Liars for Gaia

We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

— Phil Jones, Hadley Climate Research Unit

That’s Phil Jones, of Climategate fame demonstrating that openness to skeptical inquiry that so differentiates science and reason from the closed, insular world of obscurantism and fear of the cleansing light of day that is the hallmark of the religious darkness that inspired such fearers of the intellect as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

As with soulmate Peter Gleick, who committed theft and forgery, we are instructed that he does this “for the greater good” (People may recall a little discussion about lying “for the greater good” last year in which I maintained that it is not the case that lying for Gaia is bad while lying for Jesus is good and instead insist on the Catechism’s teaching that lying is bad. Period.)

Now, in the latest “Shut up!’ he explained” moment from the faith-based climate change community somebody calls for “denialists” (read: “heretics”) to be “tracked” and their houses to be allowed to burn (you know, if they should somehow, for some reason or other, just spontaneously catch fire for some unknown reason). This is of a piece with previous pleas to “suspend democracy” (but of course only until the present crisis is past, as in 1933). Also from the totalitarian playbook comes the call to treat heretics for “mental illness” and to label them as akin to racists.

Do other scientists do this? Are there pleas to suspend democracy or label those who question Dark Matter theory as mentally ill or racist?

I hasten to add that I am not a scientist. Some form of global warming may be occurring. I presume the temperature goes up and down all the time. Change is what climate *does*. What I’m noting is not the science, but the (quite obvious) religion that is at work here: including the increasingly brittle actions of the priesthood as it fails to compel the faithful to adhere to orthodoxy. This appears to get tougher as the data comes in that Arctic and Himalayan ice is thickening, and polar bears and penguins are popping out the pups like Pez dispensers. Also, the oceans stubbornly continue to not rise and the Day After Tomorrow stubbornly refuses to arrive.

I know religion, not science. These guys act like leaders of a religion, not like scientists. Only with Catholic religion, nothing the faith proposes is actually contrary to the data science analyzes, while this particular religion is frequently contradicted by the facts–and it responds not by developing doctrine as Catholic faith does, but by demanding the houses of unbelievers burn to the ground.

Memo to Climate Change Magisteria: We Catholics tried that method of coping with realities not to our liking several centuries ago. Didn’t work. Since you seem bent on creating a religion, why not take a tip from one that’s been around the block and learn from our mistakes. Jim Lovelock seems capable of doing it. So can you.