Barone On Gores Secular Faith - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S AN inexhaustible topic, the solipsism of the baby-boom generation, the idea that the world revolves around the wonderful evolved people who came to consciousness in the 1960s.

And that goes for Al Gore, baby-boomer almost, and his global-warming belief system, writes Michael Barone.

Gore and his followers seem to assume that the ideal climate was the one they got used to when they were growing up.

We’re told in effect that the climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s was, of all those that have ever existed, the best of all possible climates. Not by science. But as a matter of faith.

The trouble is that the climate of the earth has always fluctuated—in all times scales. And in the past climate has changed a lot faster than it is doing right now.

Writes Barone: “Even The New York Times bridles” at Gore’s exaggerations.

After Gore won the Academy Award for his film on climate change, the Times printed an article in which respected scientists — not Republicans, not on oil company payrolls — charged that Gore has vastly exaggerated the likelihood of catastrophic effects.

It comes down to a matter of spirituality, the baby-boomer word for religious faith.

The natural human yearning for spirituality has produced in many people educated in secular-minded universities and enveloped in an atmosphere of contempt for traditional religion a faith that we vulgar human beings have a sacred obligation not to inflict damage on Mother Earth.

Of course, Gore and his pals do not intend to change their ways. It is the great unwashed, you and me, who will make the great sacrifice to propitiate the climate change gods.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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