Between the dead dollar, the collapse of various “banking” sectors (mortgage originators, ABCP-spewing SIVs, etc), Iraq, and global warming, faith-based initiatives prophesying apocalypse are clearly enjoying the bull market of a generation.
Global warming has been a particular hobbyhorse of mine. I don’t have the scientific grounding, time, or patience to be “well-informed” about climatology, so I’m in no position to falsify the latest scientific findings on their merits. But the global warming movement has all the suspect hallmarks of a faith-based initiative in secular drag. It has “clergy” who cannot predict what the whether will be 2 weeks from now, yet who are taken seriously as they predict the weather 2 generations from now. Their assumptions, theories and models are too complex for outsiders to realistically falsify them. And they have enormous, obvious conflicts of interest, whether it’s the fact that every graduate student and young professor needs to pay homage to the religion to have any hope of advancement, or the enormous power that comes with higher federal grants, subsidies, and climatology regulations.
Martin Wolf and Yves Smith offer little more than resignation over the (to them) terrifying inevitability of global warming.
Climate change is rapidly joining a host of media stories, like Darfur and the deterioration of living standards in Iraq, where the public half-heartedly follows the updates because they believe there’s no underlying news and even if they are bothered, there is nothing they can do. For example, the final, summary report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change got a fraction of the attention of the first report, even though it contained a great deal of additional information and drew conclusions. As serious as other ongoing horrors might be, climate change is in a completely different category, yet in too many quarters is generating no meaningful response. …
The point of the story of the boy who cried wolf is that, finally, a wolf did appear. I feel the same way about the intellectual heirs of Thomas Malthus. Malthusians have finally found a wolf called climate change. Many now agree. …
The one point in favour of George W. Bush’s US or John Howard’s Australia is that they were not hypocritical. For the signal feature of most of the commitments made so far has been the failure to meet them (see chart). The vaunted European emissions trading system has been more a way of transferring quota rent to a few big emitters than an effective means of emissions control. …
In short, if they are to tolerate radical change in energy use, people must first be frightened and then they must be offered a good way out. The truth, moreover, is that this will happen only if the US also takes the lead. No country will deliver radical cuts if the US does not do so, too. No leaps forward in science and technology will occur if the US is not prepared to commit its resources to those ends. The US can no longer wait for a lead from others. Either it takes the lead now or the cause, in all probability, will be lost. Our children and grandchildren will then find out whether it was a real wolf or not.
Statements such as “people must be frightened” illumine exactly why the climatology establishment should not be taken seriously. The Stern Report, for example, prophesied Day After Tomorrow-esque climate change in the next 10 years without draconian curbs in economic output. It was patently fraudulent science, and anybody outside the climatological clerics’ sanctum sanctorum understood that immediately.
However, global warming’s political salience never ran more than skin deep, and its cultlike appeal among information elites is not shared by most voters. The complete flop of Al Gore’s “Live Earth” concert expensively taught information elites what we political animals have known all our lives: if anything is presented as a problem, and voters are asked if they would support [thoroughly vague] prescriptions to solve it, huge majorities will tell the pollster that 1) the issue in question is an urgent problem, and 2) they would support the proposed vague measure.
That has no correlation, however, with how the voter would react later, if the issue rose to the political fore. How would an individual voter react to infinite disparate streams of information, to which he paid no attention before the bill came under serious consideration? What would the voter think about the proposed means of solving the problem–which, at this late juncture, would not be vague at all, thus removing his ability to fill in previously vague parts of the proposal with that individual’s preference? Would he trust the agents charged with enforcement of the remedy?
As with politicians, whose approval ratings always fall over time as they are further scrutinized, public approval for any complex piece of legislation plummets commensurate with the public’s acquaintance with the proposed legislation’s particulars . That’s why a lot more legislation “gets done” in the dead of night, or in conference committee, than on the open floor of Congress.
There’s one other reason, though, why global warming has lost what little salience it had, and why it’s doomed as an effective political issue. China is now the world’s number-one CO2 emitter. India and other rising powers are also belching enormous amounts of carbon dioxide. What’s the prospect that they will change their behavior? Zero.
