An Old Story is Still New

In 2024, a member of the climate panic group “Last Generation Canada”, university student Étienne Eason, struggling with ecoanxiety, vandalized an Ottawa museum’s dinosaur replica. In a speech to a few museum visitors and staff before the police led him away in handcuffs, he said:

“The dinosaurs famously went extinct, and the way things are going right now, we are barrelling towards another mass extinction event.”

Eason’s story isn’t new. From the beginning of recorded history people have explained extreme hardship and disastrous events through stories of human sinfulness, punishment and death. One of the most famous is the biblical account of Noah’s Ark, an apocalyptic story in which the entire world drowned in a flood with only a tiny righteous remnant surviving.  It is a moral drama in which human wrongdoing unleashes catastrophe, and it finds surprising echoes in the way many today talk about the climate crisis.

Noah’s lesson is more than a biblical story. It is a fundamental archetype, a way of making sense of past disasters as having been caused by human evil.

The Flood Story is Universal

In Greek mythology, Zeus, angered by human wickedness, sent a great flood, with only two humans surviving to repopulate the earth. In Norse tradition, the myth of Ragnarök foretells a cosmic collapse: wars, monsters, floods, a fire that destroys the gods and much of the world, followed by rebirth. In more recent history, Norwegian TV series Ragnarök (2020–23) features a boy who is the reincarnation of Thor, fighting climate change and industrial pollution which are destroying the planet.

In the Indigenous Canadian traditions of the Cree and the Squamish there are also flood stories. Wisakedjak is used to explain both the creation of animals and as responsibility for a great flood which destroyed the world. A similar story among the Inuit is that of a great flood sent by the creator to cleanse the earth of its inhabitants’ wrongdoings. In this tale, a lone hunter survives by constructing a large canoe.

Climate Change is the New Flood

Today’s climate narratives often echo that same good versus evil structure. Fossil fuel use is cast as the new sin, carbon dioxide emissions as the rising floodwaters, and climate activists as modern prophets warning of judgment. Just as the Ark represented salvation for the faithful, so today’s proposed rapid decarbonization, emissions caps and EV mandates are presented as the only way to avert climate catastrophe. The parallels are not accidental. They reflect a deep human tendency to frame the environmental apocalypse as a moral drama.

It’s striking how closely today’s climate change religiosity follows the same script. Today’s climate change advocates suggest that before to the Industrial Revolution the climate was in a kind of Garden of Eden-like balance. Humanity then “sinned” by embracing the forbidden fruit: fossil fuels. Today, fossil fuels account for more than 80% of global primary energy consumption, and the resulting emissions of carbon dioxide are said to upset the planet’s natural order. The punishment is what used to be called human-caused global warming, and now re-labelled climate change, blamed for increased frequency and severity of hurricanes, wildfires and floods. As with Noah, the righteous are offered salvation by rejecting fossil fuels, embracing the “green transition” through renewable energy, and pursuing net-zero policies.

This framing has enormous emotional power. It presents carbon dioxide as Satan and fossil fuels as sinful transgressions to be repented of. Extreme weather is not just a natural occurrence; it is a moral judgment. And the solutions are not just practical policies but mandatory rituals of purification, sacrifice, and redemption.

Computer Models Have Become the Bible in Today’s Climate Story

Today’s climate crisis story doesn’t reference the Bible, but is founded on computer models that forecast future warming.  These forecasts have run far hotter than the actual, measured warming. And models are not measurement.  They merely forecast imaginary, unrealistic scenarios of the future – scenarios that assume runaway global coal use and population increases far beyond plausibility. These imaginative concoctions are political marketing, generating frightening headlines to justify destructive government policies. But they are closer to science fiction than science.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its technical reports, has said repeatedly that it cannot clearly detect an increase in most kinds of extreme weather beyond natural variability. Today, every hurricane or wildfire is presented in the media and government reports as proof of humanity’s guilt for emitting carbon dioxide. The structure is the same: sin, punishment, impending mass death, survival of the virtuous.

But fossil fuels, far from being the forbidden fruit, now provide over 80 percent of the energy that sustains modern life, which is why most of us would quickly die without them. They give us abundant food, heating and cooling, electricity, modern medicine and mobility. They have lifted billions out of poverty and helped extend life expectancy around the world. To demonize them as an evil to be eliminated is dangerous.

The climate is a complex natural system, not a morality play. Human influence on the climate is minor compared to natural variability and humanity can adapt to actual climate change. The true danger is not climate change but the frightening power of apocalyptic rhetoric, which fuels fear, division and destructive energy policies.

But Canada is not doomed to replay Noah’s story. By grounding energy policy in evidence rather than panic, we can avoid the trap of mistaking scary stories for science, and build a future more resilient than any Ark.