The New Evangelical Left (XX)

The Danger of the Intelligentsia and Other Snobs

I know a little bit of Glenn Beck’s frustrations waiting for his spiffy red phone to ring with a call from the White House telling him where his facts are wrong. My problem, however, is not with the White House—well, maybe a little—but rather with the Christian celebs that signed the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. That sounds so officious, doesn’t it? Who would not listen to an intergovernmental panel? The short answer is: someone with a modicum of common sense.

In a world filled with sound bytes and “gotcha” politics, we’ve come to accept the premise that if it’s on TV or in print, it must be true. Well, no, not necessarily. You see, I’ve been trying to get Christian celebs like Rick Warren, Brian McLaren, Bill Hybels, Dan Kimball (an old Facebook friend. Yes, it’s true. Dan and I are Facebook buds, but it appears that Dan is too busy doing cutting edge things to remove his name from the IPCC resolution.), and Richard Mouw, of Fuller Seminary to get in touch with me and explain why they refuse to take their names off the IPCC signatories. Actually, they don’t even have to get in touch with me. No, they can merely go public and tell all their avid followers that they made a mistake in signing the IPCC document. It’s really not all that painful to say.

I’ll even give them a head start. They could say or write or both something like this: “At the time I signed the IPCC document I genuinely believed that the planet was overheating and that man was the problem and that CO₂ was a pollutant. I didn’t do well in high school science and slept through the class on photosynthesis. Please forgive me for signing such a bogus, political document and leading so many of you astray. It was not my intention. It was an honest mistake.”

There. It’s over, but if I were you, I would not hold my breath waiting for any recantations. On February 3, 2010, that pesky economist, Walter E. Williams wrote a column entitled “Global Warming Update,” in which he said this: “John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, in an hour-long television documentary titled ‘Global Warming” The Other Side,’ presents evidence that our National Climatic Data Center has been manipulating weather data just as the now disgraced and under investigation British University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit.[1] The word “manipulating” in the previous sentence is a euphemism meaning more something like “fudged” or “tweaked it to say what they wanted it to say.”

Just like the UN and its IPCC resolution, the NCDC has a political agenda and likes the fat grants taxpayers fund and, of course, everyone loves a climate crisis, especially the recipients of those juicy grants. I’ve been reading one of the most fascinating secular books I’ve read in a while. It is by another pesky economist and another black man, Thomas Sowell. Both Sowell and Williams are amazing black because they don’t even write with a dialect, unless, of course, they want to. Sowell’s book is not one that you skim through or gloss over while you’re watching TBN. No, even though it truly is a “page turner,” it is a read that requires your undivided attention. It’s a little like his book A Conflict of Visions and is entitled Intellectuals and Society.[2] One comment from Sowell sets the table for us. “Since many, if not most, intellectuals operate under the implicit assumption that knowledge is already concentrated—in people like themselves—they are especially susceptible to the idea that a corresponding concentration of decision-making power in a public-spirited elite can benefit society. That assumption has been the foundation for reform movements like Progressivism in the United States and revolutionary movements in various other countries around the world.”[3]

Christian celebs are not immune to that kind of thinking. They are often considered experts on everything, even if they know little or nothing about the subject. So, it’s a given that getting some well-known theologians to get on board with global warming is relatively easy. It sounds good, plausible, and feasible, so these Christians are willing to put their name on a document, especially if it gives the impression that “it’s for the poor” or my other favorite: “It’s for the kids.” As I’ve pointed out, a more than superficial examination of (stubborn) facts discloses that quite a bit of environmentalism is more PC and more political than it is ever considered to be. Moreover, for Christians to be signing on to the major tenets of environmentalism would be like the early Christian Church signing on to Gnosticism. In fact, the whole Gaia gig (you know, Mother Earth, with capital letters) is a direct derivative from Gnosticism. The New Age movement falls under the same criticism. And here’s the kicker: PC ideology, Gnosticism, Gaia, Mother Earth, and global warming are anti-Christian. I imagine that some poor soul will continue to attempt to fit them together in some kind of syncretism, but ultimately, it cannot be done.

Christianity and Gnosticism are arch-enemies from the opening words of the Old Testament: in the beginning God… Yet, many Christian celebs have no trouble signing on the IPCC line and, what is worse, the lion’s share of evangelicals have no trouble with them signing it and then not taking their names off when it’s discovered that the Emperor is wearing no clothes—or that his clothes have been manipulated a little to suit grants and “research outcomes.” For example, between 1960 and 1980 the number of stations used for calculating global surface temperatures was around 6,000. By the early 1990s, that number had dwindled to about 1,500. Williams observes, “Most of the stations lost were in the colder regions of the Earth. Nothing adjusting for their lost [sic] made temperatures appear to be higher than was in fact the case. According to Science & Environmental Policy project, Russia reported that CRU was ignoring data from colder regions of Russia, even though these stations were still reporting data.” (1. Emphasis added.) For the uninitiated, this is sometimes called neutral scholarship. It’s just your friendly, underpaid scientist with leftwing political leanings gearing up for some grant money.

But it was also reported that National Climatic Data Center “engaged in similar deceptive activity where they have dropped stations, particularly in colder climates, higher elevations or closer to the polar regions. Temperatures are now simply projected for these colder stations from other stations, usually in warmer climates.” (Ibid. Emphasis added.) Allow me to translate this for you. The NCDC lied—repeatedly and intentionally. They used selective data that would skew the results to favor their agenda. Williams correctly notes, however, that there is big, big money in the global warming hoax. While we’re watching those greedy insurance companies (you know, the ones who average a 3% profit, which the wonks, hacks, and pundits call “gouging”), Chicago has developed its own Climate Futures Exchange “that plans to trade in billions of dollars of greenhouse gas emission allowances. Corporate America and labor unions, as well as their international counterparts have a huge multi-trillion dollar finance stake in the perpetuation of the global warming fraud. Federal, state and local agencies have spent billions of dollars and created millions of jobs to deal with one aspect or another of global warming.” (Ibid., 2. Emphases added.)

Sadly, this entire scam is about substantially more than money, although money is a huge carrot. Williams writes, “Schoolteachers have created polar-bear-dying lectures to frighten and indoctrinate our children when in fact here are more polar bears now than in 1950. They’ve taught children about melting glaciers. Just recently, the International Panel on Climate Change was forced to admit that their Himalayan glacier-melting fraud was done to ‘impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.’” (Ibid. Cursives mine.)

After all this, you’d think that the celeb signatories would feel some compunction to remove their names from such a scandalously corrupt resolution, but no. Nothing. Nothing. Not a word of contrition. I wonder if they preach about biblical conduct and behavior. I know. Maybe they could preach on how building an Ultimate Fighting cage in the foyer, next to the Starbucks, would bring more men back into the Church. Oh, wait, some modern churches have already thought of that. It’s all a sham just like the Crystal Cathedral that just announced that it’s $55 million in debt, which, by the way, is more than I make a month.

---

[1] http://townhall.com. (Emphasis added.)

[2] Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society, (NY: Basic Books, 2009).

[3] Ibid., 18.