Editorials

When Science Becomes its Own Church

Even the Left is lamenting the testimony, or lack thereof, Sierra Club president Aaron Mair gave to the Senate Judiciary committee headed by Ted Cruz two days ago. You can see a transcript here at Breitbart or a YouTube video here.

My best argument for years with environmentalists in general has been that everything they insist today is ‘accepted science’ about climate change (global warming) could never be proved in a court of law where the Rules of Evidence are enforced. Mair’s kind of testimony would never be allowed into evidence as it doesn’t meet the minimum standards for being probative, as being hearsay, or not meeting the “best evidence” (original source) rule.

“Where did you learn about this scientific consensus, Mr Mair?” “Oh, I saw it on the internet.”

Mr Mair couldn’t quality as an expert witness, nor could Al Gore. If  either tried, you’d hear a lot of “Your Honor, I object. Relevance. Hearsay.” and a lot of “Sustained” by the judge.

Why a conservative group hasn’t done a 20-30 minute dramatic depiction of Gore trying to make his case in court would be worth millions to the cause of climate sanity.

No judge would ever allow either Gore or Mair to sit in front of a jury and bloviate about “facts” they couldn’t prove in a hundred years. But the Left knows this, and has known if for over a century, which is why they have used political forums instead, where, as we have seen over and over again, there is no authority like a judge who can bring the gavel down on their bloviations. In fact, they don’t even have to worry about an impartial jury, for they can bring their own.

About this climate crisis, they’ve been at this for over 20 years, beginning with the Clinton Administration, when global cooling suddenly lost favor with the Left, and global warming replaced it, just as ambient earth temperatures began to level off from the great shut down of American fossil fuel emissions in the 1970s. I was a law clerk in a state environmental regulatory agency in 1970 when Nixon created the EPA, and know that by the time Clinton took office in 1993, we had already reduced air pollution (as it was called then) by 90%-95%, so were a little stunned that Clinton would resurrect the issue…for the children…with asthma…as a way to increase tax revenues into federal environmental agencies. That same year, then-VP Al Gore published his first best seller, Earth in the Balance and what began as a simple concerto for strings with lies has grown into a symphony for full orchestra and choir with doctored film, with several movements that seem to have no end.

You see, it has become so large this orchestra can now afford to play before a packed house…of graduates from their own music academies, no longer needing a ticket-buying public.

After his failed presidential bid, Gore turned to brokering his carbon-for-trade business, writing books, and making speeches before audiences composed largely of political beneficiaries of his hoax, and the generation of young goof balls that weren’t even born when he wrote his first book. (This is big business now, it’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars in university grants in America alone, and much more worldwide, thanks to UN cooperation and mostly American (taxpayers’) money…and if you throw in built-to-fail scams like Solyndra, a political money-laundering scheme that never quits giving.  And like Richard Dawkins, the militant-atheist cum scientist who kept getting stomped in debates with Creationist scholars, who like the 13th Century Christian disputationist Ramon Lull (12th C), uses Aristotelian logic instead of Scriptures, Gore, having less than 50% of the intellect of Dawkins, long ago gave up public debate about “his science.” He won’t even do an interview that isn’t solicitous and pandering.

Since 1993, back to back to back, Gore wrote:  The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change (2013), Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis (2009), The Assault on Reason (2008), An Inconvenient Truth (2006). All best sellers. But does anyone actually believe Al Gore wrote these books, or could even pass a test based on the “facts” he laid out?

Which brings us back to Aaron Mair of the Sierra Club, the most venerable of “preservationist” environmental groups going back to John Muir, from the Teddy Roosevelt era when progressivism was at least half-way respectable to the public. I still remember David Brower, a true leftie of the Bernie Sanders mold, as honest as he was wrong. And I always admired Brower for that, even 30 years ago. Besides, he still liked to hug trees. The Club fired him in 1987 and replaced him with a lawyer. (When I left law school in 1971 I noted that the law classes that came in behind me were 2x-3x the size of my class, and almost a third of them were graduates with science and engineering under-graduate degrees. So there was no doubt where law was going in the 70s and 80s, and it wasn’t chasing ambulances.

So here we are 45 years later and now the Sierra Club is run by a president who could only pass muster as an expert in a courtroom if he qualified as a political operative who knows his way around bureaucracy. Environmentally, even to rudimentary environmental science, he is a know-nothing. And he showed his ignorance in his exchange with Ted Cruz.

But this incompetent’s position tells us much about the maturation of the entire climate change movement. It has moved into a second generation. It is no longer just political, and no longer has to even pretend to be scientific, as people commonly understand it to be. It has now risen to full-blown religion status, and now comes complete, as just mentioned, with its own home grown congregations, who’ve attended Climate Science Sunday School since they were 8, just like we used to do when we first learned about Noah, Daniel and the lion’s den and the little Baby Jesus.

Our children’s “age of belief” has been high-jacked. Children are most impressionable when they are 8-10 years old, and take to heart almost anything that is fed to them if offered with a dash of heroism and a splash of pathos. It seems America’s parents have been outbid with the 8-10 year olds…just in case you’re interested in knowing what this war on religion is all about.

It’s about the new religion. You see, the Left always knew kids had to have something to believe in. Al Gore is their arch-bishop.

It’s interesting that only yesterday I told some groupie that common sense could tell Aaron Mair was hiding something, and that skepticism was natural, as all science is based on skepticism. He corrected me by saying, “How can anyone be skeptical about the fact that the earth revolves around the sun?” It never takes them long to show you how old they are, so I replied, “Well, to be begin with, skepticism is what taught us that fact in the first place, since for 1000 years the received wisdom, as handed down by the Church of Rome, was that the sun revolved around the earth.”

So what we have here now is a religion, full-fledged medieval religion; the Church of Climate Science, who wants to put anyone who disagrees it in in jail. Or on the rack. (Don’t smirk.) Ramon Lull taught us 900 years ago, when the other side has their own holy books, saying only “It is written” won’t get you anywhere if what you want to do is cause your opponent to question himself about the logic or depth of his own religion. Though the Left is largely certifiably delusional and must be fought in other institutional ways (e.g., in public schools) self-reflection happens more than you know. It’s worth your time. As a Christian who doesn’t like Bible-thumping I much prefer reason and logic to overcome any religionist from the other side (the Left is its own religion, the Church of Climate Science a mere sect inside it), for as Richard Dawkins found out, it forces them into corners from which they can’t escape. Many are able to work their way back to the top of their closet for a period of self-reflection.

Aaron Mair proves that if it walks like a religion and talks like a religion, and wants to hunt and punish like a religion, it’s a medieval religion. If you can find a difference between the modern climate science movement and the 14th Century Church, let me know.

 

 

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