As with most things, Congress is behind the times on religion. The new religion, that is – the faith that anthropogenic global warming is an urgent crisis. Mankind has sinned against Mother Gaia with our modern ways. We must repent our sins by giving up earthly goods. Or at least by paying more for them. Believers can also purchase indulgences, now called “carbon credits.”
As Congress gets set to vote today on the $2 trillion Waxman-Markey climate change bill, the village atheists are having a bit of a coming out party. The argument from consensus has long been believers’ biggest weapon, if a weak one; millions of people can be wrong, and often are.
More and more, even that argument is being taken away from them. Kim Strassel lists a few of the bigger names who are now saying the global warming debate is more about religion than science:
The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. — 13 times the number who authored the U.N.’s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world’s first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak “frankly” of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming “the worst scientific scandal in history.” Norway’s Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the “new religion.” A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton’s Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled.
Inertia Wins! 