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Who's afraid of global warming?
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
07/12/09 2:29 PM EDT
Back in the 1970s we were told that overpopulation and global cooling were going to destroy the world. Turns out they haven’t. Population growth has slowed way down almost everywhere and the problem, we’re told now, by governmental, universal, media and corporate elites, is global warming or, rather, man-made global warming. But despite the cries from the likes of Al Gore and friends that we cease debate about whether global warming is occurring and will occur—not a very scientific attitude is it?—some dissenting and persuasive voices are being heard. Two examples: this piece by Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph and this interview of Australian geologist Ian Plimer in the Spectator. Plimer is the author of Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science, and has been an important part of the political debate in Australia where, Booker reports, Labour Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s global warming bill seems about to be rejected by the Senate.
I am open to arguments on this issue, but as I have written several times it seems to me that many global warming alarmists are motivated by something that is more like religion than science. It makes sense to try to mitigate negative effects of any change in climate or weather, as we are quite capable of doing, technologically and economically. Though not always politically, as seen by our decades-long failure to protect our one major city under sea level, New Orleans, from the effects of a catastrophic storm, in the ways that the Dutch have protected their country in which most people live below sea level. But imposing huge costs on our private sector economy on the basis of computer models of something as complex as climate, and which have not done a good job of predicting the present or recent past, seems the height of folly.
I think it makes more sense to monitor and mitigate—keep our eyes open for problems that may occur and take intelligent action to prevent negative effects. My example here is Warren Buffett. For many years he, like so many of our elites, was convinced the world faced disaster from overpopulation. But evidently he kept his eyes on the facts, which showed that population growth was slowing and that thanks to the adoption of capitalist models there w as huge economic growth in the two countries with one-third of the world’s population, India and China. For years Buffett’s will left most of his billions to fight overpopulation. Then he changed it and deeded the billions over to the Gates Foundation. He explained that Bill and Melinda Gates would have a better idea of what to do with it than he did.
As for global warming, why assume that every affect will be negative? I grew up in Michigan and would have been grateful for some global warming as I waited in the dark for the school bus. As Plimer explains in the opening chapter of Heaven and Earth, climate has been much warmer and much cooler at various times in the past. Human beings have adapted—and it’s been a lot easier to adapt to warming than cooling.
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