Writing in the Leicester Mercury on Nov 16, East Midlands MEP Roger Helmer stated the “Church of England seems to have abandoned religious faith entirely and taken up the new religion of climate alarmism instead.”

“Many commentators have remarked on the similarities between religion and climate alarmism,” Mr Helmer said, as “both are based more on faith than on evidence. Both warn of dire consequences unless we have faith and change our way of life.”

Mr Helmer, who resigned from the Conservative Party’s frontbench in Europe when the party leadership jettisoned its promised referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, noted with approval the comment by children’s author and former Anglican priest GP Taylor, that “many bishops spend more time preaching about climate change than preaching a gospel of salvation” and that the Church of England had become the “spiritual arm of New Labour.”

The “world is cooling” and not warming, Mr Helmer said, arguing that “more and more scientists around the world are breaking cover to challenge the theory of man-made global warming” and called for the church to have “more faith in God, and less in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.” The Bishop of Leicester told the Independent he was “surprised and saddened" by Mr Helmer’s remarks. Bishop Tim Stevens noted that Mr Helmer had not offered his “extraordinary view that the earth is cooling" when he spoke at a climate change debate at Leicester Cathedral.

While the consensus among the top echelon of the Church of England is that man-made global warming is a threat to the planet, a growing number of climate scientists have disputed this view. In the United States a petition endorsed by 32,000 scientists including the late Edward Teller argues the claim of “settled science” and an overwhelming “consensus” in favor of the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and consequent climatological damage is wrong.

“No such consensus or settled science exists,” they argue, noting that “human-caused global warming hypothesis is without scientific validity and that government action on the basis of this hypothesis would unnecessarily and counterproductively damage both human prosperity and the natural environment of the Earth.”

One of the most pugnacious critics of the global warming, Ian Plimer, a professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, argues in his recently released book, Heaven and Earth -- Global Warming: The Missing Science, that the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is a confidence trick played upon the public by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians who thrive on creating public anxiety.

Plimer notes that fears of carbon dioxide building in the atmosphere are misplaced, as the current levels are at their lowest point in 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held on the earth’s surface. Mankind, he argues, contribute an insignificant fraction to the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

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