Double Blind

This is a really good article from the Coyote Blog on things to consider about global warming. He writes something that I would never have the patience to do myself.

For many years now I’ve been increasingly skeptical of all the “doom and gloom” scenarios that people have been painting about the climate. I think what finally “snapped” in my head was when the movement changed from using the term “Global Warming” to “Climate Change” so that way they can cover their asses for any variation of climate, not necessarily warming.

The other source of skepticism was reading the history behind the scientists predicting a new “ice age” back in the 1960′s. There were actually proposals on the books to spray paint the arctic and antarctic ice caps black to reduce the earth’s total surface albedo and increase absorption of solar energy.

The final issue deals with something Coyote touched upon – solar output. Astronomers have also noticed that the Martian ice caps are shrinking – presumably Mars has its own global warming problem as well.

I really don’t think climate scientists can predict with a damn what the climate will be like in ten years, let alone a hundred or a thousand until they can model solar output properly.

I’ve always viewed it as the ultimate hubris that certain environmentalists believe that the climate that the earth had in 1900 or 1950 or whatever is the “absolute perfect climate” and if there is any deviation from the climate of that “perfect year” that it must be man-made and therefore we have to shut down civilization to prevent it.

If the earth is too hot today, then what is the ideal temperature? Should we cool ourselves down 2 degrees? 4? 8? Bring the planet into an ice age?

What doesn’t worry me is the actual debate on whether the earth is actually warming or not, but what worries me is when you mix this in with politics.

My real big fear is that if activists are successful in doing something stupid (like putting in a carbon tax), that any subsequent increase in temperature would be a sign that the tax isn’t high enough. Any decrease in temperature would of course be interpreted as a success, and so we would have to increase the carbon tax because it’s obviously successful. There is absolutely no benchmark that you could reliably measure the success of such a measure or not. The only guarantee is that you will be slowing down the economy, which is the ultimate goal of this movement (and Al Gore’s re-election campaign for 2008).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 25th, 2006 and is filed under Commentary, Links. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.