A piece from the Religion News Service complained of unbelief. But not in God or spirits. In almighty climate change. “On the same day Pope Francis issued a new call for climate change action, a group of mostly mainline Protestant and Jewish leaders launched a seven-year campaign to advocate for meaningful climate solutions. ‘One Home One Future’ is the latest multifaith effort intended to engage congregations in caring for the Earth. But a new survey released by the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that work won’t be easy.” But necessary, they feel. Unfortunately the flock are exceptionally dim on this point and the shepherd needs to whack them with his crock or something. Like the climate hammer that makes zealots see nails everywhere, even in autumn leaves. Whack! Whack! [Read more.]

To those with the climate obsession, all perspectives merge into one. For instance a David Leonhardt column in the New York Times about how the fight against malaria seems to be stalling in which he cites two main causes:

“First, mosquitoes have evolved to elude strategies that were once working against them. The increasing use of bed nets has led to a decline in the population of mosquitoes that tend to live indoors – but mosquitoes that thrive outdoors have increased in number, and bed nets can’t fight them so easily. Mosquitoes have also evolved to become more resistant to current insecticides.”

Well, that pretty much covers it, doesn’t it? It once would have. But today, heck no. See I have this hammer and so:

“Second, climate change has expanded the areas where the weather is warm enough for the most dangerous species of mosquitoes – those that carry deadly diseases – to thrive. Dengue, which used to be a purely tropical disease, has moved into Florida and France. This past summer, a small number of malaria cases spread in Texas, Florida and Maryland, the first local transmissions of the disease in the U.S. in 20 years.”

Right. Malaria killed over 600,000 people worldwide in 2020. And obviously it’s due to climate change because a handful of people in three U.S. states got it for the first time in 20 years. Whack! (Also there’s this endangered bird in Hawaii, with just five counted in the wild, and climate change is sending malaria up the hill to get it. Whack!)

Also, of course, all the mass extinctions in the past history of the Earth are now the fault of CO2, and never mind that it was much higher than today during such massive non-extinctions as the flowering of the dinosaurs. Whack!

The obsession is also visible in the fact that in the religion story, the pollster is unimpressed by the views of these hicks who don’t think everything is a nail. It’s not about what the public does think but what they should:

“‘The fact that it [the amount of belief in AGW among Americans who also believe in a God] remained unchanged was pretty remarkable to me,’ said Melissa Deckman, CEO of PRRI. ‘It’s just really concerning’.”

Concerning why? Well, obviously, because you knew what they are supposed to think before you asked them what they did think. Which is fair enough if, say, you are a Roman Catholic, a Baptist or an Orthodox Jew. At least up to a point, namely that you think they should agree with your religion’s core tenets. But now the problem is those who think scripture includes the Book of Greta, which is not too far-fetched given what mainstream Protestants nowadays claim is, or is not, in the Bible. Like the former head of Canada’s United Church who “did not believe in heaven or hell, or that Jesus was divine”, or the minister from that same church who, after saying belief in God promoted terrorist hatred, won the right to remain in the pulpit despite being an atheist.

This item doesn’t go that far. But it is interesting partly for the lack of respect it affords to people’s mental powers. It avers that:

“To a great extent, these unyielding views of the climate crisis may be shaped by politics. Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints, who overall don’t see climate change as a crisis, are stalwart Republicans, a party that has resisted acknowledging climate change.”

Resisted acknowledging, you’ll note. Not reasonably doubted. Nor does it appear to dawn on this writer that just possibly people who are themselves skeptical of a man-made climate breakdown crisis might be drawn to a party that is skeptical, instead of being mindless partisans unlike the enlightened author and all their like-minded friends.

Whack! Whack! Whack!