If anyone still doubts that environmentalism has far more to do with quasi-religious belief and ideology than it does with science, “Climategate” ought to finally drive the point home.
What do you do when you are bunch of politically motivated scientists bent on using the hobgoblin you created in the minds of the masses in order to advance your global socialist agenda and you discover that… horror of horrors… reality will not conform with your theory!
Why, you do whatever you can to hide and obfuscate data that will not fit your theory and thus advance your ideology. Your theory says temperatures should be rising, yet they are declining. That is damn inconvenient, isn’t it? So what do you do? You hide the decline.
Then you make shrill proclamations, such as “the debate is settled.”
You accuse any scientist who disagrees with you of being the equivalent of a “holocaust denier.”
You claim that “if we don’t act NOW!” (meaning: enact a draconian, industrial-civilization-crushing socialist agenda), that the earth will face armageddon.
You get an insane but gullible failed politician to develop a Powerpoint presentation and produce a movie designed to instill fear in a generation of schoolchildren and enlist them in your little green army…. and then you give him a Nobel prize.
And so now we find that the core group of about five scientists that Al Gore and the political hacks at the U.N. were basing their theory on, were engaging in gross lies, obfuscating data, shutting out peer review, and “massaging” the data. Not only are they lacking any proof of their claims, they don’t even have the data to support a valid hypothesis!
And because of this nonsense, we are expected to turn Industrial Civilization upside down, endure increase taxes and energy costs, and forcibly go back to a pre-19th century standard of energy consumption — for absolutely no reason.
As more and more light is shed on this, and the ugly fraud is revealed, the big question most thinking people will ask is WHY? Why would all of these “respectable” people perpetrate such as fraud. There are two reasons.
The first one is money. As Ed Cline summarizes:
Environmentalists, global warming advocates, and the government all have a vested interest in the “truth” of catastrophic climate change. Not to mention car manufacturers and other industries that have either retrofitted their plants or invested in “green” industries to comply with anticipated federal carbon legislation. Think of the billions spent on hybrid cars and florescent light bulbs and solar panels and wind turbines, all contrived to combat non-existent global warming. Poof! It will all have been for naught. So, the economic and political consequences of ClimateGate go far, far beyond the issue of the veracity of a handful of climate scientists.
Not to mention all of the taxpayer money handed out as “research” grants to climate scientists on the politically correct side of the issue.
And the second reason is ideology. Believe it or not, what used to be the fringe of the environmentalist movement has today become its mainstream. Environmentalism has become a secular replacement for religion for those on the left. As Christopher Monckton quipped, “the greens are simply reds who are too yellow to admit it.”
Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is nothing more than a junk science smokescreen designed to conceal a political agenda. It’s the same agenda that came up with the DDT scare of the 60’s… or the population bomb scare of the 70’s… or the global COOLING scare of the 70’s….
Doug Reich puts this nicely over at the Rational Capitalist..
Environmentalists are not concerned with saving the earth for man but saving the earth from man. In other words, because man, by his nature, must use the earth, the environmentalist who values nature “intrinsically” must, on principle, consider man to be only an enemy of the earth (which carries the status of a god to be worshipped for its own sake.) Therefore, the scientific issue of “warming” is nothing but a smokescreen - a convenient claim carrying a pseudo-scientific veneer that can more easily confuse the ignorant public as to the movement’s true aims. If “warming” were wholly disproved it would not temper the environmentalist cause for a second. They would move on to something else as they are already doing with “climate change” or to a yet to be determined apocryphal fantasy aimed at scaring the public into accepting sacrifice and global government decrees thwarting production and economic progress.
So we may have won this battle, but we have by no means won the war. The key thing to learn from this whole episode is this — the question of what is the best socio-economic system should be completely separate from whatever “crisis du jour” politically motivated leftists cook up. In the words of Economist George Reisman:
The answer to the question of how best to cope with intolerable global warming caused by Nature is obviously the maintenance of the free market, not its replacement by Socialist central planning. Indeed, the answer is to make the free market freer than it now is—as much freer as is humanly possible. This is because while the primary reason for advocating a free market is the greater prosperity and enjoyment it brings to everyone in the course of his normal, everyday life, a major, secondary reason is to have the greatest possible industrial base available for coping with catastrophic events, whether those events be war, plague, meteors from outer space, intolerable global warming, or a new ice age.
The trouble is, environmentalism in general, and global warming in particular, has become a religion, and the fundamentalists of this religion are not going to go away. Again, let me quote Ed Cline:
Global warming is a religion, not a science. The prospect of governing every action of every individual on the planet in the name of staving off “catastrophic climate change,” and charging especially the U.S. a fee for impoverishing it, makes belief in global warming as tenacious and anti-reason as the literal interpretation of the Bible is to a fundamentalist or evangelical holly-roller. The fraudsters and reivers have come too close to their goal of “world governance” to concede not only error, but the lies that sustained that error, as well. They want to rule, or at least see men ruled by others.
AGW is a fraud, but it will not stop environmentalists from concocting another man-made apocalypse to justify global socialism and the destruction of modern industrial civilization. Man is their enemy, and until we’re kind enough to be wiped out by a plague, these lunatics will march on.
