I think M. Lamar Keene put it best:

“The true-believer syndrome merits study by science. What is it that compels a person, past all reason, to believe the unbelievable. How can an otherwise sane individual become so enamored of a fantasy, an imposture, that even after it’s exposed in the bright light of day he still clings to it — indeed, clings to it all the harder? No amount of logic can shatter a faith consciously based on a lie.”

All right. Keene wasn’t speaking about the greenies, and he certainly wasn’t discussing science, but the basic premise still fits: no matter how many times you try and tell them there’s still debate, they insist that science is “settled” on the matter [science is never "settled"—new discoveries are often revising or overturning previously considered true notions about the world], and even if it wasn’t, we have to act now, because the world ends next Tuesday at seven pm.

Or so they insist ad nauseum.

Did I get that right? Wasn’t it Karl Marx who said religion was the opiate of the masses?

‘Accused of being an amoralist who always believed that the ends justified the means, Trotsky responded that a “means can be justified only by its end. But the end in turn needs to be justified.” And how was anybody to decide if something was morally justified? “The end is justified,” he continued, “if it leads to increasing the power of humanity over nature and the abolition of the power of one person over another . . . That is permissible which really leads to the liberation of humanity. Whether something is morally supportable should depend on whether it passes that test in the specific circumstances of the day, rather than according to some timeless commandments.’

Or, as Lenin put it rather more pithily (referring to the kulaks): “You can’t make an omlette without making eggs.”

What we see with the greens is just a new convolution of bourgeois morality, in which Trotsky’s dictum about increasing humanity’s power over nature has been inverted.

Perhaps we need an update to revolutionary morality: “You can’t liberate humanity without changing the climate.”

That would imply that there is a 95% possibility that the temperature won’t rise that much. Why is that lost on our intrepid reporter? He must buy lottery tickets, anyone who looks at the odds of winning a lottery would consider 5% to be pretty good odds. That this kind of certainty is driving the new morality is truely scary. I’m constantly amazed at the lengths some people will go to to control the lives of others.