The Global Warming Suicide Cult
By Don Feder
http://www.donfeder.com/
Posted December 26, 2007

The Global Warming movement has been compared to a religion – albeit one without God, but with a vision of sin and repentance, damnation and salvation.

Not quite.

Real religion is about improving the human condition by encouraging moral conduct in obedience to the will of God. The proponents of Global Warming are creating a suicide cult, which – if followed to its logical conclusion – will lead to human extinction.

           Forget the Kyoto Treaty. Forget the Luddite Lieberman-Warner bill to cut so-called greenhouse gas emissions by 70% by 2050, which would cost the U.S. an estimated $1 trillion and result in the loss of 3.4 million jobs. That’s just the beginning.

           Ultimately, the Global Warming crusade is a frontal assault on procreation, the family and the future of mankind.

           In the December 9^th edition of Medical Journal of Australia, Professor Barry Walters urges a one-time “baby levy” of $5,000, followed by an annual tax of $800 per child, on Australian families with more than two children.

           “Every newborn baby in Australia represents a potent source of greenhouse gas emissions for an average of 80 years, not simply by breathing but by the profligate consumption of resources typical of our society,” writes Walters, who calls childbearing “greenhouse unfriendly behavior.”

           Walters will have to look hard for families to tax. Australia’s fertility rate (the number of children the average woman has) is 1.75 – well below replacement level (2.1) and less than half of what it was in 1960 (3.6) .

           Angela Conway of the Australian Family Association thinks Walters should pay his own gas tax. “I think self-important professors with silly ideas should have to pay carbon tax for all the hot air they create,” Conway says.

           Beyond the fiscal flogging to be administered to families who stubbornly continue to procreate, Walters says he wants the Australian government to consider population control measures like China’s, with its one-child-per-family policy backed by draconian penalties, sterilization and forced abortions.

           In Britain, a group called The Optimum Population Trust has the same agenda. The Trust is horrified by a brief blip in the U.K. birthrate – up from 1.8 in 2005 to 1.87 in 2006.

           It notes that the lifetime energy consumption, or “carbon footprint,” of a child born in Britain today is the equivalent of 620 roundtrip, trans-Atlantic flights. The Trust urges government coercion for Brits who don’t follow the Planned Parenthood model.

 Global Warming-ists see people only as energy consumers (or pollution-generators), never as potential creators – of say a more efficient light bulb or engine, or a new way to clean the environment.

The greenhouse-gas gang is on a population-control kick.

“Human population growth is the paramount environmental issue,” says Ric Oberlink, a spokesman for the ominous-sounding Californians for Population Stabilization.  “Global warming is a very serious problem, but it is a subset of the overpopulation problem.”

Ric (dropping the consonant is his contribution to conservation) claims the problem isn’t just too many people, but too many Americans, who, by our evil nature, will consume too much energy over the course of our lives. Americans are “by far the most voracious consumers and the greatest producers of greenhouse gases per capita of any nation on earth,” Ric remarks.  

 That America has spent the past century showering prosperity on the rest of the world (not to mention defeating the twin totalitarian horrors of the 20^th. century) is irrelevant to Ric. It’s all about our voracious consumption and great production.

 “One solution to the crisis (a hot globe) is for people to stop having so many babies,” says a March 14^th  posting by Dave Johnson at that fount of idiocy, The Huffington Post. “We’ve already used up the fisheries. The cattle being raised to feed so many meat-eaters is as big a problem as the cars we’re all driving.” So the solution is to stop having babies and become bicycle-riding vegans.

 “The population explosion has severely disturbed the ecological relationships between human beings and the environment,” the Sierra Club warns. “In recognition of the growing magnitude of this conservation issue, the Sierra Club supports a greatly increased program of education on the need for population control.” The left is really into control.

 Global Warming fanaticism seems to lend itself to self-loathing. In 1989, David Graber, then a biologist with the National Park Service, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times observing: “Human happiness and certainly human fecundity are not as important as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature, but it isn’t true…We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon Earth. Until such time as homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature (by wearing natural fibers and living in trees?) some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.”

 And they call them misanthropes.

 Is the right plague what Jacques Cousteau had in mind, when he wrote in 1991: “In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.” A speaker at Gorbachev’s 1996 State of the World Forum in San Francisco called for cutting the global population by 90%. He did not specify the method.

 Most of the Global Warming-ists are content to make preposterous predictions and induce panic, while leaving their ultimate agenda unstated. 

 Thus, in accepting his politically correct Nobel Peace prize, Al Gore (the Herman Munster of Global Warming) declared that, “We have begun to wage war on the Earth itself.” Gore predicts that our trashing of the ozone layer could cause sea levels to rise by 20 feet in this century.” Would that be before or after New York City is covered by a glacier, a la “The Day After Tomorrow”?

 In a column in Sunday’s New York Times (“It’s Too Late for Later”), Thomas L. Friedman squawks: “The fact that global warming is now having such an observable effect on pillars of our ecosystem – like the frozen sea ice within the Arctic Circle, which a new study (conveniently, unnamed) says could disappear entirely during summers by 2040 – is certainly one big factor (in the change of “global consciousness”). But the other is the voracious power of today’s global economy, which has created a situation in which the world is not just getting hot, it’s getting raped.” Look at the bright side: At least when Friedman is babbling about the environment, he’s not blathering about the Middle East.

 The doomsayers notwithstanding, Global Warming is not an observable phenomenon, which is why hysteria is an essential part of the sales pitch. I write this while gazing out the window of my New England home at 12 inches of snow and ice – in mid-December, for God’s sake.

 As a group of scientists reported in a study published in last week’s online edition of the International Journal of Climatology, over the past three decades, the forecasts of computer-generated climate change models (which warming alarmists rely on) don’t correlate with actual, measurable data from weather balloons and orbiting satellites.

 But that’s just the tip of the Arctic ice cap (which, by the way, is not shrinking).

• According to Brazil’s MetSul Weather Center, this year, the Artic ice cap is within 1% of the winter norm, and winter has just begun. Ice on the southern polar ice cap has grown substantially, compared to last year.

• Australian Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney, notes that the atmospheric temperature of Mars has risen by 0.5 degrees Celsius. If only Martians would stop having so many kids with huge carbon footprints and start riding bicycles.

• Hurricane expert William Gray of Colorado State University believes the Earth will start to cool within 10 years. Neil Frank, a former director of the National Hurricane Center, calls Global Warming “a hoax.”

• Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, points out that Europe was far warmer in the Middle Ages then it is today. But the 17^th. century was much colder. (Then, it wasn’t unusual for the Thames to freeze over in the winter.) In other words -- please pay attention, Albert -- the Earth goes through periodic cycles of warming and cooling, completely unrelated to carbon emissions.

• There are now an estimated 22,000 polar bears, compared to 5,000 60 years ago. Apparently, the creatures enjoy the effects of Global Warming on their environment – witness their predilection for sunglasses and Hawaiian shirts.

• The temperature in Greenland is lower now then it was in 1940.

• A thousand years ago, Viking settlers were growing crops in Greenland, which really was green. Sadly, Sven and Inga began driving SUVs and burning fossil fuels to run their 11^th. century factories. Ja, by jimmeny, the rest is history.

• Reid Bryson, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, considered the father of scientific climatology, explains: “We’ve been coming out of a Little Ice Age for 300 years. We have not been making very much carbon dioxide for 300 years.”

• From what we know about climate change over the past 12,000 years (based on historical accounts and data like growth rings on trees) the Earth’s warming and cooling cycles exactly coincide with the sun’s magnetic activity.

• How about that scientific consensus in favor of man-made Global Warming, touted by Gore and company? It’s a myth. There are plenty of scientists with the courage to call it a fraud – the 21^st century equivalent of the Piltdown Man. Others are silenced by intimidation. Scientists who are willing to go along to get along get tenure, research assistants, grants and peer recognition.

• As Lindzen explains, “Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labeled as industry stooges.” The invective is vicious. Lindzen: “I can tolerate being called a skeptic because all scientists should be skeptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all of the connotations of the Holocaust (deniers). That is an obscenity.”

Lindzen is one of those who compares the dogma of Global Warming to a religion. “Do you believe in global warming? That is a religious question. So is the second part: Are you a skeptic or a believer?”

 The professor is mistaken. Global Warming is a religion only in the sense that Jim Jones’ People’s Temple and the Heaven’s Gate were religions.

 In its more extreme variation, Global Warming is a suicide cult whose prophets and priests warm to the idea of the mass extinction of humanity.

While many warming alarmists are content to repeal the industrial revolution, and others favor the end of civilization through gradual de-population (worldwide, fertility rates have declined by 50% in the past half-century, and still they carry on about over-population), others are more ambitious.

Underlying the left’s agenda has always been a hatred of humanity. Enlightenment philosophers hated mankind because our nature wouldn’t conform to their utopian ideals.

Marxists hated us because we were selfish beasts who stupidly refused to embrace scientific socialism. Ah, the misuses of science.

An earlier generation of ecologists hated us for polluting, for despoiling virgin wilderness with skyscrapers and shopping malls, for not allowing them to contemplate pristine nature from their vacation homes.

Animal rights activists hate us for dominating other species.

And Global-Warming-ists hate us for having children, not driving hybrid cars, destroying the ozone layer with CO2 emissions, making life miserable for the penguins and polar bears, and, eventually – according to their nightmare scenarios – making the Earth uninhabitable.

Hence, the inevitable conclusion: The world would be better off with all of us dead.

• “Given the total, absolute disappearance of Homo sapiens, then not only would the Earth’s community of Life continue to exist, but in all probability, its well-being enhanced. Our presence in short is not needed,” Paul Taylor in “Respect for Nature, A Theory of Environmental Ethics.”

• “We have no problem in principle with humans reducing their numbers by killing one another. It’s an excellent way of making humans extinct,” a spokes-creature for the Gaia Liberation Front.

• “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs,” John Davis, editor of the journal Earth First.

• In the book “The World Without Us,” Alan Weisman celebrates what he sees as the inevitable extinction of humanity, as vine and branch, deer and bear, reclaim our cities.

• There’s even a Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which describes itself as “the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.” VHEMT explains that “the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens… us.”

• Continuing with this cheery line of thought: “When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth’s biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve … and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature’s ‘experiments’ have done throughout the eons.” Is that why liberals seem to be disappearing?

The let’s-all-die-for the-planet movement may be the fringe of Global Warming. But their conclusion is the logical expression of its ethos. Why settle for the gradual extinction of humanity through below-replacement birthrates and deindustrialization when we can accomplish the same thing in a generation? (For other Global Warming-ists, their death wish is more subconscious.)

 But rather than having the decency to just kill themselves, they need to make a statement – like the poor bastards who go to a mall with a high-powered rifle to see how many innocent bystanders they can take with them.

 If you see Al Gore in a shopping center with what looks like a semi-automatic – or at a podium handing out Kool-Aid -- run.

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An earlier version of this commentary appeared at GrassTopsUSA.com