Anti Darwinism embraced by globo warmers

George Will:

A PREVENTIVE war worked out so well in Iraq that Washington last week launched another. The new preventive war - the government responding forcefully against a postulated future threat - has been declared on behalf of polar bears, the first species whose supposed jeopardy has been ascribed to global warming.

The Interior Department, bound by the Endangered Species Act, has declared polar bears a "threatened" species because they might be endangered "in the foreseeable future," meaning 45 years. (Note: 45 years ago, the now-long-forgotten global cooling menace of 35 years ago was not yet foreseen.)

The bears will be threatened if the current episode of warming, if there really is one, is, unlike all the previous episodes, irreversible, and if it intensifies, and if it continues to melt sea ice vital to the bears, and if the bears, unlike in many previous warming episodes, cannot adapt.

Because of restrictions on hunting, polar bears might be more numerous today than ever and might be twice as numerous as they were three decades ago - when the media were fanning frenzy about global cooling. (Science magazine, March 1975, reported "the approach of a full-blown 10,000-year ice age.") As Nigel Lawson, a former British Cabinet member, writes in his new book "An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming":

"Over the past 21/2 million years, a period during which the planet's climate fluctuated substantially, remarkably few of the earth's millions of plant and animal species became extinct. This applies not least, incidentally, to polar bears, which have been around for millennia, during which there is ample evidence that polar temperatures have varied considerably."

But Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne says the "threatened" label is mandatory because sea ice has been melting and computer models postulate future melting caused by human activity. So, now that human activity is assumed to be the primary cause, or even a measurable cause, of warming, the decision to classify the bears as threatened has become a mighty lever.

Now that polar bears are wards of the government, and now that it is a legal doctrine that humans are responsible for global warming, the Endangered Species Act has acquired unlimited application. Anything that can be said to increase global warming can - must - be said to threaten bears already designated as threatened.

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What Friedrich Hayek called the "fatal conceit" - the idea that government can know the future's possibilities and can and should control the future's unfolding - is the left's agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state's supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left's hostility to markets. And to automobiles - people going wherever they want whenever they want.

Today's "green left" is the old "red left" revised....

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The last time I wrote about the anti Darwinism of the globo warmers most of the comments seemed quasi religious in nature suggesting I was for hell on earth. While I do prefer warmer weather and do not think I would be inconvenienced at all if it were a couple of degrees warmer, may real message is that humans, animals and plants can adapt. Climate zones where certain plants do better may shift somewhat, but I do not believe it is anything we can't live with.

I have to say that I have always been skeptical of a guy with a sandwich board proclaiming the end of the world. That the guy with the sandwich board may be a scientist or a Nobel winner does not erase my skepticism. That polar bears who have increased their numbers in teh warmer weather are now considered endangered just shows what an Alice in wonderland world the globo warmers inhabit. It is too bad they are on this planet and not Mars which is also getting warmer.