I myself am I Christian, and the more I see of the world today the more convinced I am that for some people science has replaced religion, and in turn become its own religion. You only need to look at climate change to see the trappings of a religion. We hear phrases like, “trust the science,” “believe the science,” and “the science is settled.” These remind me of religious mantras, like believe in God, or trust in Jesus. There is also the idea that the matter is settled, and cannot be questioned, as if it is something written in scripture. If you dare to disagree with climate orthodoxy you are labelled a “denier,” a modern day heretic and cast out, excommunicated, or as we like to say today, “cancelled.”
I, like many others, don’t deny the climate is changing. It has always changed and always will. When trying to explain this to climate zealots you get the slur “climate denier,” generally used to try and silence anyone with a dissenting opinion. It carried with it the charge of not knowing or not being smart enough to understand “The Science.” So let’s look at the science. We often hear phrases like the hottest/wettest week/month/year on record. But how far back do the records go? Modern weather stations started in the 1800s. Temperatures were taken in England from the late 1600s. Sounds impressive? Not really. According to the science the Earth is roughly 4 billion years old. So give or take a few hundred years, we have 4 billion years of missing data. Not very scientific, is it? Yet the news media constantly bombards us with stories about how this is the worst weather event since records began.
Why? As humans we are given to thinking short-term. We often concentrate on having our immediate needs met. If we are cold, hungry, have nowhere to live then these get priority. We also tend to think in relatively short-term timescales. Yes, a few hundred years is a long time when compared to a human lifespan. But when compared to a geological age it’s the blink of an eye. Indeed the climate has been both warmer and colder than it is now in the relatively recent past, say the last few thousand years. In Wales, iron age hill farms show evidence of farming at higher altitudes. There are furrows, farming equipment, etc left behind in the archaeological record. Those higher areas are no longer farmed. They were able to in the past as the climate was warmer. When things cooled down settlements went lower. Warm periods also included classical antiquity. Civilisations such as the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians thrived and expanded. The high Middle Ages was also a warmer period, giving rise to the Renaissance among other things. Colder periods in the 16th and 17th centuries saw harvest failures in Elizabethan England, leading to an increase in poverty and Elizabeth passing numerous laws against begging and vagrancy in an effort to control it. All these things happened well before industrialisation.
Add to this the idea of carbon as the driving force of earths temperature. Today we are told we have record amounts of carbon, 419 parts per million. This works out at about 0.04% of the Earth’s atmosphere. And this is supposed to be the main driver of temperature. Not for example, the sun which has provided all of earth’s heat and light for the last 4 billion years. Or the Earth’s orbit around the sun varying, or its axis of tilt changing. When asked about past ice ages, the climate zealot will reply that these were of course naturally occurring, but that all of today’s changes are caused by man because carbon. Okay then, that sounds completely scientific. So I often ask about the other greenhouse gases. Usually to be met with a blank look. You know the other gases, nitrous oxide, ozone, water vapour. I ask what we are doing about those, and why we only focus on carbon dioxide. At this point their eyes usually glaze over and I’m called far-right. It seems it is difficult to break the religious programming.
Having studied history, this is not a new phenomenon. History is littered with end of the world cults and groups thinking that they must act or disaster will not be avoided. The first millennium in the year 1,000 AD saw rampant end of the world fervour, with belief by some that Jesus would return and the rapture would ensue. Fast forward to the year 2,000 and we have the Y2K bug that was supposed to wipe us all out. Computers would implode, technology would fail, planes would fall out of the sky. Religion replaced by science, but the same ideas.
When the plague arrived in Europe there were people who blamed God, the Devil, planets in the heavens, etc. Groups of flagellants went around whipping themselves to remove sin. Crazy right? Cast your mind back to 2020 and the pandemic. People refused to go outside at the thought of catching a cold because the TV told them not to. There was the ide a cloth mask would stop a virus, and that if you sat down and ate a scotch egg in a pub you were safe, whereas if you stood at the bar with a pint you were surely doomed. People became fanatical in their beliefs, even banging post and pans and clapping to worship the NHS. Scientists and doctors appeared on TV giving prophecies of doom, like old fashioned preachers from a pulpit. People lapped it up.
The more things change the more they stay the same. An old phrase, but a true one. This is because people are the same, throughout history. They have the same motivation and drives. We like to think we are enlightened beings but our behaviour during Covid shows we are not. Many showed unthinking obedience to the science, which was flimsy at best. We had a vaccine that we were told would stop the spread and unlock us from our homes and provide freedom. Yet people still got Covid, and it kept spreading. So the narrative changed to actually that’s not what vaccines do, they stop you getting really ill, but don’t stop you getting it or passing it on. This is different to any vaccination campaign in history, and I am not anti-vaccine. My parents remember queueing around the block for the small pox vaccine. Smallpox which had a roughly 30%-50% fatality rate. I asked them why, they said so we didn’t get small pox. Note the language. Vaccines are meant to stop you getting a disease, and to stop you passing it on. Always were. Except this one. You explained this to people at the time and were called anti-vaxx, a denier.
Added to this were the lockdowns, acts of national suicide damaging our health, economy, culture and fabric of society. Yet we did them because the science told us to, and we blindly followed. Yet every pandemic in history has been resolved by the disease burning itself out or mutating into a less harmful strain, which is exactly what Covid did. With a death rate of 0.1% the vast majority of people were not at risk. We could have maintained an open way of life, with those most at risk shielded until the virus burned out. But we blindly followed the mantras of scientists and doctors at the time, who were again thinking short term. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren will still be paying for all the debt we racked up at this time. Yet the warning were there. Science has failed before. I remember being told not to eat eggs, as they would give me cholesterol and I would eventually have a heart attack. We’ve all seen pictures of the thalidomide babies. So what happened?
As mentioned, human behaviour rarely changes and is the same as it ever was. As people we like to understand what is going on, find reason and meaning when something happens. We don’t like to think that some things change without our influence, such as the climate, or that natural disasters happen and there’s nothing we can do abut them. It makes us feel small and powerless in the world, that we are not in control. So, we look for reasons and meaning and ascribe blame. The weather is bad. Well, then someone must be to blame. Or we are to blame, and must atone somehow. In the same way those in the middle ages prayed or whipped themselves, believing they were being punished by God and needed to remove sin, we see nature as punishing us and we must remove the carbon. It is no surprise that modern day groups like Just Stop oil are eerily familiar, they are modern day flagellants taking extreme action. The ide we have done something bad and need to change in order to influence events is not new. In the Byzantine Empire, they were to them inexplicably losing to Arab armies. Many blamed the worship of images, and the iconoclast movement was born, smashing religious images in the hope of appeasing God and granting victory. Today we have the idea that if only the misbelievers would rip out their gas boilers and replace them with expensive and inefficient heat pumps, the world will be saved. As the saying goes, there is nothing new under the sun.
© Jonathon Davies 2023
