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.
