Environmental Religiosity & the Global Warming Evangelists

I've said it before and guess will say it a whole bunch more -- Environmentalism is the Left's dominant religion and Global Warming Alarmism is its most current catechism. Case in point, the May issue of Vanity Fair Magazine -- their "Green Issue". Here's some of the table of contents:

JUNGLE LAW Decades of oil drilling in the Ecuadorean Amazon has turned hundreds of square miles of rain forest into a toxic-waste site.

GLOBAL CITIZENS
The mission: save the planet. The weapons: food, movies, wine, fashion, fame, and music, as well as science, economics, and superhuman will. From Robert Redford to Sir Nicholas Stern, to a treeful of Nobelists, V.F. pinpoints 88 crusaders whose passions have global payoffs.

DANTE'S INFERNO: GREEN EDITION
Abandon hope, all environmental sinners. George W. Bush, Michael Crichton, and Gale Norton are among those toasted as V.F. reimagines the nine circles of hell.

THE HOUR IS NEAR
With an exclusive transcript from his upcoming documentary feature, The 11th Hour, Leonardo DiCaprio steps forward to take the baton from Al Gore.

RUSH TO JUDGMENT
Lampooning environmentalists as "wackos," Rush Limbaugh lulled millions of Americans into happy complacency.

TEXAS CHAINSAW MANAGEMENT
The Bush administration has gutted decades of environmental protection, appointing energy-industry executives to uphold the very laws they'd worked against.

A CONVENIENT UNTRUTH
When scientists are united, and even corporate sponsors like ExxonMobil are backing off, how does a global-warming skeptic stay busy? As long as the media calls, Myron Ebell is happy to explain why CO2 is good. Michael Shnayerson catches him in full denial.

THE FALCON'S CALL
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got his first red-tailed hawk from his father, at age 11, and an environmental education through the ancient art of falconry. Decades later, he meets up with a small band of falconers in Wyoming's sagebrush, a wilderness being overrun by Halliburton.

AN ECO-SYSTEM OF ONE'S OWN
If you're like the average American, your daily routine—from brushing your teeth to hitting the gym—wreaks havoc around the globe.

And on, and on, and . . . I think you get the picture. Why was this ol' Okie reading the VF rag in the first place? Well, I was sitting in a Brentwood salon, waiting for the SoCal wife to get her hair all done up just so, and it was on the top of the mag pile. I used to subscribe about a decade ago, so I decided to check in and see what was up in VF land. Geez -- What a crock!

From lambasting Rush and Hannity as nothing more than money-grubbing poseurs who don't believe anything that they say, to intimating that anyone that doesn't buy into the global warming hysteria is pawn of big oil, the issue jams home the point ad infinitum that the Earth is getting warmer at a dangerous rate, that man is the cause, that disaster looms for us all -- unless we drop our drawers and let the UN shove Kyoto up our collective wazzoos.

It sure ain't easy being green enough for these folks. Telling was the article about Rush Limbaugh where they showed an aerial picture of Rush's Florida "compound" -- looks pretty sweet! But it is big, and that leaves him open to criticism for his wastefull carbon-footprint lifestyle. Funny, no mention of ol' Big Al Gore's multiple mansions, or John Edwards' 20,000-plus square foot monstrosity that gives him a place to hang when he's not out getting $400 hair cuts or massages at the Pink Sapphire. But why won't they lambaste their own? 'Cause for the Left, as long as you talk-the-talk, who cares if you walk-the-walk? Intent is all that matters for them, actions mean nothing -- except for Ed Begley, who does a fine job of walkin'-that-walk, I'll grant him that. I think he's a nut, but . . .

A quick tour around the Googlesphere shows that Myron Ebell, director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute and chairman of Cooler Heads Coalition, is vehemently hated by environmentalists, anti-industrialists and global-warming-alarmists world wide. From his CEI bio:

Among numerous recognitions, Greenpeace featured Mr. Ebell and three of his CEI colleagues in “A Field Guide to Climate Criminals” distributed at the UN climate meeting in Montreal in December 2005. Rolling Stone magazine in its November 17, 2005 issue named Mr. Ebell one of six “Misleaders” on global warming in a special feature, along with President Bush, Senator James Inhofe, and Michael Crichton. In November 2004 as a result of a BBC Radio interview, seven members of the British House of Commons from all three major parties introduced a motion to censure Mr. Ebell “in the strongest possible terms.” In its May 22, 2004 special Issues and Answers issue, National Journal profiled Mr. Ebell as one of ten people who would lead the global warming debate during the next presidential administration. The Clean Air Trust in March 2001 named Mr. Ebell its "Villain of the Month" for his role in convincing the Bush Administration not to regulate carbon dioxide emissions.

Gee, I think I like him better already! In Michael Shnayerson's VF article "A Convenient Untruth", he tries to skewer Ebell as an Exxon-Mobil patsy -- takes Ebell positions, provides a counter-argument from a global warming alarmist, then gives Ebell the last word -- kinda. Each time Ebell's arguments are stated to be nothing but the bleating of a big-oil, big-energy, pro-western-industrialist mouthpiece.

Gee, Ebell says the same thing -- with pride, natch. But, the boy is certainly "hated" by the Lefties. This blog, written by Goatchurch, is a case in point -- completely devoted to smearing Myron Ebell and promoting global warming hysteria.

Mission Statement

* Myron Ebell is an intellectual terrorist whose sole objective is to sabotage public and political understanding of climate change by lying about the soundness of the science and promoting the work of seriously flawed reports and researchers.

Like I wrote earlier, it's a religion, folks. One more example from the VF issue to drive home this point, and that is the Dante's Inferno for Global Warming Deniers. It would be pretty clever, even humorous if the rest of the rag wasn't so downright preachy -- so much so that one has to take this one at face value -- meaning that it shows how the Vanity Fair folk really feel. It's not shown on their website, so you'll have to sneak a peek at the newsstand or at your dentist's office. I'll describe what I can remember.

The "First Level of Hell" is reserved for all the tens of millions of folks that voted for Bush in '00. Gee, that's telling. Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) showing at the start.

The "Second Level of Hell" is reserved for the even larger numbers of folk that re-elected Bush in '04.

I can't remember particulars for the middle areas, but oil-industry execs and former Bush administration members make up most of those damned to the ever lower areas of Hell.

Near the bottom is a beheaded Michael Crichton, carrying his anti-global warming hysterics novel "State of Fear" -- in the heretics level of Hell.

In the next to the deepest level was Myron Ebell and a couple of others.

In the lowest level of Hell was Satan, and being chewed by his three mouths were Oklahoma Senator and global warming denier Jim Inhofe, President George Bush and VP Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton. (Wish I had 50 bucks for each time Halliburton was slammed in this issue, would probably have enough to make decent down payment on an Escalade or a Hummer!)

So, we should disregard the opinions of the 17,000 scientists that see no merit in the arguments for "mankind-caused" global warming? We should disregard the opinions of Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when he says:

"Recently many people have said that the earth is facing a crisis requiring urgent action. This statement has nothing to do with science. There is no compelling evidence that the warming trend we’ve seen will amount to anything close to catastrophe. What most commentators—and many scientists—seem to miss is that the only thing we can say with certainly about climate is that it changes."

When noted hurricane forcaster Dr. William Gray says that Al Gore is a "gross alamist" and that Big Al's predictions for storms of ever greater magnitude, caused by global warming, is a sham -- should we listen?

When, as this article by Dr. Lee C. Gerhard makes an excellent case for, the science actually tells us that warming trends in our Earth's history have precluded rising CO2 levels, not followed them, and that the historical record of climate change closely matches the records of solar activity, and is actually not even closely patterned with the rise and fall of CO2 levels -- should we ignore that science and believe those that want to scare us back to 4th Century lifestyles?

We've got radical-Islam wanting to take us back to the 7th Century, and a bunch of alarmists that want to take mankind back even further than that. What is it about the future that scares these folks so much? Maybe it's because the secular humanist movement has nothing to believe in except for mankind -- and that's plenty scary! It's not like there's any reason to consider believing in a supreme being, especially the God that is worshiped by those pesky Evangelicals that vote Republican.

Oh, by the way -- one last note on the "Dante's Global-Warming Inferno" cartoon -- At the top, walking in paradise, is good ol' Big Al Gore, carrying his "bible", his little book Earth in the Balance. Well, guess if you can't believe in a god, might as well believe in a Gore.

Like I said -- for these folks, it's a religion!

[Cross posted at Okie on the Lam]