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.
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.
In the second term of the Obama administration, there was this weird fad of research into whether climate change makes you fat. It turns it does… in at least four different ways.
* Crops are becoming carb heavy (and less dense nutrient-wise) due to CO2 fertilization.
* Hot weather makes us less active and lower our metabolic activity.
* Hot weather and higher CO2 concentrations make our blood more acidic, influencing our brains to eat more.
* We make more white fat in warmer weather. You don’t want that if you’re trying to lose weight.
I’m still looking for studies that show climate change makes you thin.
What I really need to know is how does climate change affect high fructose corn syrup?
Well, if someone can make the case for correlation; then they’ll assume causation. See above.
He, I think more than anyone, was responsible for the politicization of science.
I think I would nominate Carl Sagan for that dubious honor.
Jim Davis
I wouldn’t necessarily argue with that, but I think that Gore did a lot more damage to the economies of the world.
It’s potentially an interesting connection. Sagan had framed the advance of science as light versus darkness, and in Cosmos fell into the trap of the English protestant framing of describing the Catholics as a mindless totalitarian force that was trying to crush knowledge and science so they could maintain religious dogma. He may have not even been consciously aware of how we came to have that framing, shaped by the massive religious wars in Europe.
That may have laid some of the groudnwork for Al Gore framing the climate debate as science (good) versus greedy capitalism, because liberals always think they’re good and their opponents are evil, and they believe that science is good because they believe in it and they only believe in good things, so their evil opponents must be greedy, evil, and anti-science. Oh, and the entire planet’s survival hangs in the balance. But Cosmos didn’t air until 1980, while Earth Day had been in 1970, so the narrative was already well established. American chemical companies were destroying the planet with pollution, don’t ya know?!
But perhaps Gore played a critical role in dragging science into what had been a political and economic debate over environmental policy, connecting it up with a cultish religious narrative that he could exploit.
I’d nominate Thomas Malthus for that. Half a century later virulent strain of politicized science would come from Communism. So much politicized science of today, just from those two starting points.
–European Union to restructure its space bureaucracy
April 9, 2026 10:38 am Robert Zimmerman
The European Union
This label would be more accurate if it read
“NOT made in the European Union”
The European Commission of the European Union (EU) announced earlier this week that it is renaming its “European Union Agency for the Space Programme” to the “European Union Space Services Agency (EUSPA)”, with the new agency aimed at running the EU’s various satellite projects, including its Galileo GPS-type constellation, its proposed communications constellations, and its various European security satellite projects.–
I blame Thomas Jefferson and his public schools.