Global Warming - Are You Scared Enough To Elect Al Gore Yet?

Here in Utah, there exists an
odd combination of equally illogical devotees of Al Gore’s perspective on the
Global Warming theory, who range from groups of (obviously well-intentioned)
ladies who meet weekly and drink tea together at The Grand America Hotel in
downtown Salt Lake City and wring their hands about how the world will soon end
without more stringent regulation, and, I assume, plan various fund-raisers to
help ensure that the day is as far in the future as possible, to those who will only
believe a politician whose name has an (R) after it. 

My perspective is simply an
opposition to politicized science, whether it’s creationism/evolution, stem
cell research, or whatever.  I do believe governments are best positioned,
potentially, to enact and/or enforce the necessary rewards and penalties to
alter unfettered profiteering at the expense of the rest of us, and our
children, and our children’s children, etc. However, I would expect that people exhibit a more robust acknowledgement of the fact that we know astonishingly
little about the environment, from its past history to its present state, and
even less about how to protect and preserve it.  We can neither “assess”
nor “predict” the future, and to continue to pretend that we can is the height
of self congratulatory hubris.

I no more trust the Industry-Sponsored
Research than I do Al Gore (although anyone who can keep a straight face while
discussing Carbon Credits has my admiration at some level).

That there has been an
increase in the incidence of carbon gases in the atmosphere seems to have been
proven, and I also believe we will ultimately find humans are to blame.  The significance of the impact has been and will continue to be, more
of an effect upon the land (heat zones, etc.) than upon the atmosphere. One would anticipate that the series of false
prophesies of impending ecological doom over the last 4 decades should at least
have imbued us with a healthier dose of skepticism than we seem to possess. I predict
that the next century will find our progeny existing well, having eliminated
the dependence on fossil fuels, and escaped the dire warnings generated by
geometrically-progressed computer models which are waved about to cower the
masses and win in New Hampshire.

There is so little
unpoliticized “fact” left within scientific literature as to be thoroughly
disconcerting.  The computer models I have seen reveal (after
considerable, though hardly thorough, research on the subject) a variance of
approximately 400% in the extant models - de facto proof that nobody really
knows anything.  Your and my opinions are as valid as theirs.

The current near-hysteria
about the environment frightens me far more than any genuine environmental crisis
that might ultimately be discovered.  As a people, we have repeatedly been
more than willing to exchange freedom for security when whipped into a fearful
posture by our government (witness Iraq, the Cold War, etc.), and this
constitutes as significant an invitation to totalitarianism as I have witnessed
in my lifetime.  Inevitably, at best, this leads to “policy decisions” – which
manifest as taxes and control. In the aggregate, the cumulative policy
decisions made (Kyoto Protocol) and pending do little but either handcuff the
developed world, or conversely, empower the developed world to handicap the
undeveloped world with a “we got ours, but we better curtail manufacturing now
because this pollution thing is getting out of hand” imposition, preventing
development where it is most needed.

I would suggest that in the
last 40 years, science has made incredible strides in a variety of areas
(quantum physics, chaos theory, catastrophe theory, linear dynamics, etc.) and
yet, as Michael Crichton suggests, the environmental movement remains
inexplicably mired in the seventies, where these and other ideas have failed to
penetrate the concepts and rhetoric of that time.  Gore is just another
pseudo-tree-hugger; the real tree-huggers are at least sincere.

Al Gore is just another political opportunist
(these words are not meant to imply there are other than opportunists in
positions of political power – we should be so lucky) who expanded a PowerPoint
presentation into a movie, and is now expanding a single issue, and its unprovable consequences, into a unprecedented grab for power and prominence.