Bret Stephens: The Great Global Warming Fizzle [Wall St Journal]

Another sign of the times. Mark this one in your history books for studies on the Rise and Fall of the Great Warming Delusion. Yes, it’s another well written piece on the religious nature of the faith some have in our ability to change the weather. But this time there are sounds of the death knell…

The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom

How do religions die? Generally they don’t, which probably explains why there’s so little literature on the subject. Zoroastrianism, for instance, lost many of its sacred texts when Alexander sacked Persepolis in 330 B.C., and most Zoroastrians converted to Islam over 1,000 years ago. Yet today old Zoroaster still counts as many as 210,000 followers, including 11,000 in the U.S. Christopher Hitchens might say you can’t kill what wasn’t there to begin with.

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term “climate change” when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other “deniers.” And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse….

Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal, 29 November 2011

hat tip Benny Peiser GWPF

"As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate."

Michael E. Mann (born December 28, 1965) is an American physicist and climatologist, currently director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is best known as lead author of a number of articles on paleoclimatology and as one of the originators of a graph of temperature trends over the last thousand years, called the "hockey stick graph" because of its shape.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann

RE: About Mann: "Definitely a High Priest!"
I would differ. He is simply a low end stooge who was assured of getting what appeared to be un-limited grants. The high priest are in the IPPC, Goldman Sachs, GE's, al Gore, key people within the socialist framework in Europe as well as the USA and other countries. Same goes for Hansen. He depends on his NASA salary and side jobs to make a mere million bucks. Call the lower echelons simply pawns that profit on the AGW and related issues.

I recently got into a huge exchange on a unrelated forum over global warming with a faithful believer in AGW. I imagine many of us on the right have had this same discussion with the AGW believer leftist and want to improve my argument if possible.

- My first observation is they suspect no evil is possible from their sources. The denial of agenda and money is amazing on the other side;
What ever happened to the saying ‘follow the money’? Total denial there from my liberal friend.

-By far my biggest challenge was to make the argument that his scientists were biased and agenda driven instead of objective. “my scientists are better than your scientists” sums up his argument.

-The only ‘defense’ against the email releases, both of them, was that they were totally debunked by peer review. I pointed out that they exposed the total disregard for the scientific method in ‘proving’, and are as such show AGW arguments as illegitimate. That is where the conversation stopped.

-In reviewing the discussion I ask myself if I am the one who is misled or closed minded, but my intuition keeps returning me to the fact that I would be gullible to not come to my conclusions, and these are agenda and money driven charlatans, starting with the divinity school dropout and AGW high priest Al Gore. The red flags are everywhere with Global Warming theory, which I conclude is the religion of the chicken little gullible. “The sky is falling! Quick, give me your money!!”

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The climate religion fades in spasms of anger and twitches of boredom.