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people still feel the need both for the comfort and for the transcendent values that religion
canprovide.Itisthequasi-religionofgreenalarmismandglobalsalvationism,ofwhichthe
climate change dogma is the prime example, which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned
questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege.
The parallel goes deeper. As I mentioned earlier, throughout the ages the weather has
been an important part of the religious narrative.
In primitive societies it was customary for extreme weather events to be explained
as punishment from the gods for the sins of the people; and there is no shortage of this
theme in the Bible, either—particularly, but not exclusively, in the Old Testament. The
contemporary version of this is that, as a result of heedless industrialisation within a
framework of materialistic capitalism, we have directly (albeit not deliberately) perverted
the weather, and will duly receive our comeuppance.
There is another aspect, too, which may account for the appeal of this so-called
explanation.Throughouttheages,somethingdeepinman'spsychehasmadehimreceptive
to apocalyptic warnings that the end of the world is nigh. And almost all of us, whether
we like it or not, are imbued with feelings of guilt and a sense of sin. How much
less uncomfortable it is, how much more convenient, to divert attention away from our
individual sins and reasons to feel guilty, and to sublimate them in collective guilt and
collective sin.
Why does this matter? It matters, and matters a great deal, on two quite separate
grounds.Thefirstisthatithasgonealongwaytowardsusheringinanewageofunreason.
It is a cruel irony that, while it was science which, more than anything else, was able by its
great achievements, to establish the age of reason, it is all too many climate scientists and
their hangers-on who have become the high priests of a new age of unreason.
But what moves me most is that the policies invoked in its name are grossly immoral.
We have, in the UK, devised the most blatant transfer of wealth from the poor to the
rich—and I am slightly surprised that it is so strongly supported by those who consider
themselves to be the tribunes of the people and politically on the left. I refer to our system
of heavily subsidising wealthy landlords to have wind farms on their land, so that the poor
can be supplied with one of the most expensive forms of electricity known to man.
This is also, of course, inflicting increasing damage on the British economy, to no
useful purpose whatever. More serious morally—because it is on a much larger scale—is
the perverse intergenerational transfer of wealth implied by orthodox climate change
policies. It is not much in dispute that future generations, those yet unborn, will be
wealthier than those alive today—ourselves, our children, and for many of us our
grandchildren.Thisistheinevitableconsequenceoftheprojectedeconomicgrowthwhich,
on a 'business as usual' basis, drives the increased carbon emissions which in turn
determine the projected future warming. It is surely perverse that those alive today should
be told that they must impoverish themselves—by abandoning what is far and away
