Let's Get One Thing Clear: The Earth is Warming

Global warming is kind of like stem cell research. Which kind are we talking about? Well, in both the cases of global warming and stem cell research, it's a shell game. When it suits the supporters of the wrong kind either, the supporters dissimulate. It makes for entertaining confusion, but not for a very good deduction of the facts. On purpose.


Did you ever notice that it's pretty hard to tell which kind of stem cells the media and the Democrats and Barbra Streisand are talking about? It's on purpose. Isn't it interesting that (a) embryonic stem cells have never been a therapy or cure for anything, so they make it very difficult to know that there are actually two different kinds of stem cells, and (b) that adult stem cells are almost never identified as cures despite the fact that all stem cell therapies and cures in existence today are of the "adult" variety. Ergo, each news headline simply says something like "Patient Responding Well to Stem-Cell Therapy".

It's that way between the two kinds of global warming--man caused versus nature caused. They don't want you to know that there are two kinds of this either, because it ruins their PR campaign. So they just talk about GLOBAL WARMING, as if there only ever were and could be one kind. And then when reputable scientists say that they see no evidence of man-made global warming, the headline gets snipped to something like "Fringe Scientists Dispute Global Warming." Very helpful. Very educational.

Newsweek and Time do a good job of ticking me off from time to time. And the Newsweek "episode" regarding global warming on "newsstands" everywhere is an excellent case in point. With arrogant surety, it bloviates the following:

Science chipped away at the ranks of global-warming deniers, who have mostly been forced to concede that the Earth really is warming

Pay no attention to the dissimulator behind the curtain!

It has been quite a while (oh, 6,000 years or so, when was Adam born?) since anyone has disputed whether the earth is warming (or cooling), so it's pretty misleading to say that someone has been forced to admit what they've known and what has been evident all along.

And in the very next phrase, Newsweek makes another, albeit very small, eureka:

and that industrial pollution is at least partly to blame

McFly! Hello!

Of course it's partly to blame. But it's just that how 'partly' is a matter of discussion. Between whether you rely on science, which indicates that it's a very small partly, or whether you rely on the paid ministry of the new religion, which says it's definitely an "it just might be but we're not sure, but we can't be wrong about this, so we better hurry and do something about it" overwhelming 'partly', is a chasm of controversy . There needn't be.

But then the dismantling of one of the largest industries in the western world--scientific prostitution--would cause a great deal of economic upheaval.

Thomas Friedman's column today notes that in Kenya, droughts are becoming more common (as they have been before, but apparently he hasn't studied history) and that the Kenyans of all people have no ability to cope with such climactic climate change. He is correct, but, as the doctors who prescribed leeches to bleed the already blood starved Abraham Lincoln following a night at the Ford Theatre, Friedman prescribes exactly the wrong cure. The only way that Kenya or anyone else in a developing country will be able to cope with climate change (besides resettlement) is through improved technology. But that would cause global warming (ahem...man made) and lions and tigers and bears, oh my! So we can't do that!

If membership in the Church of Global Warming becomes a requirement, then the Kenyans are sunk. If not, they will be able to develop the technology that they need to either resettle or redistribute water from other areas of Africa.

This is what I'm afraid of. If Friedman and others like him were to have their way, only the creme de la creme will have a life of material comfort, while all the rest will, like the horse named Boxer in Animal Farm, be required to live a life much like the Kenyans live today. Such a draconian cure will surely be worse than the disease. And the greatest of man-made global warming advocates (to exclude Al Gore) won't even state categorically that we're sick yet.

Newsweek begins its article thusly:

No sooner did James McCarthy's name turn up in an associated Press story on the outlook for global warming than he started getting outraged e-mails from colleagues. All that McCarthy, a Harvard oceanographer who studies how climate change affects marine life, told the AP last week was that "the worst stuff is not going to happen ... not that I think the projections aren't that [accurate], but because we can't be that stupid."

If they'd have stopped there, it would have been a good article.