Tuesday, 8 April 2014

The game is up for climate change believers

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Charles Moore writes in the Daily Telegraph about the philosophical underpinnings of the global warming fears - what he calls warmism.

"The origins of warmism lie in a cocktail of ideas which includes anti-industrial nature worship, post-colonial guilt, a post-Enlightenment belief in scientists as a new priesthood of the truth, a hatred of population growth, a revulsion against the widespread increase in wealth and a belief in world government." 

He might have added a belief in the power of reason rather than trust in providence, a faith in human nature. As I have said before, it reminds me of Whittaker Chambers's description of Communism. 

'Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: 'Ye shall be as gods.' It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communists vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world."

3 comments:

  1. IMHO you're overlaying an idea not supported by the article's thesis, which sea to be that concerted proactive effort in the face of climate change is doomed to political failure, and that the only thing which will work is after the fact mitigation. All that wrapped up in a diatribe against fatuous leftish alarmism in various politician's call to action. Well, fair enough. Much of that rhetoric is silly. But to argue against long-term climate change is also silly. The record clearly shows that climate will change all on it's own, without humanity's carbon contribution. A continuing warming trend is likely as we're still emerging from the last Ice Age.

    On top of that you're ladling what I take to be a prelapsarian vision of humanity before the original sin, which was really one of hubris; that through knowledge we become our own gods. Well, that particular cat has been out of the bag for nigh on a half million years, and it's not getting back in.

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  2. Ah, hubris! I doubt that any of us are appreciably worse off without dinosaurs wandering about and I doubt that anyone (if there are any) will be appreciably worse off one million years from now without the current form of mankind. The planet will continue in whatever form into which it evolves. There are many more pressing issues which man should be addressing in the here and now.

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    1. hello nelson!! how s everything?

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