Story Time with E: Global Warming – Just Another Tedious Religion
Posted by Enrique on 08.23.2007
The cover story of last week’s Newsweek patriotically exposed the global warming “denial machine,” effectively branding global warming doubters as heretics. This is the kind of thing that happens when lefties find religion – they become as intolerably smug as right-wingers.
I read Christopher Hitchens' "God is Not Great" last month. You may be aware of this book – it's one of the Atheist Bestsellers that's come out in recent years, and it makes a strong argument that religion and God have been manufactured by human beings. If you consider the numerous faiths that have existed throughout our history, it's undeniable that human beings have a compulsion to religious behavior. This can be explained in one of two ways.
1. God exists, and every culture represents Him with their own local flavor.
2. God doesn't exist, and human beings have an interminable fear of death combined with overactive imaginations.
I lean towards the latter, but it's also undeniable that you don't need God to have religion. Communism is officially atheistic, but it still bears many hallmarks of religion – subjugation to authority, repression of the individual, suppression of free inquiry, prohibitive rules about sex (think China's one-child policy), etc. But Communism's old hat in 2007, and it seems that the worldwide left is subscribing to a new religious fad these days – they're worshipping the Sun. According to the New Millennium Global Warming Cult (NMGWC), if we don't change our behavior right now, we're all gonna burn.
The story so far…
The most recent Ice Age in the earth's history ended some 10,000-15,000 years ago. During this time, most of North America and Europe was covered by colossal, almost unfathomable glaciers. This was the age of wooly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers, and marsupials so gobsmackingly massive you wouldn't even know what to do with yourself – "Megafauna" as they say. Kangaroos as big as minivans. Fo' shizzle. We're currently experiencing an "interglacial" period of the Pleistocene Epoch, meaning we don't expect a new Ice Age to catch us by surprise anytime soon. However, since no one other than a few extremists (and three current Republican presidential candidates) would dispute that there was an Ice Age tens of thousands of years ago, it seems obvious that the earth has gotten warmer. If the entire state of Wisconsin (where I live) was laid flat by slow-moving sheets of ice at one point, the earth must be warmer now than it was then. Global warming exists. Indisputable.
However, at the end of the most recent Ice Age, human activity consisted mostly of hunting enormous kangaroos with spears, and running back to caves to draw pictures of the ones that got away. "I'm telling you, Thok – it was the biggest kangaroo I've ever seen in my life. The bastard was as tall as a house. I hurled my spear and missed it by this much. I couldn't believe how big it was. Let me draw you a picture." At which point Thok would say, "Not another picture, Garg. You know what I did today? I killed three rabbits with a slingshot. And I'm not going to draw a picture of them. I'm going to eat them. You can draw a picture of the giant kangaroo, and afterwards perhaps draw a picture of yourself starving to death. And what the hell's a house?" At which point Garg would come up with an equally witty rejoinder, or perhaps stab Thok in the throat, but that's beside the point. Ice Age-era human beings were hunters, not industrialists – by today's standards, they had no "carbon footprint." The single greatest source of Ice Age-era carbon emissions was wooly mammoth flatus (Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – the truth is out there). In other words, the global warming that brought about the end of the last Ice Age could not have reasonably been caused by human activity.
Thus, it seems highly unlikely that anything we do in the year 2007 can have significant impact on global climate change. In fact, it's almost blindingly obvious that human activity can't be solely responsible for global warming – it may not even be significantly responsible. We don't know. But the NMGWC can't say they don't know, they can't say "During the last 2 million years the earth has undergone incredible climate changes that no one can adequately fathom," because it's unsatisfying. Religion has always served to explain that which we couldn't comprehend – disease, natural disasters, birth defects, mental illness, etc. Before we knew about psychology, geology, biology, or any of the major -ologies we inserted some formulation of God when we couldn't understand something.
"This thunderstorm means God is angry."
"This epileptic man is possessed by evil spirits."
"Your child is deformed because the gods have punished you. Prepare to die."
"Your child is deformed because the gods have blessed you, and we must now make your freak child our king, and sacrifice a multitude of virgins in his gimpy honor."
When faced with the inexplicable, religion can be comforting – if you accept that God's angry about something, then all you have to do is change your behavior to make Him happy. In other words, you can do something about it. You have agency. If we don't know what causes global warming, then we can't fix it. Even more terrifying is if we can't do anything about global warming. But rather than consider that, the NMGWC steps in and says "No! You can do something! You can ride the bus to work!" The NMGWC doesn't follow "God" per se – its version of God is the Sun. And its version of "We have to change our behavior or God will punish us" is "We need to change our behavior or the ozone layer will be depleted and the Sun will make the earth very hot." Which is to say, the Sun will punish us. This is the first hint that global warming might just be more religion than science. A few other hints that global warming could be just another tedious religion:
It makes great claims for itself – If you believe the NMGWC, the Western world must reduce our carbon emissions in order to fight global warming. We can save the planet! It's all about us! Anyone who denies global warming is a heretic! According to Newsweek, anyway. In fact, that Newsweek cover story was so full of oversimplifications and half-truths, one of its own columnists called them out on it. Robert Samuelson writes:
The McKinsey Global Institute projects that from 2003 to 2020, the number of China's vehicles will rise from 26 million to 120 million, average residential floor space will increase 50 percent and energy demand will grow 4.4 percent annually. Even with "best practices" energy efficiency, demand would still grow 2.8 percent a year, McKinsey estimates. Against these real-world pressures, Newsweek's "denial machine" is a peripheral and highly contrived story.
How exactly are we supposed to get China to reduce its footprint? Leading by example? When has that ever worked?
It makes great demands of others – I've never seen Al Gore's Academy Award®-winning "An Inconvenient Truth." But apparently a fellow named Robert Bryce has. Bryce notes that just before the closing credits roll, a line of text appears on the screen: "In fact, you can even reduce your carbon emissions to zero." As Bryce points out, the statement is absurd in that most living things expel carbon dioxide as effortlessly as they breathe. The NMGWC expects us to reduce something that can't possibly be reduced to zero until we are all dead. I think they may be asking a bit much.
It holds itself above criticism – The NMGWC claims to be the opposite of religion – science. And no one can deny that there are many scientists that push the global warming line. However, until these scientists adequately explain my above-mentioned issue with the Ice Age, I'll remain unimpressed. After all, the attempted suicide bombers of Glasgow and London were all medical doctors – men of science. Evidently, even scientists aren't immune from the sway of radical ideologies. And to some extent, it's part of any scientists' job to "play God." I bet you could get carried away with that.
It has silly rules about sex – Okay, as of yet, I'm not aware of any silly sex rules associated with fighting global warming. But as far as religion goes, it's the next logical step for the NMGWC to take. We have to stop them before it gets to that. I don't want the NMGWC trying to regulate my non-carbon emissions. (Rim shot.)
George Carlin had a bit about worshipping the Sun – it makes sense to worship the Sun because we can't live without it, the Sun doesn't judge us, and as a bonus, we can actually see it. Makes perfect sense. If the NMGWC came right out and said we should worship the Sun, it might really build its credibility. If not the Sun, what else shall we worship?
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