A Pro-Human Take on Climate Alarmism

Michael Shellenberger has written a must-read essay (just north of 10,000 words) in which he starts by calling global warming/climate change/the climate crisis/whatever the left feels like calling it today our most "exaggerated" problem and asks along the way:

Why kill ourselves trying to eliminate a problem that just isn't that severe?

Most interestingly, after making the case that climate change is not a major problem -- but that current ideas for combating it would be -- he compares climate catastrophism to a religion:

Image by Boudewijn Huysmans, via Unsplash, license.

... According to their holy scripture, the industrial revolution, powered by fossil fuels, was our fall -- and the consequence is, according to the United Nations, "extinction." The only alternative is puritan: don't eat meat and don't fly. There are even indulgences, for the wealthy who feel guilty, in the form of carbon offsets sold through the airlines.

This is the heart of the matter: climate alarmism is powerful because it has emerged as the alternative religion for supposedly secular people, providing many of the same psychological benefits as traditional faith. It offers a purpose -- to save the world from climate change -- and a story that casts the alarmists as heroes. And it provides a way for them to find meaning in their lives -- while retaining the illusion that they are people of science and reason, not superstition and fantasy.

Naturally, as a religion, climate change has a fraudulent aspect. Some offsets pay rich landowners not to cut down trees they could not profitably cut down anyway. Exposed, the climate religion seeks to censor. The American government's Forest Service has repeatedly silenced one of California's most published and respected scientists, Malcolm North, who stressed to me and other reporters that the cause of high-intensity forest fires is not climate change, but rather wood fuel. The Center for American Progress, which raises tens of millions from natural gas, renewable energy, and financial interests, has been pressuring Facebook to censor critics of renewable energy. [bold added]

This remarkable claim calls for remarkable proof -- which Shellenberger's previous material supplies in the best way possible short of a read of his excellent Apocalypse Never.

What I like about the essay is that it presents solid evidence that not only is the world warming more slowly than you would think, but that the warmists would, for poor reasons, deny us the means to continue preserving our life from natural disasters or to adapt to any changes in the climate -- including, for example, the use of nuclear and hydroelectric power.

In doing so, it presents a question alarmists need to be asked (and the rest of us need to be aware of): Do you value human flourishing or untouched nature more? Man must change nature to survive -- something Shellenberger embraces, while the doomsday cult of global warming rejects it.

I highly recommend reading this essay and passing it along to any thoughtful, persuadable people you know.

-- CAV