Climate change alarmists are really just closet creationists. At least that is the most recent claim from climate change denier Vincent Gray.
Environmentalism is just the latest attempt to find a substitute for the theory of evolution and it is paradoxical that it can be so widespread when next year (2009) is the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his major work “The Origin of Species as the Result of Natural Selection”.
This is a genuine breakthrough in crank thinking! All of a sudden the thousands of respected scientists who can be classified as environmentalists (not just climatologists) are actually creationists, who just pretend to accept evolution. Clearly this is a deathblow to climate change and environmentalism, because such claims simply cannot be refuted… at least not with a straight face.
Oh and for the record, Darwin’s famous book was not called “The Origin of Species as the Result of Natural Selection” as Vincent Gray asserts but “On The Origin of Species
by Means of Natural Selection“. Makes one wonder what else he may have gotten wrong…
Jeebus Dan, I just followed those links back a few generations. WTF? Who are these people?
Vincent Gray is definitely one of the more entertaining deniers out there, but really his claims aren’t out of the ordinary in the denier camp.
I’ve noticed a correspondence between young earth creationists and global warming skeptics myself. (This is from personal relationships, so obviously it could be unrepresentative of the wider population).
What I find puzzling is why the correspondence is there. There isn’t any logical link between creationism and global warming skepticism. Assuming for the moment that creationism is 100% true, it simply doesn’t follow that global warming is a sham any more than it would follow that Scruffy Dan likes dogs. They’re not related at all.
In fact one could argue that if the earth has only been around 7,000 years it makes it more probable that human activity could alter the climate because you don’t have millions of years of climate evidence to draw on. Much more rapid climate shifts would seem to follow from creationism, so wouldn’t that make human induced climate change more likely?
I simply do not understand why the two seem to go hand in hand.
Sure, one could say that if you distrust distrust evolutionary science you’ll distrust all other science, but this isn’t the case. I see no correspondence between creationism and doubting the moon landing or doubting particle physics, or quantum physics or any other science. So why the climate change science?
You certainly aren’t the first to notice this correlation, which makes the claim by Vincent Gray all the more absurd. And it was already plenty absurd to begin with.
As to why the correlation exists, I have a few theories. The first is what Mark over at the Denialism Blog calls crank magnetism.
The other is that both creationists and climate change denial are accepted by a significant number of right wing leaders (be they political or religious), and thus both beliefs tend to be accepted by similar sorts of people.