The globo warming doomsday cult

Rich Lowry:

The phrase "doomsday cult" entered our collective vo cabulary after John Lofland published his 1966 study, "Doomsday Cult: A Study of Conversion, Proselytization, and Maintenance of Faith." Lofland wrote about the Unification Church. His subject could almost as easily have been the Church of Warmism.

Its college of cardinals has gathered in Copenhagen amid professions of an imminent global apocalypse that allow no room for doubt or deviation. "The clock has ticked down to zero," declared UN climate chief Yvo de Boer. Yes, the end is nigh -- just as surely as when the Millerites gathered on Oct. 22, 1844, to witness the Second Coming, only to comfort themselves at the end of the night, "Well, maybe next year."

Copenhagen's opening session featured a video of children pleading, "Please help save the world." Had these precocious kids carefully reviewed the costs and benefits of a large-scale global carbon-rationing scheme? Of course not. They were props in the climate confab's effort to propagandize itself -- in the kind of closed loop always welcomed by true believers.

This doctrinaire impulse jumps off the page of the recently disclosed e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, an outfit at the heart of climate science. MIT's Michael Schrage says the e-mails reveal "malice, mischief and Machiavellian maneuverings." George Monbiot, a leading journalistic promoter of climate alarmism, wrote, "I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed."

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They do seem more cult like than scientific. They are more faith based than fact based. They certainly are intolerant of other points of view and have failed to debate the issue suggesting they have no time for persuasion through argument.