The legacy of Al Gore’s religious polemic, twenty years on.
He, I think more than anyone, was responsible for the politicization of science.
The legacy of Al Gore’s religious polemic, twenty years on.
He, I think more than anyone, was responsible for the politicization of science.
Can I get an “amen”?
The Amazing Randi used to say that scientists are easier to fool than children, and I wonder if Al Gore’s escapades hit another mental flaw in academia related to the old observation that people without a religion are liable to adopt any belief system that will fill that void.
What Gore presented was functionally an apocalyptic version of Judeo Christianity stripped of all religious identifiers. It had the original sin, the rejection of proper reverent behavior, and that angered the “higher power” which was then going to strike us with pain and suffering and death until we atoned and changed our ways.
The message is one all those academics and drilled into them when they were kids, and which to some degree is foundational to our culture, showing up in novels and movies in all sorts of ways. And the academics spring up out of their pews and began speaking in tongues and their souls were saved because the gospel had touched their heart.
And so we got decades of papers about how some disappearing tree frog, or butterfly migrations, or ski lift tickets proves the truth of global warming and the need to clear cut the Alabama forests to produce wood pellets so the British can offset their CO2 emissions.
And of course it didn’t hurt that academia quickly figured out how to monetize their religion and rake in trillions of dollars from it.