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 THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE Number 540, October 11, 2009 "The gun is a symbol of freedom, not tyranny"
Attribute to The Libertarian Enterprise Here's an idea ... Maybe the news hasn't reached the immediate neighborhood of your braincase, yet, but over the past couple of years, the bizarre conceit of man-made global warming—recently euphemized to "climate change"—has been thoroughly discredited. I won't say that "the science is settled"—properly speaking, science is never settled—but every item of "science" its proponents claimed to stand on has been knocked out from under them. So-called global warming has been demonstrated, beyond the palest possible shadow of a doubt to be a pseudoscientific hoax. Doubt me? Go to www.climatedepot.com An argument can be made for plain old-fashioned fraud. And fraud is a crime. It's not hard to see how it happened. Those already in power were prepared to see that power—the naked ability to coerce people into doing whatever you want them to do, and the equal ability to coerce them into not doing whatever you don't want them to do—increase exponentially. Those not already in power could secure for themselves a place at the public trough by going along with the pseudoscientific scam. But fraud, I will remind you, is a crime. Academics likewise prospered, assured of grants and tenure as long as they didn't permit the truth about global warming—that it is an utter hoax—get in the way. Anyone who did could be assured he'd be out looking for a job in the private sector—if he wasn't actually prosecuted and jailed, as some so-called scientists have demanded. The rabid Canadian environmentalist and "civil liberties activist" David Suzuki—who according to Wikipedia seems to have more academic degrees than any other single human being I have heard of—comes to mind. I'm sure Professor Doctor Suzuki thinks he wields an impressive suite of credentials; it seems to me a lot more like an idictment of academic culture. His lot have all but destroyed the credibility of science, the only reliable lamp humanity had to light its way through the darkness of a cold and hostile universe. I'm unsure it will ever recover. Somebody needs to tell Suzuki that fraud is a crime and suggest perhaps that he's the one who ought to be headed from the hoosegow. For industry, the myth of man-made global warming represented a bonanza of new products to be developed—purchases of which would be guaranteed by government and by builders and homeowners who wanted tax breaks—higher prices for the older products that people really wanted, and surrealistic meanderings of all kinds away from the path of genuine technological progress—like microflush toilets, solar collectors, silly windmill farms, and poisonously over-technologized lightbulbs. But fraud is a crime no matter how much money it makes. Various latterday Luddites and neoPuritans of one ilk or another could find new arguments against whatever their fellow human beings liked to do that they themselves disapproved of. I read one perfect idiot denouncing the smoking of tobacco because it added to global warming, and of course the home barbecue grill—requiring endless supplies of red meat and a source of heat and carbon gasses itself—might as well have been a swastika or a statue of Hitler. Guns and shooting were anathemized (of course), as were the SUVs used to get people to the range and back. Odd, how the pollution and energy usage involved in the manufacture of solar panels and bicycles—or the atmospheric damage presumably due to marijuana smoking—never got mentioned. Beginning in the 1960s, automobiles have contributed less and less to what we think of as air pollution until today they emit very little at their tailpipes besides water vapor and carbon dioxide. For those hysterical collectivists who despise the very idea of the convenience, privacy, and safety of private transportation, this was absolutely intolerable, and some other excuse had to be found to attack it. That excuse—which only required swallowing the absurd lie that a natural constituent of the planet's air is a contaminant—was its "carbon footprint". Fraud is not only a crime, at this scale, it's just plain stupid. Sooner or later it was bound to be discredited and its advocates exposed. As talk radio and the Internet came to be used more and more as a forum of last resort for open debate on global warming—debate that had been brutally stifled in the conventional media—and as the phenomenon itself began to disintegrate under closer scrutiny, there were calls to reinstitute the horribly misnamed "Fairness Doctrine", curtail the use of personal computers (to save energy, you know), and to monitor or control "irresponsible" content across the World Wide Web. All to cover up the crime—among others—of global warming fraud. Meanwhile, not one scientifically respectable scrap of information supporting global warming has survived investigation. Embarrassingly—for the warm-mongers—warming seems to cause carbon dioxide, not the other way around as they wanted us to believe. The Earth had a brief, shallow warming at the same time Mars and Jupiter did. The planet has been getting cooler since, over the past dozen years. The hottest decade in the 20th century was the 1930s. Data showing recent warming (especially the "hockey stick" model) have been exposed as cherry-picked or falsified. We've just lived through a summer that almost wasn't there, and some think we're in for an unusually bitter winter. It's long past time to put a stop to this nonsense, which has confused our children (and millions of weaker-minded adults) about our species' proper place in the universe, damaged our economy, skewed our technology, and threatens to smash the entire system altogether with punitive and nonsensical taxes. It's time to assess the damage to civilization that it and its proponents have inflicted, and to exact restitution. Monetary damages alone to our society are staggering. Even before enactment of corrupt irrationalities like "cap and trade", we have already wasted hundreds of billions of dollars—and vastly more in terms of lost opportunity—in a transparently futile attempt to deal with a problem that doesn't exist. No longer can modern thinkers laugh at the ridiculous medieval arguers who debated about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, as if it were somehow something real and important. They have the myth of global warming to account for, themselves. Any politician who has ever gained materially or held public office on the strength of his support for the myth of global warming must be removed from office and placed on trial like the con-man he is. Algore would be a good place to begin. Arresting him would put manmade global warming—the 20th century equivalent of phlogiston, phrenology, and Piltdown Man—on trial. He must be made to account for every cent of public money he and his disciples—including the current governor of Colorado and the mayor of Denver—have spent in an attempt to stamp out a threat they know doesn't exist. People whose lives and hopes have been damaged by this lunacy should be able to sue. Algore must be treated as what he is: the leader of a violent, dangerous cult that would destroy civilization and set mankind back a milennium. Algore is the Jim Jones of Gaia worship. He's the David Koresh of environmentalism. But we'll treat him more kindly and more lawfully than the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team did. And to prevent scientific fraud like this occurring again in the future, we need a Constitutional amendment formally separating science—let's throw in medicine, too—and state.
TLE AFFILIATE
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