Global Warming Skeptic to Lead the EU

Now with the Czech President Vaclav Klaus set to lead the EU, a vocal skeptic of human-induced climate change is about to become highly visible, and hopefully influential in questioning the massive increase in state power that cap-and-traders want to impose on western economies.

Here's a good summary in Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald. It quotes geologist and University of Adelaide (Australia) professor Ian Plimer:

Plimer said there is a division between those scientists who sit in front of super computers and push piles of data into the mathematical models that drive the theory of climate change, and those who take measurements in the field.

We are not sceptical enough about the data. For instance, Plimer cited differences between results from temperature measuring stations in urban and rural areas. Those in urbanised Chicago, Berkeley, New York, and so on, show temperature rises over the past 150 years, whereas those in the rural US, in Houlton, Albany and Harrisburg (though not Death Valley, California) show equally consistent cooling. "What we're measuring is urbanisation," Plimer said.

Of course, science is based on skepticism. Human global warmning, as I've said in previous posts, has become an article of faith among its adherents and advocates, so much so that they've taken to labelling skeptics "deniers," an outrageous likening of legitimate inquiry to those who believe the WWII Holocaust never took place.

Seeing the skeptics emerge now is especially encouraging in light of the new governmental powers being accumulated by western democracies to save us from worldwide economic collapse. Taken together, a resurgence of statism to fight the twin economic and environmental panics would erode our freedoms far more than the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 reforms.

In a time like this, it's worth reading (or re-reading) Thomas Sowell's best book, The Annointed, in which he observes a familiar and recurring post-WWII political theme in the USA. To paraphrase him: First there is a crisis, a crisis about which only certain annointed people understand. They tell us that unless the rest of us adopt their solutions, we are all doomed. Those who dispute their solutions, or their premise, are derided is wildly out of touch, or worse, agents of the crisis itself. We adopt their solutions, the crisis worsens, but rather than accept responsibility for ineffectiveness of their solutions, the annointed point to a new crisis as the cause. And the cycle repeats.

Sowell describes an old political trick, the use of fear to galvanize public support for state power that would otherwise not be tolerated. It's been used as an organizing principle for state welfare programs, purges of immigrants and Communists, wars, and now "saving the environment."

This tactic often uses crisis as a mere vehicle -- a Trojan horse -- to implement the real agenda of its proponents, an agenda that would on its own be too unpopular to win support in a democratic society.

For example, the underlying motives of the most radical global warming alamists -- shifting the value system of western economies away from economic growth to local cummunitarianism -- has never been scratched or sufficiently aired. Most people have never spent time on Earth First's web site, or read Bill McKibben's thoughtful books, but if they wish to see where the global warming crowd wants to take us, they should. Were "saving the planet" not available as a useful vehicle, I think these same people would be advocating their ideas about capitalism, market-based economies, and American culture on their stand-alone merits, saying, for example, that they believe it is better to can your own food for the winter rather than have fresh food trucked in from California in January.

Of course, the planet isn't going anywhere for a few million years. The debate is really about human quality of life and existence today, and so far it hasn't been a debate at all -- just a fearful capitulation to the annointed. Maybe Vaclav Klaus can stir things up from the other side of the pond.