Saturday, January 08, 2011

What is to Be Undone?

Being a global warming activist is a good gig. You get to argue that only experts can save the world from global warming doom. Conveniently, you are one of the people qualified as an expert. And you get to jet around to great vacation destinations to earnestly explain why other people need to dial down their use of fossil fuels with a simpler life. And the evidence we see is simply a no-lose situation (tip to Instapundit):


The Global Warming Survival Handbook gave the game away when it encouraged people to see the future through ‘carefully crafted “what if?” stories’. Admitting that it is virtually impossible to predict our climatic future - ‘We can’t even forecast if it will rain next week’ - it advised us to host ‘scenario parties’ to ‘pool the imaginations and experiences of your friends’. It’s the closest we’ve had to an admission by the green movement that its warnings of future desert-spread are based on its own feverish teenage imaginings rather than on scientific forecasts. The snow crisis demonstrated this in Technicolor (well, in bright white): that the expert elites have taken leave of the realm of reality, preferring to seek meaning and momentum in the fantasy notion that they are fighting a hot apocalypse.

Anyone with a shred of self-respect who had predicted The End Of Snow would surely now admit that he was wrong. But no. Perhaps the most revealing thing about the snow crisis is that it was held up as evidence, not that the experts were mistaken, but that the public is stupid. Apparently it’s those who ask ‘Whatever happened to global warming?’, rather than those who predicted ‘no more traditional British winters’, who need to have their heads checked. Because what they don’t understand - ignoramuses that they are - is that heavy snow is also proof that our planet is getting hotter, and that industrialised society is to blame, just as surely as the absence of snow was proof of the same thing 10 years ago.

Nothing disproves the global warming thesis for these people.

If there is a warmer than recent usual season, it is proof of climate change.

If there is a colder than recent usual season, it is just weather and not proof that the climate is not warming.

And is a recent twist, if there is a colder than recent usual season, it is also proof of global warming--and you ignorant non-climate educated hicks don't understand The Science.
 
In the end, it is all about a desire to control people in search of a reason to exercise control. The global warmers who jet off to lavish conferences are the Vanguard of the Warmetariat, and they'll lead us to a carbon paradise whether we like it or not.

If we let them, of course.