I grew up reading The Courier-Mail and, in those days, the religious column was somewhere in the second half of the paper - on the same page as the bridge notes if I remember correctly. Now I live in Perth and read The West Australian, in which the daily dose of religion is most often found on the news pages. State-sponsored religion it is, because the articles quote global warming predictions generated from government bodies such as the CSIRO.
Sometimes this results in hilarious juxtapositions, such as having an article predicting that our beloved wine industry will have to move to Tasmania to escape the coming heat, next to an article noting that a good proportion of the year’s grape crop was wiped out due to a severe frost. Among we sceptical scientists, there is argument as to whether the global-warming scientists believe the constant stream of apocalyptic visions they concoct or are bold-faced liars? But I think that is missing the point.
The global-warming religion was established without much of a written creed. The high priests of the religion, in the CSIRO and the universities, are still writing it, and it gets published daily in our newspapers.
Some of the lesser priests, or priestesses in the case of Sheryl Crow, tell their followers how to do menial things, like using only one sheet of toilet paper to wipe their bottom. Last week, it was an injunction not to wear socks.
Soon global warming will be an extremely difficult religion to adhere to properly. As a religion, it has borrowed heavily from medieval Christianity, with the sale of indulgences - by way of carbon offsets - and plenty of self-flagellation for imagined sins. Without global warming, the lives of many of its adherents would be shallow and meaningless. It also seems to make them blind to breathtaking hypocrisy.
No, I am not talking about Al Gore buying a property in San Francisco just above sea level. I am talking about restricting coal consumption in Australia while encouraging coal exports at an ever-increasing pace. I will leave it for someone else to explain away the intellectual contortions behind that one.
The warmers say that they will not debate the science because they say that the science is settled, which reminds me of the line from the Wizard of Oz: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.”
They are well aware that they are peddling a monstrous fraud, hoping for a quick closure at Copenhagen before the public wakes up to the fact that they have been had. The world has been cooling for the past 11 years. It may not have even warmed in the first place. The whole global warming debate has serious consequences but not in the way imagined by the warmers.
To quote Winston Churchill: “The whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” I do believe that Churchill was very prescient, and the perverted science he was referring to is global warming alarmism.