Written by by Norman Rogers at americanthinker.com
A popular saying is that those that don’t believe in God will believe in anything. Global warming provides and excellent reason for making an effort to believe in God, or at least in Judeo-Christian ideology that is the basis of our civilization.
Global warming religion originates in well-financed scientific organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The scientific basis of the catastrophe theory is junk science made to seem authoritative by dressing it up with lengthy reports based on dubious computer models. These organizations and scientists greatly benefit from rivers of government money and bask in the prestige that comes from being credible-seeming prophets.
The junk science is bad, but the camp followers in the media and environmental non-profits are far worse. They amplify the junk science claims into hysterical predictions of imminent doom. The climate science establishment mostly sits on the sidelines, the members abdicating their responsibility as public servants and apparently happy with ignorant exaggerations of their scientific conclusions.
In 2005, when I retired, I took up the study of global warming. I joined the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. I went to their annual meetings of both organizations. I exhibited posters and went to the AGU annual climate change banquet in San Francisco Chinatown. I attended Gordon Research Conferences that related to climate change. These conferences encourage open discussion by requiring attendees not to quote other attendees. I made every effort to build relationships with climate scientists.
At one Gordon Conference a former insider at the National Science Foundation stood up and said that the NSF was corrupt in various ways, for example directing grants to their friends. You could have heard a pin drop. Nobody defended the NSF and nobody agreed with the critic. They all pretended to be turtles. Presumably most of them had pending grant applications or plans to submit applications.
As President Eisenhower said in his 1961 farewell address about government support of science: “the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”
Although I was deeply invested in studying the science, the friendships with climate scientists were the most helpful aspect of my study. Very few establishment climate scientists openly depart from orthodoxy. But plenty of climate scientists doubt the orthodoxy but are afraid to speak up.