All you unbelievers are going to burn in hell and probably take New York city with you!

Courtesy of Jewel Samad, AFP, Getty Images

Isn’t this a great picture of the Goreacle!

It reminds me of one of those old U.S. military recruiting posters, the ones the said “Uncle Sam want you”.

Except I don’t think the Reverend Gore is asking for people to follow him, since he generally only preaches to the choir. I think he is suggesting that bad things will (or should) happen to those who don’t follow his religion.

Like these folks, for example, and this guy.

And, he is not alone. Here is another pastor predicting the end of the world after receiving personal advice from God. He is suggesting stockpiling supplies for 30 days, an odd thing to do if the world is about to end. Perhaps the triggering event, which he predicts will occur in New York city, has to do with the deniers' meeting and Al Gore’s curse.

The new secular religion of environmentalism

From time to time I carry on an e-mail debate with one of the senior editors of one of the Toronto daily newspapers. He is one of the few that spends some time crossing swords with his readers. Many columnists don’t acknowledge you, especially if you have disagreed with their points of view. This guy is different and I enjoy our infrequent interchanges.

Recently, I sent him a commentary on how I saw the new secular religion of environmentalism. He liked it, and said it was the best description of it he’d seen, it was “brilliant”. It is not often one receives such high praise from a hard-boiled newspaper editor, so I thought I would reproduce it below:

“It is now trite to say that environmentalism has become the new secular religion. It has its God (the IPCC), its dogma (curb CO2 at all costs), its high priests (Al Gore and David Suzuki), it has a narrative (human destruction of the planet), it has breakaway sects (the people who advocate non-reproduction of humans), it has apocalyptic predictions about the end of the world (mainly Gore's Inconvenient Truth) and it has a Bible (the Kyoto Protocol), and if one only follows the path, the people on the Earth will be saved.”

That was the paragraph he really liked. I don’t believe he bought into the one that followed:

“When you say you believe in the IPCC (i.e. you believe in God) but not in the literal truth of the Bible (Kyoto), then the fundamentalists attack you for your lack of faith -- you are a mere deist. The funny thing about religions is that you think you are disputing only the actual beliefs and not the people who believe them. But people's egos are so tied to their belief systems that any attack on it cannot be seen as anything but an attack on them.”

Morally Relative Capitalists

For my three or four readers, my sincerest apologies for not blogging for these many months. I will make more effort to keep it up and make it interesting. To wit:

There are a number of Canadians who are anti-capitalist, western civilization loathing types. Their dislike of capitalism shows up in many contexts.

One that has always amused me is the dismissal by these folks of the opinion of scientists who dissent from the global warming hysteria of environmentalists like Al Gore and David Suzuki. The argument usually runs like this: Gore should be believed because he is trying to "save the planet", whereas these skeptics work for public policy organizations that accept money from rapacious capitalistic companies like Exxon and their opinions should be dismissed without consideration on their merits for that reason alone.

When you look at the financial reports of some of these public policy organizations you find that Exxon's contributions are very small potatoes in the overall budget of the organizations. In fact, Greepeace has a website devoted to exposing Exxon's "secret" donations, totally some $3.5 million annually distributed amongst 49 "front" organizations. It is difficult to understand how an internationally publicly traded company can have such secrets, but thank heavens Greepeace was there to "out" them.

One of these terrible public policy institutes that was fingered by Greenpeace, for example, the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco, according to its 2004 Annual Report (see page 41 of the document) had a budget of approximately $4.1 million and received $45,000 from Exxon in 2003. This amounted to 1% of its overall budget and only 9% of all corporate donations received by the PRI that year. In other years the PRI was getting sums from Exxon of $15k to $95k. Is it credible to assume that these paltry sums are enough to discredit the objectivity of such an organization?

It is clear that Exxon, by only spending a miserly $3.5 million a year is losing the war of warming discreditation. One wonders why, if discrediting global warming science is an important objective of this oil company, as alleged by Greenpeace, it would not have spent more money doing so. After all, in 2007, Exxon's profits were $39.5 billion dollars. It's expenditure on the "secret" fight against global warming amounts to just 9/1000th of 1% of its profits. Could it be that Greepeace is mistaken? Could it be that Exxon doesn't really care one way or another about the global warming controversy?

I never really understood the Exxon versus global warming argument anyway, since any extra costs imposed on Exxon and other fossil fuel companies to combat so-called global warming will simply get passed on to consumers. So why would they care that much about discrediting global warming science?

On the other hand, there are people who care very deeply about whipping up the public fright on climate change. Al Gore is making millions selling something called "carbon credits". I have often referred to him as a snakeoil salesman for this very reason. Now it appears, from this story in the International Herald Tribune, that other billionaires are following Gore's pioneering and are plotting to cash in on the climate hysteria.

I guess as long as capitalists are profiting from "saving the planet" they are morally superior to capitalists who are profiting from warming our homes in the winter and cooling them in the summer and providing fuel for our transportation to our jobs and vacation destinations.

Now for something completely different

Here is a refreshing site. This is a greeny organization whose executive director, Lawrence Solomon, has written a series of articles profiling global warming dissenters (I prefer that term to Al Gore's "deniers" -- it sounds more democratic). Some of these dissenters are actually scientists who were asked to be part of the IPCC process, and who have distanced themselves from it.

Is Canada Ready?

If you would like a little relief from the Al Gore version of what global warming means, take a look at a site called "Is Canada Ready". There are some nifty charts and graphics and the cyclical theory of ice ages is simply explained here.