Many people in this post-Christian, post-truth era still feel the human need to believe in something to make their time here on earth seem meaningful. Having moved up Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs, the ultimate self-realization beckons. Passionate engagement in climate change fits the bill, with the reassurance of emotional group belief, chanting, protest and action against the devil of unbelievers under the ominous threat of great global catastrophe. As passions mount, facts and reason fade.

History tells

History is instructive about evolution of the climate change religion in the context of other waves of mania.

In the previous century the Australian government sponsored the Energy R&D Corporation, which was converted overnight in 2000 to the Australian Greenhouse Office. The AGO sought to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by implementing 20% renewables by 2020 from a zero base.

Channeling the 1990 Copenhagen conference, environmental sustainability became the new catch cry. Everyone wanted to save the planet: just how to do so became the issue as best brains committed to finding solutions.

But wait, in no time environmental sustainability morphed into global warming, orchestrated by scientists noting minor variations in temperature that caused some bleaching across the 2400km longitude of the Great Barrier Reef and regularly occurring droughts that are a natural, if unwelcome feature of Australia’s climate.

Zealots claimed that temperatures would continue to rise, ice caps would melt, the dams would never be filled, the GB Reef would be destroyed, Pacific islands would be inundated displacing populations, and we would be unable to feed the billions of people on the planet.

When the temperature and Pacific islands stabilized, world food production increased, global warming lost out as a religious brand to climate change, which is reaching high fervor in the election campaign.

Fry and Die Urgency

We will fry and die in 10 years ill-informed protesting children shout and lament, while child actor Stella Brazier, an activist supporting Zali Steggall’s bid against Tony Abbott in Warringah, breaks down and weeps on cue for the TV cameras, whipping up the frenzy for the media. Norwegian child activist Greta Thunberg lectured world leaders at Davos, the Pope in Rome and the British parliament about her concerns for the planet. So called independent candidates all claim action on climate change is their priority, adding to the momentum.

The ineffectual United Nations and the discredited International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is driving the global Gaia. At considerable cost to the economy from subsidies in renewables and higher energy costs, Australia is doing its bit to reduce global emissions before it’s too late. Never mind that USA, China, India and Africa haven’t signed up for the same commitment to economy crippling action and budget stretching payment.

Follow the money. Under the guise of saving the planet, Australia and other responsible nations are asked to pay $hundreds of billions to the UN to be channeled to developing countries to help them deal with the effects of climate change, without ever so much as getting an accounting of how that money will be spent. Opportunities for corruption abound.

Not only that, whipped up urgency to save the planet means great pools of research funds have been directed into finding solutions, corrupting science. The IPCC has been discredited for falsehoods. A study by Professor Ian Plimer of the 97% of ‘settled science’ claimed by devotees of the religion showed most research papers merely reaffirmed each other, rather than replicated science to prove hypotheses. Prof. Peter Ridd was sacked by James Cook University for suggesting as much regarding the Great Barrier Reef science.

The Climate Change Religion

In a pattern of suffocating cultural conformity, money, power, research and politics swirl in the great corruption go-round of the climate change religion, featuring :

• Fervent beliefs undeterred by facts, costs, futility or harm caused (20,000 recorded as dying from the cold in the UK);
• Irrelevant consequences, dismissive of the damage it wreaks as mere detritus on the path to salvation (Ergas)
• Demagogy and fanaticism
• Appeals to emotion and backs turned on reason
• Apostasy, proselytizing zealots and climate change prophets
• Champions and inspirational, saintly child prophets
• Judgment and public shaming for lax adherents and deniers as immoral and unworthy
• Money for indulgences sent to the UN and never seen again (shades of seeds of the Reformation, when absolution could be bought)
• Overseas carbon credits
• Bottomless subsidies to business and those who can afford installation of solar panels
• Black Tulip like mass mania for investment in renewable technology, with taxpayer subsidies, without any assessment of the life cycle cost/benefit of manufacturing, transport, building, operating and disposing of wind mills, solar panels and batteries, all of which have a use-by date. A future waste recycling /disposal issue threatens.

Respect, facts and reasoned debate have gone by the board in this religion. No seeking of truth or valuing of difference.

Not the first time the end of the world is nigh

Climate Change is not the first time the end of the world has been deemed nigh. Mania follows the money.

• Inconvenient Truth:Al Gore became a billionaire traipsing around the globe spouting his Inconvenient Truth, which is still promoted to vulnerable children in schools.  Gore claimed that if we did not take “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gases, the world would reach a “point of no return” within ten years. He declared it a “true planetary emergency.” Gore’s ten years are up!
• Gore predicted increasing storms, more and larger hurricanes, melting ice, rising seas, dying polar bears and dangerous increases in deadly CO2.  Every one of these predictions is demonstrably wrong. In fact, increased levels of CO2 act as a fertilizer. Indeed, commercial greenhouses use carbon dioxide generators to increase growth and production.  Carbon Dioxide is NOT a pollutant, it is a plant nutrient!
• All this is a result of ignorance on the part of the people and a willingness to accept, even desire, an ever increasing and demanding federal government.

• Peak oil: This imminent catastrophe has been raised on a regular basis for 139 years. Maybe one day the catastrophists will get it right. Peak Oil is the point at which oil production, sometimes including unconventional oil sources, hits its maximum. Predicting the timing of peak oil involves estimation of future production from existing oil fields as well as future discoveries. The most influential production model is Hubbert peak theory, first proposed in the 1950s. The effect of peak oil on the world economy remains controversial.
• Since 1880 there have been 36 estimates of peak oil production, the latest in 1995 and more recently near 2000. Human innovation has resulted in changes in the mix of fuel, energy efficient cars and natural gas.

• Y2K Apocalypse: in the year 2000, at the start of a new millennium, catastrophists promoted the belief that dramatic turn of the century signalled tremendous upheaval in the world and that a period of chaos would prevail. Families and businesses invested heavily in new IT equipment under the belief that anything before the turn of the century would not “roll over” on 1 January 2000, causing calamitous disruption to life and commerce. Nothing happened!
• Population Explosion: In 1968 American biologist Paul Ehrlich gained a lot of money, followers and prominence when he vividly described how the Earth’s population, then growing by 95 million people a year, would rapidly deplete the planet’s resources, resulting in famine, global warming, acid rain, and other major problems. As we know, the population has continued to increase, innovation has spurred production of food and environmental stewardship and hundreds of millions of people have been brought out of poverty.
• Tulip mania: The speculative bubble of tulip mania occurred during the Dutch Golden age when contract prices for some bulbs of the recently introduced and fashionable tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then dramatically collapsed in February 1637. Get the drift? A lot of group think amongst interests who do not want to miss out on the band wagon and heavy investment leading to implosion.

Truth has no agenda

In all the examples of impending global catastrophe heralding the end of the world (these are only a few), emotion overrides facts, a lot of other people’s money is consumed and group think prevails in a tsunami like tide towards a reckoning that can only end in disruption and disaster.

As my Maturity Model shows, when truth is not present, burdens are loaded onto those with little choice, all parties become less mature and there are enormous social and economic costs as dissension and division ensue. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than climate changers’ manic opposition to the Adani mine in central Queensland. Those behind the goats’ cheese curtain of the inner cities, impose demands that deny Adani the right to mine, deny jobs for desperate workers, deny power to 300 million poor Indians.

Righteous rich atheists self-indulging emotionally in the religious cult of climate change may have momentum with them at the moment. Yet like all other previous catastrophic predictions, the end of the world is not nigh.

Only knowledge of the truth will reverse this. TRUTH HAS NO AGENDA.