Policy By Panic - Global Warming

Did you catch this random act of journalism in Slate discussing global warming's outlandish predictions?

I'm shocked to see the author, Bjørn Lomborg, stray slightly from global warming orthodoxy. Look for Bjørn to be shunned at the next earth worship service.

And while its nice to have some fun with this piece, the author makes a good point about policy by panic. Fear mongering is not an acceptable path to change hearts or minds. Because of all the wild claims made by the left over the years (hole in ozone, DDT, Alar, new ice age, mortgage crisis etc), many like myself are automatically suspicious of any prediction that comes from the Progressive-Democrat-Media complex. When you have folks eager to "never let a crisis go to waste," it is highly probable that they would create one, real or imagined, to implement their agenda.

The man-made global warming crisis gave me great pause when I first heard about it. I remember the outlandish claims in the 70s - that we would have to move to Mexico to avoid freezing to death in the coming ice age. Thankfully, that idiocy died rather quickly. But the myth of man-caused global warming will not end so gracefully. There is just too much money at stake, too many UN agendas to implement, too many 3rd world countries to plunder, and too many reputations at risk for this nonsense to finally die.

Commonsense should tell you that the sheer size of the Earth, a planet that is over 70% water, and with only a small percentage of land inhabited by humans in any appreciable density, would limit mankind from having much, if any influence on the GLOBAL climate. Even a limited scientific knowledge should cause you to consider the Sun, which is beyond man's control, as the most significant driver of any climate change. And even if you focused exclusively on greenhouse gasses, why would you not focus on water vapor, which is by far the largest greenhouse gas, instead of CO2? And of course there is the Earth's historical record, which includes long periods that were both much colder and much warmer than now, and sometimes much higher concentrations of CO2, should make any wild claims of man's influence on global temperatures suspect.

But this blog is not to dispute the why or why not of global warming. Climate change has happened in the past, and will happen again, with or without man's help. This is about the propaganda war waged by the left.

When Al Gore and other warmanistas claimed after Hurricane Katrina that global warming would cause ever increasing numbers of storms like Katrina, with ever increasing destructive power, it was laughable. We are now almost 2500 days (2488) removed from the last Cat 3 or above storm making US landfall. This far surpasses the last record (1900-1906 - 2231 days). But do you hear any "believer" apologizing for their obvious fear mongering? No. They are still pushing this nonsense with ever increasing fervor and even more ridiculous claims.

This is where Bjørn hits the nail on the head. Every incident, climate related or not, seems to get blamed on global warming. BTW - I know the warmanistas have been running away from the global warming term, but as far as I am concerned, they invented and own it, and I will use it as long as free speech is still allowed. The warmanistas use every drought, rain shower, snowstorm, tornado, heat wave, cold snap as absolute proof of global warming, in spite of sometimes overwhelming evidence against such claims. They make ridiculous predictions about more frequent hurricanes or the Arctic sans ice, and are never called out when these predictions are epic failures. If they want anyone to take this issue seriously, the propaganda needs to end.

IF the climate is changing, let REAL scientists do their job figuring it out apart from the politics and agitprop. Let them examine all factors before automatically blaming man. You may just find that the climate is getting warmer no matter what man does. If that is the case, it hardly seems prudent to tax the world into the stone age, leaving the common folks, those not enjoying the Carbon Tax/Cap & Trade windfall, incapable of adapting to their changing environment.