Global Warming?
Instapundit offers the sanest response to Global Warming hysterics I've read since the United Nations came out with its politically motivated hatchet job on U.S. economic productivi -- er, I mean, its Global Warming report.
While luddites, er, liberals the world over have been crowing over the alleged science in a report that employs the words "probable", "possible" and "potentially" more often than a room full of Quantum Physicists, it's been vastly entertaining to note that the very same people who believe it's impossible to bring democracy to Iraq are droolingly insistent that if we just pull together we have the means to put the brakes on Mother Nature.
Right, whatever. *rolls eyes*
But I'm fully in the Instapundit camp on this one, in that while I don't believe we have more than the slimmest, most coincidental of evidence to bolster the idea that humanity is the culprit behind any global climate change, it's still a good idea to switch away from burning fossil fuels and into utilizing cleaner energy sources anyway. His money quote:
"Regardless of what you think of the above, burning carbon is a lousy idea. Coal and oil are, over the long term, far more valuable as chemical feedstocks than as fuels anyway, and burning them is unacceptably filthy regardless of greenhouse issues. We should replace them as soon as possible with nice, clean, greenhouse-friendly nuclear plants and other environmentally friendly power technologies. Burning less carbon is good planetary hygiene, and good practice generally, regardless of what you think of global warming. So, I suppose, in a way we should be pursuing global warming remedies regardless of what you think about global warming."
Hear hear.
But expect to hear plenty of hyperbole about melting ice-caps and flooded coastlines from the neo-hippies for the next several years or so, at least until a Democrat is elected as President, and then suddenly Global Warming won't seem so urgent an issue anymore.
Tax oil companies into oblivion as punishment for being profitable businesses -- check. Hand out taxpayer funded subsidies to alternative energy groups without requiring any tangible results -- check. Finally become signatories to the Kyoto Treaty -- whoa, hold on a minute there, fella! You think I'm aiming for political suicide as a career option? Al Gore I aint.
The Becker-Posner Blog offers additional sage advice: "I should add that throughout history, there has been a tendency to underestimate the potential for technological developments that greatly reduce the predicted doom from various natural and manmade disasters, such as claims during the past several centuries that the world is running out of wood, coal, or oil. One glaring and instructive example is the 1865 book The Coal Question by the great economist, W. Stanley Jevons, which predicted disastrous coal shortages by the end of that century. The lesson for warming is that new technologies may arrive much sooner than expected, technologies that not only effectively reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, but also help take them out of the atmosphere."
Does any Global Warming disciple remember the 1970's and the massive amounts of pollution spewed across Europe and the Americas at the time? Oh, right -- no, they don't, because we've made rapid and massive changes to our industrial sectors already, changes which have cleaned up our waters, our air and our cities. The big joke when I was growing up in Michigan was that you didn't have to be Jesus to walk on the water when you had Lake Erie, a body of water so thick with pollutants that it was pronounced all but dead only thirty years ago. Now, Lake Erie is seen as a success story, almost a model of a recovered ecosystem with scientists more concerned about the proliferation of introduced species than the extinction of them all.
I think there's a lesson in there for our Climate Change hysterics.