Michael Barone has a very good column today on the public’s increasing aversion to doomsday climate activism. The belief that we must adopt draconian anti-jobs and anti-economic growth policies in order to avery dramatic future disasters has been tested by many recent events — the ongoing economic crisis being the most important.
There are two additional points that I would add — in both cases, points that no party to the argument can avoid, even if you go in for the “settled science” of climate change.
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First, assuming that evidence of the cause of Global Warming is overwhelming, there is still no evidence whatsoever that the proposed remedies — cap and trade, for example — would do anything to lower global temperatures anyway. In fact, many of their leading scientists suggest that we’re all completely doomed, barring a far more complete destruction of our economy than any environmentalist policy that has seen the light of day in Congress. Michael points out that cap-and-trade’s future is dim, but such draconian measures are all the more so, at least if as we remain a society in which individuals have a say in government. This makes the entire debate moot — either we’re doomed, or we’re not doomed.
Second, even if the mechanics of Climate Change are considered a “settled” issue, its effects are not nearly so settled. It seems that every academic with a newspaper reporter’s phone number has been making dire predictions and getting them into the news in recent years, creating a cacophony of often contradictory predictions about the future of certain plants and animals in a warmer world. No one can honestly say with any accuracy how much difficulty (or ease) humans will experience in adapting in either the near or distant future. Are we talking “Waterworld” bad, or nuclear holocaust bad, or is our planet on its way to becoming Venus? And on what timeframe? Don’t trust anyone who says he has the answer to that question.
