Faith and Climate Change

Posted by Olly Robinson on 3 October 2009 | 1 Comments

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A very interesting editorial by Jeremy O'Grady in The Week this week:

"Just as the world's scientists and politicians assemble in Pittsburgh and now Bangkok in a belated attempt to save the planet from global warming, word comes to us that the crucial data underwriting the entire theory of man being responsible for climate change have disappeared into thin air (see page 19). That at least is the claim being made by environmental scientist Patrick Michaels in an article in the National Review titled The Dog Ate Global Warming. What on earth to make of this? Is Michaels exaggerating the significance of the lost data? Is he lying? It would be rash, idolatrous even, to use his strictures as a pretext to join the ranks of the global-warming sceptics. But one thing we may conclude: for the vast majority of us, there is no difference between religious and scientific belief.

Consider beliefs on global warming. Do you know or care how the historical data on global surface temperature were collected? I doubt it. Most of us rely on ex cathedra pronouncements of the high priests of the IPCC. As for those experts who do query the data, we take it on faith that these are heretics with sinister designs against the established church. Even so, said my wife when I put this to her, there is something intuitively plausible about the idea that we've fouled our own nest - thereby revealing yet another basis for our scientific belief: an ingrained puritanism, a retread of the Garden of Eden story, the fall from grace. The scientists tell us to ditch religion, but it is faith, not rationality, that tells us not to leave the TV on standby."

Extract from editorial by Jeremy O'Grady
The Week, Issue 735
October 3rd 2009
www.theweek.co.uk

O'Grady's points reminds me of Michael Crichton's essay on environmentalism and religion:
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html

Worth a read. We must work hard to keep the environmental movement free of dogma and free of our extremely strong penchant for storytelling and emplotment.

Olly Robinson


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Comments

  • Michael Crichton's article comes across to me as a naive debating technique for shifting the blame of the situation in which we find ourselves today.

    The environmentalists whom he aggressively lambastes where not the ones who developed the vast oil industries, agro-chemical businesses, mining and industrialised farming operations, resulting in the massive pollution of the planet. .

    These were developed by industrialists who seized upon the advances made, and continually being made in science. Once their fortunes are made, they will occasionally a la Bill Gates offset their tax problems by supporting a third-world charity.

    His continual use of the straw man argument as a diversionary tactic is obviously transparent.
    "I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it."
    That may be so, but the real issue is the death of millions of people from smoking tobacco, an incontestable fact.

    "How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of religion, and back to a scientific discipline?"
    This sort of paranoia-based logic was the basis for the invasion of Iraq, leading to major disruption (or manipulation) of global oil markets and possibly contributing to the current financial crisis.

    "We need to start doing hard science instead."
    Isn't that what scientists have or should have been doing since Newton and Darwin?

    "The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while, without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days, with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to nature in any real way, and nobody does. It's all talk-and as the years go on, and the world population grows increasingly urban, it's uninformed talk. Farmers know what they're talking about. City people don't. It's all fantasy."
    This strikes me as the most arrogant attitude of a first world bigot whose lack of concern for the swiftly widening gap between the haves and have nots is scary.

    He really sums it all up for me when he perhaps confusedly or sub-consciously voices the crux of the matter when he says:
    "Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are lost."

    Well, that's precisely what happened with the Manhatten Project.

    Posted by Rob de Vos, 31/10/2009 12:36pm (2 years ago)

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