October 28, 2009 8:46AM # The Church of Global Warming By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE Novelist Michael Crichton [said](http://www.crichton-official.com/speech-environmentalismaseligion.html) that environmentalism had all the trappings of a religion: “Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday.” I never took such claims entirely seriously. But then I heard this statement from a Montana writer, Jim Robbins, [interviewed by the “sustainability reporters”](http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/10/27/pm-climate-race-1/) of government-funded Marketplace Radio: > There’s a saying that there are no atheists in foxholes. I think there’s something along that line happening here. I mean, there are still some people who refuse to believe it. But I think there’s been an erosion of that disbelief and it’s changed pretty dramatically. Darned if he isn’t using terms like “atheists” and “disbelief” in a discussion of global warming. Almost as if he were, you know, a theologian. Reporter Sarah Gardner, by the way, says that “in my own lifetime, average temperatures in this country have gone up more than 2 degrees.” That doesn’t sound like that much — maybe like moving from Washington to Richmond? But anyway, unless Sarah is about 200 years old, she seems to be [exaggerating](http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp/Library/nationalassessment/overviewlooking.htm). For a different view of global warming — not that of an atheist or even a skeptic, just a non-fundamentalist or non-apocalyptic — see this [short paper](https://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb111/hb111-45.pdf) or this [book](http://www.catostore.org/index.asp?fa=ProductDetails&method=&pid=1441420) by climatologist Pat Michaels. ##### Related Tags [Energy and Environment](https://www.cato.org/research/energy-environment) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).