Some friends sent me a thought provoking article:

A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.
– G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West.

For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands.. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it’s not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in “the rock higher than I” – a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy.

Despite the claims of our current crop of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Harris, this is not simply brain-dead foolishness. Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don’t yet understand.

When religious belief is subverted, it does not, as Chesterton implied, simply vanish. It is almost immediately replaced by another set of beliefs on a similar level of abstraction and serving the same purpose. Sometimes it’s an import, such as Buddhism or TM. Sometimes it’s a creed deliberately created to serve a political agenda, as we see in Nazism and Communism. Sometimes it’s the goofy SoCal syncretism currently expressed in Wicca and Neopaganism. (“If people seriously want to be pagans,” the late Joe Myers, a Christian brother of my acquaintance once said. “They’d become Roman Catholics.”) And sometimes they’re a combination, a weird melange of ideas picked up from various sources that (and usually not coincidentally) also serve a political purpose. Which brings us to environmentalism…

Read more at American Thinker: A Necessary Apocalypse

Certainly not a Christian work, but an interesting look at the history of environmentalism as a pseudo-religion, complete with it’s own series of end-times apocalyptic events. If you are old enough (and I barely am..) you may remember some of the previous dire warnings of the doomsday scientists: nuclear winter; over population and world-wide starvation (which led to b-movies like Soylent Green); the global cooling scare of the ’70s.