Has climate change become a religion?

I can hear the shouts for me to be burnt at the stake for heresy – a not unreasonable analogy given the subject matter of this post.  And while it seems off-topic for Off The Record, I assure readers it is not.  The “topic” for us is, as always, China and/or PR; in this case both. 

A perspective on climate change 

China, as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, has an important interest in knowing whether global warming is a scientific truth or just a slick PR trick that has turned its theocracy into a new opiate for the masses.

This is the very subject of an article by Miranda Devine, a journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian newspaper.  Devine looks at the persecution of climate change sceptics by the zealots of this new “fundamentalist religion” in Beware the Church of Climate Alarm.  But she notes that, as the global financial crisis bites, more people are becoming receptive to its detractors – scientists who have been looking at the globe’s weather patterns over millennia and who argue that climate change is cyclical.  

Some of those scientists, in fact, believe the earth is entering a cooling phase after the most stable warming phase in millions of years of history. 

Before readers start lighting their torches to come after me, I want to say that I am and remain agnostic on the debate.  Science wasn’t my strength in high school and I certainly didn’t pursue it at university.  So I am not particularly well equipped to assess the arguments on either side of the debate. 

In fact, like most people I have probably been enticed by the slick PR of luminaries such as Al Gore and his Hollywood buddies who helped him make his docutainment film, “An Inconvenient Truth”.  Indeed, we might even ask whether Al Gore and the Hollywood glitterati are any better equipped than the rest of us mere mortals to divine science from fiction in the climate change debate.  

All Al Gore and the Hollywood crowd have done is won the public relations war.  The problem, as the grandfather of PR Harold Burson pointed out as long ago as the earth’s climate started changing, is that perception has become reality.  Thus global warming, with man as the central cause, has become received wisdom. 

No one questions this now orthodox view.  If I want my children to turn off their room lights I don’t talk of thriftiness as my mother did, but of their responsibility to save the planet for them to respond.  They have been brainwashed.   

What concerns me – and should concern everyone – is the way the Orthodoxy has decided to persecute detractors with ridicule and vitriol to maintain their version of reality.  Indeed, I know senior business people who will not question the Orthodoxy for fear of Divine retribution – not from Miranda, the journalist mentioned above, but “the world is burning up crowd”.  You just have to look at how spleens are being vented on the Internet against the detractors to get a picture of this.   

It’s not too different to the way Galileo was treated by the Roman Inquisition, which was equally dismissive of the Italian astronomer’s defence of Copernicus’ science.  Ridicule has merely replaced the rack. 

Yet the orthodox view of global warming has forced many energy companies to expend millions searching for alternative fuels and governments to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol even at the cost of their nations’ economic growth and employment. 

Finding alternative fuels and reducing CO2 emissions are not bad things.  The world should develop green fuels anyway. Carbon fuels are limited and we will need alternatives eventually.  Carbon dioxide isn’t good for our lungs and cleaner air will mean healthier lungs and longer lives.  For us in China it will mean seeing what’s on the other side of the street.

But the concern is that a legitimate scientific debate is being muted.  That’s not science.  That is bullying.  Worse, it is the intellectual equivalent of Nazism. 

No country should be bullied into slower economic growth on the basis of a new politico-religious dogma.   

While I don’t really know whether the earth is warming or cooling and what might be causing it to get hotter or colder, I think I have a right to hear both sides of the debate.  So too do national governments, including China’s, which are making major policy decisions based on only one side of the story. 

On the climate debate, the world is in danger of becoming a one party state.

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