Climate change hysteria is heating up, with parts of the globe experiencing record-level temperatures. As the saying goes, never let a good crisis go to waste, and the current heat wave offers good fodder.
We should be cautious in attributing too much to this. ‘Record-level’ implies since the time of record-keeping, which is quite recent in history, especially in terms of planetary history. It’s been hot on the earth before, when much of Canada was a place where dinosaurs roamed, long before anthropogenic carbon emissions. And it’s been cold, where the same geographical region was covered in glaciers a mile thick, and we’re still just coming out of that relatively recent ice age.
Science requires that there be testable hypotheses, which means that such hypotheses can be open to verification, and, more to the point, falsification (as Karl Popper made clear). If all evidence corroborates your theory, then your theory isn’t science. Much of what ‘evidence’ there be comes from computer modeling, with which, like any algorithm, what you put it is what you get out.
There are any number of factors in the fluctuations in climate, not least helioogenic – the cycles of the Sun – along with water vapour, a much more potent ‘greenhouse gas’ than carbon dioxide. Recent volcanic eruptions likely have something to do with recent warming.
We might also add the factor of God, who sends sun and rain, hail and sleet, drought and floods – but all through the natural causes He Himself created in the beginning.
Prescinding from the science, it’s the deleterious moral – or, if you will, theological – implications of can be described as the ‘climate change cult’ that is more the problem, as we’ve written before – in fact, about this time last year, when the Holy Father, besides pushing the Covid ‘vaccine’, was also preaching the need to reduce our ‘carbon footprint’. Now, at this World Youth Day every pilgrim was required to download an app on their ubiquitous mobile phones – functioning now like the ankle bracelets of parolees – designed to measure and track their ‘carbon footprint’.
As the article goes on to say, without a hint of irony:
Organisers have planned for this year’s event to be the most “sustainable” WYD to date. Pilgrims will use the first carbon footprint calculator in the history of the WYD, which will be included in the WYD Lisbon 2023 app they must install on their mobile phone when arriving in Portugal.
The calculator works on the basis of a questionnaire. By recording their activities from their points of departure for WYD to the last day of the event, pilgrims will be able to discover their estimated carbon footprint by the end of WYD, and with the help of an associated manual, they will learn how to reduce their impact.
As in all cults, it’s best to brainwash them while young and impressionable – imprint permanent guilt for every emission of carbon, which must be minimized to the max.
The problem, of course, is that carbon is the basis for life. Carbon dioxide – not in itself a pollutant – is what we exhale, and what plants ‘breathe’. Reduction of carbon means, quite simply, the reduction of life, at least of the human kind, in quantity and quality. It is early Gnosticism redivivus, which saw fleshly existence as ‘evil’ and only the ‘spirit’ as good, and which promoted early forms of contraception, children being a bad thing, and the most noble thing you could do was commit suicide by slow starvation. Today’s saint, Dominic, founded his order to wage spiritual and theological battle against a version of these Gnostics who arose in the 12th century, the Cathars. Dominic’s message, continued by his future disciple, Saint Thomas, preached the goodness of creation, and of life, especially the human sort. The more of that, the better.
The modern Gnostics, now in a new mode, are becoming more explicit, panicking over a ‘boiling earth’, and their demand many and radical: A decrease agricultural production (at least, of fertilizer that makes growing food on any large scale possible), and far fewer humans doing far fewer things.
This, to put it mildly, is not consistent with Catholic teaching, that the Earth was made for Man, and we are to go forth, multiply and subdue nature.
But many people, and what is most tragic, the young, have rejected hope, and bought into their message of despair, wholesale.
Here is Tulsa Doom beckoning a young lass off a cliff in his own cult, in Conan the Barbarian, 1982:
Extreme and over the top, if you will pardon the pun? Well, we don’t have people (yet?) throwing themselves off cliffs at the beckoning of the climate-tulsa-dooms-sayers. Like any cult, the climate version began pleasantly and even plausibly enough, with a benign message and lots of graphs and numbers; but things have ramped up, ever so gradually, with constant repetition of looming catastrophe by our own doomsayers and, before you know it, you’re all in, mesmerized and Stockholmed.
Post-Covid, people are now being prepped for climate lockdowns, and these will have no best buy date, for there is no end on the horizon to the need to reduce carbon – the less, always, always the better. Already, legions of nubile youth are refusing to have children – or limiting themselves to the boutique boy and girl – to ‘save the planet’. How long, by the same logic, before they are convinced have themselves euthanasied, as they age and their ‘footprint’ gets too large? It may not have the drama of throwing oneself off a cliff, but the end result is the same. And how long after that before all this becomes ever-less voluntary, as the hordes are herded into their pods in 15-minute cities? Not so for the ‘elites’, of course, with their multiple mansions, private jets and six-star hotels – all necessary, of course, to spread their secular messianic message to the hoi polloi.
Are we all to become barbarians to see through the climate cult, or, indeed, any of the modern cults hypnotizing humanity? We may call to mind John the Savage, the anti-hero of Aldous Huxley’s novel, who, ironically is the only one in the novel not a savage. It is he who sees through the bland totalitarianism and soporific soma of the brave new world, as he lives out according to the culture of the brave old world, quoting Shakespeare and practising asceticism. But this Savage, like Conan, knew not why he did what he did, nor the point of it all, so ended tragically.
But we Catholics – now seen as the new barbarians – do see the ‘point of it all’, that the Earth was made for Man, and not Man for the Earth. We are made for more than this world, and to discover that, we too must go ‘into the wilderness’, which is what ‘savage’ etymologically means: to retreat from the world, to reject its insidious tyranny, its soft trappings, and even softer slavery. Think more John the Baptist than John the Savage, spiritual power, not physical, God-given, not self-imposed. We can be free if we want to – it all depends on what we’re willing to give up.
So, to the WYD pilgrims now returning to their homes: Delete that carbon-counting app on your phone, and, if you can manage it, cast the electronic ball-and-chain into the fires of Mordor.
Go into the desert. Find God, and His teaching. Live up to your Christian ideals – laugh and grow strong, as Saint Ignatius exhorted, and laugh especially at the gurus strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, after which they will be heard no more. Live and breathe, eat and drink, marry and be merry, and worry only about sin and offending God. This earth is not a spaceship with limited stores on board, but a God-given home with more than enough resources to sustain us all, at least as long as God wills. For the world as we know it is passing away, what a tragic irony it would be if we were to kill ourselves to save it.