Cancel 2016.2
The Almighty
http://thefederalist.com/2014/02/26/the-original-sin-of-global-warming/
I encourage people to read the above in its entirety at the link provided.
To his credit, Sagan admits that the science on this subject is still in its early stages—but then he makes a disastrous error.
And yet we ravage the Earth at an accelerated pace, as if it belonged to this one generation, as if it were ours to do with as we please…. Our generation must choose. Which do we value more: short-term profits or the long-term habitability of our planetary home?…Can you see the error? Sagan enters this topic with a clear animus against the profit motive and a pre-established belief that industrial civilization is “ravaging the earth.” These are the obvious cultural biases of a late-20th-century modern liberal. So he considers two alternative theories—that we are destroying the planet by cooling it down, or we are destroying the planet by heating it up—and calls for more government funding to figure out which is correct. But his bias prevents him from seriously considering the obvious third option: that our effect on the Earth’s climate is negligible, any heating or cooling is within the normal range of natural variation, and the benefits of industrial civilization far outweigh any negative effects. But if we don’t treat this as an option, much less as an equally likely option, no government funding is likely to be devoted to pursuing that theory.
The study of the global climate, the sun’s influence, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, these are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are funded poorly and grudgingly, and meanwhile we continue to load the Earth’s atmosphere with materials about whose long-term influence we are almost entirely ignorant.
This is the original sin of the global warming theory: that it was founded in a presumption of guilt against industrial civilization. All of the billions of dollars in government research funding and the entire cultural establishment that has been built up around global warming were founded on the presumption that we already knew the conclusion—we’re “ravaging the planet”—and we’re only interested in evidence that supports that conclusion.
I encourage people to read the above in its entirety at the link provided.