Even more than all of this, these climate scientists have an inherent motivation of self-interest in promoting global warming, because if we’re in a climate crisis then we need more climate research, and we need to fund more climate research projects, and we need more university faculties in climatology. Climatologists, then, become more important and better funded and have more job choices, because they are the prophets who will show us the way out of our predicament. Believing them when they tell us there’s a climate crisis is rather like believing the military when they tell us that the best solution to our international problems is to invade everyone. Like any profession, the marketplace rewards productivity, and in this case producing a worldwide crisis is enormously rewarding for them.
I’m getting a mental image of a bunch of weathermen on an international conference call: “Strike while the iron is hot! It’s our moment to shine, because absolutely nobody understands what we’re talking about. Not even us!! Let’s scare ’em to death and we’ll be hailed as prophets!”
Please.
Dave Nalle’s article does have some valid points, of course — just like all well-written spin. He’s quite right, for instance, that the IPCC report was targeted toward policy-making, and is thus political by its very nature. But if he’s going to go after the underlying motives, he needs to lift a different rock.
There’s far more fodder to be found beneath the one labeled “Terrorism” — or more specifically, the driving economic engine in the Middle East: Oil. And it was Glenn Reynolds who said it most succinctly, although that wasn’t the point he was trying to make:
Short of Bush nuking the Saudi and Iranian oil fields (defunding terrorism and stopping global warming in one blow!) no single change we can make is going to make a big difference. I’m all for more research on more efficient technologies, but that takes time.
No, I’m not advocating that anybody should blow up the oil fields. That wouldn’t stop global warming altogether (nothing will), but oil and terrorism are intimately tied. You’d have to be living under a rock of your own to have missed the connection between our dependence on fossil fuels, and our “national interests” in countries that produce them.
All sorts of folks are spinning and dancing, trying to avoid making any changes because Global Warming is either 1) not definitively caused by human activities, and/or 2) we can’t make it go away tomorrow. Add to that the suspicions that the U.S. is being picked on because of international jealousy, and there’s bound to be lots of pushback.
It doesn’t really matter whose “fault” this is. We know that burning carbon-based fuel contributes to greenhouse gases. We also know that there are other energy sources that have been unpursued because they’re more expensive. R&D, transitional logistics, and costs per usage unit all to add up to, “It costs too much to change things”.
Me — I think the costs are much higher if we continue to allow unstable regions of the world to control our energy… or haven’t you noticed the latest budget requests for the various wars?
Weathermen are normally meteoroligists not climatoligists. Short term weather vs long term climate change.
http://www.ametsoc.org/policy/whatisam.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatology
The only problem with your mental image is that weathermen seldom if ever are able to agree on anything, and as these are people who use terms like “50% chance of rain” when the streets are flooding, I don’t see them being that certain of anything.
However, the flaws of Kyoto (that they were aimed at certain countries, namely the USofA, while totally ignoring others, such as China and India) were real – real enough that Pres. Clinton decided to punt, and chose not to submit that treaty to the Senate for consideration. One of the smarter moves on his part, IMNSHO.
~EdT.