Some Common Sense On Global Warming

This is a must read from Daniel Botkin, a biologist and ecologist, in the OPJ. He does not argue that it is not happening just disputes that it will be as bad as Al Gore and others would like to panic us into believing. I don't dispute we may be warming a little either after all we are recovering from a mini iceage. Man cannot control the climate in any significant way and we shouldn't be wasting billions of dollars and ruining economies trying to is what he and Bjorn Lomborg are saying when that money could be put to much better use solving real problems we can have an affect on. We can slow the deforestation that does cause the loss of species by helping build the countries economies up where this is happening not by preventing them access to cheap energy but by helping them in the realms of technology and economics. I am all for clean and green just not draconian paniced socialistic measures that would force the third world into even deeper poverty and more rapid deforestation, but these are the same folks pushing this that think there are too many people on earth as it is and would love to see millions die.

Should we therefore dismiss global warming? Of course not. But we should make a realistic assessment, as rationally as possible, about its cultural, economic and environmental effects. As Erik the Red might have told you, not everything due to a climatic warming is bad, nor is everything that is bad due to a climatic warming.
We should approach the problem the way we decide whether to buy insurance and take precautions against other catastrophes--wildfires, hurricanes, earthquakes. And as I have written elsewhere, many of the actions we would take to reduce greenhouse-gas production and mitigate global-warming effects are beneficial anyway, most particularly a movement away from fossil fuels to alternative solar and wind energy.

My concern is that we may be moving away from an irrational lack of concern about climate change to an equally irrational panic about it.

Many of my colleagues ask, "What's the problem? Hasn't it been a good thing to raise public concern?" The problem is that in this panic we are going to spend our money unwisely, we will take actions that are counterproductive, and we will fail to do many of those things that will benefit the environment and ourselves.

And from Bjorn Lomborg in NRO.

Gore tells us that we need to hear the voices of the future speaking to us now. We have to imagine them asking: What were you thinking? Didn’t you care about our future? He is absolutely right.

Do we want future generations to say that we have spent trillions of dollars and perhaps done a little good for rich people in a hundred years? Or do we want future generations to thank us for giving billions of poor people a new beginning and a better life, which will enable them to better deal with whatever challenges the future holds?

In other words, do we just want to feel good, or do we actually want to do good?