by J.M. Schell

Created on: July 23, 2008

Global Warming/Climate Change is Belief, but also Politics

It's really quite simple: so many "believe" in anthropogenic global warming/climate change (AGW) because they have been carefully led by the triumvirate force of politics, media and education systems to do so. In this way, AGW is no different from any other cult. People believe it because they desperately want to.

AGW very neatly conforms to most definitions of a religious system. It has its beginnings in an older form of belief, one that held we were destroying land, sea and water with industrial pollution, and within this, there is a basis in fact. Acid rain is real (though no longer an issue today). Anyone old enough can remember when certain rivers in the US would catch fire from all the flammable toxin simply dumped into them. Toxins such as those that made the Love Canal area uninhabitable really were dumped pretty much willy-nilly all over the landscape, and it has always been far worse in places outside the US, Canada, and Western Europe.

AGW began as the "ecology" movement; something that actually did a lot of good. Too much good, in fact. It cured most of the truly dangerous problems. When dedicated ecologists brought to the public's attention the problems caused by land, air and water pollution, the Western (anyway) public demanded that industry and government do something to clean the mess up. And they did. They had no choice. Stiff regulations were enacted with stiff fines and even prison for those who don't follow the rules. Most industries today, run by people whose children have to breathe the same air, drink the same water and who get the same food as the rest of us from the same place as do we, are more aware of the issue thanks to those early ecologists and far less reluctant to do the work and spend the money to ensure they don't add to pollution.

By about 1990, the problem (in the West) was solved and the messes on the way to being cleaned up, and the early ecologists-by now called "environmentalists"-deserve our undying appreciation. The movement was, essentially, at its end. It had done what it set out to do. The job was finished. The environmental advocates could pack their pickets away in their attics, turn off their phone and fax lines, send their cadres of young volunteers home and close their bank accounts.

Oops. It was that last one that got some of them thinking. Thinking: we've been doing this since the early 1970s. It's what we do. It's all we know how to do. If we close up

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