Global Warming: A Capitalist Solution?

Claremont adds an interesting codicil to the NYT article on scientists actually trying to use science to counteract the effects of a warming trend on our planet.

...our environmental scientists know too little, not too much. If they really understood what was going on, they could come up with more liberty-friendly solutions.

Yesterday's op-ed by Richard Lindzen in the Wall Street Journal, not available on-line, makes this last point emphatically. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT points out that "the question of human attribution [to climate change] cannot be resolved" by current science. What is going on, he says, is that "there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition."

Sloan points out Al Gore's concession that "scientists 'don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence' one way or the other and wen't on to claim--in his defense--that scientists 'don't know. . . . They just don't know.'" That was Gore's defense for his movie, which portrays the danger of rising sea levels as greater than scientific models indicate. Since science does not know, he argues, he's free to take a more extreme line!

Lindzden's essay makes me wonder whether environmentalism has taken the mantle of socialism as the religion of the Left. The dream of providing peace, plenty, and harmony to all having failed, and mankind needing a project to keep them busy, they have turned to saving the planet from capitalism. Gore's movie is his gospel.

Let's hope that we actually learn what's really going on, and some reasonable ideas about what to do about it, before he gains more converts.

Gore may be an anti-capitalist fraud until he reinvents himself again in '08, but the damage has been done to young minds indoctrinated in our nation's anti-capitalist union-ridden public school systems.

The totalitarian-minded international left knows that "if you repeat it enough, they will believe" and the enemy of the I.L. is the colossal economic success story the USA presents to the world. Despite all the Krugmans and Keynesians and other quacks in the political-economic profession, they cannot lay a glove on private enterprise, though they can cause hemorrhaging from soft minds in the political arena,[like Gore who could not get into Harvard despite having a Senator daddy because of his defective mental skills].

So gigantic polluters like China & India and attendant tigers get off, but the USA is supposed to succumb to crack-brained nostrums like Osaka that not even the EU has accepted?

Jonah Goldberg kinda echoes my rant above from the NRO Corner, mentioning nuclear power as one of the weird fetishes the Greenie left does not want to consider, despite the "weaning" from fossil fuels the nuke option presents. Gosh, inconsistency from the Luddites?