Eco-Religion

Two great commercials are airing in major cities to refute global warming alarmists and eco-religionists who call for reductions on the use of energy because it supposedly will lead to a global catastrophe.

Its funny, but Pat Robertson today said that God told him that a tsunami will hit the United States. Eco-Religionists like Al Gore have also predicted an apocolyptic future. What is the difference?

Click the Pictures to see the commercials.

Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.

Today marks an anniversary in Eco-Religion History. Thirty-One Years ago, Eco-Religionists made a valiant effort to take existing meteorological data and spin the world into a pending catastrophe! And politicians just wouldn’t listen to the experts, despite the fact that evidence showed we were all doomed! Billions of people were going to starve! Weather patterns indicated that mankind was having a negative effect on the weather, leading to the highest rate of disastrous natural weather phenomena to date!

Sound familiar? It should. These things have been said about global warming for years now. But when this was said 31 years ago, it was not about carbons causing a green-house effect. It was about carbons creating a blocking effect, keeping the sun from heating the earth, thus plunging the world, in ten years, into an…

ICE AGE!

From a NewsWeek Article, dated April 28, 1975. Copy Here.

“The Cooling World” – by Peter Gwynne
April 28, 1975 Newsweek

There are ominous signs that the Earth s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.

Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.

Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the little ice age conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

Do you think Eco-religionists abandoned the whole Ice Age predictions because someone came up with a way to melt the ice caps, whereas, with global warming, there is no easy way to cool a planet?

And what is this about a cooling period in the 20th century? Eco-religionists constantly tell us that the Earth has been warming since the advent of the Industrial Revolution.

The fact is that this country is cleaner, more environmentally safe and sound, and more fuel efficient than 1975. Don’t let Junk Scientists or Eco-Religionsits tell you otherwise. Any attempt to frighten you and tell you otherwise should be treated with the same amount of skepticism as if someone were trying to convert you to Scientology, because they use fear tactics, guilt and bad science as the foundation to do so. Hat Tip to Moonbattery.

Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.

Eco-Religionists believe weird things- such as DDT destroying egg shells, and mankind being the sole cause that harms populations of wild animals. But then we come across a story such as this, which though sad, highlights life in the wild.

Eagle on Eagle Crime should not be tolerated, especially within sight of the Nation’s Capital, where the Eagle is the proud symbol of America.

From the AP here:

WASHINGTON – Within earshot of traffic roaring along the Capital Beltway, a suddenly single dad is waging a quiet struggle to save his offspring a nest of bald eagle eggs on the verge of hatching.

The eagle, nicknamed George by workers building a new Beltway bridge, lost his mate, Martha, when she was attacked by another female eagle Wednesday. The aggressor may have been trying to take over George and Martha’s nest in suburban Maryland, which is valuable real estate for the area’s booming bald eagle population.

After watching Martha fall in a dramatic midair battle, construction workers sought help from Stephanie R. Spears, an environmental specialist working with the Woodrow Wilson Bridge project.

Spears rushed the bleeding mother eagle to a veterinary hospital in Newark, Del., where she was being treated for puncture wounds and a damaged beak that may need weeks of rehabilitation.

George was left alone to guard the nest and at least two eggs difficult because he needs to hunt for food twice a day, and the attacking female remains a threat. Spears said she and federal wildlife officials were considering whether to move the eggs, or chicks, into a surrogate nest where they might have a better chance at survival.

Maybe the “attacking female” needs to be captured and given sensitivity training. All kidding aside, shouldn’t people not interfere with nature in this regard? The natural course of events, which will include the interloping Eagle killing the eggs or the hatchlings in a territorial dispute for prey should be the course of action. People shouldn’t interfere and force these eagles to get along.

Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.

And so is protesting seal hunting. Less protesters showed up this year than previous years. But the protesters present tried to inhibit the legal slaughter of the Harp Seals by blocking hunting ships with tiny little row-boat sized zodiac dinghies- which could be deadly if the passengers fell in the water.

The hunters responded by dumping seal guts on the protesters and reporters. Somehow, the reporters are part of this story, rather than just standing off and reporting the facts from an objective point of view.

From the Canadian Press here:

Irritated hunters throw seal innards at protesters

CHARLOTTETOWN Protesters had to dodge flying seal guts pitched at them by angry hunters Saturday as tempers flared on the first day of Canada s East Coast seal slaughter.

News reporters and animal rights activists tried to get as close as permitted to the hunt on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but their presence infuriated sealers as they hunted for scarce animals on small, drifting ice pans.

At one point, a sealing vessel charged up to a small Zodiac inflatable boat carrying reporters and protesters, and a sealer flung seal intestines into the midst of the observers.

Hunters in the Gulf typically use spiked clubs called hakapiks, but scarce ice conditions in southern areas have meant many are using rifles because they cannot get close enough to the seals.

There is still ice in northern areas of the Gulf, where hunters traditionally use hakapiks to crush the seals skulls.

Sealers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence can take 91,000 animals this year.

A second, much larger hunt off the northern coast of Newfoundland and Labrador will take place later in April. Hunters in that slaughter can kill 234,000 seals.

This story neglected to state why the animals were being hunted or culled. Is this a harvest? Are they culled to protect other animals? This story is intended to portray the hunters as angry and cruel people, and of course, the protesters were just observing- not trying to block the hunters or anything else that would interfere with the legal hunting of the animals, or would endanger the lives of the hunters or even the protesters.

The official Canadian Government report on the animals is available here, and it states that the population remains stable due to yearly harvesting of the animals.

The hunt is carried out by fishermen from areas that were devastated by the depletion of the Cod fisheries. The seals eat the cod, and the fishermen kill the seals. See this article:

The commercial hunt today is largely carried out by fishers in Newfoundland and Quebec (map).

Backers of the hunt say it brings vital income to coastal communities devastated by the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery in the 1990s. Last year’s harvest of 320,000 harp seals generated about 16.5 million Canadian dollars.

This means that for each seal that is killed, a hunter gets about 51 dollars for the animal by selling the meat and skin. This seems like a fine way to keep the families affected by the Cod industry fed.

Protesters are claiming that global warming will cause a huge depletion of seals due to the lack of free-floating ice. This will just mean that there will be less seals killed next year. That is, if global warming is not just some kind of hoax.

Thanks go to the Jawa Report for the pointer to the article.

Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.

I have a category in this blogspace dedicated to Eco-Religion, and readers may wonder what I mean by it. Is it about Ecology nuts? Religious nuts? Well, its a combination of the two. This category is dedicated to those that view ecology and environmentalism as a religion, whether they know it or not. Those that worship the ancient god of the Earth, GAEA, but don’t realize it. Those that claim to be atheists, but unwittingly are rabid worshippers of trees, animals and the mythos that surrounds environmentalism, including the junk science that accompanies it.

It has long been my belief that the human soul craves worship. All societies, somehow, develop organized religion, and this cannot be explained away by some common naivete’ or stupidity among humans. It likely has more to do with the curse of knowledge that mankind has that we are doomed to die, and no one knows what lies beyond the grave. And how can such passionate, caring creatures such as humans, NOT have some divine purpose on the planet? Whether or not mankind creates religion to cope with this quandry or whether or not it develops by itself is another mystery.

But make no mistake. The worship of Gaea, and of the environment, has become the chic religion of urban atheists. Michael Chrichton, author of many novels, including State of Fear, explained it best in a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in 2003, which I have condensed below. You should read the whole thing here.

The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda.

In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They can’t be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion. Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people—the best people, the most enlightened people—do not believe in any religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?

And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.

How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The dyaks of Borneo were headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to paradise as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so hideously restrictive that you could lose your life if you stepped in the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a fantasy, and it was never true.

In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don’t, they will die.

And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you’ll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you’ll have infections and sickness and if you’re not with somebody who knows what they’re doing, you’ll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won’t experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you.

If Eden is a fantasy that never existed, and mankind wasn’t ever noble and kind and loving, if we didn’t fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious tenets? What about salvation, sustainability, and judgment day? What about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global warming, if we all don’t get down on our knees and conserve every day?

Failed Doomsday Predictions:
Paul Ehrlich: 60 million Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be extinct by 2000. And on and on and on.

With so many past failures, you might think that environmental predictions would become more cautious. But not if it’s a religion. Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts the end of the world doesn’t quit when the world doesn’t end on the day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date, and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.

So I can tell you some facts. I know you haven’t read any of what I am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally don’t report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn’t give a damn.

I can tell you that second hand smoke is not a health hazard to anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage the US land area that is taken by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5%. I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century. Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally new technology-like nuclear fusion-was necessary, otherwise nothing could be done and in the meantime all efforts would be a waste of time.

I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead.

The United States is one of the cleanest countries in the World thanks to the common sense practices of the environmental movement. Cars are cleaner, air and rivers are cleaner, healthy food is produced economically and on vast scales to feed everyone. But the shrill panicked outcries of some environmentalists regarding a doomsday are based more on religious convictions than science.

Like This Post? Rate it and tell your friends! Click the Share button below.