Climate Change a Religion for the Noughties

Then came the Industrial Revolution, cigarettes, SUVs and gaseous cattle, and the Earth cried.

Mighty prophets came forth, from universities, the United Nations and Hollywood, bearing a message from the Earth itself: Repent!

But the people who heard the message were a stiff-necked people and did not repent of their sins, disdaining the caves and stone tools of their forefathers for the hum of electricity and roar of internal combustion. The people did sin, the cattle did vent, and the Earth did weep bitterly, for its end was near.

You may have noticed, the words coming from global warming activists these days sound a lot like an attempt at religious conversion, and political efforts to "stop" warming smack of government-sponsored religious establishment.

The climate change movement has all the hallmarks of religion. It has a view of paradise: a cool Earth without human influence. It has sins: driving SUVs and emitting gasses that warm the Earth. It has an origin point for sin: the Industrial Revolution. It suggests Man has a fallen nature: People must be taught to stop warming the Earth. It has prophets: Al Gore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kofi Annan, etc. It has divine commandments: the Kyoto Treaty. There is a looming apocalypse: the melting ice caps will flood the Earth.

This religious belief is becoming entrenched in the government and other social power centers, such as schools and businesses. It is resistant to rational debate, and its supporters seek to crush heretics.

Consider the recent charges, during congressional hearings, that the Bush Administration tried to "mislead" people by "injecting doubt" into the climate change diatribe. If this country were engaged in a true debate about warming, all viewpoints would have been welcomed, but the Democrat-led Congress has no interest in allowing dissension from the environmentalist doctrine.

Consider that California and other governments are going full-bore ahead with plans to "fight" climate change despite the ongoing scientific dispute over the cause of global warming.

Even among believers in the greenhouse gas theory, there have been admissions that the role of the sun in climate change is underestimated. In 2005, a study done by greenhouse-gas-supporting researchers at Duke University said that, "minimally," 10 to 30 percent of global warming was caused by increased solar activity.

That same study said records of sunspot activity suggest solar activity has been increasing for about 100 years but that only data since 1978 could be deemed usable. However, it also asserted that many scientists' conclusions that there was no solar increase in the period since 1978 was based on flawed data related to the Challenger shuttle disaster, which caused a delay in replacement of an aged sun-studying satellite.

In 2003, a Columbia University researcher had reached similar conclusions about solar activity increasing. Richard Willson concluded that solar output has increased by 0.05 percent per decade since the late 1970s. Although he was unable to conclude if the activity extended further back in time, he found other studies suggesting it did.

"This trend is important because, if sustained over many decades, it could cause significant climate change," Willson said.

Like the Duke researchers, Willson did not dismiss greenhouse gases, but, he said, if the change has persisted at the present rate through the 20th Century, "it would have provided a significant component of the global warming the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports to have occurred over the past 100 years."

Although researchers say accurate measurements of solar output are only available for the last three decades, global warming activists have no qualms about asserting that they know for a fact the average temperature of the Earth has increased by 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past 100 years, and this is supposedly the highest increase in the past 2,000 years! (Apparently, the satellites measuring the Earth's average temperature 100 or even 2,000 years ago were more accurate than our current solar satellites.)

Going further, the climate change movement, none of whose members could tell you if it will rain two weeks from now, prophesy up to 10 degrees increase in average temperatures in the next 100 years.

Meanwhile, in 2004, real scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, reported that the sun's energy output is higher now than in the last 1,000 years. Dr Sami Solanki said: "The sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."

The institute's conclusions were based on a combination of sunspot records going back for several hundred years and studies of levels of beryllium 10, a substance linked to solar magnetism, that can be traced back more than 1,000 years.

Just to underscore how silly the global warming panic is, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued a report saying that global warming will continue for hundreds of years, even if we dropped down to zero emissions of greenhouse gases today. Common sense would suggest that if our actions can't stop it, we probably didn't cause it. Common sense has nothing to do with the climate dogma, however.

Equally absurd is that the IPCC report can't explain why, from 1940-1975, the globe actually cooled. The supposed 1 degree increase over the past century occurred in two spurts, from 1916-1940, and 1976-1998, with a long cooling period in between. Notably, the last period of warming coincides with a period when Congress has been enacting increasingly stringent environmental laws.

Despite all common sense and all evidence, the climate-change movement insists that it is human activity that causes global warming and it is human activity that must be curtailed. As with the very worst religious leaders of history, it seems plain that motives of this movement's leaders actually revolve around money: from higher taxes, from government grants, from industries needing new technologies, from books and from movies.

Just in case you still aren't convinced that global warming is a false religion and big scam, consider this one last fact: NASA probes have found evidence that Mars, also, is undergoing global warming. Apparently, our greenhouse gases are contagious.

Or maybe it's flatulent space cows.