{"id":3652,"date":"2010-01-17T09:25:10","date_gmt":"2010-01-17T17:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=3652"},"modified":"2010-01-17T09:25:10","modified_gmt":"2010-01-17T17:25:10","slug":"the-church-of-climate-change-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/the-church-of-climate-change-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The Church of Climate Change (Again)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via Andrew Sullivan<\/a>, I read that the FrumForum\u2019s Andrew Gelman is unhappy<\/a> about the way that \u201cthe newest way to slam a belief you disagree with \u2014 or maybe it\u2019s not so new \u2014 is to call it \u201creligious.\u201d For example, \u201cMarket Fundamentalism is a quasi-religious faith that unregulated markets will somehow always produce the best possible results,\u201d and so is global warming\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Professor Gelman is being a little too sensitive.<\/p>\n

For my part, when<\/a> I argue<\/a> that for some<\/em> people a belief in anthropogenic global warming seems to have taken on distinctly religious characteristics, I am primarily referring to the way (1) that it appears to be based as much on faith as science and (2) that it quite clearly satisfies certain spiritual and emotional needs. You can think that such a comparison is unfair, but it\u2019s not necessarily insulting to religion as such. I will, however, admit that my view of what some of\u00a0those spiritual and emotional needs might be is less flattering.<\/p>\n

However, while we are on the topic of using religious analogies as an insult in the climate change this <\/a>story from the London Times<\/em> is not altogether unamusing:<\/p>\n

A warning that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it. Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035. In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.
\nIt has also emerged that the New Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Hasnain has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as “voodoo science”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Um…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via Andrew Sullivan, I read that the FrumForum\u2019s Andrew Gelman is unhappy about the way that \u201cthe newest way to slam a belief you disagree with \u2014 or maybe it\u2019s not so new \u2014 is to call it \u201creligious.\u201d For … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[397],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3652"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3654,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3652\/revisions\/3654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}