Rusted Sky

The War in Global Warming seems to be the sort of thing that you're not to question. Yet the folks who were massively skeptical about the WoT and have been pushing hard to NOT do anything have no hesitation about signing onto all sorts of measures designed to alleviate the supposed problem with Global Warming.

But finally, some on the left are starting to question.

The Austrian Economists: Rushing to War, Part Two

More generally I would ask several questions of people critical of the War in Iraq but gung-ho about a War on Global Warming. Should we not be asking the same deep, critical questions about what we do and do not know about climate change and environmental issues more broadly, and how we acquired that information, as we should have asked about Iraqi WMDs before we go rushing to “war” on global warming? Though the earth has been warming, it is not at all clear that the consensus on the causes and consequences of said warming is as widely shared among scientists as Al Gore and others would like us to believe. Should we not also be asking the same questions about the effects that such a war will have on innocents in the third world as dissenters did with respect to Iraq? After all, the environmentalism-driven rush to biofuels appears to be a significant contributing factor to the run-up in world food prices, which is causing great harm to the poorest folks on the planet. And shouldn’t we be asking what the consequences of this “war” will be on our own freedoms and our own standard of living, just as critics of the War in Iraq have rightly drawn attention to those same issues in the context of that war? Finally, is it really all that much more imperialistic to try to create democracy at the point of a gun in Iraq than it is to tell the Third World that they must abide by high Western standards of environmental regulation in the name of a war on global warming and environmental destruction, when the consequences of doing so are sure to prolong their poverty?

The rises in food prices as food grains are converted to biofuels would seem to insure starvation in third-world countries. People will die in the short term - because of a vague, possible problem with global warming in the long run, which has about as much science supporting it as 'global cooling' did in the '70s.

Sometimes it seems to me like the left is searching desperately for something to believe in. Communism proved a flat-out bust, Socialism is failing. There exists very few vehicles which can be used to force mankind into 'perfection' any more, which can be used to push society in the 'proper' directions. Global Warming is virtually tailor-made (indeed, I could argue that it was Al Gore who really got the whole platform going) to provide that vehicle. It's not surprising it's turned almost into a religion.

You have a threat - formless, barely detectable, which may or may not be caused by solar influences, which CAN be blamed on mankind... even if the evidence is ambiguious. (Of course, Ruddiman's article on it is pretty unambiguious. I buy his premise, that global warming's been going on since the beginning of human agriculture, and it's a damn good thing too...) You cannot question it, or the high priests of Global Warming who say that the only way to expiate your sins and save Gaia is to burn your food reserves.

Wow. They've brought back the idea of burnt offerings to the gods. Who'd have thought it?

I've mentioned before that it seems to me the potential for millions to starve due to food shortages doesn't seem to register with the Greens pushing massive changes in the global food economy. But then, I'm not terribly surprised. You're supposed to make sacrifices for your religion.

The problem gets bad when you want to force everyone else to make the same sacrifices.

J.