Forgive me for the non-foreign policy post (though the vaunted international community uses Kyoto as a club to beat us so I have something international here), but global warming is a guilty pleasure for me.
So Michael Crichton's latest speech is great to read. Our world is too complex for us to have the notion that we understand it enough to pull levers and make a problem go away:
And for that matter, who believes that the complex system of our atmosphere behaves in such a simple and predictable way that if we reduce one component, carbon dioxide, we will therefore reliably reduce temperature? CO2 is not like an accelerator on a car. It’s not linear (and by the way, neither is a car accelerator.) And furthermore, who believes that the climate can be stabilized when it has never been stable throughout the earth’s history? We can only entertain such an idea if we don’t really understand what a complex system is. We’re like the blonde who returned the scarf because it was too tight. We don’t get it.
Is it any wonder the Left can't get worked up over maniacal dictators with nukes? They have grander problems to solve. The future of the planet is at stake!
The Left believes their big brains have seen the problem, understand the dire consequences for our entire planet, know the causes, understand what needs to be done, and have a plan to cope with all the consequences that they of course see so clearly. And when the crisis of the day does not arrive, they buy a new scarf and try it on.
Sadly, they are always too tight.
For the record:
I don't assume we are experiencing a general warming based on a mere century of purported data;
I don't assume we have caused whatever increase there is;
I don't assume that the Left's so-called solutions will work;
I sure as heck don't think we can afford them and should look to cope rather than halt any warming;
And finally, until the global warmers can tell me what the planet's ideal temperature is, I don't know why we should move Heaven and Earth to prevent the planet from getting warmer for now (even if it is within our capabilities). We've had different temperatures over human history, so I don't know why a little warmer is necessarily a catastrophe--isn't that a little time centric? If the Left ever goes back to warning us about a new ice age, they might want us to pump CO2 back into the atmosphere.
