Motus Mentis

It’s Earth Day, so President Obama took a Boeing 747*, helicopters, and an SUV to the Florida Everglades, there to scold us about global warming.

We learned that the Everglades are threatened — which indeed they are, by aquifer depletion, land subsidence, residential and agricultural overdevelopment, and invasive species. The President, however, restricted his focus to man-made global warming as the efficient cause of the area’s problems, despite the fact that there has been no statistically significant global warming for more than 18 years. The President also mentioned storms, without noting that no hurricane has made landfall on Florida’s shores for more than 9 years — a truly extraordinary hiatus — or that recent years have seen an almost unprecedented drop in U.S. tornado activity.

Land subsidence is indeed a serious problem in the southeastern U.S., with some areas, particularly the Gulf coast around New Orleans, sinking rapidly. This of course contributes, as it does in Florida, to worrisome relative sea-level rise. But land subsidence is not caused by global warming (a fact that is, of course, logically prior to the question of whether warming is caused by man-made carbon-dioxide emissions).

In case the little ones in the audience weren’t already cringing in terror behind their mothers’ skirts, the President also gave them this to haunt their dreams:

The world’s top climate scientists are warning that a changing climate already affects the air that our children are breathing. The Surgeon General and I recently met with doctors and nurses and parents who see patients and kids grappling with the health impacts.

Actually, the air is cleaner these days than ever (thanks in large part to the creative and widespread use of clean-burning fossil fuels and centralized energy production, which are replacing older, messier energy sources around the world) — and even those of a wholly unreflective nature must wonder, just a little, how a warming that hasn’t happened for nearly two decades, or average temperatures that top out over long-ago warm spells by a debatable few hundredths of a degree, have managed to cause an atmospheric crisis so dire that young lives are at existential risk. But that’s what the man said.

Having presented his case, Mr. Obama moved right along to the verdict:

So climate change can no longer be denied. It can’t be edited out. It can’t be omitted from the conversation.

Well, “denied” might be relatively uncontroversial — after all, the climate has been changing throughout Earth’s history. But what I think he really means by “climate change can no longer be denied”, if I may take the liberty of unpacking it a bit, is something more like this:

The propositions that:

a) the world is warming rapidly,
b) that this alleged warming is primarily the result of mankind’s use of fossil fuels,
c) that we can reliably predict future anthropogenic warming using current computer models,
d) that the bad effects of higher carbon-dioxide levels, and of warmer temperatures, greatly outweigh the benefits, and
e) that we can, if we want, meaningfully and reliably control the future of the Earth’s climate by government action,

… can no longer be denied.

That these propositions, in aggregate, “can no longer be denied” might be news, of course, to the more than 31,000 scientists who have signed this petition. But Mr. Obama was by now in a bit of a groove, and I can understand that he didn’t want to break his flow.

After the verdict, of course, came the sentence:

And action can no longer be delayed.

No? I’d have thought it could, actually, especially given: the abject failure of the computer models upon which all of this is based to predict global temperature changes with any accuracy; the severity and expense of the measures usually proposed for addressing the “crisis”; the many opportunities for political cronyism and corruption such measures always entail; the further expansion and centralization of government power, and concomitant erosion of individual and free-market liberties, that would necessarily result from such a large-scale intervention; and the low priority that U.S. citizens, in poll after poll, give “climate change” in comparison to other pressing problems.

No, Mr. President, I’d say that “action” could be delayed as long as we bloody well like, and that circumspection would be the wiser course.

Ah well. Happy Earth Day, everybody. And rest in peace, Holly Maddux.

 
* Air Force 1’s fuel use, round trip: about 9,000 gallons.