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 A growing contingent of scientists has been
brave enough to stand athwart the politically fashionable global
warming steamroller. More than 500 such skeptics convened in New York
at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change last month. They
argue factually and persuasively that what warming the world has seen
in the last hundred years is at best minimal and at worst exaggerated.
Conversely, radical increases in global
temperatures or rising sea levels proclaimed by Al Gore and his ilk
aren't facts. They're merely guesses, some of them hysterical, about
conditions decades or centuries into the future and based on
assumptions about innumerable variables, many of which are beyond our
scientific comprehension and expertise.
Climate change is a natural and age-old
phenomenon on this planet recurring in roughly 1,500-year cycles and
predating humanity by millions of years. Ice ages have come and gone.
Compared to the overwhelming influence of the sun and the impact of
nonhuman influences on this planet - ocean-generated water vapor,
animal life, vegetation, etc. - the notion that the puny contribution
of mankind is the principal cause of climate change is a grand conceit.
Human activity constitutes a small fraction of
the myriad influences on climate. Marginal changes in human activity
within our technological and practical economic means represent an even
smaller fraction of that small fraction. The trillions of dollars the
world would spend on wasteful schemes to avert a delusional global
warming doomsday may be the greatest fool's errand in history. Count me
among the global warming skeptics. If I'm still around in a hundred
years, I'll delight in saying, "I told you so."
Global warming hysteria is steeped in politics
and a strange collection of bedfellows. Along with sincere
environmentalist true-believers are the camp followers who embrace this
as a quasi-religious calling.
Then there are the watermelons: green on the
outside, red on the inside. They embrace ecological arguments to
achieve ideological goals, exploiting fears of enviro-Armageddon to
regulate and control evil capitalists and redistribute world income and
wealth. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, recognizes the
signs. "As someone who lived under communism for most of (my) life," he
warned, "I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to
freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious
environmentalism, not communism. This ideology wants to replace the
free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now
global) planning."
Add to this mix, political opportunists
seeking election and economic opportunists seeking a quick buck from
government grants, subsidies and market manipulation, and you have an
irresistible coalition.
In this time of runaway oil prices and surging
world demand for energy, of course it's only sensible to marshal
creative technological resources and capital to use energy, from
whatever source, as efficiently as possible. That's precisely why
government-driven boondoggles like ethanol are worse than wasteful,
especially as this misallocation of agricultural resources has driven
up the world price of foodstuffs. Justifying a wrongheaded policy by
simply asserting it's "for the environment" is just as stupid as
justifying a wasteful government-spending program with the magic words
"It's for the children."
It's currently fashionable for politicians to
brag about their policies for a "new energy economy" and the jobs
created by it. Economically productive energy programs are wonderful.
Just spending taxpayer money for humbug isn't. The market is a much
better judge and taskmaster than government for what makes economic
sense. Imagine your tax dollars at work hiring 10,000 people to
generate turbine electricity by climbing a perpetual wheel like a
hamster in cage. Wouldn't that be a great way to create jobs in a new
energy economy?
I've got a better idea. While we're waiting
for the breakthrough in hydrogen fusion technology that will make water
a cheap and plentiful energy source, why not put Americans to work
developing our known natural gas and petroleum resources offshore and
in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Source
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