More on the Global Warming thing

A very nice anonymous commenter has responded at length to my previous little post on global warming, indeed probably at rather more length than it deserved. I have a slight problem: I'm not quite sure what my anonymous friend wants me to do; so I'm not sure exactly how to respond. But I'm reasonably sure (s)he and I disagree on one point: my commenter doesn't seem to think it does much harm to try to stop global warming even if global temperatures aren't something human beings actually influence -- that is, even if the religion of Stopping Global Warming has no basis whatsoever in fact.

There are lots of different ways the conversation could go from here. Here are several alternatives; if you want, you guys pick the one that interests you.

(By the way: if my anonymous global warming commenter is my old torture-of-terrorists friend "Arnie," I should take this chance to apologize that the pressures of real life have kept me from ever getting around to talking about the misuse of the Golden Rule and the role of uncertainty in political ethics.)

1. Tremendous, immediate, and absolutely non-hypothetical increase in human welfare, and decrease in human suffering, stand to be gained in grossly poverty-stricken parts of the world like Africa – but only by means of rapid industrialization fueled by greatly increased consumption of fossil fuels. If somebody genuinely cares about human suffering, and genuinely values the empiricism that is the root of all genuine science, then to me it would seem very hard for that person not to set up a balance scale that looks something like this:

On the one hand, if the speculative model-driven foretelling-the-future form of “science” that is the specialty of the IPCC is right, and if we don’t do anything about global warming, and if the free market (which over the last half-century has created technological improvements that nobody could possibly have imagined in the ’40’s and ’50’s) doesn’t come up with perfectly good solutions that don’t happen to have occurred yet to the Vice-President In Charge Of Environmental Scare-Mongering at Newsweek magazine...if all those Might-Be’s come true, then there is a possibility (though one that has no real empirical evidence behind it to date) that a couple of million people a couple of generations from now could get sick and maybe even die. Which would, I agree, be a bad thing. If it actually happened. But then again, maybe this decade’s Great Big Oh My God We’re All Going To Die Unless The Government Gives Me Enough Grant Money For Me To Find A Solution To The Problem That I Assure You Exists, And That Is Clearly The Fault Of Republicans And Big Business And The Great Satan America, And That Did I Mention Requires You To Give Me Heaps Of Taxpayer-Funded Grant Money? -- maybe, I say, this decade's "scientific consensus" of Armageddon, isn’t going to turn out to be any more accurate a prophecy than the Great Global Cooling scientific scare-consensus of the Seventies, or the good ol’ Population Bomb of the Sixties. According to the news media, the “scientific consensus” has been assuring us that modern man’s pernicious habit of making life better for himself and his family was going to bring destruction upon us all, ever since the Baby Boomers began congratulating themselves on the twin discoveries that (a) they were infinitely smarter than their oh-so-square and oh-so-inadequately-self-indulgent parents and (b) New-Age-ey do-it-yourself nature-worship conveniently declines to impose the obligation of self-discipline, either in the realm of intellectual rigor or in that of sexual self-constraint. Thus the empirical track record of the anti-technology “scientific consensus” is slightly less impressive than that of astrologers and gamblers whose hunches have led them to attempt to draw to inside straights. But if they happen to be right this time (as even blind pigs sometimes are), and if the sun doesn’t happen to calm down its sunspot activity and start pushing our temperatures back down faster than global warming is pushing it up, and if modern technology suddenly stops advancing and utterly loses its ability to figure out previously unimagined solutions to problems theretofore perennially considered to be insoluble...why, then a couple of million people might, possibly, get sick and maybe even die. Eventually.

On the other hand, the longer we wait to take all the oil and coal that’s in Africa and use it to bring on line rapid and cheap electricity to the millions and millions of unimaginably poor Africans who don’t have it, the longer we will continue to see millions of Africans lives shortened. That includes, in particular, the lives of thousands upon thousands of African children who die each year from respiratory diseases (since they inhale smoke from the indoor cooking fires that could be replaced by electric stoves) and water-borne infections (since they have no such thing as hot water) and digestive diseases and parasites (since they have no refrigerators in which to keep food). And these aren’t hypothetical deaths – we see them happening right now, and we know exactly what it would take to make them stop happening – namely, the creation of a whole bunch of power plants capable of churning out energy as quickly and cheaply as possible. Which ain’t gonna happen with solar and wind, because solar power and wind are much more inefficient -- which is to say, much more expensive on any meaningful scale -- than are coal- or gas-fired power plants. And although pampered American environmentalists sometimes have trouble remembering it, Africa is poor -- that is, "expensive" is a synonym for "ain't gonna happen anytime soon."

Hmmm...avoiding highly hypothetical deaths of people two generations from now, plus ensuring that middle-class (which, by the standards of the rest of the world and of all human history, means obscenely rich) American tourists on family vacations get their full money's worth out of this year's Grand Canyon vacation; or else putting an end to an empirically verifiable epidemic of deaths that are taking place right now, today. Boy, that’s a tough choice there...on second thought, it’s just poor black African kids that nobody cares about – so let’s get to work on making that Grand Canyon prettier before my next vacation.

That last bit, by the way, is not aimed at my anonymous commenter (except insofar as I'm teasing him by using one of his examples in an unfairly unflattering juxtaposition), but is rather aimed at the talking airheads who make all the global warming noise -- you know, like Al Gore and the Oscar voters. I admit that I am yanking the chain pretty cruelly there, however; and I will try to behave myself for the rest of the post. In all seriousness, I certainly don’t really believe that my commenter cares more about having good vacation pictures for his website than he does about the thousands of African children who die each year from causes directly traceable to the lack of electricity. After all, there aren’t very many Americans left who remember how radically cheap electricity and the internal combustion engine changed the brutal lives of our rural poor. (Though my East Texas farmboy father, who grew up plowing behind horses rather than seated on a tractor, and who went back home from college and installed electricity in his mother’s house so that she would no longer have to put her iron on the old black cookstove to get it hot, certainly remembers it. And oddly enough, he’s not a big proponent of hamstringing the advance of the free market and modern technology for the sake of hypothetical future grandchildren – it's almost as if he thought his very real present-day grandchildren are vastly better off thanks to the free market and modern technology. Pretty weird, huh?)

At any rate, the serious point underlying my silliness here is that rich Westerners who are out to save the environment have a nasty habit of grossly underestimating the degree to which their environmentalism is a luxury of the wealthy. They have a nasty habit of underestimating the very real human cost that comes from environmentalism-motivated restrictions on freedom and capitalism, the two great engines of the prosperity of the Anglosphere in general and America in particular – which prosperity is, ironically, the precondition for all the spare time that Western environmentalists have on their hands in which to promote environmentalism.

2. I think that the fostering of gullibility and intellectual laziness on the part of the public is a vastly greater threat to human welfare than global warming will ever manage to be, and the global warming brouhaha is promoted in ways that are clearly intended to play to human gullibility and intellectual laziness rather than to rationality and a prudent skepticism. There are few forces on earth more destructive, more catastrophic, more apt to Satan’s hand, than the good intentions of a fool. We don’t have a nice long list of actual deaths and human misery directly attributable to global worming; but as far back in the annals of human history as you can go, you can find societies destroying themselves through society-wide folly and gullibility. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the foolish intellectual habits that are manipulated by the global warming propagandists, have a far more deadly potential than does global warming. (For just one example of the empirical cost of the folly of democracies whose voters are easily gulled by eloquent idiots, go look at the example of the English electorate during the days of Neville Chamberlain.) And therefore, if The Great Global Warming Crisis is not really a crisis, then I think it’s a disaster for people to get fooled into thinking it is – and I would think that, even if I thought the things people propose as solutions for global warming would be good ideas on other grounds.

For example, you wouldn’t believe how many people I know that..well, let’s put it this way. (1) They want to argue that we need to cut back on our consumption of fossil fuels, despite the fact that the astonishing improvement in American health, life expectancy, infant mortality rates, and even our average height and strength, have all been made possible by the enormous economic advantages afforded by our harnessing of the energy in fossil fuels. Try running a steel mill – or a major medical research hospital – on solar power sometime, or try generating enough wind power to run the air conditioners that keep two or three million Houstonites comfortable in the summer even though a measly little 100-degree heat wave is enough to hand over to the Grim Reaper almost fifteen thousand aged Parisians. (2) In defense of this position they trot out the argument that our dependence on foreign oil causes petrodollars to flow to various nasty people like the oily (in multiple senses) Saudis or murderous loonies like Chavez, and argue that we need to make the price of oil fall. Now, I think this is an excellent point, and am happy to agree with them, and indeed to adduce all sorts of evidence to show that far more human misery has been caused in the twentieth century by petrodollar-funded Islamofascism than is likely to be generated in the next two centuries by all the global warming the IPCC can dream up. At which point I observe that this is a first-rate reason to open up the continental shelves and Anwar to oil production...and do you know, it’s just astonishing to see how instantaneously my conversational compatriates cease to be concerned with the security risk posed by American dependence on foreign oil production. Well, a nation full of people capable of that kind of intellectual self-deception, is a nation that pretty much deserves the fate that always ultimately befalls democracies full of the foolish.

In a word, I believe it is far more important for a democracy to ostracize people who are dishonest about their motivations, than it is for a democracy to ostracize people who do not adequately conserve their fossil fuels.

3. I don’t for a moment believe that my commenter really thinks there’s nothing wrong with saying, “We ought to do X because if we don’t, Y will happen,” and then when somebody points out that it’s not at all clear that Y will really happen, you say, “Well, that doesn’t really matter because we ought to do X anyway.” I think he was just a little careless in the way he expressed his position. But I can imagine that there are ends-justify-the-means types who would say, "So what's the problem here?" and for those folks, here’s the test case: would you buy the following defense?

IPCC: We must immediately begin enforcing the provisions of Kyoto, despite the immense economic cost that would be inflicted if the provisions were actually to be enforced (which not even any of the governments who went ahead and signed the thing, other than the New Zealanders, have up to now actually been ass enough to do); because otherwise global warming will kill lots of our grandchildren.
ME: Um, I don’t see any particular reason to think that global warming will kill our grandchildren.
IPCC: Well, even if global warming wouldn't actually kill any more of our kids than Rachel Carson's bête noire of DDT has managed to kill, it doesn’t matter, because there are lots of other good reasons for us to impose the restrictions we want to impose.

Would you buy it, I mean, if it were a different person making exactly the same defense?

DUBYA: We have to go invade Iraq, because otherwise Saddam will kill lots of people with his WMD’s.
DEMOCRATS: Hey, wait a minute – turns out Saddam didn’t have any WMD’s! What’s up with that?
DUBYA: Oh, well, it’s okay because I had lots of other good reasons to go in there. I just appealed to the WMD thing because if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have done what I wanted to because the other reasons I had weren’t going to be enough to convince you.

Something tells me most global warming fanatics would, even in the face of the it’s-okay-because-there-are-other-good-reasons defense, complain with a certain amount of vigor that “Bush lied.”

4. I think that the expansion of the ability of governments to use violence to frustrate the ability of free citizens to make their own economic and moral decisions, is almost always a cause of human misery and a roadblock to human health and happiness – and the global warming political movement has everything to do with expanding the scope of government coercion and no interest whatsoever in reducing the ability of bureaucrats, politicians, and funded-by-coercive-taxation grant-scavengers – or, to sum it up, in a single phrase, the various types of parasites on human society – to do their blood-sucking. (But I can’t tell whether my commenter is personally advocating an “increased role” of governments à la Kyoto or not. If all my friend is trying to say is, “We should all voluntarily turn out the lights when we leave the house,” rather than, “We should start putting guns to the heads of formerly free citizens and forcing them to pay greenhouse-gas taxes every time they drive to the grocery store,” then this particular exceptionally bad consequence of the global-warming scare is not at all relevant to my friend's line of thought.)

So, anyway, there's an off-the-top-of-my-head response that is careless and stream-of-consciousness and not at all charitable and backed by practically no decent research at all -- which is to say, it's precisely the sort of response that a global-warming parrot rag like Newsweek (though not my excellent commenter) pretty much deserves.