Cooling it on Warming
Global warming may be happening. But the extent of the potential danger is such that doing nothing is the best strategy of all.
Jan Narveson - March 12, 2008
(Note: rah-rah “scientists” who uphold the Al Gore-type thesis have even claimed, on the basis of some very odd evidence, that the medieval warm period didn’t happen. All those reports of people at the time growing wine grapes in northern England were evidently fabricated by the nasty climate-change deniers of the time...)
I said there were “two things” that are clear, but there’s a third that comes very close to being clear enough to do. The year 2007 was far from being the warmest on record--in fact, it turns out to have had a mean temperature somewhat below the 20th century average. And respectable-sounding scientific research institutes--such as at the University of Alabama--tell us that the last eight years show no warming trend at all. Global warming seems to have gone on holiday, even as the pundits shout from the rooftops about the dangers that await us.
And then there is this winter--not quite over yet, with snow still piling up in Toronto more than ever before (also in my driveway, by the way), and sea ice around the poles at unprecedented levels, and so forth. It is worth quoting Christopher Booker from the Febuary 21st London Daily Mail: “U.S. satellite data for January shows the extent of snow cover in the northern hemisphere as reaching its highest level since 1966, 42 years ago--and those temperatures were lower than their average for the whole of the 20th century.”
And record low temperatures in all sorts of unlikely places, including Greece--and Iraq and Saudi Arabia who apparently have seen their first reported snow ever. As Alan Honiton remarked (in the same article as the above), “Whatever the scientific arguments, human beings tend to notice a billion tons of ice suddenly appearing in their back yard rather more than a billion tons disappearing around the Antarctic.” He’s right, except that it isn’t disappearing around the Antarctic either...
All in all: you don’t need to “decide” whether global warming is “real” and to what degree. You do need to insist that your politicians face the facts when they are known and relevant. The one really relevant fact before the public today is that the main thing that governments are trying to do about “global warming”--even if it is a real problem--will not work. What it will do is cost us a huge amount of our liberty and incomes.
And at least to some of us, that matters!
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