Many heretics, er, global warming skeptics, have viewed the climate change herd as being a new incarnation of a religious cult. These fine folk believe what they believe without the benefit of logic, reason, evidence, and (if that’s not enough) they also believe in miracles.

It was Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that provided a canonical structure for those worshiping at the altar of Global Warming. He even gave them (thanks to Dr. James Lovelock) a deity – the earth goddess from Greek mythology, Gaia.

Real science (again, to them) isn’t real at all. The only real science is that which has been blessed by Al Gore, Barack Obama or his (allegedly non-political) Environmental Protection Agency.

To true believers in Global Warming, both frigid temperatures in the east and the simultaneous creation of desert-like conditions in California are irrefutable evidence that the world is coming to an end because of climate changes caused by human activity. To these cultists, no other explanation is conceivable. So it appears to be a miracle.

In addition to reviving the worship of a mythological goddess, Gore also reintroduced the practice of simony.

Simony is the practice of selling any religious articles for money. Most infamously, during the 9th and 10th centuries, this practice became widespread in the form of selling indulgences for your sins. Get an indulgence and the evangelists of that era promised the gullible that God would give them a pass on their sinful ways. And if you sin again, you just have to hand over a few coins and you have another exemption. Apparently, like the very wealthy today, sinners could sin and sin and sin again, and with a tawdry financial exchange can be cleansed of their sins and then go right on sinning.

Of course simony was condemned by the church since the very earliest days. In fact the first instance of simony was noted in the New Testament (Acts 8:18) when a gentleman named Simon Magus (Simon the Magician or possibly Simon the Con Artist) tried to cut a deal with a couple of apostles for some of their power.

Today, worshippers of Gaia also believe that they can perform some sort of a penance and will be granted an indulgence for the evil ways of the world that are harming Gaia. Gaia is the name of the primal Earth Mother in Greek mythology, or as more commonly known to most people as Mother Nature, and as we all know, it’s not nice to harm Mother Nature. She’s a goddess after all, and most Greek mythological deities are reputed to have kind of a short temper.

For today’s true believers though, an indulgence is known as a carbon tax. Or cap and trade. Or mileage standards. Or closing coal plants. All of which will directly or indirectly punish the average sinner, er, citizen, for their transgressions against the will of Gaia. And inevitably, some of that indulgence money sticks to the fingers of the high priests of Gaia. After all, what good is it to be a high priest if you can’t make a few bucks on it?

The mythological Gaia, revived from the Greek, is the handiwork of a Dr. James Lovelock, who developed the theory that Gaia was something akin to a single, living organism in the 1960’s. Who would have believed that it could have been developed in the 60’s? He has since written eight books with the word “Gaia” in the titles. Dr. Lovelock is a doctor of medicine, not climatology or meteorology. He is also a proponent of “sustainable retreat.”

“Sustainable retreat” is a concept which defines the necessary changes to human settlement and dwelling on a global scale with the purpose of adapting civilization to global warming and preventing its expected negative consequences on humans.

If anyone is surprised that Al Gore could be involved with anything even resembling a revival camp meeting, it should be remembered that he actually attended a theological seminary. Early training sticks with you, I suppose.