencies including NASA announced that 2014 was the “hottest year” in “recorded history,” as The New York Times put it in an early edition. Last year has since been demoted by the Times to the hottest “since record-keeping began in 1880.”

But that may not be true. Now the same agencies have acknowledged that there’s only a 38 percent chance that 2014 was the hottest year on record. And even if it was, it was only by two-100ths of a degree.

Lindzen explained the deception:

Lindzen scoffs at the public-sector-generated hysteria, which included one warmist blogger breathlessly writing that the heat record had been “shattered.”

“Seventy percent of the earth is oceans, we can’t measure those temperatures very well. They can be off a half a degree, a quarter of a degree. Even two-10ths of a degree of change would be tiny but two-100ths is ludicrous. Anyone who starts crowing about those numbers shows that they’re putting spin on nothing.”

What is happening here?

In effect, the environmental movement has been trying to reverse the Industrial Revolution, the better to impoverish and immiserate the world. Lindzen does not say that it is the intention, but it will happen if their policies are put into practice.

For good measure, he debunks the current hysteria about carbon dioxide levels.

Carr reports:

Lindzen said he was fortunate to have gained tenure just as the “climate change” movement was beginning, because now non-believers are often ostracized in academia. In his career he has watched the hysteria of the 1970’s over “global cooling” morph into “global warming.”

“They use climate to push an agenda. But what do you have left when global warming falls apart? Global normalcy? We have to do something about ‘normalcy?’”

As for CO2, Lindzen said that until recently, periods of greater warmth were referred to as “climate optimum.” Optimum is derived from a Latin word meaning “best.”

“Nobody ever questioned that those were the good periods. All of a sudden you were able to inculcate people with the notion that you have to be afraid of warmth.”

The warmists’ ultimate solution is to reduce the standard of living for most of mankind. That proposition is being resisted most vigorously by nations with developing economies such as China and India, both of which have refused to sign on to any restrictive, Obama-backed climate treaties. Lindzen understands their reluctance.

“Anything you do to impoverish people, and certainly all the planned policies will impoverish people, is actually costing lives. But the environmental movement has never cared about that.”

Starve the people; save the planet.

Now, that would be an interesting slogan.