On another thread a gentlemen called Chandra added some value, but not in the ways he thinks. When someone appears that ignorant yet that confident it makes for a good catalyst. I came up with a question.

CAGW is perfect. Perfect to hang whatever you want from it. If it hadn't have come about something like it would have been invented ;-)

Warmists always have a problem though.

They realise they could frighten everyone very easily, because Climate is basically just weather. Weather both normal and apocalyptic is part of every culture. Easy they thought for the priests and the witchdoctors to scare the natives.

However, people understand the weather, it is again part of every culture. It is open view. And when this is linked to redemption then the energies of many people will come to bear. Free will. Free thought.

But that is not the real problem the Warmists have. The real problem is that they act like the medieval catholic church as regards science. And yet?

Yet... the internet to science is the equivalent of the Reformation to Catholicism.

Science is now open. Berners-Lee is Martin Luther (though he did not realise it at the time).

But there appears to be something more to CAGW than simply relating it a established religion.

I have had direct interaction with Scientologists. The twin elements of Ignorance and Confidence on view in plain sight. I am not trying to link Warmism with Scientology. Scientology is older than the internet.

But I am asking this question.

Is Warmism, the first distributed, non-hierarchical, internet-age, global cult? A new phenomenon?

Ohh... just a small note. Chandra tries to divert most of the discussions in which he partakes onto himself.

It may seem contradictory, because he is the catalyst here, but please try to make this discussion (if there is one) NOT about him, because he will push it that way. Just a request. Probably futile.

Whether by accident or deliberate plan, the latter in my opinion, the warmists have used the age old cult methodology of you are doomed but I can save you. Religious leaders cottoned on to the fact that deep in every human is the fear of disaster. Probably in the DNA as a survival mechanism. The problem with the religious doomsday cults was that doom happened at a specific time, when it didn't the majority of believers moved onto the next, humans are very gullible on doomsday.

The climate doom community have been more clever by using vague could be by then but may be much later prophecies of doom. This means they have a churn of disillusioned older members leaving and a new young enthusiastic replacement group joining. The leaders continue to make themselves rich on the backs of the recruits. An additional factor that the cult uses is that humans believe that the world has always been the way it is now, we've always grown rapeseed and winter wheat and silage is made in big plastic sacks, for instance. This applies to climate/weather, which has been getting "worse" all my life, although despite recent floods it seems OK to me.

Perhaps I was lucky and as well as playing outside until it got too dark to see in summer and sledging in the moonlight in winter I had the benefit of teachers and an education system that taught us about the Anglo Saxon chronicle, Greek legends and encouraged an interest in science, history, geography and the benefits of human endeavour, and how mavericks changed all of these. This was in a state school. Today there seems to be more experts say In all walks of life and mavericks are sidelined even more than they were in times past.

I don't know if this answers the question, but they are my first thoughts.

Hi JC,

I agree with most of your opening. The way in which 'insistent cultural entities', including religions, cults, and secular entities too (there are differences between all of these but the same underlying mechanisms) work, has been researched for many decades, and there's been good progress imho. The common underlying mechanisms cause readily recognisable characteristics in such entities, and CAGW is a dead ringer. But the larger end of the scale (e.g. mainstream religions) have always been distributed, and the Internet serves the insistent culture just as much as it serves those who reject it. Hence, apart maybe from some acceleration of the whole process, I don't think the Internet has made any difference, and certainly the main characteristics of CAGW seem no different to many insistent cultures going back through history. As the mechanisms are deep rooted (an evolutionary heritage - but that's a whole other story) I guess this is not a surprise; you mention yourself the leveraging of weather by priests/witchdoctors in many cultures. I am reminded of the Lambeyeque, who built man-made mountains and an entire culture (plus a rich elite atop those mountains) based on predicting and controlling the PDO. Ended badly when nature didn't conform.

Ah, in the time I took to write, I see Geoff makes a similar point about comunication media, be it printing or the Internet, helping both sense and nonsense spread.

Here's my ha'peth worth.

I think one must also distinguish between delusional belief systems and non-delusional.

By way of example, someone believes the world is going to fry because of the emissions of an essential trace gas.

If that person is alone in such a belief they would be probably called delusional (note, this is whether the belief is accurate/true or not). However, when an opinion poll says that 43% of the general public also believes the world is going to fry then they are not delusional (again, whether accurate/true or not).

An interesting phenomenon whereby exactly the same belief has diametrically opposite meanings.

Does this make sense?

Andy.

Mar 28, 2014 at 9:09 AM | Paul Matthews
"I think it's by accident - a form of natural selection. "

The theories regarding the underlying mechanisms I mention above, range from weak to strong Darwinian cultural selection. I favour the strong end, which includes memetics. Have much more on this, and specifically wrt CAGW, if you're interested.

Mar 28, 2014 at 9:11 AM | jones

Makes huge sense to me. The usual explantion for this is that a lot of our 'self' is in fact invested in the culture aorund us, what neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga calls 'the social mind'. And yes I agree, just like for religion, in which a sizeable majority of the world's population still believe, CAGW cannot be definition by a delusion.

ahhh... 'cannot by definition be a delusion'

I agree with Geoff, it's not a planned cult and has largely evolved through natural and ancient features of human nature. I say that, even while accepting that the AGW devil might exist. Ironically it's the religious aspect that warmism has adopted that might prevent genuine action if it turns out to be a significant problem. A bit like islanders attributing the smoking mountain to the volcano god and sacrificing virgins rather than evacuating the island or at least building ships. Cultism promotes irrationality.

I'm sure that some are cynically exploiting the opportunity but most will convince themselves that it’s just happy accident they make money while saving the planet. If endeavours fail, they won’t blame their own ill thought out plans but instead blame others and console themselves that they had tried. For those who are predisposed to cults (as leaders or followers) AGW is a very flexible, accommodating god. As a cult, it’s got more social respectability than religions with thousands of years of popularity because it clothes itself in scientific robes. If AGW turns out to be CAGW then as a religion it will become unbearable. I fear the high priests of CAGW far more than CAGW itself.

On the plus side, religions and cults are falling out of favour, mainly because they’re too much like hard work. We seem to have swapped life long worship, for short term… crushes seems to be the right word. People get very passionate about the latest fad for a few years and then move on. It’s why the warmist trend to put celebs up front is a bad move. Those people might be hot stuff today but people might want to forget they ever liked that person next year. Like most crushes people go from passion to hatred.

Also, AGW doesn’t offer an afterlife. That’s the jewel in the crown of most religions. It’s the reward for believing in the improbable. Not ‘YOU will live forever and be rewarded if YOU are good’ but ‘your children/grandchildren MIGHT have better lives, assuming EVERYONE else is very good too’. Not much of a deal is it? Even communism offered the masses a better slice of the cake for hard work and obedience. OK it didn’t deliver and it was actually capitalism that has given the masses a taste of luxury and freedom, but the original promise was there. Warmism demands poorer, less comfortable lives, even though it doesn’t admit it explicitly. Fool me once shame on you, fool me forever… not gonna happen dude!

Mar 28, 2014 at 10:20 AM | Paul Matthews

Thanks Paul :)

Mar 28, 2014 at 10:16 AM | TinyCO2

Agree very much with your first two paragraphs, this is all spot on imho. The discipline of cultural evolution offers plausibe mechanisms for how and why such entities arise, in the generic case. From the candidates I find that the memetic perspective seems to offer the greatest explanatory power, and at the links given by Paul above I characterise CAGW from this perspective. The main essay is long I’m afraid (short novel sized), but if you do happen to have any interest the introductory post (which you can find more conveniently at the direct link below) is only about 4 pages, of which one is a super-condensed summary of all the essay sections to give an idea of the ground covered. This includes stuff like a comparison to religions and why the common mechanisms are (perhaps surprisingly) advantageous to society overall, while still enabling cultural parasites to prosper (CAGW may essentially be such).

Regarding your paragraph3, traditional religions and cults may be losing ground, but (as many other than me have pointed out), this may in fact be a reason why modern secular entities such as CAGW are becoming so powerful. In essence our evolutionary pre-sensitisation to these modes is simply grinding on, while substituting rather more credible (these days) secular causes instead of the traditional religious ones.

Think your observation in the last paragraph is also very astute. Secular cultural entities are constrained not to make blatant offers of personal salvation, and typically offer a range of ‘salvation substitues’ instead. One section of my essay looks at two of those in CAGW, but from an evolutionary perspective the substitute offer of life for one's children and grandchildren is in fact a hugely powerful motivater, and as you note the CAGW narratives never admit to any downside consequences that could spoil the apparent shinyness of this offer. I think it remains a big emotional persuader.

http://wearenarrative.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/the-cagw-memeplex-a-cultural-creature/

Mar 29, 2014 at 10:53 AM | geoffchambers
"What is this but the pilgrimage to Mecca or the gathering of the cardinals?"

Indeed. The robes and rituals are about protecting orthodox narrative, the 'DNA' if you will of a cultural entity. These systems evolve via iterative selection of many narrative generations. Pilgrimmages help reinforce motivation, once the challenge is achieved the pilgrims both gain status, and, because that statuts is only valid within the narrative context, will likely become much stronger transmiters of the narrative themselves. I guess if a degree in climate modelling or a paper supporting climate alarmism are tickets to the priesthood, then maybe the ship of fools was a pilgrimage, in this case one that backfired!

Is it you that authored the humourous sceptic cli-fi?

Mar 29, 2014 at 12:28 PM | stewgreen

Then you're sharper than me. I didn't take much notice of CAGW until around 2006, my head was in other things though I had no reason to disbelieve the increasing noise in the media, which finally began to intrude on me at that date. However, around the start of 2007 I saw Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, and immediately smelled a rat. As I was already familiar with cultural evolution, it didn't take me too long to see the characteristics of CAGW that were similar to religions. I note also that there are thousands of quotes from a whole range of folks, both notable and otherwise, pointing out in various (typcially vague) ways the religious parallels and often making reference to 'memes' as well. Such comments have increased in recent years, and surprisingly some come from within the Consensus itself, like those from Hans Von Storch about climate scientists taking on the role of prophets.

But the big step for me was having something that formally attempted to map the characteristics of CAGW onto the mechanisms via which religions and cults (and indeed various secular entities too) operate, as represented by the best candidate from cultural evolution, using many of the above comments as circumstantial evidence and backing up with work from various other domains. Without this, it is very easy for vague and casual references to religious parallels to be simply dismissed. So on this enterprise I've been thinking for about 5 years, and gathering material for about 2, but the exercise has considerably clarified my own thoughts in fact, and hence I feel more confident to comment whereas before I would not have.

P.S. and I figure it doesn't really profit us too much to know that CAGW possesses 'religious' characteristics, if we don't know how and why religions work, and why we co-evolved with them, and therefore what about the driving of society by such cultural entities we may want to keep, and what we may wish to grow out of.

I was not convinced of the CAGW in the late 1990s. the religious aspect came later. At that time ca 2000 I had discussions with colleagues about the theory/hypothesis my point was always if the climate isn't outside known historical bounds, which it wasn't/isn't, then it was likely to be natural variation. If it wasn't getting warmer then we'd be in trouble. I assigned the scientific/political following to the Marathon Syndrome aka me too syndrome, and flavour of the moment; the enlightenment that funding came by pandering to politicians also dawned on me about then. The political following meant taxation without resistance by the payers, who can say no to a tax to save the planet for your children and grandchildren? It was a self sustaining system at that time. Insight into the cultism came after the BBC Horizon Snowball Earth programme in 2001 with it's CO2 bias. I naively thought that it would follow the Marathon Syndrome and after 20 years everyone would be bored by it and would have moved onto the next fad. I suppose there are 3 or 4 years left until boredom sets in.

I had kept the ecomentalist and global-warming groups compartmentalised in my head, the extreme greens being the Spanish Inquisition and the rest being regular church goers. I still hold to that view, and that the extremists should be left to get on with it and it's the rest who should be converted to a more realistic view. After all civil wars and internecine killings only end when both sides get tired of killing each other and have too much to lose in a continued war.

stewgreen, "“Is Warmism, the first distributed, non-hierarchical, internet-age, global cult? A new phenomenon?”
The first successful one, yes. But it hasn't been willed into existence by a conspiracy."

CAGW is a globalist/illuminati conspiracy created by Maurice Strong as a means of imposing a fascist totalitarian world government. It's anti-science because it's entirely fiction; CO2 was chosen as a tool because, as a 3-atom molecule, it has vibrational bonds in the IR, and therefore the potential to affect the temperature of the atmosphere, although there's only been evidence against its causation of warming, and because the atmosphere can be considered a global environmental issue. AGW evolved from the CoR 1972 eugenics/NWO publication "Limits to Growth", followed by "The First Global Revolution" two decades later. This is not some quirky little cult. This is the stated agenda of the leaders of the environmental movement. From "The First Global Revolution:

" This is the way we are setting the scene for mankind’s encounter with the planet. The opposition between the two ideologies that have dominated the 20th century has collapsed, forming their own vacuum and leaving nothing but crass materialism.

It is a law of Nature that any vacuum will be filled and therefore eliminated unless this is physically prevented. “Nature,” as the saying goes, “abhors a vacuum.” And people, as children of Nature, can only feel uncomfortable, even though they may not recognize that they are living in a vacuum. How then is the vacuum to be eliminated?

It would seem that humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act together in the vacuum; such a motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose.

New enemies therefore have to be identified.
New strategies imagined, new weapons devised.

The common enemy of humanity is man.

In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.

The old democracies have functioned reasonably well over the last 200 years, but they appear now to be in a phase of complacent stagnation with little evidence of real leadership and innovation

Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.”

So, long before Global Warming became a well known issue Al Gore and his Club of Rome colleagues stated that they would use the threat of global warming to unite humanity and "set the scene for mankind's encounter with the planet." In the same way that shamans and sooth-sayers in medieval times used their advance knowledge of when eclipses would occur to control and terrify their followers, they would use a natural phenomenon as their 'enemy' to achieve their objectives. But then they state that although Global Warming would be presented as the initial enemy, the real enemy of humanity would be portrayed as man himself.
Having discovered that all these influential environmental leaders were associated with the Club of Rome I set about reading all the reports, lectures and speeches on their website as well as the reports commissioned by the UN. I was amazed to find that they lay out their entire agenda for anyone who has eyes to see. Exactly the same themes, concepts and phrases are repeated continuously throughout their publications. They are full of references to 'imminent collapse', 'dying planet', 'our mother Gaia', 'wrenching transformation', 'united global society', 'global consciousness', 'new forms of governance' etc. They truly intend to bring about the world's First Global Revolution.

The Kosmos Journal provides perhaps the best insight into their worldview. This Journal was founded by the Club of Rome in partnership with with several of its sibling organizations. As described in my article, The Green Web, the CoR has established a network of supporting organizations, each focusing on a different aspect of their agenda. The Kosmos Journal contains many articles written by CoR members. The basic premise of their worldview is:

"Modern industrial civilisation is fast outstripping the Earth's natural regenerative and life-supporting capacity..."

"At current rates of resource depletion and environmental degradation a near complete collapse of ecological integrity will occur within the next 100 years..."

"Gaia, our Mother, who nurtured humanity for countless millenia within her womb of evolution, is dying..."

“A small window of opportunity now exists to transform humanity into a sustainable global interdependant society based on respect and reverence for Earth..."

"A radical change from the current trajectory is required, a complete reordering of global society..."

"Humans only truly unite when faced with a powerful external enemy..."

"At this time a new enemy must be found, one either real or invented for the purpose..."

"Democracy has failed us, a new system of global governance, based on environmental imperatives, must be implemented quickly..."

Now that Obama is firmly ensconced in the White House the Club of Rome and its affiliates are swinging into high gear. The CoR recently unveiled a new 3-year programme entitled A New Path for World Development. The Club of Madrid has launched the Road to Copenhagen, a joint programme with the UN Environment Programme intended to facilitate a binding global climate change treaty in 2009. Perhaps most interesting is the State of Global Emergency declared by the Club of Budapest in October 2008. The declaration states that we only have four or five years to prevent a total collapse of the Earth's ecosystems. To quote from the document:

“If we continue on our present unsustainable path, by mid-century the Earth may become largely uninhabitable for human and most other forms of life. Such a total systems collapse could occur much sooner, however, due to runaway global warming or other ecocatastrophes, and/or by nuclear wars triggered by religious, ethnic or geopolitical conflicts or access to diminishing natural resources. The macro-trends driving these global threats and challenges have been apparent for decades and are now building toward a threshold of irreversibility. The scientific modeling of complex systems shows that when systems reach a state of critical instability, they either break down to their components or break through to a higher order of integral functioning. At these “points of no return” maintaining the status quo, or returning to a previous mode of organization and functioning, are not a feasible option.

The acceleration of critical trends and cross-impacts among them indicates that the ‘window of opportunity’ for pulling out of the present global crisis and breaking through to a more peaceful and sustainable world is likely to be no more than four to five years from the end of 2008. This is close in time to the Mayan 2012 prophecy for the end of the current world. The period around the end of 2012 is likely to be a turbulent one for this and other reasons. Predictions coming from the physical sciences foresee disturbances in the geomagnetic, electromagnetic and related fields that embed the planet causing significant damage to telecommunications and impacting many aspects of human activity and health. For the esoteric traditions the end of 2012 will be the end of the known world, although the more optimistic interpretations speak of a new world taking the place of the old.”

This may seem very strange – a group of prominent world leaders talking about ancient Mayan prophecies, but as I describe in my article, Gaia's Gurus, many leading global warming activists openly advocate earth-reverence and other New Age philosophies. Gaia, Global Warming, and Global Governance are intricately entwined, if one truly believes in Gaia, and that she is being fatally harmed by the current system, then a new system of global governance and control would appear to be the only answer. Global Warming provides the ideal 'enemy' to bring about this objective. It is easy for these global elitists to talk about sacrifice, wrenching transformation, population reduction and eliminating the use of fossil fuels but the implications are truely horrendous.

As Al Gore said in the closing sentence of his statement after he won the Nobel Peace Prize ... "This is just the beginning."

http://green-agenda.com/globalrevolution.html

CAGW is a fascist/globalist/illuminati/bankster/corporate fraud that co-opted anti-science/anti-tech "green is good" altruistic naivete and dogmatism as a covert means of destroying democracy and the US economy and murdering the majority of the world's population. Obama and Al Gore founded the Chicago Carbon Exchange, CCX, and Al Gore founded Carbon Investment Management. Maurice Strong co-founded the IPCC with Gorbachev, was the first director of the Global Environment Bank formed by UNESCO, and is currently on the board of directors. The UN-Wider website includes the history of the formation and purpose of the IPCC. Maurice Strong is former World Wildlife Foundation director and Rothschild/Rockefeller crony.

Fraudulent science is essential to CAWG; science is truth, and is merely a cover for CAWG, a political and economic scam. We don't read the truth in the news because the players own the news and entertainment media. CAWG is an anti-religion fascist phenomena with a Gaia-worship facade created by the most destructive polluters who are ignoring the truth that the earth is communicating to us about our impact here and burying it in lies to achieve a goal that can only be described as blasphemous and evil.