Things I don’t understand ||

Just a note on an essay from George Mason University’s History News Network blog, on the symmetry between organized religion and environmentalism (or at least the catastrophic kind getting the headlines at the moment):

• Both are highly moralistic and use the language and strategies of “sinfulness.” This also involves an implied and often explicit claim to have monopolized the moral high ground.
• Both involve the idea that one must sacrifice now for some undetermined future reward. This makes the Lent connection very logical.
• Both have historically been very quick to label and condemn as “heretics” those who disagree with them.
• Both have a tendency toward irrationalism and mysticism, e.g. the Gaia strand of environmentalism.

Of course this has been noted before by Michael Crichton:

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. [my emphasis]

I recommend both essays.

For those of us outside of the UK, the BBC News website has advertising on it. I inadvertantly clicked on one by mistake (because the Beeboids haven’t mastered html yet as rendered by Firefox), and got this link: http://www.loveearth.com/uk/tracking

As you can see, its a lovely website dealing with the cuddliest animals threatened by Human-caused Climate Change and sponsored by BBC Worldwide

So what do we have on the menu bar? “Saving Planet Earth” with the byline:

The BBC Wildlife Fund supports work protecting wildlife under threat around the world. The remit of the Fund is to support projects that are helping to protect endangered wildlife and biodiversity - animals, plants and the wild places they need. It also helps to protect and improve the natural habitats that wildlife and humans share.

Which leads me back to the BBC Trust who last year produced a report on the BBC’s news activities especially in regard to its reporting on environmental issues. On the BBC’s reluctance to report on dissenters of the supposed scientific consensus, the BBC Trust said:

But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate. They cannot be simply dismissed as ‘flat-earthers’ or ‘deniers’, who ’should not be given a platform’ by the BBC. Impartiality always requires a breadth of view: for as long as minority opinions are coherently and honestly expressed, the BBC must give them appropriate space. ‘Bias by elimination’ is even more offensive today than it was in 1926. The BBC has many public purposes of both ambition and merit – but joining campaigns to save the planet is not one of them. [my emphasis]

Well I’m sorry BBC Trust, but it appears still that the BBC News team and BBC Worldwide are not only joining those campaigns but actively soliciting funds for them. They’ll continue to flout the BBC Charter just as long as you keep giving a blind eye to their real acitivities.

For sheer breathtaking climate alarmist inanity, can I recommend Mark Lynas? He has produced a classic piece of apocalyptic-fevered writing that should be preserved for future generations.

Parents: make sure your children get a proper scientific education or they’ll end up like Mark Lynas.

I present: the easy way to stop climate change

We have about 100 months left. If global greenhouse gas emissions have not begun to decline by the end of 2015, then our chances of restraining climate change to within the two degrees “safety line” – the level of warming below which the impacts are severe but tolerable – diminish day by day thereafter. This is what the latest science now demands: the peaking of emissions within eight years, worldwide cuts of 60 per cent by 2030, and 80 per cent or more by 2050. Above two degrees, our chances of crossing “tipping points” in the earth’s system – such as the collapse of the Amazon rainforest, or the release of methane from thawing Siberian permafrost – is much higher.

Ah yes, Mark is a fundamentalist believer in the unstable equilibrium theory of climate - in this model, the climate is naturally stable, but a small perturbation (burning fossil fuels) can (by the magic of positive feedbacks!) lead to destabilization of the climate leading to runaway…well…unpleasantness.

Which leads me to the next part - democracy is over. Fall into line:

STEP ONE: Stop debating, start doing

Although there is now a very broad consensus on climate in the media and politics, opinion polls show that many people still harbour doubts about climate change. One of the peculiarities of the climate debate is that although more than 99 per cent of international climate change scientists agree on the causes of global warming, the denial lobby still only has to produce one contrarian to undermine the consensus in the public mind. Similarly, changes in our understanding can be magnified and distorted to suggest that, because we don’t know everything, therefore we must know nothing. Thus, data from one glacier that apparently bucks the global trend can be wielded as a trump card against all the accumulated knowledge of climate science.

A classic example of antiscience. In science, one piece of evidence that falsifies a hypothesis does indeed trump that hypothesis. Of course with global warming, every extreme event is evidence of global warming, whether warmth, cold, drought, floods, fire, more storminess, less storminess, more fish, less fish and so on.

Its Lynas’ “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” trick.

But what of debate? Since when as Lynas ever advocated the debate tha he’s now calling a halt to? Here’s Lynas’ real attitude to debate with people who oppose him:

I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put this in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial – except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.

Yep, its not as if Lynas hasn’t dragged the debate down far enough that he can’t just dispense with it altogether.

Read the whole screed. In 2015, I’m sure he’ll deny he ever wrote it.