Anthony Gregory
Campaign for Liberty
October 24, 2009
This December, leaders of the industrialized world will gather in Copenhagen to frame an international strategy against “climate change” to take the place of Kyoto.
Many in the mainstream media would have you believe that someone must be crazy to voice skepticism toward the idea that human carbon emissions cause significant and disastrous global warming.
They don’t usually call it “global warming” anymore. The lingo for a few years has been “climate change,” since it provides a much more rhetorically strong ground from which to deride skeptics. Lambasting those who “deny climate change” is more compelling than to scoff, “how could you deny the earth is warming?” Especially now that we know it has been cooling for a decade.
So it’s cooling now, but the real problem, we are told, is climate change — as caused by human emissions of carbon — particularly with an alleged long-term trend toward warming. Real and alleged cataclysms of nature — everything from Katrina to spiders getting bigger — has been blamed on our greenhouse gases.
Merely to express doubt of this theory has been called “treason against the planet” by Paul Krugman, who probably speaks for a large segment of left-liberals. It is seen as unseemly, unpatriotic and hysterical to wonder if humans are causing the earth to warm in unsustainable and disastrous ways. Another Nobel Prize winner, Al Gore, even said a year ago that businesses (conveniently ones that compete with his own favored industrial interests) should be censored for voicing doubt on climate change:
[efoods]“I believe for a carbon company to spend money convincing the stock-buying public that the risk from the global climate crisis is not that great represents a form of stock fraud because they are misrepresenting a material fact,” he said. “I hope these state attorney generals around the country will take some action on that.”
Scientists who question the common wisdom are marginalized and silenced. It is considered beyond the pale to suggest, for example, that the sun — that big ball of gas that supports the life of the planet, constituting more than 99% of the solar system’s mass — has much more effect on idiosyncratic temperature changes than human-emitted greenhouse gasses. And the fact that the carbon emissions theory was first seriously advanced by the Margaret Thatcher regime to bolster the case for nuclear power, back when the environmentalists had been worried about a “new ice age”? That’s ancient history, and only a loon would bring it up.
The scientific method relies on doubt and the idea of a settled “consensus” is anathema — although many would have us believe it’s unscientific to harbor doubts. But even putting aside the question of scientific fact, there is the policy discussion, and here it makes even more sense that some of us would be skeptical. The extent to which many Americans and people in the developed world are willing to part with their liberty in the hopes that national and global bureaucracies can fine-tune the planet’s weather is staggering.
At home the immediate threat is so-called “cap and trade,” a scam to legalize and normalize pollution, regulate industry and impose massive costs onto the American people.
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