I have plenty of material to get to on the topic of global climate change, but for now let me respond to a caller who caused Rush Limbaugh to rant for nearly a half hour on his nationally syndicated radio show yesterday (full transcript here, but will be archived by 6M next Wednesday).
While I wish he would change his terminology sometimes, Limbaugh's analysis of this issue is founded in correct principles.
First, let individuals and groups be responsible in their decisions as to how they are affecting the environment around them. As a former Chief Scout (the Canadian equivalent of the Eagle), I believe firmly in the majesty of nature and of God's creation, and my default attitude toward such beauty is to take only pictures from it and to leave only footprints on it. With that basic conservationist philosophy explained, I also believe that we were put on this earth to be stewards of the resources it contains, animal, vegetable, and mineral. This means that we will be held accountable by God for the misuses we make of His creation, but also that it was placed there for our USE. In other words, if we can do something useful to US with the living and non-living resources of the planet, it is a good thing. Of course overuse is not responsible if it endangers the use future generations might have of a scarce resource. Also waste should be minimized and pollution, if necessary at all, should be cleaned up. But none of this should prevent humans from using responsibly what is here.
Limbaugh's problem with this principle of responsibility in the modern environmentalist movement is the question of to whom we are responsible. For Limbaugh, and myself, responsibility is ultimately to God, and until then, owners of property should be responsible to themselves. Of course there may need to be SOME regulations in place to prevent abuses where the public benefit must outweigh the rights of an individual owner. We simply can't have landfills too close to water supplies, for example. But in all cases those owners should be fairly compensated and the regulations should be kept at a bare minimum.
The world's green parties, on the other hand, would have us be responsible to government, which would necessarily involve politicians and bureaucrats who would theoretically be beholden to "experts" for crafting their legislation and regulations. The danger of such is that individuals, groups, and property owners would be much more subjected to either unfair compensation, or to the outright tyranny of government, and would thus have to give up some degree of their rights. Whether or not this becomes a slippery slope that slowly but inexorably dissolves all property rights in favor of state rights (which becomes communism), the relinquishment of any degree of rights to property is something that should be opposed on principle. Freedom is meaningless without property rights, since ownership of things upon which to act is a prerequisite to just action upon those things. Therefore the environmental movement is in opposition to freedom.
Now if it were a matter of encouraging individuals and groups to consider the public benefit in choosing to refrain from certain potentially harmful practices by freely exercising their rights in a limited way, I would have no problem with it. Let people reuse, recycle, reclaim, and by all other means conserve as much of our natural resources as it pleases them to do. I am not opposed. But for the environmental movement to seek to legislate or, worse, regulate (without recourse to democratic institutions) a public conscience on this matter or any other is unconscionable.
This desire to force the human mind is insidious enough in and of itself, but even more insidious than that, the environmental movement relies on shaky data, shoddy analysis, sometimes outright false claims, and when push comes to shove, they attempt to stifle debate with heavy handed censure tactics.
For example, on the subject of global climate change, Al Gore's documentary film An Inconvenient Truth presents a compelling explanation for an alarming growth curve of our average planetary temperature, then claims that scientists are of a consensus that the earth is warming beyond its natural tendency and that this is the fault of man's activities. His graph is based on tweaked data (both from the standpoint of statistical analytical method as pointed out in this American Thinker article, and from the standpoint of the actual data chosen as in this highly technical climatology site's analysis--some of the comments explain in more plain English that the data chosen may not lead to accurate temperature measurements) leaving out inconvenient "anomalies" that would call his theory (nay his agenda--if he can ride this political issue into power all the better for him, but even if he can't he's already personally heavily invested in new carbon offset trading companies who stand to make billions if any large market economy were ever forced to "offset" its carbon emissions--and what economically beneficial activity, pray tell, does NOT emit carbon!--via legislation) into question. He leaves inconvenient facts out of his explanation: Like the fact that the climate change models he's working from (including the US Department of Energy's) which predict global warming do not include the effect of the single most prevalent and effective greenhouse gas on the planet--water vapor (you can read about this at this site which I haven't vetted, but which provides ample annotation). He leaves out the pertinent fact that even the common gas we produce in our economic activities, CO2, is, although poisonous to humans, nothing more than plant food (to cite Jim Quinn's oft-used phrase from his nationally syndicated radio show). He leaves out the inconvenient fact that otherwise natural phenomena (volcanic eruptions, cow flatulence, insects breathing, etc.) make humankind's contribution to global greenhouse gas production much less significant. And finally, he leaves out the inconvenient fact that the earth's single external source of heat--the sun!--has been producing similar curves of warming on ALL of our system's planets (data on Mars is discussed here). He even laughably cites the melting of the glaciers in Greenland (theory contested at Newsbusters here) as evidence that the earth has never been warmer with a completely straight face apparently without ever considering that the very name of the place evidences the fact that it was once not covered by glaciers as it is now.
By claiming a consensus of scientists on the matter (however meaningless the term--scientific facts don't require agreement and do not depend on democratic principles, whether there's a consensus or not--an honest evaluation of the very use of the term "consensus of scientists" belies the true nature of the phenomenon in question: that it is unsettled opinion and NOT scientifically unquestionable fact), the effort is to silence critics and to calm the scientific skepticism of the lay public who might otherwise choose not to believe Gore's assertions. I will also have more to say later about the dark underbelly of the scientific community and how they get money for their projects--an underbelly which by its nature constrains the very possibility of certain questions being asked or not asked.
Now Limbaugh's caller yesterday had heard the argument of the Sun's responsibility for our planetary warming (NOT man!) from Rush, and was calling to disagree, citing the fact that Mercury, which is closer to the Sun than Venus, was actually cooler than Venus was. This may be true, but it misses the point on several grounds. Another caller explained later that since Mercury has no atmosphere it's extremely hot and cool sides average lower than Venus because Venus's atmosphere is so thick and filled with water vapor (among other greenhouse gasses) that it traps more of the heat and homogenizes the heat throughout the entire planet. This may be an excellent factual refutation of the caller's point, but I would suggest that even without the facts, the caller's analysis is flawed. His premise is that since Mercury is cooler than Venus, the Sun cannot be producing the warming on earth. But even without the facts to combat the premise, his basis for judgment is missing. In order to know if the Sun is increasing the average temperature of the planets or not one would have to compare not one planet with another, but each planet WITH ITSELF over time. The relation between the temperatures of Mercury and Venus is irrelevant to the question of man's fault in global warming.
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