Give Me Liberty

This is not a book review, because I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending. Michael Crichton is, after all, a master story teller (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park, etc.), and this one is just as exciting. But it’s the factual background research worked into the story that makes this one an absolute “must read” for anyone who has ever heard the term “global warming”. Without detracting from the excitement of the story, Mr. Crichton conveys more factual information on the subject than you’ll ever see in the main stream media, and puts it into a much more realistic perspective.

He also makes some useful observations about the state of the debate, a couple of which I’ll repeat here:

* We know astonishingly little about every aspect of the environment, from its past history, to its present state, to how to conserve and protect it. In every debate, all sides overstate the extent of existing knowledge and its degree of certainty.

* I think for anyone to believe in impending resource scarcity, after two hundred years of such false alarms, is kind of weird. I don’t know whether such a belief today is best ascribed to ignorance of history, sclerotic dogmatism, unhealthy love of Malthus, or simple pigheadedness, but it is evidently a hardy perennial in human calculation.

You can find other interesting insights from Mr. Crichton on his website. In particular, check out his comments on complexity theory, which inspired State of Fear.

In an excellent column on global warming, Charles Krauthammer puts the “cap and trade” debate into much better perspective than we usually get from the mainstream media. Environmental activists would have us accept that “the debate is over”, but as Krauthammer points out, Newton’s Laws of Motion stood up for over 200 years, until they were proven wrong by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. And climate is far more complex and less understood than Newton’s Laws. So before we destroy our own economy, and trap billions of third world citizens in continuing poverty, let’s make sure there will be a corresponding benefit. Cap and trade has been a complete failure in Europe, and the environmentalists’s own studies show only a minimal reduction in global temperatures even if carbon emissions were reduced to ZERO! And remember that scientists were still warning us of the coming Ice Age in 1977, 8 years after temperatures bottomed (in 1969) and reversed their 35 year cooling trend. We’re now 10 years past the warming peak in 1998, so it’s about time we reconize the hoax for what it is.

“We simply cannot afford to gamble … by ignoring it. We cannot risk inaction. Those scientists who say we are merely entering a period of climactic instability are acting irresponsibly. The indications that our climate can soon change for the worse are too strong to be reasonably ignored.”

Not so fast. These frightening words are not the latest warning of a need to reduce our “carbon footprint”, adopt a “green” lifestyle, and wreak havoc on our economy in the process. No, these words were written in 1978, by Lowell Ponte, in a book called The Cooling.

The fact is, the only constant about our climate is change. When I was in third grade, “scientists” were convinced that we were heading into another Ice Age. Global temperatures had been declining for a number of years, and continued to do so for several more. Even in 1978, almost ten years after that trend had reversed itself, global cooling was still the primary concern.

Thirty years later, there is growing concern, approaching panic, about global warming. But again, not so fast. It has now been ten years with no warming trend! Due to the natural El Nino cycle, 1998 was a warm year. No year since has been as warm. Last fall, our government predicted unseasonably mild temperatures for the first three months of this year. In case you were hibernating, North America and Asia have experienced one of the coldest and snowiest winters on record.

Congress is not going to control the weather any time soon. Global warming is nothing more than an excuse for the radical environmentalists to impose their extremist views on rest of us. But the hoax is running its course. Fifty years from now we won’t be congratulating ourselves on our foresight, we’ll be wondering how we could have been so gullible.

So the next time you catch yourself reading terrifying statements like those above, stop and think for yourself. If you’re paying attention, and reading critically, you’ll soon realize that there’s a lot more hype than fact out there. And there are also a lot of contrary facts being discussed as well, they’re just pretty well hidden in the main stream media.