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Inconvenient Truths Denied By Climate Faithful

Melanie Sturm | @ThinkAgainUSA Read Comments - 18
Publish Date: 
Thu, 09/11/2014

 

At the tumultuous summer’s close, when throat-slashing, genocidal jihadists and economic malaise dominated headlines and our psyches, Hillary Clinton announced her preoccupation.

 

"Climate change is the most consequential, urgent, sweeping collection of challenges we face," she proclaimed, adding, “no matter what the deniers try to assert” -- thus dismissing from polite society those inclined to Think Again about America’s greatest concerns.

 

Like Clinton, members of the “Church of Settled Science” invoke the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial to reject those deeming climate change less dangerous than other threats, like the Islamic State, a nuclear Iran, a debt-laden stagnant economy, or record levels of poverty.

 

Their Church gospel considers it “anti-science” to believe climate change is a naturally reoccurring phenomenon to which mankind has always adapted, and still can. After all, as Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore said before congress, because “frost and ice are the enemies of life…. a warmer temperature than today’s would be far better than a cooler one.”

 

Nevertheless, it’s an excommunicable sin to oppose tax and regulatory policies that would barely limit global emissions but would increase economy-wide prices, retard economies, and reduce standards of living -- disproportionately among the poor.

 

According to their dogma, it’s blasphemous to oppose giving unaccountable bureaucrats (in the EPA or internationally) unprecedented power to centrally plan and control economic life, without even a vote of Congress.

 

That’s because the faithful overlook the stunning failure of their doomsday-predicting models to forecast warming’s nearly 18-year pause (confirmed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), or Al Gore’s 2007 prediction that polar bears’ Arctic habitat would be ice-free by 2013.

 

Thankfully for children fearing polar bear extinction, current satellite readings by the US National Snow and Ice Data Center reveal Arctic ice larger than when Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his global warming activism -- an Alaska-sized expansion since 2012.

 

Clearly scientists don’t yet understand the relationship between rising CO2 levels and global warming -- now conveniently called climate change, rendering all planetary events explainable by a theory whose falsification is impossible.

 

Unfortunately, the skepticism required for scientific discovery is now punished, as MIT professor of atmospheric physics Richard Lindzen described. “Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse,” he wrote. “Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science that supposedly is their basis.”

 

Today, skepticism is synonymous with greed and immorality to Church adherents who bask in the influence and profits they derive from sermonizing and policy advocacy. Yet, they ignore the “inconvenient truth” that their policies adversely impact the lifestyles of the budget conscience.

 

So, who are the heretics?

 

Are they alarmists intent on circumventing scientific inquiry and the free and open debate on which national consensus in a pluralistic democracy depends, or skeptics “not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead,” as Thomas Jefferson encouraged?

 

“It is error alone which needs the support of government,” Jefferson believed, because “truth can stand by itself.”

 

In his Farewell Address noteworthy for military-industrial-complex warnings, President Eisenhower articulated the modern version of Jefferson’s concern. “A government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity,” he said, and “the prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.”

 

The modern era is awash in government–abetted tragedies precipitated by theories claiming to advance the human condition but which, in fact, involved anti-poor and anti-progress policies. Thomas Malthus’ theory that population would always outstrip resources justified 19th-century British tax and regulatory policies to constrain human aspirations. The result was poverty-induced famine in Ireland and India, and 20 million victims.

 

Ensuing in the 20th-century were even more deadly policies – derived from Malthusian-based eugenics and resource depletion theories -- proving Jefferson’s observation that “even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

 

Malthus’ theories are as wrong as they are immoral. Since his time, world population grew seven-fold as well-being (world GDP per capita) grew 50-fold, thanks to human ingenuity and economic freedom.

 

Today, life-enhancing devices unimaginable to Malthus – refrigerators, phones, air-conditioning, cars, and televisions -- are commonplace, except among the poorest.  Why decrease their affordability by increasing the cost of the energy required to make, distribute and run them?

 

The truth is, affordable energy and the economic growth and well-being it enables are the keys to addressing our greatest concerns, including the environment, joblessness, poverty, and indebtedness – even terrorism. 

 

Think Again – To pass a secure, prosperous and clean world to future generations, shouldn’t we encourage – not constrain -- the scientific inquiry that informs and unleashes boundless human creativity?

 

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Exactly, "denier" is

Exactly, "denier" is definitely a negative term, a typical ad hominem attack against people who disagree with you, used in place of a real argument.

I disagree though that the "climate change" issue is merely a distraction. It is a serious, long-term, well-financed movement whose goal is to transfer enormous power over all industrial countries to an entity such as the UN, in the name of "protecting" us against what they falsely promote as an enormous threat to mankind. Please note Obama's intention to "use his pen" sometime within a year to effectively make the US part of the existing global warming "treaty". I know he can't legally do that. So what?

Considering the priority

Considering the priority certain powerful politicians place on promoting climate change alarmism (they have been very vocal recently stating it is their TOP priority), and the very clear evidence you enumerate that there is no reason to believe that their underlying theory is correct much less unassailable, one has to ask the question: what is the true objective? These politicians are willing to expend all kinds of political capital on this project

I love the Jefferson quotes.

I love the Jefferson quotes. I would like to add that I believe the mention of climate change by the likes of Clinton and Kerry is an attempt to distract the public with a shiny object. Furthermore, they are timed just at the beginning of a new session in Congress and are offered as sound bites for lobbyists who will use them in another fallacious appeal to authority.

The focus on Climate Change

The focus on Climate Change is needed because they either will no or cannot deal with the important things confronting this country. It is pure diversion......tell your friends.

"Denier" is a psychologically

"Denier" is a psychologically charged term. It implies blindness in the face of overwhelming evidence.

There's a long-running effort by the true believers to assert that AGW science is as solid and "settled" as things like evolution are. In pressing the word "denier" upon anyone who's even slightly skeptical of the alarmist position, the true believers imply that the "deniers" are as bad, wrong, ill informed etc as those who deny the theory of evolution, those who deny the Holocaust, and those who deny the Moon landing happened.

Use of the term in AGW discussions is an abandonment of respect for science, open inquiry, free debate and rational thought.

Nonsense. Human caused CO2 -

Nonsense. Human caused CO2 - which is an essential gas for life to exist - represents about 3% of that emitted.

Scientists make forecasts - which have been all been wrong - not even knowing what the natural processes are to ameliorate the agreed to Greenhouse Effect. Many are defying the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics by stating that the oceans are absorbing the heat - which is physically impossible - cold makes warm cold, not the other way around. Thats why it's nice to take a cool dip on a hot day.

It doesn't matter if there is

It doesn't matter if there is a nuclear armageddon or a worldwide Islamic state if the planet on which that occurs is unable to support human existence.

On a related note we should also be spending money on preventing space objects from colliding with earth as well. What Hillary Clinton is saying is that these petty problems are temporary and that looking at the history of this planet over the billions of years climate change is responsible for the most extinctions. And as for humans adapting to climate change throughout history, humans responded by migrating, so unless you plan on mankind reverting back to the nomadic, sustainable lifestyle that allowed us to survive pre-agriciluture then you might want to stop worrying about gay marriage and tragedies that kill hundreds or thousands of people and worry about the problems that will kill BILLIONS of people.

There's always a label for

There's always a label for someone's beliefs. Denier, hater, teabagger. Labels don't bother me much but I do laugh at the prospect that some people apparently believe that in 30 years man's going to have trouble with global warming.

Mother earth's laughing too since she's over 4 billion years old and changed the climate all by her lonesome long before man came around.

I live 150 away from the ocean and we found a 80 million year old whale fossil while building a pipeline. My house was under the ocean then and it will be again in the future, but it won't be because of man.

Mother earth moves at slow deliberate rates. Do you global warming guys realize that the Sahara Desert was once an ocean 100-150 million year ago. YES, MIAMI AND NEW YORK AND LAS ANGELES WILL BE UNDER WATER AGAIN........... its all on the wheel......

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