Maurice Newman (image – ABC)

Another enjoyable read from Maurice Newman, former chairman of the ABC:

ONCE upon a time when Christendom was at its peak, missionaries would be dispatched to the four corners of the globe in search of converts. They believed their mission would expand the influence of Rome and save heathens from eternal damnation.

It was a compelling message. Convert and enjoy everlasting life in the hereafter. The advantage the missionaries had was that the religion they taught had no hypotheses that could be tested. Death – “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns” – meant that the afterlife could be neither proved nor disproved. Faith was the only thing needed.

Climate science is a bit like that – push the rewards and the catastrophes far enough into the future, and have faith that the prophecies will come true. However, unlike heaven, which we may reach at any time, climate prophecies need to be distant enough to make them hard to challenge yet sufficiently close to generate urgent action. [Read more…]

Al Gore creating the alarmist religion

This is just the latest in the long line of attempts to demonise climate scepticism. The US National Centre for Science Education (NCSE) has announced that it will be tackling the teaching of climate scepticism in the classroom, just as it has tackled the teaching of creationism:

NCSE is proud to announce the launch of its new initiative aimed at defending the teaching of climate change. Like evolution, climate change is accepted by the scientific community but controversial among the public. As a result, educators trying to teach climate change, like their counterparts trying to teach evolution, are often likewise pressured to compromise the scientific and pedagogical integrity of their instruction. But there was no NCSE for climate — no organization, that is, specializing in providing advice and support to those facing challenges to climate change education.

With the launching of the initiative, NCSE itself becomes that organization. As NCSE’s executive director Eugenie C. Scott explained in a January 16, 2012, press release, “We consider climate change a critical issue in our own mission to protect the integrity of science education.” She added, “Climate affects everyone, and the decisions we make today will affect generations to come. We need to teach kids now about the realities of global warming and climate change, so that they’re prepared to make informed, intelligent decisions in the future.” (source)

But which side of the climate debate is really closer to creationism?

• Which side has a pre-determined “cause” that must be defended at all costs?
• Which side suppresses inconvenient data that doesn’t fit the cause?
• Which side attacks heretics that dare challenge the cause?
• Which side takes scientific findings and shoehorns them into the results it needs to support the cause?
• Which side hides uncertainties in order to prevent the cause from being diluted?
• Which side tries to stifle debate in order to protect the cause?
• Which side has armies of paid organisations the spread “the word”? Think all the Green-bankrolled blogs and websites
• Which side believes that the world will end unless the cause is blindly worshipped?

On the other hand, however:

• Which side champions impartial, free-thinking scientific enquiry?
• Which side isn’t beholden to any “cause”?
• Which side welcomes all data, whether inconvenient or otherwise, to increase understanding?
• Which side welcomes debate, since, again, it leads to greater understanding?

Check out this great essay over at Number Watch, which exposes in great detail the frightening similarities between climate alarmism and organised religion. Here is the introduction:

It was Michael Crichton who first prominently identified environmentalism as a religion. That was in a speech in 2003, but the world has moved on apace since then and adherents of the creed now have a firm grip on the world at large.

Global Warming has become the core belief in a new eco-theology. The term is used as shorthand for anthropogenic (or man made) global warming. It is closely related to other modern belief systems, such as political correctness, chemophobia and various other forms of scaremongering, but it represents the vanguard in the assault on scientific man.

The activists now prefer to call it “climate change”. This gives them two advantages:

1. It allows them to seize as “evidence” the inevitable occurrences of unusually cold weather as well as warm ones.
2. The climate is always changing, so they must be right.

Only the relatively elderly can remember the cynical haste with which the scaremongers dropped the “coming ice age” and embraced exactly the opposite prediction, but aimed at the same culprit – industry. This was in Britain, which was the cradle of the new belief and was a response to the derision resulting from the searing summer of 1976. The father of the new religion was Sir Crispin Tickell, and because he had the ear of Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who was engaged in a battle with the coal miners and the oil sheiks, it was introduced into international politics with the authority of the only major political leader holding a qualification in science. The introduction was timely yet ironic since, in the wake of the world’s political upheavals, a powerful new grouping of left-wing interests was coalescing around environmental issues. The result was a new form of godless religion. 

I recommend you read it all. And then decide whether it’s the sceptics that should be lumped in with the creationists.

Can spot a fake religion when he sees one

UPDATE: Josh records Cardinal Pell’s speech (on which this article was based) in cartoon form here.

The irony – a spiritual leader within a faith-based belief system (the Catholic Church) possesses far more capacity for rational thought than thousands of “scientists” and politicians swept up in the quasi-religious tide of climate alarmism.

We can only attempt to identify the causes of climate change through science and these causes need to be clearly established after full debates, validated comprehensively, before expensive remedies are imposed on industries and communities.

I first became interested in the question in the 1990s when studying the anti-human claims of the “deep greens”. Mine is not an appeal to the authority of any religious truth in the face of contrary scientific evidence. Neither is it even remotely tinged by a postmodernist hostility to rationality.

My appeal is to reason and evidence, and in my view the evidence is insufficient to achieve practical certainty on many of these scientific issues.

Recently Robert Manne, following fashionable opinion, wrote that “the science is truly settled” on the fundamental theory of climate change: global warming is happening; it is primarily caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide; and it is certain to have profound effects in the future .

His appeal is to the “consensual view among qualified scientists”. This is a category error, scientifically and philosophically. In fact, it is also a cop-out, a way of avoiding the basic issues.

The basic issue is not whether the science is settled but whether the evidence and explanations are adequate in that paradigm.

I fear, too, that many politicians have never investigated the primary evidence.

Much is opaque to non-specialists, but persistent inquiry and study can produce useful clarifications, similar to the nine errors identified by the British High Court in Al Gore’s propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth.

The complacent appeal to scientific consensus is simply one more appeal to authority, quite inappropriate in science or philosophy.

Read it here.