Rush Limbaugh, when sassing the Global Warming True Believers, likes to say this: "When you don't believe in God, you'll believe in anything." Which is why otherwise intelligent people can believe that, given sufficient complication and obfuscation, 2+2 can actually, really, for-sure-n-doubt equal 5 when it comes to the environment.
I don't know if that's entirely true--there are plenty of agnostics and atheists who don't sign up for the Global Warming mythology--but it certainly doesn't help.
While I make the argument myself previously that global warming and environmentalism is a secular religion, (and extensively quote Michael Crichton, who made the argument well before me) it is, more particularly, an excellent example of magical thinking.
What is "magical thinking"? To quote Wikipedia:
In psychology and cognitive science, magical thinking is non-scientific causal reasoning (e.g. superstition). James George Frazer and Bronislaw K. Malinowski said that magic is more like science than religion, and that societies with magical beliefs often had separate religious beliefs and practices. Like science, magic is concerned with causal relations, but unlike science, it does not distinguish correlation from causation.Which is an excellent description of the nature of the consensus "science" that "proves" man-made Global Warming.
I've always loved this cartoon by Sidney Harris, where the middle of a complicated mathematical proof is "and then a miracle happens".
While I found an amazing number of liberals citing that cartoon as example of the Bush administration's Iraq strategy, I couldn't find anybody citing it as an example of the science used to "prove" the religious contentions of Global Warming. Yet I think it is much more apropos to the junk science of Man-Made Climate Change than it does to military strategy (or, as one liberal used it, as a way of discrediting the supply side idea that tax cuts lead to economic growth, although that use is inaccurate, at least such a comparison makes more sense to me than to military strategy, but I digress).
Ahem. The point is, with magical thinking: it's magic! It can be anything! Causal relationships are anything you want them to be. Correlations mean anything you want them to. It's magic!
When it's negative magical thinking--as is the doomsday alarmism of man-made Global Warming--there is no real solution, and the problem is all your fault. The problem is a well-greased pig that can never be really caught, can never really be restrained, although we are all supposed to try, because we're the dumbasses who greased the pig up in the first place.
There is not a lot on the web specifically about negative magical thinking (Google it yourself, if you don't believe me), but I found this excerpt from Building Resilience in Children Affected by HIV/AIDS by Silke-Andrea Mallmann, CPS, that will serve as a sufficient explanation:
Three months ago, six-year-old Petrus came home from school to be told by his mother that his father had died suddenly. He was sick only for a few days ... He has been withdrawn and quiet since the death of his father. He doesn’t like leaving the house to go to school. When he gets to school he is very shy....When he makes a mistake he seems frightened, compulsively erasing the mistake so that his exercise books are full of holes.All grown up, negative magic thinking has liberals, lefties, and even well-intentioned middle-of-the-roaders buying carbon offsets, buying hybrid cars, agitating to outlaw incadescent lightbulbs, demanding biofuels, and so on, so that the planet doesn't die. Even though there is no relationship between the warming--much less the "death" of--planet earth and whether or not they buy products with recycled packaing or compost at their house, they think they are saving the planet, and demand that you do the same. Yet, just as the boy in the example above was tearing up his workbook that he was erasing so much, so are the unintended consequences of the magical thinking of environmentalists prone to cause more problems than they solve. If they solve any problems, which they usually don't, because the initial problems are imaginary, and only the unintended problems caused by trying to "solve" the imaginary problems are real.
When his teacher confronted him about the holes in his books, he started to cry. When his mother asked him why he had rubbed holes in his books, he said that if he didn’t rub his mistakes out properly, his mother would die too. When his mother asked him why he thought that, Petrus said that his father had died on the day that he got into trouble for not listening at school and he had been told to repeat a whole exercise.
The example of Petrus is a typical example of a child who engages in magical thinking...Children Petrus’s age think that their own actions have a direct impact on the events that take place in their lives. In Petrus’s case, he believes that making a mistake and being scolded in school had a direct impact on his father’s death...Negative magical thinking (as in Petrus’s case) can lead to feelings of guilt and failure and have a negative impact on the child’s coping capability.
And as often as not, the real or imagined problems that liberals and lefties end up agitating about are the direct product of their previously legislated solutions to imaginary problems. Because, with negative magical thinking, there is no real solution. You can never erase enough, hard enough, fast enough. Enough is never enough.
For example: although the problem is imminent and the consequences will be disasterous, there is, at least, a promised solution--outlaw incadescent light bulbs, replace fossil fuels with bio-fuels, put solar panels on everybody's houses, get power from windmills, erase all your mistakes until the paper tears, and so on. But negative magical thinking is like one of those teenage slasher movies: you can't ever really kill the bogeyman.
So if everybody replaces their lightbulbs with fluroescent lamps, suddenly the cost and energy of manufacturing, the mercury in them, even the very wavelength of the light (I'm sure most of you remember the accusation that fluroescent lights were making people sick, or depressed and suicidal, because of the "kind of light" they put out)--all that will become an environmental disaster in the making. The solution will suddenly become the problem. Because with negative magical thinking, there can be no solution. Only the promise of one.
Since billions have been spent on nuclear energy and we were well on the way to having meaningful nuclear power that would help us become more energy indepent, it became a huge problem. It became a bogeyman for a long time--even though the only problems, ever, with nuclear plants have all been due to government mismanagement, and when the government has stepped out of direct management of nuclear power, there have been zero mishaps.
Right now, biofuels are the rage. But there is a high cost in producing them, there are energy and polution issues, refining biofuels skips all the zillions of insane regulations liberals have irrationally heaped onto the the gas and oil industry (which, I guarantee you, will be a "Big Problem" as biofuels become mainstream), ethanol adversely effects the price of staple grains in the 3rd world, and on and on and on. There are hints of it already, but biofuels will eventually be worse than oil. Because, of course, there are real problems with all energy alternatives, and because the negative magical thinking involved in Global Warming alarmism requires that the problems be insoluble, and that the cure always be worse than the disease.
And also, of course, that they never see this repeating pattern in their behavior.
If solar power was deployed widely--that is, Joe and Jane Six-Pack were using solar panels on their house--then suddenly solar power would not be a solution, it would be a problem. The heat envelope generated by the absorption of solar radiation would be causing glacial melting ten-thousand miles away that was killing the aquatic polar ice monkey. And it would all be because we hadn't outlawed SUVs and heavily taxed excessive breathing.
Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees are Global Warming.
If you've ever watched a teen slasher movie and for the umpteenth time wondered: why isn't she running? Why is she just standing there while he advances with the axe? The answer is: because there is no point. They will not get away. Even if they manage to survive this movie, they'll get killed in the sequel.
Because you cannot kill the bogeyman. And Global Warming is the current incarnation of the left's perpetual bogeyman. It will always have two unchanging aspects: it is disasterous, and it is humanity's fault. Just as Victor Von Frankenstein was to blame for the monster his scientific curiosity unleashed upon the world, so is the desire to progress, to invent, to create, to start a business and live a good life, always going to somehow, in the mind of the left, spawn some terrible palpable consequence, and one frequently global in scope. Global warming, or a new ice age, or acid rain, or the ozone hole, or Y2K, or second hand smoke, or towering infernos--whatever it is, it's a disaster, and it is humanity's fault.
M. Knight Shamaylan is currently working on a movie that, in essence, is about the earth acting as a vengeful Goddess and killing off humanity (and perhaps animal life, I'm not sure) because Man has been a poor steward of nature, what with the polluting and the SUVs and the incadescent light bulb. At one point in time the working title was, apparently, The Green Effect.
And it matches the negative thinking mythology of Global Warming perfectly. A disaster is imminent, it is apocolyptic in nature, it is largely unavoidable, it will destroy mankind as we know it: and we deserve it, because it is all our fault, and only the liberals were smart and good enough to save us, but even they--in all their power and wisdom--could not pass enough laws, nationalize enough industries, outlaw enough companies, regulate enough consumers, and imprison enough Global Warming deniers to save the world in time.
While there is an absurd presumption of center-of-the-universe power with most in the Global Warming movement (as many people, amazed at the hubris of assuming that we control the weather and have more power over the temperature of our planet than the sun, will point out), it is, like most egotism or narcissism, an illusion.
It always turns out that we are powerless to put the genie back in the bottle. We replace the old light bulbs, and the new ones will be worse. We replace fossil fuels, and the new fuels will be worse. We finally prove the planet isn't warming, and it will be cooling--so fast that an ice age is imminent. And, strangely, the culprit will always be something symbolic of man's scientific and spiritual triumphs: technology and capitalism, generally, or things like the automobile, the factory, or the light bulb in particular.
It's never, say, Hollywood movies or Cable News Networks or ecological activists that are destroying the world. It's always the meaningful achievements of man where we actually have "subdued" nature: whether it's domesticated live stock or "catching lightning in a bottle" (the electric light!), those who are Global Warming alarmists will always find some doomsday scenario in which to believe, and some area of real human progress and achievement upon which to blame their fantastical doomsday.
And, as is often the case the negative magical thinking in adults, their personal guilt and resposibility about their imagined power over the planet will manifest in them pointing the finger of blame at you, and demanding that you change your life, your lifestyle, your business, and surrender your autonomy.
So, when you have to give up your SUV, your light bulbs, your land, your right to own private property, start a business, or keep the money you earn, just remember: perserving the environment requires sacrifices from everybody.
Because everyone knows the environmental gods are angry. And angry gods demand sacrifices. So, if we just sacrifice your freedom and liberty to them, the God's will be appeased.
That's the consensus, at any rate.
