Matt Ridley comments on the latest round of climate reports from the UN, here.
I present this simply in the interest of balance, of course. I find it necessary to reiterate our own editorial position on global warming “climate change” from time to time, so here it is:
1) The Earth may indeed be warming; it has warmed and cooled throughout its history, and has often been much warmer, and much colder, than it is today. We are currently in one of the “interglacial” periods of a continuing Ice Age. About a thousand years ago, we underwent a significant warm spell, during which time even Greenland became hospitable; this was of course long before human industrial activity could have had any significant effect on climate. Much longer ago, the Earth was warm enough for there to have been ferns in Antarctica. There has not been any statistically significant warming this century — but this does not mean that we are not in a long-term warming spell.
2) None of this should be understood to imply that present-day human activity cannot be exerting an influence on climate. It does mean that huge, completely natural swings of climate happen all the time, and will continue to do so, until we humans achieve such towering technological puissance that we can actually control the Earth’s climate. Anyone who suggests that we have this power already, however, is a fool or a liar.
3) Warming can have both good and bad effects. We tend to hear a lot more in the press about the bad than the good, but warming brings: increased agricultural yield through longer growing seasons in temperate zones and extension of arable land into higher latitudes; lower energy costs; access to resources currently inaccessible due to permanent ice; and fewer winter deaths (cold weather kills many more people than hot — not only directly, but also through influenza and other diseases, and accidents and other calamities caused by snow and ice). In addition, CO2 is what plants eat, so having more of it in the atmosphere also tends to increase agricultural output.
4) There can be no doubt that a great many people have taken this “crisis” as a foundation upon which to erect prominent careers and lucrative business interests, and have used it as a stalking-horse for the advancement of centralizing ideologies: politicians, bureaucrats, academic grant-recipients, film-makers and propagandists, “green energy” entrepreneurs, small nations eager to get their hands on the collar (and onto the pockets) of the big ones, and so on. Where there is so much to gain, there is good reason for wariness about vested interest, conflicts of interest, and ulterior motives. As I wrote in a post on this subject about four years ago:
My responses in these pages generally reflect an inveterate wariness toward grandiose collectivist schemes, particularly when they assume the form of secular religions, complete with sanctimonious moralizing toward infidels and heretics — all of which the Global Warmist movement exhibits in spades.
Students of history need no reminding that progressivist ideologues like nothing better than a crisis, or an external enemy; they are just the thing for suspending those pesky individual economic and social liberties, and they provide an unbeatable rationale for collective action at the broadest possible scale. In times past the broadest possible scale was that of a nation, or a continent — but Global Warming, affecting, as it is alleged to do, the entire Planet, expands “broadest possible scale” to its literal maximum.
Sometimes crises come ready to hand. For example, Woodrow Wilson made splendid use of the Great War to impose, albeit briefly, a stifling statist regime here in America, in which many cherished freedoms were simply laid aside, and individualism itself became a grave moral transgression. FDR was similarly fortunate: the Great Depression, and then the Second World War, gave him everything he needed. His National Recovery Administration, under the stern leadership of Hugh “Iron Pants” Johnson (who actually distributed Mussolini’s writings to his staff) was a Fascist apparatus in all but name — as witness propaganda clips like this, featuring FDR and the Blue Eagle as only a compliant, complicit Hollywood could present them.
In quieter times, when the moment simply must be seized, crises can also be made to order. But whether bespoke or off-the-rack, crises have been essential, again and again, to the subductions and upthrusts of history’s seismic shifts.
To those modern reformers, then, whose eyes glitter with collectivist and redistributionist ambitions of Earth-girdling scope, a truly global emergency was needed. And by a splendid stroke of luck, they have found one.
5) The question before us, then, is what to do about all of this, which is a purely normative question about which reasonable people may disagree. Given everything presented above, though, and speaking just for myself, I must confess a positively heretical lack of enthusiasm for colossal political and economic interventions in response to this “crisis”, or for further abdication of national sovereignty and individual liberties to ambitious U.N. busybodies.
I know, of course, that for my sins I must bear the obloquy of the faithful, but there it is. Here I stand; I can do no other.
Our earlier posts on global warming are collected here.