As night follows day, my recent post on the near-zero climate effect of the methane emitted by feral camels in Australia elicited a torrent of criticism from all the usual suspects, in full stampede to be the first and most vociferous in terms of condemnations of yours truly. A denier. A tool of the fossil-fuel industry. A defender of capitalist outrage. An obstacle to environmental “justice.” A facilitator of resource depletion, the climate existential threat, and the imminent mass migration of the world’s victims of grinding poverty seeking in desperation to escape the relentless expansion of lifeless desert in place of life-giving greenery (uh, no) and other such ravages flowing from the planet’s revenge.

The opprobrium was brutal, particularly for a shy, retiring, sensitive, easily wounded type like me. I remain deeply traumatized, unable to perform even the most elementary of daily functions except the preparation of such musings as the one that you, dear reader, now are perusing. My only solace is the curious failure of any of the aforementioned stampeders to dispute my central point: Eliminating the feral camels would reduce global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by about three million carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) metric tons per year — that is, by 6/1,000ths of a percent — with an ensuing impact of zero, literally, in terms of temperatures and other such climate phenomena as cyclones, sea levels, and all the rest.

Notwithstanding that failure to engage my argument, the critics decidedly were unamused by my observation that “there is just something about climate change that leads a lot of people to lose their minds,” given the proposal made — in all seriousness — by the climate alarmists that 1.2 million feral camels in Australia be shot from helicopters, in the name of saving the planet from the looming climate catastrophe engendered by humanity, a premise for which there is no evidence. A friend — in my case, there are precious few — noted that the feral camels are an important source of food and other resources for the nomadic aboriginal population in the Outback. A loss of the camels would exacerbate the poverty of those people, a break-eggs-make-omelets outcome of little concern to the climate propagandists continually wailing about the aforementioned environmental “justice.”

In any event, one common refrain was: Put aside the camels. What about the world’s livestock herds? They too chew their cud and emit vastly more tons of methane than do the camels, as a result of mankind’s insatiable demands for meat and other animal products. Can we afford such profligacy in the face of the climate emergency?

In contrast to the emotional outbursts summarized above, that is an actual argument that can be addressed analytically. Total global methane emissions in CO2e are about 9.5 billion metric tons annually, or about 18 percent of total global CO2e emissions of 55 billion metric tons annually. Of that 9.5 billion metric tons, livestock emit about 21 percent, or two billion metric tons annually, less than 4 percent of global GHG emissions in CO2e.

Suppose those emissions from livestock suddenly were to go to zero. Using the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) climate model and applying the highest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) figure (4.5 degrees C) from the 5th Assessment Report (page 16 and Table SPM.2) for the equilibrium sensitivity of the climate system — that is, the highest IPCC assumption about the effect of reducing GHG emissions — the temperature effect in 2100 would be less than 1/100th (0.0072) of a degree C. As the standard deviation of the surface temperature record is about 0.11 degrees C, that impact would not be measurable and would be utterly irrelevant in terms of any climate phenomena. So go ahead: Enjoy that rib eye with a clear conscience.

But, say the stampeders: The impact of each individual policy to reduce GHG emissions might be small, but they would add up to something significant. Well, no, as I have pointed out repeatedly. The entire Obama climate action plan: 0.015 degrees C. And if we include the (utterly meaningless) 2015 pseudo-agreement with China: 0.025 degrees C. The entire Paris agreement, if it is to be taken seriously (it is not): 0.17 degrees C. Zero net US GHG emissions by 2050: 0.17 degrees C. A reduction to zero in GHG emissions by the entire Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development: 0.35 degrees C. Those are the calculations using the EPA climate model under the same assumption noted above. There is no dispute about them, which is why the proponents of “carbon” policies never offer actual estimates of the climate effects of their proposals.

Consider an “aggressive” global policy to reduce GHG emissions, one wholly implausible as a matter of economic and political reality, but useful nonetheless for analytic purposes. Assume zero net US emissions by 2030. And: a 20 percent cut in Chinese emissions, a 30 percent cut in emissions by the rest of the industrialized world, and a 20 percent cut by the rest of the developing world, all from 2005 levels by 2030. The resulting reduction in global temperatures by 2100: 0.53 degrees C. Would someone please ask the supporters of various climate policies and those arguing the imminence of a climate existential threat to describe a benefit-cost test under which any of the proposals can be justified?

What is it about anthropogenic climate change that, again, “leads a lot of people to lose their minds”? There is no way to “prove” any given hypothesis, but my sense is that an apocalyptic vision is a necessary adjunct of the reality that modern environmentalism generally, and in particular as manifested in the climate issue, has been transformed into a movement both religious and fundamentally authoritarian. (One imminent apocalypse after another also is a tool useful for fundraising.)

The interpretation of destructive weather as the gods’ punishment of men for the sins of man is ancient. And just as the pagans for millennia attempted to prevent destructive weather by worshipping golden idols, so do modern left-wing environmentalists now attempt to do the same by bowing down before recycling bins. At a more general level, the guiding dogma of modern environmentalism is easy to summarize: In the beginning, earth was the Garden of Eden. But mankind, having consumed the forbidden fruit of the tree of technological knowledge, has despoiled it. And only through repentance and economic suffering can we return to the loving embrace of Mother Gaia.

And that is how we arrive at a political world in which proposals to shoot over a million camels are taken seriously, as are proposals to constrain or proscribe any number of such manifestations of increasing wealth as meat consumption, air travel, simple heating and air conditioning, and automobiles. Do modern environmentalists actually believe that reductions in wealth are consistent with environmental protection? Do they actually care, their rhetoric notwithstanding? And if such efforts to save the planet are insufficient on a voluntary basis, as they inexorably would prove to be, coercion by any means necessary will be mandatory so as to avert the climate “existential crisis” for which, again, there is no evidence.

That is the deeper implication of proposals to shoot camels, eliminate livestock, limit individual mobility, reduce population growth sharply, and allow the world’s poorest to die from disease and malnutrition, a vision driven by a view of humans as only mouths to feed rather than moral agents and the eternal source of ingenuity driven to find solutions to problems. There may be something amusing about feral camels, their humps, and their reproductive enthusiasm in the Australian Outback, but proposals to do away with them carry implications vastly darker.