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Human caused global warming- True or False?

True or False?

  • True

    Votes: 45 66.2%
  • False

    Votes: 23 33.8%

  • Total voters
    68
It does seem reasonable that the sun has a greater influence on the earth's climate than anything that people do. Just a thought.

It's also logical that if you change the chemical composition of the layers of air that protect the Earth from the sun that something negative could happen.

If you 99% of the world's top scientists to believe something in this era, it's fairly likely that it's true.
 
Stop ruining funny sarcasm with 'lame-isms' RJ.
 
Dude, lectro, please just stop.

http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/...s-debunked-claims-about-cosmic-rays-and-cfcs/

"This sensationalist headline is often repeated with little mention that Lu’s claims are not new, and have not held up to scientific scrutiny in the past."

- This theory has been considered and dismissed before. A 2010 report by the National Academies of Science was commissioned by Congress to examine all the evidence surrounding global warming including the theory that cosmic rays might influence Earth’s climate. It concluded that “a plausible physical mechanism… has not been demonstrated” and “cosmic rays are not regarded as an important climate forcing.”

- In 2011, a peer-reviewed paper found that Lu’s conclusions “are based solely on correlation… do not have a physical basis… and the findings of the IPCC… remain unchallenged.”

- In response to Lu’s most recent publication, several different scientists interviewed by the Vancouver Sun each said that Lu’s conclusions “[go] against 150 years of very fundamental physics.”

- Critics point out that Lu’s paper fails to make the leap from correlation to causation, one of the most basic and most common scientific failings. This error is simply illustrated in the classic fable of the rooster who believes the sun rises because he crows. Two things may happen at the same time, but this does not mean one causes the other. A “physical mechanism” by which the two events are connected must be known, in order to fully understand causation.

- In contrast, there is strong experimental evidence of the physical mechanism by which CO2 warms the planet, evidence that (as scientists have mentioned already in response to Lu) dates back 150 years."
 
More controversy as science challenges the basis for CO2 preeminence in the role of climate change.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/06/03/3773350.htm

"The Australian’s Environment Editor Graham Lloyd has a habit of misrepresenting the work of scientists. He has also shown a fondness for citing the work of cranks.

Earlier this year The Australian was forced to issue an embarrassing correction after claiming sea level rise was not linked to warming.

Lloyd shamelessly cherry picks quotes, as this example clearly shows.

So desperate is Lloyd’s attempts to cast doubt on the science, he is now scraping the bottom of the barrel by citing junk “research” in his latest article:

The peer-reviewed research by Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, biology and chemistry at Waterloo University, was published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B.

The findings of Professor Lu’s paper – Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change – are at odds with the consensus view that climate change is driven by increasing concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere. Waterloo University said Professor Lu’s research provided “new fundamental understanding of the ozone hole and global climate change”. Critics said it might be “nothing more than coincidental correlation”, but it warranted further study.

Chlorofluorocarbons are known to deplete ozone, but conventional thinking is the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide had mainly contributed to global warming.

The claim that CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) are the real culprit behind global warming is a tired, old debunked sceptic myth.

The journal, International Journal of Modern Physics B is pretty fringe. Climate Science Watch has already addressed Lu’s paper and notes how he recycles discredited claims."
 
Well, sonny Jim, its like this...your cracker white ass is getting ready to be shipped back to your "roots" via a new Ice Age.

I'm gonna be on the train with ya.. I'll be the one serving cold cuts.

Didya catch that slider there, slick?
 
Well, sonny Jim, its like this...your cracker white ass is getting ready to be shipped back to your "roots" via a new Ice Age.

I'm gonna be on the train with ya.. I'll be the one serving cold cuts.

Didya catch that slider there, slick?

Feel free to address my links whenever you want. Although based on the undercurrent of racist and retard in your post don't bother.
 
Feel free to address my links whenever you want. Although based on the undercurrent of racist and retard in your post don't bother.

You wouldn't last 2 seconds debating the scientists on those blogs. You would get your ass handed to you. Go throw phony baloney charts at those guys and gals and see how quickly they take them and shove 'em back up your ass. Go ahead. I have seen a multitude of guys a helluva a lot smarter than you getting clobbered over there. No asshats or pinheads like ol' Lec. Nobody will threaten you. You will simply see your arguments scientifically dissected by some truly brilliant physicists,chemists, et., al.

Take your game over to a "Climate Denier" blog...

Tread on over. The water is only mildly acidic.
 
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Watts Up With That?
The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change

Take your A Game. I want to see you do it. Go on over to Anthony Watts' Science Blog and spout your bullshit. That's no board for the "midget". You better personally "know the science". Might better send TW, eh?

A climate of scepticism
Posted by Anthony Watts
Guest post by Philip Lloyd, Energy Institute, CPUT

The world is getting a little warmer. Of that there is no doubt. The measurements by which we know that it is warming are poor. The figures are not accessible, and keep on changing[1]. Many points at which temperature is measured are badly sited, and bound to give misleading results[2]. But in spite of this, all agree that the world is warmer than it was 150 years ago.

There are some fairly clear signals of a warmer world. The Arctic ice is less than it was[3]. Many glaciers are retreating[4]. Some glaciers – for instance, those on Kilimanjaro – are shrinking because the long-term precipitation is less than it was 150 years ago, not because it is warmer[5]. Others are shrinking from a warmer climate.

Where the sceptic differs from many other scientists is in ascribing the warming to human activities – specifically, the burning of fossil fuels and the concomitant rise in the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. The hypothesis is that the carbon dioxide traps infra-red radiation that would otherwise escape to space. This means that some of the energy received from the sun is not lost, and the trapped energy leads to a warming of the globe.

The physics of how carbon dioxide traps infra-red radiation is well known[6]. But there are other molecules in the atmosphere that also trap infra-red radiation. Water vapour is the predominant “greenhouse gas”[7]. What is not so clear is the extent to which the trapping of energy causes heating. There are wonderful mathematical models that claim to show how heating occurs. Unfortunately, all the models suffer from identifiable flaws, a point considered later.

A prime difficulty with the anthropogenic warming thesis is that it is not known how much of the warming is natural and how much might be caused by carbon dioxide. It is simple to illustrate this. Figure 1 shows the global temperature record as kept by the Hadley Centre at the University of East Anglia[8].



Figure 1 Global temperatures, relative to 1950-1990 average

The global temperature dropped from 1850 to 1860; rose until 1880; dropped until 1910; rose until 1945; dropped until 1980; rose until 2000; and has dropped slightly since then.

Figure 2 shows the carbon dioxide record. Careful measurements have been made at Mauna Loa on Hawaii since 1958[9]. The pre-industrial level of CO2 in the atmosphere is generally accepted to have been about 280ppm[10]. Figure 2 shows a reasonable extrapolation of the data back to about 280ppm in 1800.


Figure 2 Atmospheric CO2 concentrations, measured and estimated.

It seems entirely reasonable that the measured rise is the result of fossil fuel consumption. Figure 3 shows annual CO2 emissions over time[11]. In 1900 it was just under 2 billion tons per annum; by 1943 it was at 5 billion tons and then fell back and only exceeded 5 billion tons again in 1947. Thereafter it grew rapidly, passing 10 billion tons in 1963, 15 billion in 1971, 20 billion in 1986 and 30 billion in 2006.



Figure 3 Annual CO2 emissions from fossil fuel consumption.

Comparison of Figures 2 and 3 makes it clear that the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is almost certainly directly related to the emissions from fossil fuels. However, the low levels of emissions up until about 1945 make it clear that the impact of the fossil fuel combustion prior to 1945 must have been very small if not negligible. Therefore the changes in global temperatures prior to 1945, shown in Figure 1, were largely natural. The additional carbon dioxide from human activities cannot have played a significant part in the changes prior to 1945.

If most of the temperature changes prior to 1945 were largely natural, then there is great difficulty in determining how much of the temperature change post-1945 is natural and how much might be driven by increasing carbon dioxide. This raises the question of what the natural variation in temperature might be.

To answer this question, we turn to the Vostok ice core record over the past 9000 years[12]. The core was sampled every metre of depth, which represented ~20 years of accumulation in the upper layers and ~50 years in the lower levels. The temperature was estimated from differences in the oxygen isotope ratios. While a point measurement such as this cannot give a good measure of the average global temperature, it is a reasonable measure of changes in global temperature, and it is primarily temperature changes that are of interest.

The data are shown in Figure 4. There has been a slight cooling over the past 9 millennia, as shown by the least-squares line. The data were therefore detrended before further analysis – the mean temperature at any one date was added to the reported relative temperature. The detrended temperatures were what is known as “normally distributed”, i.e. there was nothing abnormal or skewed about them. Then the rate of change between each detrended temperature and the temperature approximately 100±20 years earlier was calculated and expressed as a rate per century. The results were also normally distributed, with a standard deviation of 0.94oC per century.



Figure 4. Relative temperatures over the past 9000 years.

Thus there is about a 2:1 chance that the temperature may vary by up to 1oC per century from natural causes, but only about a 1 in 10 chance that it will vary by more than 1.9oC naturally. Between 1900 and 2000 it varied by about 0.9oC, which is, therefore, within the range of natural variation. And that, in simple terms, is why there is scepticism about the thesis that carbon dioxide is causing global warming – there is no clear signal of any such warming effect.

However, the proponents of the anthropogenic warming thesis claim to have models that show how added carbon dioxide will lead to a warmer world[13]. There are major problems with these models, not least of which is the fact that the proponents claim that doubling the CO2 in the atmosphere will increase the temperature by over 3oC. This is well above any physical reason[14]. It results from arguments about the effect of water vapour in the atmosphere, which is supposed to exacerbate the effect of increased CO2.

The doubling effect is so far invisible. Other estimates have suggested that doubling the CO2 may increase the global temperatures by less than 1oC[15]. The evidence for this is building. For instance, there has been about a 40% increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1945, which would imply 1.2oC of warming if doubling the CO2 caused a 3oC rise. Figure 1 shows that the actual warming over this period has only been about 0.4oC. Has the globe cooled by 0.8oC while the added CO2 has been warming us? It seems unlikely.

There are further reasons to doubt the models. For instance, Figure 5 reproduces Figure 10.7 from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report[16].
 
Thanks! I knew you needed some entertainment this evening.

I like the part where your boy Greg Laden starts threatening others. "I am a large muscular man. I own pit-bulls, carry a firearm and know martial arts, etc., etc."

Nice guy. Great Fucking link! Preesh.
 
Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012
UPDATE: January 1st, 2012 – still here, no reports of mass deaths at the last minute. – Anthony

Global warming may go on a last minute rampage. Maybe best to just stay at home and lock your doors, bar your windows, and turn your air conditioner on. If you live near the coast, head for high ground. Deaths due to drinking and driving will be nothing compared to this.

This story appeared in The Canadian January 8th, 2007, it’s been a countdown example of stupidity ever since. Unbelievably, it is still on their website. Note today’s date.





Over at the Daily Bayonet, where they’ve been following for this for years, they have encouraging news:

Assuming there is no last minute surprise attack by pesky methane clathrates, the Daily Bayonet wishes you a safe and happy 2012.

If it happens, it will be the gaia fart heard round the world.

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Climate-Change-Theory on January 30, 2012 at 2:36 pm
Let’s see now: 4.5 billion out of 7 billion – well at least that gets rid of 64.3% of the warmists.

Paxmax on February 11, 2012 at 4:04 pm
I gotta hand it to you guys and gals, pretty funny!

John Hendry on February 18, 2012 at 4:53 am
One mistake does make an issue true. But like I said in another post, regardless of manmade warming or no warming we have gone through 200 million years of stored carbon and must slow down to conserve the last half of it for future generations. We must conserve our resources for what matters most and that’s not some crackhead driving a car to deliver drugs that says the Moon landing was a hoax too just because of 911. Let em walk. Finding balance and learning to tune rather than change scales is what needs to be done. We have a violent past that shows us the future if we do not change our ways and the unfortunate fact is that takes time and many people will remain stuck in the past habits. The new religion is physics and because it wears a strait jacket and reveals only truth arguments over it will be resolved. We are making progress and should help with the tuning established, not try to change the age old song that made it though. You can accomplish a lot with tuning if you do it right, but you must accept the strings as they are as cutting them will get you nowhere except involved in endless arguments . In other words what matters is we stop the greed and their lack of balance.

John^^

Mick on March 10, 2012 at 11:55 am
you can’t always get what you want,
but if you try, sometimes you get what you need.

Simon on April 3, 2012 at 5:50 am
John – I suggest you get yourself a copy of “The Deep Hot Biosphere” by Thomas Gold and/or look up J F Kenney. – plenty of info on scribed.

Wayne on April 11, 2012 at 8:29 am
John: Take your meds!

Morganne on April 19, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Global warming is not an issue. It’s the way of life. After global warming, there will be global cooling. Then it’ll start all over again. I don’t see the point in panicking over a fact of life.

Mike on May 6, 2012 at 10:02 am
I take it flying 1800 miles to the East and driving my new ride back to its Western home was not what these folks had in mind. But it was a good way to get familiar with my Escalade.

Leo Smith on May 11, 2012 at 4:36 am
Several million will die as a result of crazy policies adopted by politcians who believed (or asserted that they believed) in AGW.

Andy Wilkins on May 14, 2012 at 3:30 pm
I’ll ‘fess up:
I couldn’t help myself and just had to email Nick and remind him about this prediction wholly failing to come true. I also noted that he was still calling it ‘Global Warming’ back then, but is now calling it ‘Climate Change’ (probably because of the current lack of warming). I went on to ask him when he was going to start calling it ‘Climate Disruption’ so that he could blame any weather event on our level of CO2 production.

Naughty of me, I know, but it always does me good to a have bit of levity in my day!

Andy Wilkins on May 14, 2012 at 3:36 pm
Sorry!
I meant John not Nick!

It’s late and I’m tired!

custom written dissertation on May 23, 2012 at 3:36 am
Well, that is definitely sad news, but at least now they have stopped talking about the end of the world…

rodney porter on July 12, 2012 at 5:30 am
Simply amazing, carbon an essential gas, as without it we would not be here, the planet as we know it would not support life as we know it, but would be a snowball. To grow some sort of food that we could eat to live we need Carbon”, now we have in Australia” a tax mainly on the air we breathe, great, not only do we have death taxes but now a right to live tax. Economically this country is now on the way out, be interesting when the liberals get back in, how long it will take to reverse this damage that is about to be lumped on to us.
One can only hope it will not be to bad..
Rod P.

Little Joe on July 14, 2012 at 5:46 am
Carbon is not a gas until the temperature reaches 4098K.

Charles Johnson on July 19, 2012 at 10:45 pm
I too, have contacted them and demanded a retraction and apology for publishing garbage.

yadontwannano on July 22, 2012 at 9:18 am
Everybody says ” global warming ” it’s the side effect of noticular clouds seem to play a role in warming the morning temperatures especialy in highly populated areas where low level air pollution and calories sources abound such as body heat , merthane production internal copmbustion engines etc are concentrated . The sun has the biggest effect apon global temperatures varying it’s out put bewteen cycles . Then comes the cloud covers made up of water hellium , and dust paarticles from many sources . The problem is that the atmosphere suffers from ionic pollution

G_Grady@gmail.com on August 8, 2012 at 8:17 pm
You guys are all shills right?

Bondi Climate Realist on August 12, 2012 at 12:25 am
Here in Australia, our carbon price is raising electricity prices even higher. We have been incurring huge increases (to subsidize “green” energy) for several years and they are set to jump again now we have the world’s highest price on carbon. The Greens would like to raise it from $23 per ton to $200 per ton. I can forsee deaths from starvation and other poverty related mortality to fund this insane tax. I personally know pensioners who simply will not use heating anymore(and thus are cold during winter) and go to bed early to avoid using lights.They are paranoid about how big the electricity bill is going to be. We are going back to the stone age. Perhaps this is the TRUE intention of the ultra green movement.

steve on August 14, 2012 at 3:30 pm
@Bondi

you need heating in Australia?

on a serious note, I am a former climatologist (lowly postdoc) and climate skeptic. but I also agree with carbon taxes. I genuinely like wind turbines and other ‘renewables’. In the UK it is more about energy security than climate chaos though.

grumpydenier on August 17, 2012 at 10:43 am
@steve

“In the UK it is more about energy security than climate chaos though.”

Please explain in words of one syllable, how wind turbines and solar panels ensure our energy security.
A simple answer to the problem is nuclear energy, shale gas, newer coal extraction/conversion techniques and, possibly, thorium.
Everything else is pure vanity to placate the greens and make the politicians look as if they’re doing something to solve a non-problem.

Morpheus on August 26, 2012 at 9:23 am
The human body generates more bio- electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 B.T.U.’s of body heat.

ace nurnette on September 1, 2012 at 9:04 am
in america we can build our own electrical systems and make the providers pay us…a wind turbine, water wheel, solar panals and batteries, all home made. your government IS the problem.

psychopigeon on September 2, 2012 at 4:08 pm
All you have to do is look at the United Nations Climate Alarmists to see they’re in it for power and money. Carbon Credits is simply a permit to pollute, all that will end up happening if energy companies will increase their prices to pay for it and we’ll pay that increase because we need energy. It’s a god damn scam. On top of that the ‘climate treaties’ require more power given to the Communist United Nations. I don’t want these corrupt people gaining more control over my life.

Industrial Hemp can replace all our wood, paper, fuel, food, plastic needs, why isn’t that at the forefront of the agenda for these so-called saviors of the world? BECAUSE THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT THE ENVIRONMENT.

MShea on September 19, 2012 at 12:09 pm
On the positive side, if the estimate is correct, then the over population problem will be solved…..

Dajake on October 2, 2012 at 6:34 pm
We must conserve the remaining half of carbon for future generations? Future generations are a purely abstract hypothetical.

Billy on October 16, 2012 at 8:16 am
It seems like the Canadian is a lunatic blog with no readers or advertisers. All of the posts are idiotic.

Mick on October 18, 2012 at 2:45 pm
HAHAHAHA they obviously ran out of ideas of thing to write about and just wrote something in a desperate attempt to get some visitors….!!

housni on November 12, 2012 at 6:13 am
mercii pour cette article

D.N Power on November 20, 2012 at 8:53 am
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Anthony Siebenthaler on November 25, 2012 at 9:10 am
Time should have resolved this issue by now, but you still hear people making the same old statements and repeating the same old gloom laden prophecies despite, like the one in the headline story, not materialising.

was watching the EU parliament the other day…. they go on as if there has been no caution raised at all. Even one Dutch MEP saying that even if shale oil/gas could sort out all of Europe’s problems overnight she would still rather leave it in the ground… so save ‘mother Earth’


Keith on January 8, 2013 at 12:23 am
Most of the over populated and agrarian based nations on the planet had better be hoping for “warming” because if it starts to cool the food supply will disappear real quick.

Stew Green on January 8, 2013 at 3:55 am
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/12/071212-AP-arctic-melt.html
from 2007 ‘Arctic Sea Ice Gone in Summer Within Five Years?
Seth Borenstein in Washington
Associated Press
December 12, 2007′

Stew Green on January 8, 2013 at 8:38 am
- note the weasel words like “UPTO” & “COULD” to cover any eventuality that are used in the body but often omıtted from the headlines
- It would seem much easier to compile a list of the predictions that CAGW supporters have correctly made ..There is nothing wrong with giving them credit when they are right.
Below is a link to a good analysis of the 2012 UK Met Office (mis-)forecasts
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/hcubed/comment.html?entrynum=282

Andrew Fernie on January 28, 2013 at 8:26 am
As far as I can see, Raymond Samuels pretty much IS the Canadian ‘newpaper’ and he’s a certified (and certifiable) tin-foil hat wearer of the Mayans/UFOs/NWO/Gnostic-Archons-are-aliens-from-another-dimension/giant-spaceships-near-the-sun variety. Combine that with his amazing journalistic prowess and it’s not a big surprise…

Equorial on February 4, 2013 at 12:13 pm
This is something I read about nearly 20 years ago. The scientists during that time period ultimately decided that “Cow Farts” were releasing methane into the atmosphere at 1000 times the rate that anything in the process of melting was. So, if you have cows, please refrain from feeding them beans and other known sources of ‘gaseous emissions’ so that we’ll all live longer, healthier lives. Besides, the president of the USA wants these people to kill for himself, and who are we to take away his ambitions?

Stew Green on May 3, 2013
Ice Free Forecasts a few coming up this year
- I see you have a longer list http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/16/i-need-your-help-for-a-short-research-project/
- but here from teve Goddard’s long list http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/ice-free-arctic-forecasts/
2000 New Scientist in 1960
2000 AP in 1972
2008 Olav Orheim, the head of the Norwegian International Polar Year Secretariat in 2008 ! yes
2010-2015 Articnet Canada in 2007
2012 NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally
2012 Seth Borenstein in Washington Associated Press &N Geographic December 12, 2007
2013 Jonathan Amos Science reporter, BBC News, San Francisco in 2007
2013-2019 Richard Black BBC News 2011 WOLF WOLF says BBC
2013 niagarafallsreview.ca in 2011 they removed it now
2014-2016 Al Gore December 15, 2009
2015 Arctic Marine Shipping Assessment Report in 2009
2020 UK Met office old forecast, updated to 2060-80 their 2009 forecast
2030 Joe Rommm quoting NSIDC Serreze in 2011
- some claims it’s partially due to a strange definition : when the Arctic sea-ice extent in September is below 1 million sq km (“ice free”).
- It seems it has low years then recovers, but pessimists never predicted any recoveries hence their way off calculations.

Rachel Shaffer on July 6, 2013 at 7:21 am
Well, not in 2012.

Igor Karlić on August 14, 2013 at 12:17 pm
Do not be sad. Never lose hope. If not in AD 2013 try AD 2014! You never now. But be aware. After 4,5 billion years you must change paranoia reason from CO2 to Sun explosion.
 
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Eco-Religion 101

Most critiques of environmentalism have become as dreary and predictable as environmentalism itself. Environmentalists, their critics (myself included) never tire of telling us, grossly exaggerate problems, promote endless bureaucracy, corrupt the law, and engage in relentless scaremongering—or at least insist on wearing Al Gore masks on Halloween. These criticisms are all true, all well deserved, and all .  .  . tediously familiar.
Here, the French author Pascal Bruckner deploys the eccentric and discursive style of French social commentary to break out of this rut in spectacular fashion. Bruckner, one of the left-leaning nouveaux philosophes who broke with Marxism in the 1970s, writes for Le Nouvel Observateur and delights in being a scourge of decadent European liberalism (see his splendid The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism). A major literary figure in France, Bruckner is largely unknown here in America, chiefly because the American left lacks a self-critical impulse.
Bruckner’s approach to environmental criticism departs from most others in not disputing any particular environmental claim, including global warming. He fully accepts the possibility of great human harm to nature, and he accords respect to some of the philosophical critiques—by figures such as Martin Heidegger and Hans Jonas—about the obligations of humans to nature, mostly agreeing that we are falling short of our obligation. But just as Bruckner came to understand that Marxism was a perversion of—or an obstacle to—achieving greater justice for the dispossessed, he regards “ecologism,” as he labels the dominant tendencies of environmental thought, as the virtual successor to Marxism, and believes it to be just as potentially degrading, if not tyrannical.
He writes: “In the wrong hands, the best of causes can degenerate into an abomination”—which is exactly what Bruckner thinks has happened to environmentalism.
Ecologism has become a global ideology that covers all of existence, modes of production as much as ways of life. In it are found all the faults of Marxism applied to the environment: the omnipresent scientism, the appalling visions of reality, the admonishment of those who are guilty of not understanding those who wish us well. All the foolishness of Bolshevism, Maoism, and Trotskyism are somehow reformulated exponentially in the name of saving the planet.
He notes that “Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. .  .  . With ecologism, we move up a notch: the guilty party is humanity itself.” The result is a domain of thought and action today that rewards vehemence over sensibility. This is not a new theme; the “watermelon” label—green on the outside, red on the inside—has been applied to environmentalists for a while. Likewise, Bruckner joins in seeing environmentalism as a secular religion. But Bruckner captures more of the depth and texture of these two aspects of environmentalism than do other critics.
Along the way, he sheds fresh light on why even reasonable and rational environmental concern enables the nonsensical and extreme versions to flourish and dominate. The rational environmentalist wishes to warn us of the damage industrial civilization brings with it, while the nonsensical environmentalist wishes only to use this fact as a stick to beat human beings and condemn modern industrial civilization.
Bruckner offers a particular twist on the environmentalism-as-religion theme. More than just a form of faith, environmentalism revives a monastic mentality that wraps human guilt together with a call for humility, repentance, and a discipline of abasement. This “gaseous equivalent of Original Sin”—an eco version of the fall of man—explains why environmentalists are congenitally resistant to facts, science, and progress itself. Environmentalism isn’t out primarily to save nature, but to purify humanity: “Adding ‘eco’ .  .  . and ‘bio’ to any word is enough to sanctify it”—although it is no longer acceptable to the high priests to carry your holy eco-water in plastic bottles.
This also explains why environmentalism is so wedded to apocalyptic horizons. I’ve always explained that environmentalists react with fury to facts debunking their end-of-the-world scenarios because the prospect of the eco-apocalypse makes them happy. Bruckner extends the analysis: “The [eco] prophet is not a great soul who admonishes us but a petty fellow who wishes us many misfortunes if we have the gall not to listen to him. Catastrophe is not something that haunts him but his source of joy.”
 
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