Friday, April 07, 2006

Global Warming Redux, Part II

Been trying to post this for 3 days, but due to long meetings here at work plus a weird inability to upload to Blogger in late afternoons that's persisted for 3 days, this is a bit late. Meanwhile, thanks to Luther for his thunderously great series of commentaries!

Anyhow, late, but not forgotten, here's a followup on my initial Global Warming post of a few days back. (This is a favorite topic of Luther as well.) I've decided to respond at some length to a thoughtful comment left by a reader in my first Global Warming post.

As unclear as it may seem sometimes, this blog primarily focuses on how the use of image and language and the misuse of professional expertise distorts arguments of all flavors in all disciplines, rendering them into mere tools of largely leftist politics and agendas. For a long time, science has served as the last bastion of objectivity in this regard. But now it, too, has become highly politicized in many subdisciplines, which leads one to question whether tried and true scientific methodologies are being manipulated to political ends or are indeed still valid. And so it is with the long-building press and "concerned scientist" frenzy obsessing on the still unproved myth of "global warming." We always endeavor to put this currently fashionable leftie bugaboo in "scare quotes" because we're not buying the argument. Too much politics. Not enough disinterested science.

Our commentator gave George Will a trip to the woodshed for mentioning the bogus ice-age scare of the 1970s. But in point of fact, that's what it was. A scare. And bogus. If you were around in the 1970s, (which Will and I both were), you might recall that, after the appearance of the cited articles in that piece, including the Science article that hinted at a new ice age, journalists whipped themselves and their readers into a frenzy about how we would either freeze or starve or both, and in fairly short order. Would we all migrate to the South? Would Canada cease to exist? Would wooly mammoths return? Will documented several instances of this early meme in his piece. It was hard to miss his point.

Will is entirely correct to recall this reaction. Our commentator pinches in on the science of the article, or the lack thereof, with regard to validated, empirical proof. But the whole point of the "ice age" scare was not science at all. Amateurs with an agenda grabbed little bits of speculative "evidence" and ran with it to scare people silly. And this is really what Will was talking about. It wasn't the scientific content of the Science article that really mattered. It was how it was reported, disseminated, and ultimately distorted in order to frighten people. Which, of course, sells newspapers and magazines. And once it starts, they all have to get on the same bandwagon.

Likewise, we now have the, er, polar opposite with the global warming theory, with "concerned scientists" thundering jeremiads of doom. And once again for some reason, Science magazine is at the center of it all. But this time, Science is knowingly and aggressively upping the amperage. As they intensify the frequency and intensity of their articles on this subject, one begins to wonder just when this once-respected journal fell out of the hands of real scientists and into the waiting arms of leftist advocacy journalists.

If you read recent issues Science beating the "global warming" drum as well as the rest of the media parade that feeds off and sensationalizes these stories, we can be forgiven for envisioning a scenario where in two years or less, the entire planet will be a desert, the oceans will shrivel, we'll all starve, and everyone who hopes to survive will have to move to Greenland which will probably be parched. Just the opposite of the nutty stories we got on the "ice age" in the 1970s. Which again, was Will's actual point. And which is part of ours.

Don't forget, the real objective of the current "global warming" debate, which you will never read in the New York Times, is the ruthless and sustained attempt of leftists, Third Worlders, and a lot of other countries that should know better, to impose the Kyoto treaty on the US, thus seriously disadvantaging the American business engine due to the draconian restrictions that would be imposed upon our industries. Meanwhile, major polluters like China would be exempt from the same stricture because they're "developing countries." Which, of course, has nothing to do with science at all.

What in heaven's name is the point of this? If our pollution is causing problems in the atmosphere, how does ratcheting it back--while allowing the Chinese economy to grow and grow and grow without having to deal with any such restrictions--improve things? If anything, the alleged situation would grow even worse. The real deal here is anti-American politics. The left fervently believes that hampering the US will somehow allow Third World economies to flourish while putting us in our place. (Of course, none of this will do anything to improve dysfunctional, socialist Third World governments, but who cares?)

There are, frankly, very good arguments indeed to be made for developing alternative energy sources, cleaning up our air, and improving the quality of our planet's water resources as well. "Global warming" is not one of them.

But the politically concerned enviro-propagandists are off chasing the chimera of "global warming" again because it's politically fashionable, will always get you favorable press, can be used against Bush, the Republicans, and the US, and in general, makes our lefty friends feel very good about themselves even as they plot how to destroy more American jobs than Wal-Mart has already sent to China.

When an argument like "global warming" departs the realm of scientific inquiry and morphs into political dogma, I have to leave the table. "Global warming," like abortion, has become another Holy Sacrament of the left. As an organic part of a religious creed, its veracity can thus no longer be questioned. It has become, like transubstantiation, an unquestioned article of the Marxian faith no longer capable of rational examination by the tools of traditional science.

When politics masquerading as science replaces science itself, we run the very real risk of embarking on a disastrous series of policy moves that could wind up jeopardizing far more than tomorrow's temperature range. Science here and elsewhere, is beginning, thanks to its politicizers, to lose its authority and credibility. And when this happens, any "scientific" viewpoint, whether derived from actual science or weird science, will increasingly be regarded as subjective and capable of instant dismissal without a second thought. If we allow this erosion of science to continue, we could be ruining the skeptical, rational foundation that has made this country the greatest beacon of hope the world has ever known. The Marxists don't care. We do. Time to step back and be skeptical of "global warming."

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