Same reason that folk hold to religious beliefs that to dispassionate specialist observers are clearly complete nonsense, while the folk in the house next door hold mutually exclusive but equal nonsensical views, and just as vehemently.

This here climate change debating group on ABC Pool, laughingly so-called since not a soul chooses to debate on anything, has listed and described many reasons why the anthropogenic greenhouse warming model of climate change is complete scientific gibberish. But, who wants to know?

People want to believe simple and irrational things. It allows us to divide the community into goodies and baddies, them and us. You are then nice to your mob and labour day and night to undo the other mob. A bit like parliament, or grown men chasing rubber eggs around empty paddocks. It is simply mating displays. Other species have daft ones, so why should we be immune?

Holding rational beliefs in groups is no use whatever, because everyone knows, for instance, that it's best to drink your tea with the cup the usual way up. So what are you going to ague about? When the entire point it to argue?. It's called displacement activity, and it keeps the species fit.

The sillier the mind-bogglingly-urgent group activity the better, so that when you have a real community problem, like say a flood or a bushfire, the nonsense projects can be dropped instantly and at virtually no real cost. So, burying carbon, the basic building block of life, underground in huge quantities, is a very smart move. And burying it in the form of a usually totally essential and beneficial gas, CO2, that, when artificially hugely concentrated, as we are doing, will kill all the life already underground, which is most of the life on the planet, is a move of pure genius in the collective hierarchy-climbing and mate-collecting game. Few things could possibly be scientifically dafter but combatively more inspired. Unless it is persuading one and all to use a steel elephant weighing 2 tonnes to move their flabby arses down to the shops for the more chocolate in the bigger economy bar that's on special.

Keep it up and you have lots of reserve people, OK, a bit fat and slack, but anyway, all in the habit of working very hard, five days a week, to pay for the chocolate and the steel elephant and the home gym gear, and all rearing to go do something heroic. Attack someone far away, is usually the go for Terra Australis Incognito but often to repel borders looking for cheap chocolate, from elsewhere on the planet.

Charity balls kept the dancing classes fit. But since we mechanised the factories and the farms, the dancing classes have declined and boy, do we now need exercise? So we rush to environmental rallies, where we walk along a way. Often those marching rallies are the longest walks in some desk jockey or jockette's life. Ballroom dancing is now unattractive to the couched classes. Off the screen, that is. And there too, no running way after the over-cooking shows.

A vast industry has grown up, very rapidly, that lives off this new climate angst. Most wear suits and ties so far, but huge numbers of kids worldwide are hoping to get jobs in the carbon police, in the anti-carbon secret service, in the technical forensic arms of the carbon Stasi, in policy-framing think tanks, or just in putting out bushfires in the real world. We are just about to hear that the bushfire brigades have re-defined their role, and are now our front-line CQ2 Suppression Units first, and life and home savers second and third.

Entrepreneurs dream of getting government contracts to build huge greenhouses on ever street corner, Demolishers are stroking their wallets in glee and scrappies are eyeing the copper pipe in the houses that will have to go.

Climate hymns will surface next, and soon banked rows of climate hermits will sit on cliff edges and decline to breathe more than once a minute, to reduce their carbon footprint.

Science in contrast is hard work, and unlike religion, there are no certainties. You have to get your head around all sorts of fiendishly complex ideas, many of them complete rubbish, but not detectable as such for decades or even centuries. You have to read and read and read and there is no scantily clad heroine or James Bond creature anywhere, with solutions available at the pull of a prick or a trigger. It is just a bit like farming, but that is also no longer fashionable in the west. Or here in Skippyland. We buy our veggies from Thailand now.

Housewives of both sexes can, in the (steadily warming) embrace of the Church of the Holy Molecule, give deeper meaning to their lives, by not leaving sooty footprints behind them. It is a complete waste of time telling them that a sooty footprint on the path six inches away is an organic veggie's dream Christmas present Veggies come from Thailand. Did you forget?
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They send their kids to uni to study the new holy of holies, environmental science. Confession time. Long ago and far away, (Cape Town, 1975) Denise and I set up the first student taught course at the uni there, and the first undergrad environmental course in the Cape. "Environmental Awareness," we called it. Oh boy, did we get our wish? Even back then, the doomed and unlamented government of Rhodesia asked if they could use the whole course as the model for that country's schools. Maybe it survived Ian Smith and has survived Mugabe. What a thing to have on your conscience, setting so many kids, now hungry, to wanting to be carbon footprint trackers for a living. Instead of growing their own and their families tucker. But, how where we supposed to know?

Now, I think, we all have to tone it all down more than slightly if humanity is to make it. It being the "economy" of endless waste. In my lifetime, start date 1950, the human population has gone from 2.55 billion to 6.8 billion. That much, 2.6 times as many animals in just under 60 years, for any species, almost always means a very sharp decline is about to happen. Says Ecology 101. But at the same time, we use vastly more of everything than we did in 1950, per person. so effectively we have maybe four or more times as many 1950's-type people.

The game is to make it as gentle a demographic and waste-reduction down-slope as possible. We have no claim to be an intelligent species if we do not.

Less waste by the rich, us that is, including and starting with not wasting our time and collective treasure on utterly meaningless and cynically callous status games, like burying carbon dioxide underground, in order there to gas the biggest part of the biosphere.

Hooroo, all.

Peter.

Poted ABC Pool. August 2009. Public domain.