(July 20, 2012) Canadian poet and essayist David Solway explores his picks for the three greatest scams of our time. Number two on his list is man-made global warming. Solway says the political ideology driving global warming alarmism “rides on the deeper, rhizomatous sense of spiritual vacuity that characterizes the modern age. In effect, political science has coalesced with dominical theology.” Lawrence Solomon’s work is noted.

By David Solway for PJ Media

… The second great scam is, of course, the canard of global warming or climate change.

All sensible people are concerned with preserving the natural environment—this is one of the central themes of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Storyteller, cited in the epigraph. But when environmentalists run amok and start trading in panic scenarios, revering false prophets, relying on specious measurements and statistics, crediting counterfeit procedures and pre-programmed computer models that crank out what they want to see, and cooking up apocryphal stories that no self-respecting “hablador” would dream of telling, it is incumbent upon us to mount the most strenuous opposition.

In his pithy and valuable account Understanding the Global Warming Hoax, retired physicist Leo Johnson does exactly this, furnishing a damning list of twelve major blunders made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and 32 global warming myths that should instantly disqualify the alarmist project, replete with disruptive recommendations, from consideration. He continues: “The reports of the IPCC provide a permanent record of misrepresentation, erroneous data, deceit, scientific fraud, and political corruption of science.” He goes on to show how the great imposture is endorsed by academia, the political establishment, the media, religious hucksters and environmental groups—indeed, as he wryly remarks, “the greatest threat to humanity and the environment is the environmentalists.” Johnson’s short study is among the most devastating—and irrefutable—exposures of the tangle of lies, fictions, and fudge factors that power the theory of a “human-caused biotic holocaust.”

There is clearly a popular fascination with the presumed fate of Mother Earth at the barbarous hands of fallen mankind, an obsession with cultic overtones generally signifying a hunger for spiritual nourishment and longed-for redemption that goes otherwise unsatisfied in the secular West. As James Lovelock, who developed the Gaia theory—the Earth as a single, living, semidivine organism—and who until recently was the darling of the Greens, has deposed in an MSNBC interview: “It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion.” Lovelock observed: “I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use. … The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are.” I suppose we should be grateful that Father Lovelock has now confessed that his views on imminent global warming were “alarmist.” Even so, the climate covenanters are not to be deterred as they seek devoutly to create “an anticarbon nirvana that will never come to pass” (Wall Street Journal, February 8, 2012).

But there is more to it than a substitute faith based on guilt and subliminal self-loathing. In fact, liberal environmentalism is the cutting edge of the movement for bureaucratized state control of both private life and free market economics, not only conscripting the media, the NGOs, government departments, the education sector, and the intellectual classes to advance its agenda, but also shrewdly operating through the very corporations it seeks to regulate by offering tax and other incentives to ensure acquiescence. Environmentalism has become the salvation of the Left after the collapse of communism and the failures of technocratic socialism.

Speaking at the Heartland Institute’s 2011 Seventh International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago, Czech President Vaclav Klaus, who lived for many years under the Soviet yoke, warned his listeners about the climate change votaries: “For them, the temperature data are just an instrument in their plans to change the world, to suppress human freedom, to bring people back to underdevelopment. Their ideas are the ideas of ideologues, not of scientists or climatologists” (Financial Post, May 29, 2012). If we do not awaken in time, we might one day find ourselves living under a regime that would in many ways resemble the communist nightmare from which half of Europe has only recently emerged.

It is fair to say that the ideology of man-made global warming is one conspiracy that really is a conspiracy. It has reached the point where it must be maintained by the omission of details, the distortion of scale and pattern, and the suspicious liability to error. The plot had already thickened in 1989 when the late Stephen Schneider, professor of environmental biology and global change at Stanford University and a vociferous global warmist—who twenty years earlier had been warning the world of an advancing ice age—wrote: “So we have to offer scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have” (Detroit News Editorial, November 22, 1989). Twenty years later, in November 2009, the Hadley Climate Research Unit was hacked, releasing thousands of files suggesting a covert mega-operation to propagate an anthropogenic global warming myth.

John Kerry’s June 19, 2012 floor speech to Congress urging his compatriots to fight the “insidious conspiracy of silence on climate change…where truth should prevail” and challenging skeptics to “prove us wrong or stand down” is a perfect example of political manipulation and bad faith. There is no such silence except that imposed by the media. The only conspiracy is to be found among government-funded climate change berserkers. Kerry—who is obviously deeply unread—has failed to prove his own assertions, relying instead on anecdotal rumours about wilting azaleas. But the politics of money and power—higher taxes on the middles classes and the wealthy, enrichment schemes for carbon brokers and fishy green industries, limits on individual freedoms under the expansion of statist control—rides on the deeper, rhizomatous sense of spiritual vacuity that characterizes the modern age. In effect, political science has coalesced with dominical theology.

Thankfully, there is a rapidly growing and easily accessible adversarial bibliography on the subject of climate change that anyone interested in the global warming controversy might do well to consult. The scientific expertise assembled in these books, written by such reputable authorities as Fred Singer, Robert Zubrin, Lawrence Solomon, Ian Plimer, Brian Sussman, A.W. Montford, Steven Milloy, Nigel Lawson, Senator James Inhofe, and many others, cannot honorably be ignored or discounted. Mark Levin’s chapter “On Enviro-Statism” in his Liberty and Tyranny provides an incisional critique of the various stages of the global warming hoax and how it functions as an instrument of statist control of civil society. Further, the number of reputable analytical studies exploding the AGW myth is now legion. As if this were not enough, on May 19, 2008, 32,000 dissenting scientists issued the Oregon petition disavowing the alarmist assertions of scammers like Al Gore and the IPCC. This prestigious group of skeptics (or “deniers” as they are called), which includes a veritable who’s who of American scientists, is fifteen times larger than those scientists involved in one way or another, directly or marginally, with the IPCC.

The petition states in part: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

“How might anyone of clear mind,” asks Marc Sheppard, rhetorically, in American Thinker, “consider these words from these numbers and still accept claims of scientific consensus?” Will the MSM, the IPCC, the compromised scientists, and myriad politicians who have invested in their species of junk science actually ponder, let alone honestly acknowledge, the authenticity of the petition? Sheppard answers: “As the [real] science no longer appears to concern any of them—don’t hold your CO₂ polluted breath.” A global juggernaut is hard to derail even as it hurtles toward environmental, political, and economic disaster.

The original essay in full, published by PJ Media, is available here.