The Dogma of Global Warming

In a prior posting, I posted about how the changing Pacific Ocean weather patterns were caused allegedly by pollution from Asia along with Asia’s participation in the Kyoto Protocol. I have been meaning to post a follow up to the prior posting and news that Korea experienced its warmest winter in a century has given me the perfect excuse to:

South Korea had the warmest winter in more than a century due to global warming and the El Nino weather system, officials said Monday. The country’s average temperature during the three-month winter season to February was 2.46 degrees Celsius (36.4 degrees Fahrenheit), the highest since such records began in 1904, they said.

Those who have been following this blog regularly know that I often discuss history. The article above only has since 1904 to conduct an historical analysis from. Let’s conduct a historical analysis from much further back in history in regards to global warming.

Being an American, I always like to think back to if the Anasazi Indians were concerned about global warming? Roughly a thousand years ago this civilization of western United States Indians was wiped out due to climate change that caused rivers to dry up and crops to fail. This caused them to have to migrate from their native lands which put them in conflict with neighboring nomadic Indian civilizations which ultimately enslaved and absorbed the Anasazi thus wiping out their culture from record. The Anasazi never adapted to their changing environment and were eventually wiped out by those who did. The fall of the Anasazi, however is minor compared to the catastrophic fall of the early Meso-Americans.

About five centuries before the fall of the Anasazi, the Teotihuacan civilization in Mexico were destroyed by civil unrest caused by climate change. The Teotihuacan civilization was the predecessors of the Aztecs. This civilization was extremely advanced for the time and even constructed a pyramid that is similar in size to the Pyramids of Giza in Egypt. The priests who ruled the civilization were extremely intelligent and skilled in astronomy and weather. The priests were able to make predictions on the start of growing seasons and rain fall due to their accumulated knowledge of the stars and weather patterns, though the general population thought their predictions came from the Gods. A massive drought hit the Teotihuacan civilization in approximately 535AD. The priests knew better, but they told the people that the Gods were angry and had to be appeased in order for the rain to return. The only way to appease the Gods was through sacrifice. They started with small sacrifices of food and then eventually animals. When it still didn’t rain, the priests than started sacrificing humans. As the drought continued the priests sacrificed even more and more people to appease the Gods.

The starving and desperate population eventually revolted against the priests that sacrificed so many humans to appease the Gods in order to make it rain. The angry mob in the city killed the priests, burned down the religious buildings, and abandoned the city ending the reign of a civilization that wielded as much power in Meso-America as Rome wielded in Europe.

Byzantine historians recorded climate change between 535-542 AD that correlated with the same time frame as the destruction of the Teotihuacan civilization. There are plenty of further historical examples of global climate change through out history such as in 1816 when American scientists recorded a Year Without A Summer or even more recently in the 1970s when the Earth last experienced global climate change. Additionally don’t even get me started on the Ice Age and prior melting of the ice caps. Clearly climate change has been happening throughout the Earth’s history and has impacted human civilizations in kind.

However, the one thing that all these historical examples have in common is that there was no multi-national corporations and SUVs responsible for the global climate change. That doesn’t mean people didn’t find something to blame for climate change. The Anasazi and the Teotihuacan people for example didn’t blame global warming for their demise, they blamed the Gods for forsaking them. Today it appears instead of blaming the Gods, people blame something nearly as intangible man-made global warming.

That leads me to my next point that many people today treat environmentalism and global warming as a religion. The global warming crowd out there put just as much faith into global warming as people who practice religion put into God. People in each religion deny certain aspects of other religions since they believe their God is the one true God. The global warming crowd vehemently condemns anyone that challenges the divinity of their God, global warming. Many religions have a prophet such as Jesus or Mohammed and now the global warming crowd even has their own prophet, the Goracle. To top things off the Goracle is able to live a lavish energy excessive lifestyle by paying carbon credits. Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like making offerings to your church to forgive your sins?

I can’t make this stuff up and I’m not the only one thinking it either. Michael Crichton in his book State of Fear and in his speeches has been highly critical of the global warming movement for the religious dogma given to global warming. Crichton makes an excellent comparison of global warming with the dogma of eugenics in the early part of the last century.

When you treat an issue such as global warming to the equivalent of a religion where your God is the one true God, then this creates an atmosphere of hostility instead of one of open debate. That is one of the issues of why when debating global warming, it seems almost to be the equivalent of debating who is the real true prophet, Jesus or Mohammed? It is an argument that each side is not going to bend from, which is the atmosphere currently surrounding global warming. Someone challenges global warming and their jumped on like they are a blasphemer instead of treating it like the scientific issue it is that should be open to honest debate. It is eerily similar to what happened to the journalists that first reported on Dr. Hwang Woo-suk’s fraudulent cloning experiments in Korea. These reporters were initially viciously attacked just as nastily by the government and media in Korea as people wanting to debate the causes of global warming are today. Even today Dr. Hwang still has a cult like following even after being exposed as a fraud. Similarly I think an Ice Age could start tomorrow and there would still be people who won’t abandon the cult of global warming.

The next problem with global warming is politics. This issue has become so political that now people’s personal politics shapes whether they believe in global warming or not. So why has politics shaped the global warming debate so much? It has much to do with economics. Does anyone think it is just a coincidence that just about every socialist and anti-US group out there supports the current man-made global warming theory? The socialists and anti-US types out there have failed in their attempt to get the general public to embrace their beliefs and in response these types have now embraced global warming to disguise their true agendas of doing away with America’s capitalistic system and taking the country’s economy down a notch. To top it off the whole carbon trading scheme not only has a religious connotation to it, but it has income redistribution written all over it as well.

If the global warming crowd is going to depend on a religious reverence and political posturing to advance their own agendas they will never be able to create a real movement to combat global warming. A perfect example is that the public is not going to give up SUVs like the global warming crowd wants, especially when the public reads that cows put more emissions in the air than cars. Why isn’t the global warming crowd attacking ranchers to do away with cows? It is especially hypocritical when the general public sees the Hollywood types and politicians preaching about conserving energy and making themselves out as champions of the environment, but they themselves live in large mansions, ride around in limos, and fly on private jets. The day Al Gore and the Hollywood liberals start flying coach is the day I get rid of my SUV.

Now before I get labeled as a blasephemer by the global warming inquisitors and they begin to make preparations to burn me at the stake as a heretic, let me just say that I agree with Richardson, that global warming is happening, but not for the reason that the global warming crowd wants you to believe. Global warming and global cooling has happened multiple times in history before, so how do we know SUVs, Dick Cheney, etc. are responsible for global warming now?

Now do I think America needs to improve it’s energy policies to become less reliant on oil, not because of global warming, but because of national security. Reducing our dependence on foreign oil will have more impact on the Middle East then any military intervention or diplomacy towards an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal will ever have. The current terrorist sponsoring states and corrupt monarchies in the Middle East would be forced to liberalize their economies in order to compete with advanced western and Asian economies if they do not have their current advantage of oil. These nations are able to be rogue states, support terrorists, and oppress half their population, women, solely because of their ability to rely on oil for revenue.

This is why I think the issue of creating a new national energy policy is ripe for a politician to rally support around. A new national energy policy I believe should be centered around legislating fuel efficiency standards of vehicles while in the short term burning more coal for power and drilling for more oil in Alaska for example in order to reduce dependency on foreign oil now while legislating a timeline to implement cleaner energy technologies in the future which could be a mixture of non-polluting technologies like wind, solar, and nuclear power. This policy would throw a bone to the current energy industry while simultaneously legislating a timeline for when they would have to transform their industry to meet new environmentally friendly guidelines.

I am willing a national energy policy centered around national security that would have the side benefit of improving air quality would have a much better chance of being accepted by the general American public than trying to convince people that the government should ban SUVs among a host of other lifestyle altering legislation because of global warming. National security is not religious and for the most part shouldn’t be political which is why I think this it is the best way to implement much needed changes in national energy policies.

As it stands now I think the global warming crowd is actually doing more harm than good for the cause they supposedly support, but like the Teotihuacan it is easier to ask for more sacrifices to the Gods than to implement policies that run contrary to their religious beliefs.