Environgelicals And The Environment

Last night, I posted a link to a NY Times report on a brewing controversy surrounding leaked memos implicating many of today's leading anthropogenic global warming scientists in wholesale scientific fraud to manufacture an environmental crisis.

Conspiracy theorists and skeptics have long been hurling accusations of a science cartel fudging research data to create a specific conclusion designed to sustain further agw research (and the lucrative million dolllar research grants that come with them).

62 megabytes worth of data had been stolen from the Climatic Research Unit, one of the leading centers in agw research. The leaked memos and emails allegedly show a pattern of disinformation and intimidation by leading agw figures such as Michael Mann (of the "hockey stick" fame), James Hansen, Phil Jones, who defended Mann on scientific journals, and several others, revealing a deep and pervasive corruption within the agw research community - a corruption that seems to have been lifted completely out of numerous conspiracy theories and for that reason, might itself be a hoax pretending to expose a hoax. So far though, interviews of people named in the emails have confirmed the authenticity of the letters.

Governments and scientists have overweighted and long-term emotional and financial investments in agw. It is unclear, even if proven true, what impact the leak will have on current and future environmental policies. Whether some scientists will add further to deteriorating worldwide unemployment rates or even potentially go to jail given these compromising investments will be determined by worldwide reaction in the following days.

Until now, agw has been the secular alternative for religious fundamentalism that provides the same sense of moral superiority to believers. But unlike religion, the secular nature of agw also provides an additional sense of intellectual superiority. Consequently, the secular nature of this additional level of superiority has provided the justification for government overreach and the professional crucifixion of agw heretics. Environgelicals, thus, are able to write their own version of the 10 commandments, not in the name of eternal salvation, but in the name of a loftier, more practical, more fashionable, more acceptable, and more sophisticated environmental salvation, absolutely guilt-free.

Whether or not global warming is (wo)man-made or not, it is smart policy to legislate protections for the earth. Whether the oceans will rise and even boil
within 10 years or not, it is irresponsible to leave the earth worse off than when we came into it. However, the reported leak undercuts a major premise in agw. Agw called for major changes in human behavior based on an imminent environmental apocalypse. If the environmental rapture is as fraudulent as the ever-rescheduled religious raptures prophesied every 10 years, as skeptics have long argued, the damage isn't going to be just on the environment.

The agw scientists, it would seem, have been conducting politics more than science. This deriliction of duty, which is shaping up to be more than a smoking gun but a mushroom cloud, will seriously damage an already unpopular politics as well as science. Whether agw skeptics could restore confidence in the supremacy of science over politics, of reason over activism, of proof over "consensus" or further erode an already thin confidence and continue the annexation of science as the research-arm of politics will determine the future of politics, of science, and (un)hopefully, of the environment.

The protection of the environment is critical enough to stand on its own. Wedding enviromental protection to an ideology masquerading as science that, in turn, is in bed with politics that legislate these protections is a dangerously abusive relationship that will hold the environment hostage to the latest pet causes of the fashionable class and will only hurt the very environment it hopes to protect through massive distortions and attacks against real scientific research.