Guest post: Climate Change - Science or Religion?


Matthew Sann of the GloWarming Skeptics blog asks whether the science has been lost in the climate change debate?


Is anthropogenic climate change science (ACC), or has it been transformed into a religion? To understand this question we must first start at the beginning.

According to the original anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory, human emissions are causing an increase in greenhouse gases. This increase is leading to an increase of the greenhouse effect. An increase in the greenhouse effect is causing the Earth to warm. This sounds simple enough, but as more and more evidence is being revealed, proponents of AGW have changed to claiming ACC. As most of what they have claimed would be happening by now fails to manifest, the more they claim ACC.

The change from AGW to ACC is a subtle way in which those who have been pushing the whole theory of AGW can claim any extreme weather event is caused by humans. They have to do this to save whatever credibility they have left.

Unfortunately during this shift from AGW to ACC, the science appears to have gotten lost. It seems that every day someone is blaming ACC for everything from the wildfires in California to Lake Chad disappearing. Increasingly there is a trend of supposed scientists predicting more and more outrageous disasters. The most ridiculous came this past summer when in an article in the UK Guardian Bill McGuire makes the claim that an increase in global temperatures will lead to more volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and landslides.

ACC has several components that are similar to a religion rather than science. The first of which is they both require faith. The scientific evidence is very sketchy that ACC is real. There is also some scientific evidence that God is real.

Another aspect of ACC and religion have in common is that they both have the element of evil. In religion, evil is described as being controlled by the devil or some other supernatural entity. With ACC, humans and their emissions of greenhouse gases control evil.

With ACC there are several good forces: the IPCC, environmentalist, Al Gore, Dr. James Hansen, etc. In religion there are also several forces of good. First there is God and then there are the angels.

Both religion and ACC have a method of redemption. In religion, redemption comes from believing and good deeds. In ACC the redemption comes by turning over your rights to a government entity, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and buying carbon offsets.

ACC cannot be proven conclusively using science and neither can the existence of God. ACC is more a religion then an actual scientific theory.

Read more from GloWarming Skeptics at http://glowarmers.blogspot.com/

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December 2nd, 2007
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Reader Comments

Comment Number:
1
Written by:
phil
Posted on:
December 4, 2007 at 8:40 am

>> This sounds simple enough, but as more and more evidence is being revealed, proponents of AGW have changed to claiming ACC. As most of what they have claimed would be happening by now fails to manifest, the more they claim ACC.

That’s not correct at all. The difference between global warming and climate change is that climate change refers to local changes in weather patterns and climate as a result of GLOBAL increases in average temperature. It’s not something that was made up because the evidence isn’t there.

Comment Number:
2
Written by:
Brant Boucher
Posted on:
December 6, 2007 at 7:41 pm

Global warming/climate change deniers are certainly TRYING to lose the science in a web of ad hominems, red herrings and quibbles.

It’s absurd to make a semantic distinction between AGW and ACC. Temperature is part of climate. You can not change the temperature of a liquid (air) without also affecting pressure and density. These in turn determine the water-vapour bearing capacity of air, its circulation, and hence climate events.

AGW and ACC are the same thing. It’s difficult to proceed from general principles to particular instances in a chaotic system such as weather, but climate is indubitably changing and we are indubitably changing climate. Even if we weren’t, we and we alone can do anything about climate because our contributions overwhelm natural changes in greenhouse gases.

Comment Number:
3
Written by:
MPS
Posted on:
December 7, 2007 at 7:15 pm

The absurdity comes in on both sides of the argument when they don’t look at the scientific studies.

Extremists like to blame every extreme weather event on AGW even though they cannot produce one shred of scientific evidence that this is indeed the case.

Deniers will say that climate change isn’t happening even though the science is clear, climate is changing.

Then you have people like myself that have read the studies from all sides of the argument and can be fairly confident that the climate is changing, but the evidence suggests that climate change is part of natural processes and not caused by humans.

Climate has change abruptly several times since the Earth formed. It will continue to change even if we were to stop every form of emmisions and stop alter the land to suit our needs. The only thing constant about the climate is that it is always changing.

Comment Number:
4
Written by:
Steve
Posted on:
February 8, 2008 at 7:26 pm

I had trouble choosing whether I was a Red, Green or Blue person as described in TalkClimateChange’s “About” section. There is another category within which I feel more accurately described. Those who feel the evidence is strong that ACC is occurring, but understand that, as the IPCC has stated, the likelihood is 90%, and that means that with the same data 10% of the time it doesn’t mean that. The problem is that in order to maintain a feeling of the urgency that that implies, there has been almost a religiosity about that 90% figure (see if you can get ANY grant to fund research that looks into the 10%). I understand that just in order to fight the propaganda of the oil industry flack shows one must sometimes overstate his case, but sometimes a few scientists seem to get carried away by that. Now if we want to follow the precautionary prnciple that is fine, but many have really put blinders on in the \”scientific\” community, and that is a real problem for science and its legacy.