Charles Krauthammer takes on the global warming kool-aid drinkers and I must say that I’m pretty much in full agreement with him.
I’m not a global warming believer. I’m not a global warming denier. I’m a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can’t be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.
Oh yes, count me in on that. I have no problem with CO2 not being good, but how far back to the stone age do we care to go to address this problem? Next Krauthammer takes on the global warming models which lead to all the speculation…
Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems — from ocean currents to cloud formation — that no one fully understands.
Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.
This leads directly to attacks on our freedom…
Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation.
“The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity,” warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, “is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.”
If you doubt the arrogance, you haven’t seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over.
All this leads to the rationing of carbon credits…
Just Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.
There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.
and Krauthammer’s proposed alternative…
So what does the global warming agnostic propose as an alternative?
First, more research — untainted and reliable — to determine (a) whether the carbon footprint of man is or is not lost among the massive natural forces (from sunspot activity to ocean currents) that affect climate, and (b) if the human effect is indeed significant, whether the planetary climate system has the homeostatic mechanisms (like the feedback loops in the human body, for example) with which to compensate.
Second, reduce our carbon footprint in the interim by doing the doable, rather than the economically ruinous and socially destructive. The most obvious step is a major move to nuclear power, which to the atmosphere is the cleanest of the clean.
But your would-be masters have foreseen this contingency. The Church of the Environment promulgates secondary dogmas as well. One of these is a strict nuclear taboo.
Rather convenient, is it not? Take this major coal-substituting fix off the table and we will be rationing all the more. Guess who does the rationing?
There are no easy fixes and I’m not particularly for a space race or a Manhattan project effort to provide the solution. Those projects had singular goals, put a Man on the Moon and build an atomic bomb. Although the goal may be singular, obtaining energy independence, in this case there are numerous paths to obtaining the goal.
Solar, wind, nuclear, natural gas, drilling off the coast and ANWAR, hydrogen powered cars, biofuels, not to mention conservation.
