Motus Mentis

As you all know, the global-warming community has been under a great deal of pressure lately. Its Pontifex Maximus, Albert A. Gore, published a lengthy riposte in the Times today. You can read it here.

It is about what you would expect: a reminder that even if the scientific claims of the global-warming industry are wrong, it shouldn’t matter, because the things they want us to do are for our own good anyway; some hand-waving about the objections lately raised by skeptics, and assurances that the subjects of those objections — which include such things as the CRU scandal, the disappearance of primary data, the unreliability of the latest GISS report due to the removal of many of the reporting stations from the data set, and a great deal more — are negligible trivialities; an insistence on referring to carbon dioxide, which we exhale with every breath, and which Earth’s food-chain depends on for its very existence, as a “pollutant”, including a metaphorical comparison of CO₂ to feces; castigation of the media as pawns of scurrilous corporate and conservative interests for not serving as compliant propaganda outlets; characterization of public skepticism and free debate as “hatred and divisiveness”, and so forth.

But what stood out above all was this:

From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.

Well, that certainly puts the cards on the table. This is perhaps the clearest expression yet of the liberal worldview as a kind of secular religion, in which, having rejected the prospect of salvation through God, we must instead achieve salvation here below, by becoming Divine ourselves.

Al Gore, then, is the Redeemer. If we will just come to our senses, smite the unbelievers, and place the flaming sword of Justice in his hands, we shall all be saved.

If you had any lingering doubt that this man is a dangerous megalomaniac, this ought to settle the matter.

Meanwhile, the inquiry into the Climate Rearch Unit’s malfeasance continues. Here is the memorandum just presented to Parliament by the independent Institute of Physics.