Are Crazy, Corrupt Religionists Preventing Action To Stop A Climate Change Chain Reaction That Mankind Will Be Powerless To Stop?

It frightens me that the media in the U.S. gives more space and more air to a discussion of whether storms like Hurricane Sandy are retribution from an angry god then looking at the scientific data about what the real problem actually is. Ken covered the science part of the equation pretty thoroughly Friday evening. People in other countries are concerned as well-- and they should be. Psychotic and corrupt Bronze Age religionists in the U.S. are powerful enough to prevent ameliorative action on Climate Change to prevent the onset of a new Ice Age. Scottish economist, Graeme Maxton, author of Driving Over a Cliff and The End of Progress, How Modern Economics Has Failed Us, explained in the South China Morning Post why Climate Change is a "clear and present danger" that must be dealt with seriously.

It almost seems fitting. The country that uses the most oil, has produced the greatest amount of carbon dioxide emissions for decades and has consistently denied the evidence of climate change has been given the slap it required. With tens of deaths, a crushed infrastructure and billions of dollars worth of damage, Hurricane Sandy is the wake-up call America needed. More than that, it is an event to which we should all pay heed. It is time to stop wasting money on fake wars and start spending it to protect us from a much graver threat.

A few weeks ago, I attended the general assembly of the Club of Rome, in Bucharest. There, we were presented with the latest evidence on the effects of climate change, and they were scary. Predictions made just five years ago have already proved wildly wrong.

In 2007, scientists said they thought the Arctic would be ice-free by the end of this century. At the current rate of melting, however, it will now be ice-free in the summer by 2015. It will be ice-free all year by 2030. This is not the main worry, however, as this is floating ice. When it melts, it does not raise sea levels. The real worry is the Greenland ice shelf, which is also melting at an unprecedented rate. If this disappears too, the effects will be catastrophic.

Sea levels around the world will rise between six and seven metres, wiping out cities like New York, London and Shanghai. The addition of so much cold fresh water into the seas would also change ocean currents and weather patterns in ways we can barely imagine.

At the same time, rising temperatures in the northern hemisphere now risk melting much of the Siberian permafrost, which will release vast clouds of trapped methane, accelerating the speed of climate change even more. This risks starting a chain reaction, which we could do nothing to stop.

The effects of what we are doing to the planet are all around us, from the storms and floods this year to the record droughts. Since 1980, the number of natural catastrophes has risen from an average of 400 a year to about 800 now, according to reinsurance company Munich Re. Ironically, North America has already been more affected by "weather-related extreme events" than anywhere else.

We need to make urgent changes to the way we live if we want to avoid a crisis. The changes now anticipated will not just affect our children and grandchildren. They will affect us all.

When predictions were made a few years ago, scientists said it would all be more or less OK if we limited the rise in average global temperatures to two degrees Celsius.

Yet we have missed that target already. Because we have not actually done anything to halt the damage we are doing, the amount of greenhouse gas being released into the atmosphere has continued to grow.

Without change, we are now heading for a four-degree rise, which will take the earth's average temperature back to levels last seen 40 million years ago. This will cause the Antarctic to melt too, with sea levels rising 60-70 metres. The droughts and floods we would experience along the way would make the planet virtually uninhabitable.

While these changes have been happening, while they have been denied and ignored, we have been fighting two senseless wars instead. The first has been against debt. Governments around the world have spent trillions trying to prop up their economies, to keep them growing and keep people spending. In the process, they have kept us digging up ever more of the world's raw materials and consuming even more stuff we don't need, making the changes to the climate even worse.

The second senseless war has been the "war on terror." According to a study by Brown University last year, the cost to America in the first 10 years after the attacks of September 11 was a staggering $4trillion. Trillions more have been spent in Europe and elsewhere.

During all this time, there have been just 251 terrorism-related deaths in the developed world and none in the US. Over the same time, tens of thousands have been killed by climate change. According to Munich Re, 30,000 people have been killed in North America alone, between 1980 and 2011 because of weather-related incidents.

For more than a decade, we have been chasing the wrong demon. The biggest threat to our existence is not the lack of economic growth, or al-Qaeda. It is the earth itself. Unless we learn to treat it with respect and start responding to the signals it is sending us, it will consume us all.

When Thomas Jefferson was interviewing academics for faculty positions at the University of Virginia, John Adams warned him to not consider any Europeans since they were likely to have already had their minds hopelessly warped by Christianity, which many of the Founding Fathers recognized as a dangerous superstition. Jefferson founded the University of Virginia as the country's first explicitly secular school, if not anti-Christian school. Dr. Daryl Cornett of Mid-America Theological Seminary wrote that Jefferson's "vision for the University of Virginia was for education finally free from traditional Christian dogma. He had a disdain for the influence that institutional Christianity had on education. At the University of Virginia there was no Christian curriculum and the school had no chaplain." This is the quote from John Adams' letter to Jefferson (January 22, 1825):

Your university is a noble employment in your old age and your ardor for its success does you honor but I do not approve of your sending to Europe for tutors and professors. I do believe there are sufficient scholars in America to fill your professorships and tutorships with more active ingenuity and independent minds than you can bring from Europe. The Europeans are all deeply tainted with prejudices both ecclesiastical and temporal which they can never get rid of. They are all infected with episcopal and presbyterian creeds and confessions of faith.