Sunday Is a Good Day to Bring in Australian Cardinal Pell on Globaloney

The Australian Archbishop of Sydney points to a fundamental lack of reason anchored by faith as one of the forces behind globaloney — and he’s right (HT Pro Ecclesia):

Scaremongers

….. A local newspaper editorial’s complaint about the doomsdayers’ religious enthusiasm is unfair to mainstream Christianity. Christians don’t go against reason although we sometimes go beyond it in faith to embrace probabilities. What we were seeing from the doomsdayers was an induced dose of mild hysteria, semi-religious if you like, but dangerously close to superstition.

I am deeply skeptical about man-made catastrophic global warming, but still open to further evidence. I would be surprised if industrial pollution, and carbon emissions, had no ill effect at all. But enough is enough.

A few fixed points might provide some light. We know that enormous climate changes have occurred in world history, e.g. the Ice Ages and Noah’s flood, where human causation could only be negligible. Neither should it be too surprising to learn that the media during the last 100 years has alternated between promoting fears of a coming Ice Age and fear of global warming!

Terrible droughts are not infrequent in Australian history, sometimes lasting seven or eight years, as with the Federation Drought and in the 1930s. One drought lasted fourteen years.

We all know that a cool January does not mean much in the long run, but neither does evidence from a few years only. Scaremongers have used temperature fluctuations in limited periods and places to misrepresent longer patterns.

The evidence on warming is mixed, often exaggerated, but often reassuring. Global warming has been increasing constantly since 1975 at the rate of less than one fifth of a degree centigrade per decade. The concentration of carbon dioxide increased surface temperatures more in winter than in summer and especially in mid and high latitudes over land, while there was a global cooling of the stratosphere.

Rock on, Cardinal George Pell.

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UPDATE: Mark Steyn has a more, uh, irreverent look at globaloney, with the best explanation of Al Gore’s hypocritical self-dealing I’ve seen — plus good humor along for the ride. He also quoted an enviro leader who, like so many, is taken with a eco-religious fervor:

A couple of days before the Oscars, the Reverend Al gave a sell-out performance at the University of Toronto. “From my perspective, it is a form of religion,” said Bruce Crofts of the East Toronto Climate Action Group, who compared the former vice president to Jesus Christ, both men being (as the Globe And Mail put it) “great leaders who stepped forward when called upon by circumstance.”