CNN’s seven-hour-long climate calamity confab (town hall) on Sept. 4, coming just after Hurricane Dorian tragically pulverized parts of the Bahamas, attempted to kick up a storm of panic over assured planetary hellfire d***ation for our sinful carbon-fueled transgressions against Mother Earth goddess Gaia.

The dire consequences, they plead, demand immediate and drastic actions.

More than half of the Democratic candidates favor a carbon tax or fee on carbon dioxide “pollution,” which all of Gaia’s green plants view as “food.”

Nearly half the climate crisis choir — including Sens. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., Kamala Harris, D-Calif., Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., Cory Booker, D-N.J., and South Bend Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg — would ban all fracking.

Joe Biden wouldn’t ban fracking, but would commit $1.7 trillion over 10 years to achieve net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050.

Several would spend between $3 trillion (Booker), $10 trillion (Harris), and $16.3 trillion (Sanders, certainly no spendthrift), to achieve net-zero carbon emissions for electricity by between 2030 and 2050.

Buttigieg would not only require net-zero carbon emissions for passenger vehicles in ten years, but for ships and aircraft by 2040; then expand on for everything else — manufacturing and agriculture — by 2050.

Candidate Andrew Yang’s plan, my personal favorite, would pay out $40 billion in home relocation and elevation subsidies to compensate for rising ocean flooding.

The Obamas should welcome this for their new 7,000 square feet $15 million waterfront Martha’s Vineyard home. Yes, and ditto for Al Gore too — some relief for his $9 million beachfront mansion in Montecito, California.

And why all the urgency? Sen. Sanders has tweeted that Dorian “has everything to do with climate change.” And as Democratic long-shot candidate Julian Castro explained, “[Hurricanes are] happening more frequently and with greater intensity.”

Well actually, as any historical NOAA data fact check will attest, they really aren’t.

Hurricane records dating back to 1851 show that for nearly 12 consecutive years — from Oct. 24, 2005 (after Wilma) until Aug. 25, 2017 (Harvey) — represented the longest period when no moderate or major (Category 3-5) hurricane made landfall in the continental United States.

Last year set a record as the first when no “violent” (F4-5) tornado touched down in the United States.

Meanwhile, NOAA’s last updated 2016 coastal sea level data show no evidence of an accelerated sea-rise-trend over many decades.

In a 2003 speech, the late-great author Michael Crichton summed up the global warming alarmism crusade as a religious mantra falsely conflated with Judeo-Christian theology:

“There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature; there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result from eating from the tree of knowledge; and as a result from eating from the tree of knowledge; and as a result of our actions, there is a judgement day coming for all of us.

“We’re energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right beliefs imbibe.”

Michael Crichton wasn’t arguing against the importance of living more environmentally responsible lives that apply resources in more efficient, less contaminating, ways.

He was instead talking about exercising stewardship guided more by intelligence and less by emotion and political pandering to virtue-signaling sanctimony.

The temple of global warming is built upon pseudo-religious rather than scientific foundations. Climate change is not Gaia’s punishment for our human audacity to multiply and survive, any more than a tornado that destroys a church is God’s retribution for belonging to the wrong denomination.

Get over it!

Climate change is the way nature balances itself, moves heat around, and produces motivations for species to evolve. CO2 is a small, but nonetheless important part of that system.

Without it, life would not exist at all. No polar bears, no penguins, no coral reefs – and certainly no rain forests that directly breathe in lots of the stuff in an endless and essential trade cycle for other stuff we, whales, Bambi, and other creatures inhale.

Please don’t call that miracle molecule pollution. At least show it a little respect.

And regarding that alleged “climate emergency”, don’t run for the fire exits just yet. As discussed in my August 19 column, tens of thousands of recent and previous scientists have gone on record rejecting such Armageddon alarmism.

They point out, for example, that there is no debate whatsoever whether or not climate changes (weather either). Always have – always will.

Nor should there be any surprise that Mother Earth has been blissfully and blessedly warming through natural causes since the Little Ice Age ended around 1870.

There is, however, no real evidence nor remotely credible scientific consensus that human-caused CO2 emissions represent any true danger – nor even a major influence.

Leading Democrat contender Biden has famously committed to a policy that will choose truth over facts. Perhaps his party can finally begin to pursue a lot more of both.