Reframing the Issue of Global Warming
Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
April 7, 2006
You're no doubt aware of the recent
foray by Time Magazine into the global warming wars. It would be
difficult not to be, given that the magazine's shameless pimping of one
of the Left's most revered issues was broadly trumpeted as gospel on left-leaning
websites and by liberal ISPs, including, especially, AOL. As blatant an
example of advocacy journalism as the Time piece was, however,
perhaps more important is the fact that its arrant elevation of pseudo-science
as the basis for political policy is but the latest in a century-old highjacking
of scientific theory for political purposes.
To cite but one example: From the
late 1920s through the 1930s, as Joseph Stalin carried out his murderous
consolidation of power in the Soviet Union, Trofim Denisovich (T.D.) Lysenko
emerged as the leading proponent of a scientific position that would become
the basis of Stalin's collectivization of agricultural production in the
Soviet Union. Lysenko's muddy and unsupported "theory" of plant
development which held incorrectly that environment, and not genetics,
was the critical factor in determining how much time it would take a plant
to mature was applied widely in an attempt to improve the productivity
of then-recently collectivized Ukrainian farms. The resulting disaster
saw as many as five million kulaks (as the group of peasants singled out
in Stalin's brutal collectivization strategy were called) die of starvation,
in no small part because of crop failures that resulted from the application
of Lysenko's theories. Policies based on Lysenko's work were also at the
core of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Tse Tung's agricultural reform of
the late 1950s and early '60s in communist China, during which as many
as 30 million Chinese people, again mostly peasants, perished from hunger.
In promoting speculation as fact
in the service of a political agenda, Time is partaking of the same unbridled
and politically motivated arrogance of so many who have done this in the
past. No one has better expressed this arrogance than one Stephen Schneider.
Schneider is a "scientist" who has criticized the overwhelming
and indisputable evidence that Bjørn Lomborg amassed against the
case for global warming in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist. Schneider
has said this about what scientists need to do to convince people that
global warming is real: "[W]e have to offer up scary scenarios, make
simplified, dramatic statements, make little mention of any doubts we
might have . . . decide what the right balance is between being effective
and being honest."
In other words, it doesn't really
matter what the evidence indicates. Never mind that Lomborg presented
a meticulously researched and massively documented (The Skeptical Environmentalist
contains more than 3,000 footnotes!) case against global warming and many
other environmental disasters predicted by "science." What really
matters to environmentalists is to promote an anti-capitalist agenda,
specifically one which says that industrial civilization is bad for the
environment across the board, in the current instance because it tends
to generate inordinate amounts of the gas carbon dioxide, which ostensibly
contributes to the greenhouse effect, which in turn is going to lead,
possibly within our children's lifetimes, to massive changes in the earth's
climate that will render many regions of our planet uninhabitable and
create unimaginable chaos in our descendants' lives.
Never mind that, to cite only one
counter argument among many, the United States is a net decrementer of
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere because our country is literally so green
that the huge quantities of oxygen emitted into the air by our forests
and other green spaces far outweigh the amount of carbon dioxide our cars
and lawnmowers and manufacturing and power plants and other diabolical
creations of our capitalist society manage to throw off into the atmosphere.
And never mind that it is only in advanced capitalistic societies that
real progress against the ostensible threat greenhouse gases pose is being
made, that it is in modern western industrial democracies where the most
effective progress in cleaning up the environment is occurring.
In fact, the real polluters, the
heaviest contributors to the greenhouse gas problem, are generally developing
nations, which are following the same relatively unregulated path toward
industrialization that our own country pursued through the first half
of the last century. The good news, though and Lomborg, again,
makes this case convincingly is that when industrialization and
modernization in these developing countries reaches critical mass, they
too will, as we have done and continue to do, clean up their act.
But the real problem with the global
warming hysteria that is being perpetrated by otherwise intelligent and
educated scientists who should know better is that global warming itself
is a phenomenon that has only become an issue in the past decade or so.
Take a look at these dire predictions about the climatic future of our
planet from a 1975 Newsweek Magazine article entitled "The Cooling
World":
There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to
change dramatically. . . . A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray
Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals
a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern
Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia
University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern
Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last
month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching
the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and
1972.
The article went on to paint a doomsday
picture of crop failures and widespread starvation due to the dramatic
cooling that had been taking place in the previous quarter century and
was continuing at a rapid pace. The question is, What happened between
1975 and the early 1990s, when predictions suddenly reversed and scientists
began to caterwaul about global warming and the disastrous effects of
the increase in the earth's temperature many of them had begun to "observe?"
First, there is the rise of the computer
model as the digital "bible" of so-called scientists. A computer
model is a program into which its users enter suspect and incomplete and
inevitably inaccurate data and arrive at conclusions about the future
of our planet that have virtually no way of being verified but will inevitably,
if their conclusions are somehow weighed against the outcomes they purport
to predict, prove those who stand behind them to be absolute idiots, except
for the fact that those who have have stood behind them will be long gone
by the time we can verify or discredit their conclusions.
(On the plus side, Paul Ehrlich is
still alive to see what an idiot he was. Ehrlich predicted in the early
1970s that before the turn of the 20th century, the "population bomb"
would explode and that hundreds of millions of people would die in the
massive famines that resulted because of overpopulation. Not even close.)
Second, and equally important, there is the politicization of science.
If it hadn't been for the fact that George W. Bush has been occupied with
cleaning up the mess left by Bill Clinton's ignoring the real threats
to our nation's safety, such as Islamist terrorism, while "science"
was ginning up fears about global warming, I would argue that the Bush
Presidency should be busy turning the tables on bought-and-paid-for science
and selling us on global cooling. President Bush, however, has bigger
fish to fry.
Unless and until we stop listening
to such disingenuous charlatans as Stephen Schneider and start paying
attention to the fact that none of the credible data gathered on the issue
of greenhouse gas-generated climate change, when brought together and
analyzed responsibly, point to anything remotely resembling the "crisis"
that so-called "concerned scientists," in collusion with I'm-happy-to-be-led-by-the-nose
liberal-agenda media honks, are trying to sell us, we're doomed to be
inundated by so-called "news" that predicts our collective climatological
demise because we failed to limit our carbon dioxide emissions.
The bottom line is this: It's not
that we need more data (though the data we gather over the next decade
and beyond will certainly be a welcome addition to the rather funky and
incomplete stuff collected thus far); it's that we need a more dispassionate
and less agenda-driven assessment of the data currently available to us
in order to better determine where we (and our planet) stand with regard
to the issue of global warming. Until such credentialed (albeit compromised)
scientists as Stephen Schneider and his cohorts stop making global environmental
issues the occasion for America-bashing and unsupported scaremongering,
we can be assured that they are not using their knowledge and authority
to serve the interests of the people of this planet.
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