Global Warming Warriors

Nothing I write about, not even America’s greatness, generates as much vitriolic feedback as my pieces criticizing the global warming religion. It makes me wonder what these guys are so worked up about, what drives them?

Someone wrote that as a society becomes more secular, faith in God is replaced by worship of self. A profound narcissism replaces religiosity. If global warming might hurt me, or reduce my happiness, then something must be done about it!

Furthermore, love of nature, as an extension of self, transcends love of fellow human beings. It’s the sort of spiritual pathology that led to the ban of DDT in Africa because American and European environmentalists thought that animals would be harmed and cared less about the human beings who consequently died of malaria. I think that this naturalistic pantheism drives some of the global warming warriors.

But that’s not all. Anti-Americanism is another strain of the dogma. The belief that capitalism, globalization and, particularly, America’s role in shaping the world are evil forces in an otherwise idealistic planet leads many global warming warriors to seek a diminished America.

There are many malign sources of the disease, but I’ll mention just one more. The environmental movement - having been wildly successful in cleaning up America - has nothing left to do.

Like the civil rights movement and the feminist movement, environmentalists have accomplished all their major objectives and public funding is going to dry up unless another catastrophe can be manufactured. In race relations, Hurricane Katrina did the trick and Jesse Jackson can rest easy that the money train will continue for some time yet. The feminists are left to complain about not enough women in college – no, that’s not right, they already number some 60%. It’s the number of women in leading positions on university science faculties that is the latest issue. You may remember that it drove liberal Harvard president Lawrence Summers out of a job.

The global warming business is the latest money train for the environmental entrepreneurs. At universities, the number of faculties supported at the public trough by the global warming lobby is huge. Interestingly, only a few are actually climate scientists, and these seem to be about evenly split on the issues. The vast majority of dependents are biologists, environmental scientists and a plethora of other -- ists who don’t know a thing about climate but sure can calculate what might happen to their own favorite species or bacterium if the world does overheat. This doom-saying has become a cottage industry of massive proportions.

I could deal with all that if only the warriors would make their points based on logic rather than feelings (another Lefty pathology). Back on June 6 I wrote “You Say Warming, I say Cooling” that presented several myths of global warming group think but I was criticized for using information provided by a conservative think tank - not actual scientists. Never mind whether the points made by the think tankers were accurate or not.

So on June 15 I wrote “Be Very Scared” that presented statements and facts from more than a dozen prominent climate scientists. This time the critics attacked the scientists as being oil company flacks. One critic said: Wibjörn Karlén? Come on! And referencing "scientists" from the Russian Academy of Sciences? Those are the same dudes that doubt evolution! Nice - mocking the foreign scientists now.

Mel who was critical of my scientists pointed to an article by Joel Achenbach, formerly Style writer and now global warrior, in the Washington Post. Mel also cherry picked a section by Achenbach that claims the global warming skeptics are on a “parallel Earth.” But I was more interested in the comments in the article by the folks at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Among other criticisms of the “facts” presented by the Algore acolytes is the baseline used to measure the warming trend. Why start in 1860? That was the end of the Little Ice Age. Of course the world has warmed since then. That's cheating with the baseline.

The CEI guys also make a reasoned case for free market solutions. Countries with thriving economies will be more adaptive to climate change and will find more technological solutions than countries that hamstring themselves by clamping down on greenhouse emissions. Rich societies are environmentally resilient; poor societies have dirty power plants and sooty huts.

Fortunately for the world and unfortunately for the global warming warriors, even the true believers are starting to see the movement as a religion. In Reason Magazine, Ronald Bailey, who calls himself a climate change convert, writes “An Inconvenient Truth: Gore as climate exaggerator.” Gore warns that "what is at stake [is] our ability to live on planet Earth, to have a future as a civilization." Gore claims to be presenting the "scientific consensus" on global warming. But is that so?

Take sea level rise for example. Gore spends a lot of time talking about how dramatic melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice caps could raise sea level by 20 feet by 2100. Well, the "consensus" of climate scientists as represented in the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is that sea level is likely to rise between 4 inches to 35 inches. A new study in Science concluded if temperatures rose steeply that the Greenland ice sheet might melt away in 500 to 1000 years. So fortunately we don't have to worry about the impact of 100 million people fleeing relentlessly rising seas all at once.

What it comes down to is that the global warriors want to scare world governments into doing something silly. But what do they propose that might actually have an effect. Perhaps we could bomb China and India back to the Stone Age where they would not need oil for gasoline and other niceties. Is that too forceful? Then we could humbly ask them to stop burning so much coal and oil and drive their people back to the farms. Sure we could. Or we could ration gas in America. Remember how well that worked in the 70s? Or we could ration electricity use by industry and make those fat cats pay their fair share. So what if the unemployment rate shoots up to 30%. The Great Depression wasn’t so bad.

It’s all just so silly. We must find something else for these global warming warriors to do, something like picking up trash on the highways.