The control freak climate excuse

Charles Krauthammer:

I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.

Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems — from ocean currents to cloud formation — that no one fully understands.

Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.

Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation.

"The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity," warns Czech President Vaclav Klaus, "is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."

If you doubt the arrogance, you haven't seen that Newsweek cover story that declared the global warming debate over.

Consider: If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming — infinitely more untested, complex and speculative — is a closed issue.

But declaring it closed has its rewards. It not only dismisses skeptics as the running dogs of reaction, i.e., of Exxon, Cheney and now Klaus. By fiat, it also hugely re-empowers the intellectual left.

For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class — social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies — arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism.

Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself.

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Just Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

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Climate mongers are the ultimate watermelons--green on the outside and red on the inside. This is all about controlling and regulating every aspect of business, commerce and your very breathing.

One of the things that has always bothered me about this carbon conspiracy is how you measure a ton of a weightless gas like CO2. It it lighter than air how do they capture it to weigh it? If it is a volume measure, how is it calculated and measured? You can visualize a ton of straight carbon like that in a pencil lead pretty easily, but how much does the volume increase by adding a couple of atoms of oxygen to to each atom of carbon. Al Gore has never said and he probably does not know.

But by picking carbon dioxide as their greenhouse gas to worry about was pretty clever since it is a pretty small part of the whole. The big piece of the greenhouse gas makeup is water vapor which cannot be blamed on man. How convenient. Yet the cars that the globo warmers visualize have as their major by product water vapor. Something does not add up in this scheme.

It is a good thing I like warmer weather cause these guys are never going to get control of the global thermostat. But they will try to get hold of everything else.

The NY Times says that scientist have been frustrated by attempts to develop clean coal facilities that would pump CO2 back into the ground. Oil companies have had something along that technology for several years as I recall. Sometimes they will pump a gas into the areas where oil is to be able to lift more oil. I haven't seen anything on splitting the carbon atom from the two oxygen atoms, but that seems like an obvious solution if it is feasible and I think it should be. They would then have an endless supply of pencil lead and could release the oxygen into the air or capture for sale.