An Act Against Secular Leftism’s Top Dogma: Climate Change
By SHAUN KENNEY
(Editor’s Note: Shaun Kenney is a former executive director of American Life League, a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia, and an op-ed writer and ghostwriter for various publications and personalities in Washington, D.C.)
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Finally, President Trump withdrew the United States of America from the Paris Climate Agreement, a handshake deal that his predecessor agreed to by fiat rather than sending it through the normal constitutional channels — namely, the United States Senate.
The reaction from the political left in this country was abhorrent at best, like a child who just had his toys taken away and is in desperate need of a nap. At worst, it was the latest exhibition of a modern trend, namely, the rise of ideological belief to secular faith.
In fact, one might appropriately call Trump’s action in the White House Rose Garden an act of public heresy against the secular left’s most sacred dogma — namely, climate change. Set aside for the moment that science by definition is never settled. Much like free speech — another value the political left has deemed antithetical to their fragile worldview — the antidote for bad science isn’t silence, but good science — a constant and free flowing refinement of what we know and understand about the universe and why, based not on dogmatics but on truth.
Fascinatingly enough, this is the reason why Galileo found himself in hot water in the first place. Galileo didn’t disprove geocentrism; Ptolemy had determined the circumference of a very round earth 2,000 years before Galileo.
What landed Galileo in hot water with the Church was that Galileo was wrong, or at the very least, Galileo was unable to describe how a Tychonic system did not work within a Copernican system — he merely ran off with his own ideas as being scientific fact. For Galileo, the science was settled — even if it took the mind of Johannes Kepler to explain why ellipses, not circles, defined the motion of the planets in a heliocentric model several decades later.
Thus the Catholic Church remains remarkably consistent in such matters. While our dogmatics remain as such because they are divinely revealed, Pope St. John Paul II’s Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio reinforce that faith and science cannot contradict precisely because their ends remain united in Truth.
This too is the great secret of the Second Vatican Council and the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, where principles of religious freedom and the rights of conscience are held in primacy, not because the Catholic Church has surrendered her position as the Deposit of Truth and Faith, but precisely because we are the Deposit of Truth and Faith. The dice, to borrow from Einstein, are loaded indeed.
Yet as we know, both science and faith have the unique quality of being tested by argumentation and example. In both instances, truth prevails. It is here where our friends promoting climate change as a man-made phenomenon have gone wildly astray.
First, there is no demonstrable correlation between carbon dioxide levels and the warming of the planet. The Vostok ice core, taken in 1998, stretches back over 800,000 years and demonstrates that the correlation here simply doesn’t exist.
Second, practically all of the models run by the climate change promoters themselves have run hot — and not just a little hot, but a lot hot. There is a definition for wild variation — it is called failure. If you were to have placed your life savings on these models, you would have lost your nest egg in the real world. But in politics?
Third, surface area is a misleading metric for measuring the ice fields in the Arctic and Antarctic. Shockingly enough, ice happens to be a three-dimensional object (who knew?) and while the surface ice in the Arctic is shrinking, it is increasing at 40 year highs in the Antarctic — never mind that 40 years of data points is hardly a sample.
Fourth, stretching the measurement of global temperatures back tens of thousands of years, not only is there no correlation between carbon dioxide levels historically and temperature changes, but we are still coming out of the Ice Age. There is a basic fact-laws-theory relationship that the global warming advocates have violated in the extreme.
Fifth, sea-change levels are not uniform in the slightest. Some places are going up, others down. Given the “hockey stick” graph that has now been roundly discredited, one would expect violent changes in sea levels during the industrial era. The fact is, sea-level changes have been remarkably constant as we continue to come out of the Ice Age. This is demonstrable fact easily discovered.
Lastly, one arrives at Pope Francis and Laudato Si, the argument laid at the feet of every faithful Catholic as the reason why Catholics should universally reject President Trump and embrace the materialist definition of environmentalism.
Yet remember that Pope Francis did his dissertation on the works of Romano Guardini, a theologian who accurately predicted the rise of postmodernist thought culminating in what he terms the “Mass Man” and an insatiable drive to separate humanity from nature.
How does Guardini’s postmodern Mass Man do this? Transhumanism, consumerism, materialism, and a belief that mankind is either the master of creation, or worse, a poisonous affliction that must be removed from nature itself.
Pope Francis is very careful to condemn both positions. Mankind is neither a consumer suited to destroy God’s creation through consumption, nor is humanity a poison on creation that must be viewed as hostile to the very same creation from which we were made.
The great fallacy of the Paris Climate Agreement is the same mistake of both the mass consumerists and the environmentalists. Wild and unproven ideas carrying the mantle of science should be rigorously tested and verified first, not cloaked with fanaticism masquerading as faith. Such faith, Thomas Merton reminds us, is not fanaticism precisely because fanaticism is not free.
In the meantime, when the purveyors of climate change start living and behaving as if their secular dogmas are a crisis, then the rest of us can start considering whether it is a crisis. Until then, we should demand as a principle that Catholics do not hurt people in order to help people; we do not condemn half of humanity to live in poverty for an abstraction.
