In my Wednesday Examiner column, written and published before the snowstorm which is currently blanketing metro Washington, I looked at the astonishing dishonesty of climate scientists.
My American Enterprise Institute colleague Kenneth Green takes a somewhat critical view of my column, and makes some very interesting points. I think our differences are more in tone than in substance; I am willing to admit that there are some honest climate scientists, just as there are some honest trial lawyers and used car salesmen, and that honest people in all three professions serve useful functions in our society.
We do need honest climate science and we need to be prepared to take actions mitigating possible negative effects of changes in climate. Our record on such adaptations is not reassuring; we have long known that much of New Orleans is below sea level, but we did not take the steps necessary to prevent the predictable catastrophe that resulted from Hurricane Katrina.
Mitigation of dangers is not as dramatic and sweeping a policy change as those global warming alarmists have been seeking. But, as Green argues, they make more sense.
Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, whom I quoted in my column, makes much the same point in his list of recommendations. “Fifth, rethink the policy approach. The decision by the ‘climate change community’ to focus on a grand global solution to climate change was unwise. The international system isn’t capable of the kind of sweeping, rapid changes and decisions that activists seek. Meanwhile, in terms of American politics, getting a treaty through the Senate is the highest hurdle you can set yourself — it takes 67 votes to ratify a treaty. The combination is deadly. The climate change movement needs to invest some time and intellectual energy into finding a more workable agenda. Regardless of the science, the current track looks very much like a dead end.”
Subject for a future column: Why did Barack Obama and liberal Democrats have such confidence that they could impose such huge policy changes on the nation as government-directed health care and carbon emissions restrictions?
