AGW: Why Buy the Hype

The AGW Faithful

by Trevor Thomas

February 18, 2010

“A person will worship something,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “have no doubt about that…That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.”

The most interesting question now in the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW) debate is why, as Mark Steyn recently suggested, would those who have bought into this scam (the greatest scam in history, as the founder of the Weather Channel put it) continue their faithful devotion? (Is there anything on earth with less credibility than man-made global warming?)

The answer to Steyn’s question lies with Emerson’s observation. Many, most notably Ian Plimer, recently have noted that the AGW movement has become a religion. Plimer, an atheist, stated that global warming is, “the new religion of First World urban elites.” He adds that “Environmentalism has many of the hallmarks of failed European socialism and Western (failed) Christianity. It has a holy book which few have read (IPCC reports), has prophets (Gore) who cannot be challenged, relies on dogma, ignores contrary evidence, has armies of wide-eyed missionaries...; imposes guilt, has a catastrophist view of the planet, and seeks indulgences.”

Leave it to a Transcendentalist who denied the deity of Christ (Emerson), and an atheist (Plimer), to point us to the truth in this debate!

As I noted in March of 2007, I’m afraid that many caught up in the global warming hoopla became foolish in the manner described by the Apostle Paul in the book of Romans and, “Exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.” Make no mistake about it; “Mother Earth” became their idol. Lost on them was the fact that the planet and all of its resources were created for the benefit of mankind, not vice versa. In other words, they didn’t realize that human beings, not the earth, are the crown of God’s creation.

After nearly three decades of proselytizing, involving everyone from Al Gore to Hollywood to NASA to the U.N., it’s no wonder that so many were duped. Movies were made; industries were born; existing corporations created new products; commercials pleaded with us to change our energy-consuming ways—all based on AGW theory—it’s a wonder all of us didn’t buy into this boondoggle.

However, in the last 3 months the AGW movement has seen more “gates” than did all of the Nixon era: Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, and so on and so on. In 2007, the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produced its latest and greatest (Fourth) Assessment Report (AR4). It has since been revealed that it is littered with errors. (This is the document that won Al Gore and the IPCC the Nobel Peace Prize!)

Claims in AR4 concerning everything from the Himalayan Glaciers to the Amazon Rain Forests to coral reef degradation to African crop yields to the elevation of the Netherlands to Al Gore’s hat size have proven to be false.

Investigations by the British press (the American MSM has shamefully been very quiet on this issue) “found evidence that Chinese weather station measurements not only were seriously flawed, but couldn't be located.” According to the U.K.’s Guardian, 42 weather monitoring stations in remote rural China were nowhere to be found.

The U.K. Telegraph reported that the 2006 Stern Report, an economic doomsday prediction commissioned by the British government, had some predictions which “had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified.” Also, Robert Muir-Wood, a researcher quoted in the Stern Report, now claims that the Stern Report misquoted his work to suggest a strong link between global warming and more-frequent and severe floods and hurricanes. Muir-Wood said his original research revealed no such link.

Just this week, Professor Phil Jones, former head of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, who is at the center of Climategate, admitted that there has been no “statistically significant” rise in global temperatures since 1995. He also admitted for the first time that the world may have been warmer during medieval times than now.

Yet, even with all of this mounting evidence, the faithful—“Warmers” they’re now dubbed—still cling to their fateful climate views. Tim Wirth, president of the U.N. Foundation and a former U.S. Senator from Colorado, said the manipulated evidence exposed by the Climategate scandal was merely an “opening” to attack climate science and it “has to be defended just like evolution has to be defended.”

This is an all too familiar approach by liberals when it comes to any attack on their sacred-held scientific positions—they label their opponent as “anti-science.” They have done this in the stem cell debate, the evolution debate, the global warming debate, and so on.

President Obama did as much just after his inauguration last year. On March 9, 2009 Obama declared that he was issuing “a Presidential Memorandum directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making to ensure that in this new administration, we base our public policies on the soundest science; that we appoint scientific advisors based on their credentials and experience, not their politics or ideology.”

C.S. Lewis disputed the notion that we must rely exclusively on the counsel of scientists when it comes to today’s complicated problems. He did not dispute their knowledge but concluded that most of it was irrelevant. “I dread specialists in power,” Lewis declared, “because they are specialists speaking outside their special subjects. Let scientists tell us about sciences. But government involves questions about the good for man, and justice, and what things are worth having at what price; and on these a scientific training gives a man's opinion no added value.”

However, as most anyone with a pulse knows, politicians don’t hold all of the answers to today’s complicated problems, either. Ultimately, one’s faith plays a role in every decision one makes. As the late philosopher Dr. Greg Bahnsen put it, “At the most fundamental level of everyone's thinking and beliefs there are primary convictions about reality, man, the world, knowledge, truth, behavior, and such things. Convictions about which all other experience is organized, interpreted, and applied.”

In other words, all reasoning, all problem solving, is guided by certain governing presuppositions. These presuppositions are determined by one’s worldview, and a person’s worldview is determined by his or her faith. Summarizing Emerson, we all worship something. In other words, we all have placed our faith in something.

A worldview that deifies the earth, or something very close to that, puts people in extreme positions when they see their deity as under attack. Not all AGW zealots are of this worldview; some are motivated by pure, old-fashioned greed and political power, but these are generally more easily swayed by the facts and the truth than the “faithful.”

Ultimately, as with any deceit, this is a spiritual battle. For the eyes of these to be opened it takes a change of faith, and there is only One who can make that happen.