Global Warming, The New Intellectual Religion

Ian Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University in Australia--and an unremitting critic of "anthropogenic global warming" -- man-made climate change to you and me. It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behavior is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behavior -- cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks -- can reverse the trend.

But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth -- Global Warming: The Missing Science, draws together much of his previous work. It springs especially from A Short History of Plant Earth, which was based on a decade of radio broadcasts in Australia.

The dynamic and changing character of the Earth's climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behavior. Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth's history.

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth's daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come. [An edited account of an editorial in the Vancouver Sun, July 29, 2009]

But if Al Gore, President Obama, and a brainwashed Congress have their way, they attempt to legislate against global warming, and tax mankind back to the stone age, doing far more harm than good, as is typical of political intervention. And since this is truly a "religion," it must be accepted on faith (science certainly doesn't defend it very well), the "preachers" of this new religion must be revered and blindly followed, for to disagree is heresy. The punishment for heresy is exclusion from the church, denying publishing rights, refusal to be heard, and public scorn in the modern press.