Climate change
The global warming scare is so rampant now, it’s about time questions are being asked publicly about the science of it, and the politics.
On February 2, an AEI research project on climate change policy that we have been organizing was the target of a journalistic hit piece in Britain’s largest left-wing newspaper, the Guardian. The article’s allegation–that we tried to bribe scientists to criticize the work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)–is easy to refute. More troubling is the growing worldwide effort to silence anyone with doubts about the catastrophic warming scenario that Al Gore and other climate extremists are putting forth.
So, it’s starting to get hotter in other ways as well.
Sophisticated people in Western societies don’t stand in public and shout, “The end is near!†the way a nutty preacher does. They don’t cut their scalps the way Shia Muslims do in a rite of self-flagellation to mark the Day of Ashura. They do none of these things, because they have the issue of global warming instead.
Wit and irony at least defuses some of the alarm going around. And once it gets your attention, you notice some good questions are raised.
Public policy is all about trade-offs. Economists understand this better than politicians because voters want to have their cake and eat it too, and politicians think whatever is popular must also be true.
That last point is an important one. Politicians not only think that whatever is popular must be true, they go about making it true by spreading disinformation and repeating it enough — and forcefully enough — with the help of a complicit media. As Sen. Barbara Boxer keeps saying, it’s no longer a debatable issue. It’s a consensus.
