A Great Distraction

British journalist and columnist Melanie Phillips analyzes various issues of the day, from Western dechristianization to education to Islamic terrorism, often with more moral clarity than you'll find from the ostensible Christian voices in the mainstream media.

This past week, Phillips wrote a series of entries* in her web diary on the new television documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle (on UK's Channel Four and available online) and the quasi-religious (even anti-scientific) nature of the climate change advocates.

From Melanie Phillips's Diary: "The Climate Change Truth Deniers" (March 13, 2007)

The evidence that science — as opposed to the politicised version of it — does not support global warming theory has been obvious ever since this theory first burst upon us in the late 1980s. What is only now surfacing, however, is the evidence of the corruption of the processes being used to promote this scam and the intimidation of any scientists who try to tell the truth. For me, the most explosive revelations on the C4 film were scientists testifying to this corruption — from the vast amounts of grant money being used to create an entire global warming industry making it financially difficult for scientists not to produce ‘research’ that supported the theory; to the falsification of the computer models in order to produce the alarmist predictions that would attract such funds; to the IPCC’s deletion of crucial parts of the evidence that didn’t fit the theory; to the circular argument that there was now a ‘consensus’ on the theory among all the finest minds in science around the world.

Man-made climate change is just one of many tenets of the West's secular religion (see also moral relativism, multiculturalism, and homosexual/pansexual identity). For the past four decades, these non-negotiable concepts have gained widespread acceptance among the general public and in Christian churches. (Remember last year's Evangelical Climate Initiative?)

The global warming agenda is a natural product of secular humanism. In the humanist (materialist) worldview, man and man alone controls his destiny. Only he can be the cause of man's suffering and only he can save man from that suffering. To consider other possibilities — that the weather changes are (currently) unexplainable and/or that man has no control over those changes — is unthinkable. This kind of tunnel vision is unscientific; it is, however, humanist. As Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, observes in the documentary, "The whole global warming business has become like a religion, and people who disagree are called heretics."

Thus, man-made global warming is a great distraction. Radical environmentalism appeals to man's vanity at the macro level. Its broadening influence on public and private sectors is further evidence of judgment on the West as it recklessly abandons its Judeo-Christian foundation. Time and again, the current direction of the West mirrors Paul's last-days description of vain imaginations and foolish, darkened hearts (Romans 1:21).

* 3/9: "The emperor’s green new clothes"
3/13: "The climate change truth-deniers"
3/14: "The ‘post-normal’ science of climate change"
3/15: "A post-normal conference"