The financial crisis has become an obstacle to the EU’s ambitious plans to fight climate change. On the one hand, many people do not like discussing climate right now. On the other, the crisis itself is forcing governments to be very careful, particularly about decisions which directly affect their country’s economic wellbeing.

Italy and Poland have already threatened to veto a package aimed at fighting climate change, reasoning that their economies could not handle the consequences of a forced reduction in CO2 emissions.

Regardless of this, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and Chairman of the European Commission Jose Manuel Barroso seem more determined than ever to fight global warming.

In reality, the specific “bureaucratic” arguments about emissions and measures to limit them boil down to two clear positions.

According to some, everything in the world is warming up and, fundamentally, going “to hell”. Their position, naturally, is that decisive measures must be taken now, and not a moment too soon. Others hold that the fight against global warming is too expensive (in other words, it would become an obstacle against the development of current generations) and, what’s more, is not leading to any results (in other words, we are right to think about future generations but we would not be able to help much).

Both positions are based entirely on the fundamental ideas of the “religion of global warming”. More and more frequently the group of people proclaiming that global warming is coming, or has come, are being referred to as a religious formation, simply because the idea of global warming is based not on facts but on its followers’ blind faith.

This faith leads also to the widely proclaimed “consensus” about the existence and reasons for global warming. It is the same “consensus thousands of scientists” from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC) have arrived at.

The fact that a group of scientists have agreed on one issue does not necessarily mean much. In the past, for example, there was a consensus that Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity was not true. When Einstein was asked to comment on this consensus, his alleged response was: “If I was wrong, they only needed to send one scientist to prove me wrong.” The truth is that, until now, no one has proven that global warming is actually occurring.

Let us examine the foundations of this theory.

These are the foundations on which bureaucrats are standing, about which they have taken different positions and have began to argue.

It is appropriate to say that the foundations are extracted from the so called consensus of scientists from IPCC (the existence of such a consensus itself, even among the IPCC, is a completely different topic).

Everything is based around the following claims:

Global warming is a fact.

Global warming is caused by humans and their activities.

The key elements are causing the warming greenhouse emissions (CO2).

Simply stated, human activity is responsible for greenhouse emissions, which, in itself, is the cause of global warming.

Every element is fundamentally important. If just one is false it is enough to bring the entire “religion” tumbling down. In other words, if global warming is a fact, but is not caused by the CO2 emissions, the religion falls away.

Adherents to the global warming religion tenaciously claim that debate about this topic is closed. Maybe they are right bearing in mind that they (including Al Gore) refuse to enter such open debates. The bureaucratic machine has already been activated but people’s attitudes and that of the media and scientists have shifted dramatically over the past year. More and more media (including the New York Times) are questioning Gore’s “faith” and have opened their pages or their programmes to alternative views.

In fact, the debate is not finished – it is only just beginning. Bearing in mind that Gore’s followers’ fear of facing facts and scientists with alternative thinking, as well as serious indications that we should expect, literally, a cooling off period, the outcome of this debate may be very near.

It would be interesting to see how bureaucrats react under such a development. Even now they are ready to spend billions of dollars without any certainty about what they are going to achieve. There is a great danger that all measures, which would be accepted now (based on fear of global warming), would remain in place even after the complete failure of the “religion”. 

*Petar Ganev is an economist with the Institute for Market Economics think-tank in Sofia.