Pirate's Cove

Why? Because those who don’t buy into the doom and gloom of man-caused global warming are able to have their opinions, their say, and their vote.

(Boston Globe) THE WORLD now has a rough deadline for action on climate change.

Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Expect a certain part of our political class to insist that man-made climate change is not consensus science, and that until it is, nothing should be done. The problem there is obvious: By the time all the skeptics are persuaded, it will be too late for an effective response. In that regard, climate change poses a test of our democracy’s ability to address a threat pressing enough to require a relatively prompt response but too complicated for a lay person to assess on his own authority.

If you notice the hyperlink, the original title was “climate change skeptics don’t deserve veto. What’s being pushed is that democracy (yes, I know, we have a federal republic, but it’s still a democratic political model, and other countries use democratic models of voting) is inconvenient for Warmists, getting in the way of implementing their far-left Progressive agenda. And, again, the only science consensus is part of is political science. Not hard science.

Similarly, most politicians who must wrestle with the issue, like most journalists who write about it, don’t have the expertise to design the computer models and do the complex analysis necessary to evaluate the threat themselves. So the matter becomes an epistemological issue: How does one decide what to credit, trust, believe?

Mr. Lehigh mentions “authority” throughout the article. Here’s the real authority

Most computer models have failed. Here’s another representation

Most people turn to the consensus of scientific opinion. That is, to things like the UN panel. Others, however, define themselves as skeptics or contrarians, an identity that, once adopted, is often hard to abandon. Doubters might consider Richard Muller, a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley and co-founder of Berkeley Earth, who was once such a skeptic himself.

Muller is probably not the best example, considering he was a fake skeptic. Actually, on reconsideration, perhaps he was a good choice for inclusion, considering that the issue itself is fake. There has been no statistically significant warming in 17 years and 8 months despite rising CO2 levels.

Even if the temps were rising, there is no hard proof that it is mostly/solely caused by Mankind as opposed to mostly/solely natural causation, which has happened throughout the lifespan of the Earth, and we can easily see there has been a seesaw effect throughout the Holocene of warm periods, some of which were warmer than the current period, and cool periods.

But the idea that every prominent skeptic must be satisfied before the country moves forward is wrongheaded. Senator John McCain, who advocated a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases during his 2008 presidential campaign, had it right back then. He noted that if we moved forward and it turned out that climate-change believers were mistaken, we’d still have a cleaner planet, whereas if we did nothing and the skeptics were wrong, we would have done a profound disservice to future generations.

Remember when they moved forward with the Kyoto Protocol? How’d that work out for the signatory countries? Their “carbon footprints” and CO2 output continued to rise, the majority never came close to their goals, yet, their economies were damaged and reduced, their citizens suffered from slow economies, and they’ve been left with poor energy infrastructure left on a razors edge during the cold winters. And many are moving back to using more coal. It’s no wonder Bill Clinton and the entire US Senate, including all the Democrats (which included hyper-Warmist John Kerry) refused to join Kyoto, because it would damage our economy.

We would not have a “cleaner planet”, as CO2 is not a pollutant, but a trace gas necessary for life on Earth. We would be tilting at windmills, and future generations would be pretty ticked about destroying the economy and implementing tons of government regulations that harm their freedom.

But, as always, if Warmists like Mr. Lehigh are so concerned, they can easily show us the way by living the life they advocate for everyone else.

Read: Warmist Scot Lehigh: This Democracy Thing Is Bad For Climate Change »