Yes and it's based on fear.
Critics of Green politics often call it a religion and I believe that's true.
I don't. It's less of a religion than capitalism. Environmentalism is an expression of the desire to halt the decline of the natural world.
Like many religions it is based on primordial instinct: fear of the elements, fear of helplessness in the face of nature's awesome implacable indifference.
No, it's more a determination to help restore the balance.
Firstly though, about the science of climate change I'm an agnostic.
A bet each way, huh?
The greatest breakthrough of my scientific career was discovering how to shatter beakers over a too-hot Bunsen burner flame at high school. So I don't really feel qualified to confirm or refute the complex science involved.
Almost daily I see reports of scientific studies and measurements that either support climate change theory and its predictions or question them.
My understanding of science says it's the contrary findings we should be more interested in.
Science progresses through questioning established theories with new contradictory information.
Recent leaked emails from leading climate change scientists make some of them seem less than scientifically disinterested.
Some of those emails suggest the scientists want to fit the facts to the theory rather than modify or change the theory according to facts they can't disprove.
This is understandable and not necessarily sinister.
These scientists have made their names and their careers demonstrating and advocating climate change. Naturally it would be hard for them to give up.
Any cherished belief is.
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How sad that a handful of climatologists massaged the data, which is likely to fan the delusions of the climate change deniers. Already the lynch mob is stirring. The sceptics have "forgotten" that numerous corporations, esp oil and energy producers, plus the Bush administration and low-rent journos have famously fudged the figures.
However I accept that the majority of scientists back climate change theory and I so accept it is a probable occurrence.
Pacific islanders accepted the "theory" the second the seawater wetted their sandals.
However I agnostically note that in science it has often been the minority of one, such as a Galileo, that has overturned the accepted wisdom.
Also I agnostically note that the weather forecast for tomorrow is sometimes unreliable, so predictions for 100 years time strike me as dicey.
If only we did have a 100 years.
Should Kevin Rudd listen to the Greens? Tell us what you want him to do about climate change and we'll add it to list of 50 things Aussies want from Copenhagen in our Open Letter to Kevin Rudd here.
The thing that complicates climate change and makes it much more than a merely a theory is that it has tapped into a religious sense of apocalyptic mortal fear.
This is expressed in the ancient need to insure ourselves against the anger of the Gods, including Gaia, by sacrificing something. Sacrifice makes us more pure, and thus less deserving of wrath.
That's why our Prime Minister calls climate change the "greatest moral challenge of our generation."
Presumably the "moral challenge" is in forsaking the cheap energy that underpins much of our economic wealth, just as Christians forsake worldly goods for the promise of heaven.
Rudd's "moral challenge" is accepting that the spoils of the industrial era enjoyed by the West have come at a cost: degraded eco-systems, sizzling planet, exploitation of less developed nations.
However unless you view wealth itself as a "bad" thing, responding to climate change is merely a challenge and we should do whatever works best which might not include sacrifice at all.
Maybe not, and yet some argue that wealth acquisition is a key the eco-crisis. Herve Kempf, the environmental writer for Le Monde, and author of How the Rich are Destroying the Planet, believes "we cannot understand the entwined ecological and social crises, if we don't see them as the two sides of the same disaster - a disaster that comes from a system piloted by a dominant social strata that has no drive other than greed, no ideal other than conservatism, no dream other than technology".
That brings me to one of the most popular underlying climate change arguments and its religious parallel.
It is the argument that because the predicted consequences of climate change are so grave, we should believe the theory and act on it because the risk is too high if we don't. This is very similar to the old Christian argument, advocated by French philosopher Blaise Pascal, that you should believe in God because by not doing so you run the risk of going to hell. Even if the eventuality of hell or climate change doesn't occur missing out on a sinful life or giving up material wealth is worthwhile insurance, this logic says.
In other words we should hedge our bets.
However this means giving up something real, tangible and certain for something either based on faith or based on a theory that even the UN's IPCC says is only "90 per cent" certain.
"Only 90 per cent" is good enough for me.
This is an extract of a blog by Richard Neville and David Southwell, originally published at blogs.news.com.au, click view for more information.