Anthropogenic Climate Change is a Post-Modern Secular Doomsday Cult
In previous posts of this series (link 1 and link 2), I wrote about multiple independent lines of paleontological and geological evidence for Earth being significantly warmer during the period between between 34 to 2.6 million years, even though atmospheric CO2 levels during the relevant geological epochs were about the same as today. This fact is more noteworthy as the major continents were close to their current locations during that period, especially between the Mid-Miocene (14 M years ago) and end of Pliocene (2.6 M years ago). Furthermore, solar output during that period was almost identical to today. In other words, changes in the levels of atmospheric CO2 is NOT a good hypothesis for why Earth cooled during the Pleistocene starting 2.6 M years ago. Changes in ocean circulation due to the formation of Isthmus of Panama around that time provides a far better explanation for global cooling during that period.
While I will get back to more paleontological and geological evidence against the prevailing beliefs about anthropogenic climate change in later parts of this series, let us look at this whole issue from a different yet complementary angle. As mentioned in another post of this series, I would have preferred to start talking about psychological, religious and yes.. racial reasons why people in certain countries desperately want to believe in the bullshit narrative of anthropogenic climate change. So let me begin this post by talking about the similarities between belief in man-made global warming or "climate change" and Christianity, especially the Catholic variant. As early as 2003, Michael Crichton openly talked about the considerable similarities between belief in man-made climate change and traditional religions. He even wrote a novel based on that premise. I am now going to take that idea much further.
The first and most obvious red flag that belief in man-made climate change (MCC) is a religion masquerading as science comes from the label its followers use to describe those who refuse to share their belief system. If you label somebody as a "denier" you are talking about a religion or ideology NOT science. Have you ever heard of "gravity deniers" who claim that gravity does not exist? Why not? Ever heard of people who "deny" that antibiotics can cure diseases caused by microorganism sensitive to them? Again.. why not? How people who believe internal combustion engines, electricity, computers etc are not real? Note that I have intentionally chosen examples where the average person does not understand the details of how all those things work, and yet.. there are hardly any deniers when it comes to those topics.
It all comes down to whether something can be measured in an independent and reproducible manner. While we cannot see gravity, we can measure it very accurately as well as observe it effects. Effects of antibiotics on microbes can be easily measured in vitro (petri-dish type tests) and in vivo (live animals, including humans). Similarly, you can drive a car, turn on the light and read this article on your computer. In other words, it is not necessary to convince people about the existence of these things. Have you ever met somebody trying to convince you that the sky is blue, ice is cold to touch or fire is hot. But have there been examples where people used to believe something different from what they do now? What finally changed their minds?
Well, here is one recent example. As some of you might remember, throughout the 1980s and well into the mid-1990s, there were many who did not believe that HIV causes AIDS. So how did it change? To understand that, we have to first acknowledge the two main reasons why many people in those decades were skeptical about HIV causing AIDS. The first, and minor, reason was that killing CD4 cells with HIV outside the body required almost a thousand times higher viral concentrations than those measured in people suffering and dying from the disease. It took over two decades to finally understand how HIV causes death of those cells in the body at far lower levels than those required to do so in cell cultures. And yes, the biochemical mechanisms involved are quite different from each other.
But the second, and far more important, reason was that until the development and approval of second-generation protease inhibitors and nucleotide analogues in late 1990s, the prognosis for people with AIDS was really bad. Many of the first nucleoside (not nucleotide) analogues used to treat HIV were pretty toxic and lost efficacy within a year or two. Even the very first protease inhibitors approved for human use in mid-1990s had tons of side-effects and required people to take dozens of pills every single day. The prognosis of AIDS changed only after newer, less toxic and far more effective drugs became widely available. And this is why people stopped questioning the link between HIV and AIDS. Yes, it was that easy.
Now let us apply the concepts we discussed above to the issue of belief in man-made climate change, beginning with the simple question - is it really a problem? If average global temperature goes up by 2-3 degrees Celsius from those in the 1800s, would it be such a bad thing? Based on paleontological records, the earth was much greener and productive (than today) during the Oligocene, Miocene and Pliocene eras (34-2.6 M years ago). In other words, a significantly larger fraction of the land surface on Earth would have been suitable for agriculture during those eras than today. Also, increase in global temperature was far more pronounced in areas that are today temperate than which are tropical. There is also no evidence that deserts were bigger in those epochs, and there is considerable evidence to the contrary. To put this another way, a slightly warmer earth = more rain, greenery and much nicer climate at higher latitudes. I, for one, fail to see the problem with such global warming.
But.. but.. what if it leads to a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth, like on Venus? To be pretty blunt, the sheer amount of CO2 required (like 40-50x of all known organic carbon) and other greenhouse gases necessary for anything even approaching that is not feasible- even if we tried very hard to achieve that result. See.. releasing even a fraction of that much CO2 in the atmosphere requires the chemical dissociation of carbonate minerals (chalk, limestone etc) which are currently on (or just below) the surface of land and ocean floors. Our planet would cease to inhabitable for organisms other than some bacteria long before we could achieve such a runaway planetwide greenhouse effect. Furthermore, this point has not been reached on Earth in the past 4.6 Billion years. And this has not been for lack of trying by geological forces.
Earth's geological history has seen multiple massive basalt flows that covered areas as large as the continental USA in up to 3-5 miles high of basalt and these flows lasted for a couple of million years in some cases. The sheer amount of CO2 and other gases pumped into the atmosphere during those times make our current attempts seem very pathetic by comparison. FYI- most volcanic gas is a mixture of H2O (water vapor) and CO2 with a decent amount of SO2. And yes, I know that some of those outflows are connected with mass extinctions. But my point still stands. It took two large basalt flows, one in China and another in Siberia (the later being as large as the continental USA and lasting over a million years) to cause the largest mass extinction in past 540 million years. And even that was insufficient to cause a runaway greenhouse effect.
In the next post of this series, we will go into the very close similarities between Christianity and secular religion of anthropogenic climate change. I will show you why this religion and its immediate precursor aka environmentalism only started gaining traction in 1970s. You will see the connection between terminal demographic decline of the West and their eagerness to believe in this religion. You will also see the connection between the relative decline of the West in past two decades to the desire among its elites to convince others (especially non-whites) about MCC.
What do you think? Comments?