Climate hysterics v heretics in an age of unreason

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The Australian

August 04, 2008

 

Climate hysterics v heretics in an age of unreason

Arthur Herman

 

IT has been a tough year for the high priests of global warming in the US.

First, NASA had to correct its earlier claim that the hottest year on record

in the contiguous US had been 1998, which seemed to prove that global

warming was on the march. It was actually 1934. Then it turned out the

world's oceans have been growing steadily cooler, not hotter, since 2003.

Meanwhile, the winter of 2007 was the coldest in the US in decades, after Al

Gore warned us that we were about to see the end of winter as we know it.

 

In a May issue of Nature, evidence about falling global temperatures forced

German climatologists to conclude that the transformation of our planet into

a permanent sauna is taking a decade-long hiatus, at least. Then this month

came former greenhouse gas alarmist David Evans's article in The Australian,

stating that since 1999 evidence has been accumulating that man-made carbon

emissions can't be the cause of global warming. By now that evidence, Evans

said, has become pretty conclusive.

 

Yet believers in man-made global warming demand more and more money to

combat climate change and still more drastic changes in our economic output

and lifestyle.

 

The reason is that precisely that they are believers, not scientists. No

amount of empirical evidence will overturn what has become not a scientific

theory but a form of religion.

 

But what kind of religion? More than 200 years ago, Scottish Enlightenment

philosopher David Hume put his finger on the process. His essay, Of

Superstition and Enthusiasm, describes how even in civilised societies the

mind of man is subject to certain unaccountable terrors and apprehensions

when real worries are missing.

 

As these enemies are entirely invisible and unknown, like today's greenhouse

gases, people try to propitiate them by ceremonies, observations,

mortifications, sacrifices such as Earth Day and banning plastic bags and

petrol-driven lawnmowers.

 

Fear and ignorance, Hume concludes, are the true source of superstition.

They lead a blind and terrified public to embrace any practice, however

absurd or frivolous, which either folly or knavery recommends.

 

The knaves today, of course, are the would-be high priests of the global

warming orthodoxy, with former US vice-president Gore as their supreme

pontiff.

 

As Hume points out, the stronger mixture there is of superstition, with its

ambience of ignorance and fear, the higher is the authority of the

priesthood.

 

As with the Church in the Dark Ages or the Inquisition during the

Reformation, they denounce all doubters, such as Evans or Britain's Gilbert

Monckton as dangerous heretics, outliers in Gore's phrase: or as willing

tools of the evil enemy of a healthy planet, Big Oil.

 

This is not the first time, of course, that superstition has paraded itself

as science, or created a priesthood masquerading as the exponents of reason.

At the beginning of the previous century we had the fascination with

eugenics, when the Gores of the age such as E.A. Ross and Ernst Haeckel

warned that modern industrial society was headed for race suicide.

 

The list of otherwise sensible people who endorsed this hokum, from Winston

Churchill to Oliver Wendell Holmes, is embarrassing to read today.

 

Then as now, money was poured into foundations, institutes, and university

chairs for the study of eugenics and racial hygiene. Then as now, it was

claimed that there was a scientific consensus that modern man was

degenerating himself into extinction.

 

Doubters such as German anthropologist Rudolf Virchow were dismissed as

reactionaries or even as tools of the principal contaminators of racial

purity, the Jews.

 

And then as now, proponents of eugenics turned to the all-powerful state to

avert catastrophe.

 

A credulous and submissive public allowed politicians to pass laws

permitting forced sterilisation of the feeble-minded, racial screening for

immigration quotas, minimum wage laws (which Sidney and Beatrice Webb saw as

a way to force the mentally unfit out of the labor market) and other

legislation which, in retrospect, set the stage for the humanitarian

catastrophe to come.

 

In fact, when the Nazis took power in 1933, they found that the Weimar

Republic had passed all the euthanasia legislation they needed to eliminate

Germany's useless mouths.

 

The next target on their racial hygiene list would be the Jews.

 

Real science rests on a solid bedrock of scepticism, a scepticism not only

about certain religious or cultural assumptions, for example about race, but

also about itself.

 

It constantly re-examines what it regards as evidence, and the connections

it draws between cause and effect. It never rushes to judgment, as race

science did in Germany in the 1930s and as the high priests of climate

change are doing today.

 

Politicians everywhere should be forced to take an oath similar to the

Hippocratic oath taken by doctors: above all else, do no harm. The debate in

Australia on this issue is rapidly building to a climax.

 

Before they make decisions that could trim Australia's gross domestic

product by several percentage points a year and impose heavy penalties on

Australians' lifestyle, Labour and Liberal alike need to re-examine the

superstition of global warming.

 

Otherwise, the only thing it will melt away is everyone's civil liberty.

 

Copyright 2008 News Limited.