Radical green activist Bill McKibben cleverly responds in today’s Washington Post to Glenn Beck having called McKibben a communist. Cleverly, that is, up until about halfway through.
[The U.S. Chamber] submitted a petition to the Environmental Protection Agency arguing that it should avoid regulating carbon emissions because, in the event of global warming, “populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations.”
To me that sounds absurd.
This would be amusing except the guy’s a college professor. Who apparently has little clue about that to which he has dedicated much of his life.
This inanity can only be the result of someone spending a little too much time feverishly staring at fudged computer model projections of the future, at the expense of reality. Reality is evidence, models are not. And yet this haughty foolishness passed not only Mr. McKibben’s typing fingers and mental editing process, but also the Post’s system of review (whatever that may be).
It’s not just that the most vibrant modern economies ranged from chilly Iceland to steamy Singapore. Which one meets Goldilocks’ vague intimations of the ideal, ‘proper’ climate? Can’t be both, we know that. Either? Far more likely it’s neither. Maybe those people aren’t really there. At least, maybe not in a computer model.
But, further, more than people adapting to whichever climate they live in being self-evident, people always have adapted to something that’s always taking place: climate change.
Mr. McKibben, you’re not going to, erm, ‘deny’ that, are you? Because it seems you do.
In fact, this is implicitly and sometimes expressly denied by these folks, who I suppose really are the “climate change ‘deniers”’ they speak of so often — climate, rewritten in the IPCC Third Assessment Report, was now shown to have been stable (pause wait for laughter, but they really do say things like ‘stabilize the climate’) until the horrors of industrialized society.
That’s called the ‘Hockey Stick’ revision, by a computer model, of one thousand years of accumulated knowledge of observed history as even the first UNIPCC assessment had affirmed. Climate changes, always has, always will, evidence of which is found everywhere, from geology to diaries to agricultural records to cultural works of a given age.
So climate’s always changed, mankind has always adapted, and the wealthiest societies have adapted best. McKibben boasts of his leisure activities: baseball in the Spring and summer and snow skiing when conditions allow. Fairly adaptable, I’d say. And fairly wealthy.
Rationing energy or otherwise adopting McKibben’s preferred agenda would, I suppose, make it somewhat ‘absurd’ that man could adapt as well to that which will always occur. Worse, you ultimately slow down development of the poor who are most vulnerable to climate. And change.
More Florida, less Bangladesh is the better option.
Anyhow, remember that you cannot reason people out of a position that they were not reasoned into. Global warming alarmism is an emotional stance, one so many adopt because they apparently need it, need it to be true, need their worldview ‘affirmed’ by something. And are greatly disturbed by those who argue in a way upsetting this mental and emotional framework.
And as with any doomsday cult, that’s also why they’re so eager to accept whatever happens, however implausibly, as further evidence of their faith.
