Activism inspired by alarm over climate change has long been described by detractors as a secular religion. The political movement has asserted a system of belief, expressed an apocalyptic vision, parried scientific questions, converted the indifferent, and condemned nonbelievers. And it has been very successful. International ratification of the sacrificial and futile Kyoto Treaty attests to its persuasion.
The high priest of climate activism, former US Vice-President Al Gore, embodies the analogy. “This is really not a political issue,” he said recently at a meeting in Oakland, Calif. “It is disguised as a political issue. It is a moral issue. It is an ethical issue.” How dare anyone disagree with revelation? Then the apocalypse: “If we allow this to happen, we will destroy the habitability of the planet.”
Sure, intolerant
Gore has talked like this since he began holding hearings on global warming as a Democratic senator from Tennessee in the late 1980s. He was then and is now a man on a crusade: sure of his own moral rightness, intolerant of dissent, unyielding, uncompromising. It’s not politics, after all. And now Gore has a movie through which to spread the evangel. The title speaks for itself: An Inconvenient Truth. So it goes with climate activism. True believers assert a theory, extrapolate to worst-case scenarios, and capitalize every way they can on popular alarm. It says much about this urgent approach that the activists’ signature triumph, the Kyoto Treaty, is quickly proving to be as ruinously hasty, costly, and ineffectual as its opponents said it would be. Yet a colossal miscalculation hasn’t shaken the faith. It certainly hasn’t stopped Gore and his disciples from claiming every square inch of the moral high ground.
In the process, they discredit their own cause. Moral claims require certainty that climate science grants no one. Knowledgeable advocates of climate change precaution readily admit that science remains far from resolving the climate’s complexity and accurately predicting its behavior. The issue should, in fact, be about assessing risks and balancing them against the costs of potential responses in the context of that uncertainty. But moralizing activists won’t let debate proceed in those terms.
Writing in the Apr. 12 edition of Wall Street Journal, Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describes life outside the chapel. He should know. He has tried to bring reason to climate change politics since appearing before one of Gore’s hearings in 1992. He also wrote a key chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that has become climate activism’s bible-and has been a harsh critic of IPCC methods and conclusions, which he says incite undue alarm.
“Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks, or worse,” he writes. “Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.” As defined by Gore, moral issues apparently leave no room for intellectual honesty.
So a contrived religion rolls on. On Apr. 21, the Earth Day Network, founded by organizers of the first Earth Day in 1970, planned to proselytize with high technology. It was to use internet-protocol television to broadcast to more than 16,000 high school and college classrooms an interactive video of panel discussions involving “leading members of the global warming community.” The panelists were to be scientists and religious leaders.
Heretical questions
Students watching the “live chat” probably didn’t hear much about what’s really known about climate mechanisms and what isn’t. If questions arose about the extent to which changes to human activity reasonably can be expected to influence average global temperature, they probably were dismissed as heretical. Indeed, students watching the debate were to be invited to compete for “prizes and recognition” by writing essays describing, according to the Earth Day Network, “what they learned and how it has motivated them to take action to slow global warming.”
Would they excommunicate anyone for suggesting that this sounds like indoctrination?✦
