Environmentalists – adherents of the religion of Gaia – want the population of the world to shrink. Some of them want the human race to become extinct. (See our post Earth Day: ideally celebrated with human sacrifice, April 22, 2012.)

In many countries – all of Europe, Russia, and Japan being notable examples – indigenous populations are shrinking rapidly.

In the United States, the birth rate keeps the population stable and immigration increases it. But there is here, as elsewhere in the developed world, a high abortion rate, and advocacy for infanticide among the leftist self-appointed elite. (See our post The Nazi ethics of the left, March 5, 2012.)

People who have no children save themselves a large expense. They are less tied down. Through their active years they are freer to please themselves.

But what happens to them when they grow old?

This is from an essay by Nicholas Eberstadt, in the Spring issue of the Wilson Quarterly, titled Japan Shrinks:

In 2006, Japan reached a demographic and social turning point. According to Tokyo’s official statistics, deaths that year very slightly outnumbered births.. … Japan is now a “net mortality society.” Death rates today are routinely higher than birthrates, and the imbalance is growing. The nation is set to commence a prolonged period of depopulation. …

Japan’s historically robust (if perhaps at times stifling) family relations, a pillar of society in all earlier generations, stand to be severely and perhaps decisively eroded in the coming decades. Traditional “Asian family values” — the ideals of universal marriage and parenthood — are already largely a curiosity of the past in Japan. Their decay has set in motion a variety of powerful trends which virtually ensure that the Japan of 2040 will be a country with far greater numbers of aged isolates, divorced individuals, and adults whose family lines come to an end with them.

At its heart, marriage in traditional Japan was a matter of duty, not just love. … Unshackled from the obligations of the old family order, Japan’s young men and women have plunged into a previously unknown territory of interpersonal options. … Even as young Japanese increasingly avoid marriage, divorce is further undermining the country’s family structure. Just as being unmarried at prime child-rearing age is no longer a situation requiring explanation, divorce now bears no stigma. Between 1970 and 2009, the annual tally of divorces nearly tripled. The number of new marriages, meanwhile, slumped by nearly a third. …

As the flight from marriage and the normalization of divorce has recast living arrangements in Japan, the cohort of married fertile adults has plummeted in size. … Nowadays, the odds of being married are barely even within this key demographic group. And marriage is the only real path to parenthood. Unwed motherhood remains, so to speak, inconceivable because of the enduring disgrace conferred by out-of-wedlock births.

In effect, the Japanese have embraced voluntary mass childlessness. …

Rates of childlessness have been generally rising throughout the industrialized world since 1945, but Japan’s levels were high to begin with. …

Though it can be represented in cold statistics, the human flavor of Japan’s new demographic order may be better captured in anecdote:

• Rental “relatives” are now readily available throughout the country for celebrations when a groom or bride lacks requisite kin.

• “Babyloids” — small, furry, robotic dolls that can mimic some of the sounds and gestures of real babies — are being marketed to help older Japanese cope with loneliness and depression.

• Robot pets and rental pets are also available for those who seek the affection of an animal but cannot cope with having one to look after.

• In a recent government survey, one-third of boys ages 16 to 19 described themselves as uninterested in or positively averse to sexual intimacy.

• Young Japanese men are, however, clearly very interested in video games and the Internet: In 2009, a 27-year-old Japanese man made history by “marrying” a female video game character’s avatar while thousands watched online.

• Japanese researchers are pioneering the development of attractive, lifelike androids. Earlier this year, a persuasively realistic humanoid called Geminoid F was displayed in a department store window, appearing to wait for a friend.

These random facts may not reflect the full spectrum of everyday life in modern Japan, but like anecdotes about any country, they reveal things that are genuine, distinctive, and arguably meaningful about it today—and perhaps tomorrow as well.

What will all of these unfolding demographic and familial changes mean for the Japan of 2040?

Generally and probably, a poorer, harder, lonelier, drearier life for a perishing nation is the answer. For details read the whole article here.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

– Robert Frost

*

This is from Canada Free Press by Robert Felix:

Satellite data show that glaciers in part of the Karakoram range on the China-Pakistan border are putting on mass, defying the general trend toward glacier shrinkage. In an article entitled “Slight mass gain of Karakoram glaciers in the early twenty-first century,” Researchers from the National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Grenoble admit to “an anomalous gain of mass” for the Karakoram glaciers.

This is in direct contradiction to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which claimed that ice from most of the region could disappear by 2035.

Often considered a part of the Himalayas, the Karakoram range, which runs through Pakistan, India and China, is technically a separate chain that includes K2, the world’s second-highest peak. …

We’re talking about the greatest chain of ice-capped peaks in the world — from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan — and satellite measurements show that they have lost NO ice in the past 10 years.

Not only have they lost no ice, in a defiant act of political incorrectness, some 230 glaciers in the western Himalayas – including Mount Everest, K2 and Nanga Parbat – are actually growing.

“These are the biggest mid-latitude glaciers in the world,” says John Shroder of the University of Nebraska-Omaha. “And all of them are either holding still, or advancing.”

And get this. Eighty seven of those glaciers have surged forward since the 1960s.

But we don’t need to look to the Himalayas for growing glaciers. Glaciers are also growing in the United States. Yes, in the United States.

Look at California. All seven glaciers on California’s Mount Shasta are growing, including three-mile-long Whitney glacier, the state’s largest.

Farther north in Washington State, the Nisqually Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. The Emmons Glacier on Mt. Rainier is growing. Glaciers on Glacier Peak in northern Washington are growing. And Crater Glacier on Mt. Saint Helens is now larger than it was before the 1980 eruption.

Even farther north, the Juneau Icefield, which covers 1,505 square miles (3,900 sq km) and is the fifth-largest ice field in the Western Hemisphere, is also growing.

Are these growing glaciers also just “an anomalous gain of mass”? Well, let’s look at a few other countries.

• Perito Moreno Glacier, the largest glacier in Argentina, is growing.

• Pio XI Glacier, the largest glacier in Chile, is growing.

• Glaciers are growing on Mt. Logan, the tallest mountain in Canada.

• Glaciers are growing on Mt. Blanc, the tallest mountain in France.

• Glaciers are growing in Norway, says the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate (NVE).

• And the last time I checked, all 50 glaciers in New Zealand were growing. (The Franz Josef glacier is advancing at the rate of 4 to 7 feet per day!)

But these glaciers are babies when you look at our planet’s largest ice mass, namely, the Antarctic ice sheet.

Contrary to what you may have heard, this huge ice sheet is growing.

In 2007, Antarctica set a new record for most ice extent since 1979, says meteorologist Joe D’Aleo.

Antarctic sea ice has also been increasing, on average, since 1980.

Think about that.

The Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is almost twice as big as the contiguous United States, is about 90 times bigger than all of the rest of the world’s glaciers combined.

Close to 90 percent of the world’s glaciers are growing, in other words, and all we hear about are the ones that are shrinking.

Welcome to the new ice age.

Are the warmists embarrassed? Well, yes:

“Our measurements…indicate that the contribution of Karakoram glaciers to sea-level rise was -0.01 mm yr for the period from 1999 to 2008,” write the French researchers [Julie Gardelle, Etienne Berthier, Yves Arnaud].

Huh? What does that mean? “The contribution to sea-level rise was MINUS 0.01 mm per year”? …

“Why this should be is not clear,” writes BBC News environment correspondent Richard Black. “Though it is well known from studies in other parts of the world that climate change can cause extra precipitation into cold regions which, if they are cold enough, gets added to the existing mass of ice.”

Get that? Global warming adds to the existing mass of ice (“climate change” being the replacement phrase for “global warming” since global warming paused in the last ten years).

Uh huh. First we’re told that global warming will melt all of the world’s glaciers and sea levels will rise catastrophically. Now, we’re being told that global warming will make the glaciers grow and contribute – in a minus sort of way – to sea level rise. Does that mean that sea levels will fall?

If it does mean that, you won’t hear the warmists say so. They believe that sea levels will rise, so rise they must.

Seems, one way or another, the earth has only about 5 billion more years before Carl Sagan’s promised “last perfect day” and then …

We enjoy Andrew Klavan‘s columns. We often concur with his opinions. And with the column we quote today we come close to agreeing entirely.

What we cannot agree with him about today is that life came to our planet because – he implies – God put it here, and if God had not, it could not and would not have arisen.

The really strange thing about this fine and amusing article is that everything else he says argues well that the mind of man, not God, is the creative faculty in our universe and of our universe.

Here is his article at PJ Media:

Sunday was Earth Day, and in honor of the occasion, I’d like to say that as far as I’m concerned the Earth can go to hell.

The Earth — for those of you who may have fallen behind on your reading — is a piece of rock trapped in a slow death spiral into a cauldron of exploding plasma which, for lack of a better word, we’ll call the sun. Because that’s its name. There is exactly one interesting or worthwhile thing about this hunk of doomed space debris, and that is: it happens to maintain the conditions necessary for supporting life. (The odds against this would be ridiculously impossible, by the way, if there were no God — so impossible that scientists have been forced to invent all kinds of silly multi-universe scenarios solely for the purpose of convincing themselves that there is no God. But that’s their problem, and neither here nor there.)

(Let’s politely overlook that superfluous and self-contradicting interpolation.)

So the earth supports life. Whoopee. And there is exactly one interesting or worthwhile thing about life — only one — and that is the mind of man.

“Holy cannoli, Klavan on the Culture,” you may be saying to yourself, or even out loud — because, let’s face it, you’re kind of an odd person — I mean, just look at you. Anyway, “Holy cannoli or even moley,” you may be saying, “how can you say the mind of man is the only interesting or worthwhile thing about life? What about the beauty of the running gazelle? The nobility of the flying eagle? The awesome awesomeness of the spacious skies above the amber waves running to the purple mountains above the fruited plains? And how about those glazed donuts with the yellow creme inside? I love those!”

First of all, stop talking so much, this is my blog. And b, there is no beauty, no nobility, no awesome awesomeness — not even the taste of a glazed donut — outside the human mind.

Yes, yes,yes. Because there is no other mind. No mind divine beyond nature.

The science is not yet settled, but reality itself may be in part a production of the human mind as there are some aspects of the world that don’t seem to resolve themselves until we observe them. But in any case, the gazelle would be fleet for nothing, the eagle would be a winged eating machine, the skies and the waves and the mountains would be dreams without the dreamer if man were not here to know them.

Once you realize this, everything changes. You no longer worry about the earth running out of energy resources, because you realize there are no energy resources — there never were — there are only various forms of matter that our minds, the mind of man, transformed into energy resources for our pleasure and convenience. These will never run out as long as we’re here because the mind is limitless and will invent more.

You no longer worry about pollution, because you know that once free people become annoyed by it, other free people will fix it with cleaner fuel-burning methods and filters. Where are the pea soups of London? Where are the smogs of Los Angeles? Where are the snows of yesteryear? All right, I was just curious about that last one.

You no longer worry about the earth, because the earth is here for us, not the other way around. The earth is just our living space — for now. We should keep it reasonably clean and pleasant. But a carping obsession with spotless housekeeping turns you into a scolding fishwife — or an environmentalist — and makes life less comfortable for man, not more. …

The earth is not warming catastrophically. Fracking does not cause earthquakes. We should find and use every drop of oil we’ve got — there’s enough there for centuries, by which time we’ll be living on Alpha Centauri powering our flying cars with toilet paper or old pages of Barack Obama’s autobiography… but I repeat myself.

So screw Earth Day. I would like to declare today — and every day — the Mind of Man Day. Celebrate that — nurture that — glorify that — and the earth, believe me, will take care of itself.

Standing ovation.

Today, April 22, is Earth Day, the Holy Day of the present-day religion of Gaia.

She is very thirsty for human blood.

Here’s a UK government 2010 video canvassing our sympathy for the environmentalism that Earth Day celebrates:

Earth Day was begun in 1970.

Alan Caruba, writing at Canada Free Press, quotes leading environmentalists of that year:

“Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” – George Wald, Harvard Biologist

“We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.” – Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

“Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.” – New York Times editorial, the day after the first Earth Day

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” – Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation.” – Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day in 1970.

“What we’ve got to do in energy conservation is try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, to have approached global warming as if it is real means energy conservation, so we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.” – Timothy Wirth, former U.S. Senator (D-CO)

“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” – Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace.

“We have wished, we eco-freaks, for a disaster or for a social change to come and bomb us into Stone Age, where we might live like Indians in our valley, with our localism, our appropriate technology, our gardens, our homemade religion — guilt-free at last!” – Steward Brand, writing in the Earth Catalog.

Now there’s a confession! Affording us proof of a theory we’ve held about eco-freaks these many years.

“Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.” – Dave Forman, founder of Earth First

Indeed it will. No one left to worry about anything.

“I suspect that eradicating smallpox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems.” – John Davis, editor of the Earth First Journal

Yeah, pity about modern medicine curing diseases. Much nicer when life was hard, agonizing and short.

“The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing….This is not to say that the rise of human civilization is insignificant, but there is no way of showing that it will be much help to the world in the long run.” – An editorial in The Economist.

All that was way back when Earth Day was begun.

How have the predictions panned out?

Daniel Flynn, a skeptic with a taste for facts, writes at Front Page:

The world’s population on [the forty-second] Earth Day is double the world’s population on the first Earth Day. Rather than ushering in Doomsday, more people have meant a more livable Earth. Life expectancy rates in the U.S. have ballooned by about ten years for men and women since the first Earth Day. Other parts of the world have experienced even greater gains. Revolutions in travel and communications have made the globe a smaller ball. Farming techniques opposed by extreme environmentalists have shifted the conversation from “Will we have enough to eat?” to “Will we eat what’s healthy?” The more, the merrier.

But in the doom-predicting and humanity-hating business, nothing’s changed.

The following comes from an article at Infowars.com by Paul Joseph Watson:

In 2006, an environmental magazine to which Al Gore and Bill Moyers had both granted interviews advocated that climate skeptics who are part of the “denial industry” be arrested and made to face Nuremberg-style war crimes trials.

[In 2010]  “Gaia hypothesis” creator James Lovelock asserted that “democracy must be put on hold” to combat global warming and that “a few people with authority” should be allowed to run the planet because people were too stupid to be allowed to steer their own destinies. 

Writing for Forbes Magazine, climate change alarmist Steve Zwick calls [now] for skeptics of man-made global warming to be tracked, hunted down and have their homes burned to the ground, yet another shocking illustration of how eco-fascism is rife within the environmentalist lobby. … “We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices. … They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?” …

It’s the argument of a demented idiot who’s obviously in the throws of a childish tantrum over the fact that Americans are rejecting the global government/carbon tax agenda for which man-made global warming is a front in greater numbers than ever before.

*

What news for this special day from the Gaian Church of Man-Made Global Warming?

This comes from an article by Daniel Greenfield at Front Page:

A University of Illinois 2009 survey [found] that 97.4% of scientists agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. This is easily debunked when one considers its selection methodology. … The Illinois researchers decided that of the 10,257 respondents, the 10,180 who demurred from the so-called consensus “weren’t qualified to comment on the issue because they were merely solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists, astronomers and the like. Of the remaining 77 scientists whose votes were counted, 75 agreed with the proposition that mankind was causing catastrophic changes in the climate. And, since 75 is 97.4% of 77, ‘overwhelming consensus’ was demonstrated once again.” The real percentage of concurring scientists in the survey is less than .008%. That these 75 were … “scientists of unknown qualifications” adds yet another layer to the boondoggle.

Much that the environmentalists do goes beyond common sense, but this goes beyond sanity.

Thomas Cloud reports at CNSNews:

The government spent at least $205,075 in 2010 to “translocate” a single bush in San Francisco that stood in the path of a $1.045-billion highway-renovation project that was partially funded by the economic stimulus legislation President Barack Obama signed in 2009.

“In October 2009, an ecologist identified a plant growing in a concrete-bound median strip along Doyle Drive in the Presidio as Arctostaphylos franciscana,” the U.S. Department of Interior reported in the Aug. 10, 2010 edition of the Federal Register. “The plant’s location was directly in the footprint of a roadway improvement project designed to upgrade the seismic and structural integrity of the south access to the Golden Gate Bridge. The translocation of the Arctostaphylos franciscana plant to an active native plant management area of the Presidio was accomplished, apparently successfully and according to plan, on January 23, 2010,” the Interior Department reported.

The bush — a Franciscan manzanita — was a specimen of a commercially cultivated species of shrub that can be purchased from nurseries for as little as $15.98 per plant. The particular plant in question, however, was discovered in the midst of the City of San Francisco, in the median strip of a highway, and was deemed to be the last example of the species in the “wild.” …

On Oct. 16, 2009, Dr. Daniel Gluesenkamp, a botanist who was then the director of Habitat Protection and Restoration for Audubon Canyon Ranch, noticed the manzanita when he was driving along Doyle Drive. … The manzanita had been previously hidden by other vegetation but was uncovered as the area was being cleared in preparation for road construction.

With help from a biologist from the Presidio Trust … and an ecologist from the National Park Service, Gluesenkamp’s discovery was determined to be a Franciscan manzanita.

Shortly thereafter, the Presidio Trust, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the California Department of Fish and Game developed a Memorandum of Agreement (MOA) for saving this one bush from the highway project … 

The agreement of Dec. 21, 2009 – Memorandum of Agreement Regarding Planning, Development, and Implementation of the Conservation Plan for Franciscan Manzanita – explains how, why, and when the bush would be moved and which agencies would be responsible for which aspects of the move.

While the MOA did not detail all the costs for moving the bush, it did state that in addition to funding removal and transportation of the Franciscan manzanita, Caltrans agreed to transfer $79,470 to the Presidio Trust “to fund the establishment, nurturing, and monitoring of the Mother Plant in its new location for a period not to exceed ten (10) years following relocation and two (2) years for salvaged rooted layers and cuttings according to the activities outlined in the Conservation Plan.”

Furthermore, …  the “hard removal”—n.b. actually digging up the plant, putting it on a truck, driving it somewhere else and replanting it–cost $100,000.

The MOA also stated that Caltrans agreed to “Transfer $25,605.00 to the Trust to fund the costs of reporting requirements of the initial 10-year period as outlined in the Conservation Plan.”

The $100,000 to pay for the “hard removal,” the $79,470 to pay for the “establishment, nurturing and monitoring” of the plant for a decade after its “hard removal,” and the $25,605 to cover the “reporting requirements” for the decade after the “hard removal,” equaled a total cost of $205,075 for “translocating” this manzanita bush.

But those were not the only costs incurred by taxpayers on behalf of the bush. According to the MOA, other costs included:

–“Contract for and provide funding not to exceed $7,025.00 for initial genetic or chromosomal testing of the Mother Plant by a qualified expert to be selected at Caltrans’ sole discretion.”

–“Contract for and fund the input, guidance, and advice of a qualified Manzanita expert on an as-needed basis to support the tending of the Mother Plant for a period not to exceed five (5) years, provided that said expert selection, retention and replacement at any point after hiring rests in the sole discretion of Caltrans.”

“Provide funding not to exceed $5,000.00 to each of 3 botanical gardens (Strybing, UC, and Tilden) to nurture salvaged rooted layers and to monitor and report findings as outlined in the Conservation Plan.”

–“Provide funding not to exceed $1,500.00 for the long-term seed storage of 300 seeds collected around the Mother Plant in November 2009 as outlined in the Conservation Plan.”

The plant is now protected by a fence and its location is kept secret, in part because the Presidio Trust and the National Park Service fear that nature-lovers seeking to see the rare wild Manzanita might trample it to death.

“[A] single trampling event could result in damage or the death of the wild plant,” the Interior Department noted in the Federal Register for Sept. 8, 2011. “As noted …, the Presidio Trust and NPS have made continuous efforts not to reveal the location of Arctostaphylos franciscana. They are concerned that public knowledge of the A. franciscana location would attract large numbers of plant enthusiasts who may damage the A. franciscana and compact the soil.” …

One California nursery currently allows customer to purchase Franciscan manzanitas online for $15.98 per bush. Another sells them for $18.00 per bush.

Earth-worship has been revived.

Now the fashionable religion of the unintelligent intelligentsia, it is  very ancient, very primitive.

The worship of the earth-goddess, Gaia, Isis, Terra Mater … (she had many names), came even before the worship of the moon-goddess, Luna, Diana, Selene, Artemis …

Daniel Greenfield writes, with scorn, but more in sorrow than in anger:

While conventional religion has been on the decline in the modern world, there is a devoutly held belief system … a faith propounded from newstands and newscasts, its proclamations of doom and grace are all around us. It is the green faith.

When all supernatural and unseen entities are banished from the pseudo-rational mind, only one force remains as the source of all life. Earth. Or Gaia, the mother of all life, whose eponymous hypothesis postulated that the planet was a single organism. In the absence of all deities, the planet itself became the deity. Its natural harmony is the way and those who live artificial lives are the sinners.

Harmony with the planet’s creative force is the mark of good people. Those striving to live natural lives. The jet setting nomads who recognize no border or nationality, whose trust fund investments are as global as their enthusiasm about the brotherhood of man. On the other is the farmer who struggles to wrest the natural world to his own ends, the builder who is always creating new structures and products.

Righteousness is measured by the size of one’s “carbon footprint”, a vow of technological poverty, usually sworn by the well-off on behalf of the badly off who unlike them are required to live by it. The ideal is to live as harmoniously with the mother goddess as possible, either through deprivation or complex schemes for juggling resources or carbon credits. These acts of outward piety serve as sacrifices by the faithful to the planet.

The mother goddess is in pain, we are told, crying out because we are harming her, raising temperatures, flooding islands and bringing storms. If we do not relent, she will destroy us. It is up to the faithful who have the special knowledge and who are attuned to her plight, to save mankind from the apocalypse that we have brought on ourselves with our sinful ways.

The EPA in the United States acts as the religious police, protecting the mother-goddess from the blasphemous abuses of the infidels. It is above the law and evidence because it is a religious body and not subject to such secular concerns. But its minions are only the enforcers of a vast international community of faith which is convinced that the doom of mankind is at hand and spends every minute calculating the day when the oceans will rise up and sweep man off the earth for his sins against the planet.

Environmental scientists have become inquisitioners, searching out heresy, denouncing it and destroying the reputations and academic positions of the heretics. The media and the entertainment industry have wholly dedicated themselves to the propagation of the faith …

World leaders are often among the first to adopt a new faith, and the leaders of the modern world are much more likely to kneel at the green altar than they are to hold conventional religious beliefs. The green faith provides them with a revolutionary role as the agents of change, impoverishing their own people, while lining their pockets and those of their friends. It is their kind of religion.

International covenants subscribing to the doctrines of this new faith have already been signed, binding each nation to the ranks of the green. Enforcement bodies have been empowered to protect the planet from the scourge of technology and educational programs have been embedded in every school in the modern world to inculcate children with the tenets of the faith and their responsibilities to the mother goddess.

It is a misnomer to say that the modern world is atheistic. It does have atheists, but they are not the majority anywhere.

More’s the pity! But give us time.

For the most part everyone believes in something, even if it’s only in the redeeming power of carbon credits and recycling. In a unified ecosystem that makes us brother to the whale, and child of the ape –

Not to disagree with his general drift, we butt in here to murmur: well, we are that, are we not? Not brother to the whale, but child of the ape, or at least of a common ancestor –

–  a harmonious environment which we moderns have disrupted with factories, jet planes and nuclear reactors.

The idealization of the environment is not a new phenomenon, it is among the most ancient of faiths. When thunderstorms struck, many of the ancients believed that the sky was angry at them, and we in our skyscrapers notice a warm month and eagerly point out to one another that our sins have made the planet grow hotter. The Romans would have laughed at us, the Greeks would have hooted, but the barbarian would have understood exactly what we were talking about. Like the pseudo-sophisticates, he would not have needed any more evidence than a proclamation by a wise man with sufficient juju.

Without knowing it, without realizing it, our societies have become barbaric in mores and in mindset.

Modern American and European elites congratulate themselves on their superiority to their 19th century ancestors, when in reality that are their intellectual and moral inferiors, sitting on a throne of technolog[ical] and military accomplishments built for them by the ancestors they dismiss as backward.

People have a basic need to believe things. They need to believe that they came from somewhere and that their lives have purpose.

But some of us accept gladly that we came from that ape-like ancestor, and we set our own purposes.

They need to believe that there is a higher force –

We know there are many higher forces – including the Internal Revenue Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. What we don’t know is why many believe in a divine higher force. But we don’t mean to carp. We agree with almost everything Greenfield has said so far.

–  a struggle between good and evil, in which they can play a part. …

The earth is tangible in a way that the older beings that man believed in are not. It is the touchstone of all pagan faiths because it is physically present. And that physical presence can then be cloaked in all sorts of mummery as a rock hurtling through space becomes the mother goddess of all life. When all other faiths have been dismissed by the high priests of the altimeter, it is the primitive source that they return to.

He goes on to discusse science as a belief system, and the “science” that supports the green religion:

But of course science is a wholly different thing from religion. This we all know. Science, we are told, is based on facts, while religion is based on faith. But every religion at its peak has insisted that it was the proven truth. Its esoteric proofs were incomprehensible to the laity, but they were there. And only a fool or a lunatic would disbelieve them. Intelligent people knew that the truth was the truth. As intelligent people know today that it is absolutely ridiculous not to believe the thing that some of the experts tell them they should believe.

The difference between the two rests in the ability to challenge a consensus based on proof, rather than in finding proof to support an existing consensus. Any intelligent person can do the latter, it is why debates on any given subject, no matter how trivial, can continue endlessly. It is not intelligence that sets the scientist apart, but integrity. And the green faith has repeatedly demonstrated how little integrity it has and how willing it is to put its beliefs ahead of the science.

This is not a new phenomenon, in or out of science. Human beings need to believe things, and the scientific method is a hedge against that weakness. But the only true defense against it is character, a commitment to the truth apart from any other beliefs. But how can one ask people to set aside their belief in the doom of mankind, the billions of dollars invested in preventing that doom and the moral transformation of society that can be achieved by leveraging that doom.

The Global Warming debate asks researchers to choose between their science and their religion, their pocketbook and their reputation. It is a miracle that there are any who have not fallen along with the procession to the green altar. It is hard to blame those who have.

Much as we respect the pocketbook, we don’t find it hard to blame the betrayers of science at all.

After that Greenfield becomes rather obscure (here’s the link again for those who want to hear him out).

He ends with this, speaking of course not for us – us atheists and himself – but for them:

When we have nothing else to trust in, all that remains is the green, the natural renewal of the world, the primitive cycles of the seasons and the degeneracy of man into a savage who is at one with the mother goddess of the world.

Steven Hayward writes at Powerline about a French intellectual, Pascal Bruckner, who explains why  –

… apocalyptic fear has gripped so many of our leaders, scientists and intellectuals … You’ll get what you’ve got coming! That is the death wish that our misanthropes address to us. These are not great souls who alert us to troubles but tiny minds who wish us suffering if we have the presumption to refuse to listen to them.

Catastrophe is not their fear but their joy. …

It is the paradox of open societies that they seem to be disordered … threatened by crime, loneliness, and drugs because they display their indignity before the whole world, never ceasing to admit their defects, whereas other, more oppressive societies seem harmonious because the press and the opposition are muzzled. “Where there are no visible conflicts, there is no freedom,” Montesquieu said. Democracies are by their nature uneasy, they never realize their ideal; they necessarily disappoint us, creating a gap between the hope they elicit and the realities they construct.

Freedom is messy, and messiness is fecund. Only where there is freedom do great things grow.

On March 28, 2012, fifty former employees of the  National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) signed a letter to Charles Bolden, NASA’s Administrator.

Here is most of it. It can be found in full at Powerline:

Dear Charlie,

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.

The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.

As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself. …

In particular, the “unproven remarks” are being made by James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, of whom John Hinderaker of Powerline writes:

One of the world’s four or five leading global warming alarmists is James Hansen, [who], traveling in China, denounced the United States and hailed China as the world’s “best hope” to stave off global warming. Hansen described Americans as “barbarians” with a fake democracy, and urged China’s rulers to lead a boycott of the United States in the hope that it would bring our economy to its knees.

The reputation of NASA took a hit when President Obama redefined its foremost task as “reaching out to the Muslim world”:

In a far-reaching restatement of goals for the nation’s space agency, NASA administrator Charles Bolden says President Obama has ordered him to pursue three new objectives: to “re-inspire children” to study science and math, to “expand our international relationships,” and to “reach out to the Muslim world.” Of those three goals, Bolden said in a recent interview with al-Jazeera, the mission to reach out to Muslims is “perhaps foremost,” because it will help Islamic nations “feel good” about their scientific accomplishments.

What scientific accomplishments would those be?

Look up and see the wonder. Pigs are flying.

The latest report by the IPCC (the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) actually tells the truth. It is “a far cry from the IPCC’s usual slipshod, scaremongering standards.”

Kudos to the IPCC — they have gotten the issue just about right, where “right” means that the report accurately reflects the academic literature on this topic. Over time good science will win out over the rest — sometimes it just takes a little while.

A few quotable quotes from the report:

“There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change”

“The statement about the absence of trends in impacts attributable to natural or anthropogenic climate change holds for tropical and extratropical storms and tornados”

“The absence of an attributable climate change signal in losses also holds for flood losses”

The report even takes care of tying up a loose end that has allowed some commentators to avoid the scientific literature:

“Some authors suggest that a (natural or anthropogenic) climate change signal can be found in the records of disaster losses … but their work is in the nature of reviews and commentary rather than empirical research.”

So what this IPCC report is saying is that WE DO NOT KNOW if there’s an anthropogenic signal in extreme weather patterns, and that there does not seem to be a trend towards increased extreme weather events such as tornados and tropical storms.

Our quotes come from an article by James Delingpole in the Telegraph.

Here’s more:

They’re calling it Global Weirding now, as I suppose, inevitably they were bound to do in the end. Well “global warming” stopped working in 1989 when the globe stopped warming. Climate change was always a bit of a non-starter because climate does change regardless of whether or not we all drive 4 x 4s, or buy carbon offsets …  And Global Climate Disruption, as some pillock tried to christen it, was never going to catch on because, well, it’s just too blatantly contrived and desperate isn’t it?

So Global Weirding it is. The concept was popularised last week in a characteristically dire and parti pris BBC Horizon documentary which purported to have lots of new evidence (or ‘hearsay’ as it would more likely have been termed in a court of law) showing that our weather is getting more extreme – weirder. It seems to have been broadcast to coincide with a new IPCC report which has been excitedly written up in newspapers like the Guardian and the Detroit Free Press as evidence that we are heading towards climate disaster.

Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heatwaves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of scientists has said.

The greatest danger is in highly populated, poorer regions, but no corner of the globe is immune. The document, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heatwaves, deluges and droughts, and blames man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.

But this is pretty much the exact opposite of what the IPCC report actually says. …

How can the warmists bear it? How do the left-biased media deal with this document?

James Delingpole has told us how – they lie.

The liberal MSM is reporting the opposite. How come?

Well here’s the weird part. The misinformation comes from the IPCC’s summary of its own report .. which has been regurgitated, in classic churnalism style, by all the usual lazy MSM suspects.

It begins:

“Evidence suggests that climate change has led to changes in climate extremes such as heat waves, record high temperatures and, in many regions, heavy precipitation in the past half century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said today.” …

Thing is, the warmists are losing and growing desperate.

As we know, the great global warming alarmism Ponzi scheme is looking extremely vulnerable at the moment. Global warming has stopped. There’s a growing public backlash against eco-taxes, ugly flickery lightbulbs, higher energy bills, bat chomping eco-crucifixes [?] and all the other paraphernalia of the environmental religion.

And unfortunately … what these kind of people do when they get backed into a corner is not surrender but get nastier and more devious.

We’ve seen this recently in the Fakegate affair. …  And in the Planet Under Pressure comedy conference staged last week by comedy organisations including the Royal Society, mainly in order to try to breathe new life into the stagnant, green-tinged corpse of climate alarmism. …

Scepticism regarding the need for immediate and massive action against carbon emissions is a sickness of societies and individuals which needs to be “treated”, according to an Oregon-based professor of “sociology and environmental studies”. Professor Kari Norgaard compares the struggle against climate scepticism to that against racism and slavery in the US South. …

As Paul Joseph Watson notes at Prison Planet: “The effort to re-brand legitimate scientific dissent as a mental disorder that requires pharmacological or psychological treatment is a frightening glimpse into the Brave New World society climate change alarmists see themselves as ruling over.”

Due to the fact that skepticism towards man-made global warming is running at an all time high, and with good reason, rather than admit they have lost the debate, climate change alarmists are instead advocating that their ideological opponents simply be drugged or brainwashed into compliance.

Some at least may concede that their cause is lost.

Look for more pig-flights this year.