Arrest Climate Change Chop-Chop!

Official simplicity is killing the economy. Righteousness simplifies but it doesn’t try to understand, says Thomas Wells (Debating Climate Change: The Need for Economic Reasoning). They [‘environmentalists’] are wrong to see the development of human freedoms and well-being (prosperity) as a distraction or even a threat to the world. They are wrong to fixate on an abstract and impossible problem… without reference to wider ethical issues, and political and practical feasibility. They are wrong to give up on the potential of democratic politics and human ingenuity and settle for Malthusian doom mongering and moralizing.

When it comes to the government science of climate change, global warming alarmists are dealing us a deadly abuse of their ‘pragmatic’ truth as it was described by philosopher and psychologist, William James. The government version of truth is based solely on its utility in creating a sense of alarm about America’s release of CO2 into the atmosphere. Official global warming science is all about urgency –i.e., the world community must act quickly to stop America from emitting any more globe-destroying climate pollution.

Thanks to Dr. Roy Spencer (Spencer’s AGW Trend Calculator: T = s[L x D x I x ƒ]) we now have a quick way to calculate the Earth’s Global Temperature Trend (T). Simply multiply the number of Liberal politicians (L) times the Dollars they’ll throw at global warming research (D) times whatever the imagined problem is to be linked to global warming, like dying polar bears (I) times an alleged frequency of the imagined problem (ƒ) and depending on the gullibility of the audience, apply freely a scaling factor (s) that can be changed at will to magnify the results of the calculation.

Scientists should be interested only in objective truth. We’re all capable of indulging in pragmatic truth. If they’re competent to provide any value to society at all, what we need from scientists is the sort of truth we associate with the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The bank is closed: we have no money to pay for plastic truths that can be pushed and pulled to fit Leftists’ biased and superstitious preconceived notions about over-population and the price of fossil fuels. What we need is for scientists to stop manufacturing truth simply to help Leftists achieve political objectives like raising more taxes to pay for more government bureaucrats to run a Eurocommunist-style economy.

The single most pragmatic thing we can do is first ask if it makes sense that a global average temperature even exists. Let’s accept that an average global temperature actually exists, and it goes up and then down and then up, etc. And, let’s assume changes in climate are due to humanity’s release of CO2 (a silly assumption for sure: the entire world only adds 1.8 ppm of CO2 in a year ~Joe Bastardi). We still must then answer the question that was put forward by C. Essex et al. –e.g., are there physical or pragmatic grounds for choosing one over another? [See, ‘Does a Global Temperature Exist,’ J. Non-Equilib. Thermodyn, V32:1 (2007)]:

If there are no rational grounds for choosing increasing over decreasing averages, there is no basis for concluding that the atmosphere as a whole is either warming or cooling. A pragmatist should, however, believe global warming has actually been good for humanity. No one is actually clamoring for a colder Earth. That Leftists in the Western government-education complex wish to shame the successful and stand in the way of those who also want better lives is kabuki theater.

“The moralization approach undermines itself… poor country governments have a clear and over-riding moral duty to help their citizens achieve the quality of life and prosperity which the West takes for granted, and which is inevitably energy (i.e. carbon) intensive. And then there is the practical economics: the world still has lots of coal, a lot of it in poor countries like India, that can produce electricity very cheaply. Not even the strongest moral rhetoric can make renewables competitive without radical technological (i.e. price) breakthroughs. ~Thomas Wells

Let’s all get pragmatic for a moment. Does anyone truly believe Western academics have the ability to stop climate from changing? Who among us is so idealistic as to believe government scientists who are less sensible and practical than your third grade school teacher can by a popular vote control what the weather shall be, determine how our earnings shall be spent, dictate how our economy shall run and decide what we will want?