A fine day for global warming

It’s a snow day here in the nation’s capital, with most folks still digging out from under the foot and a half of snow that fell on Saturday. Wouldn’t the real tragedy of global warming be if our children never knew the excitement of waking up, discovering that school was closed and spending the day in the snow?

For a more scientific take on the question of warming, check out dueling op-eds from Climate Gate scholar Michael Mann of Penn State and longtime skeptic Patrick Michaels, recently retired from UVA. Invoking a pun-ful metaphor, Michaels writes that Climate Gate is just the tip of the iceberg. Mann argues that the e-mails were taken out of context and, anyhow, the evidence is so overwhelming that no one should doubt that human beings are warming the globe. I haven’t made time to read the Climate Gate correspondence, so I won’t pass any judgement.

However, for a very lively account of the scandal, I recommend Steve Hayward’s cover story in the Weekly Standard from a couple of issues back. The title, Scientists Behaving Badly, lets you know where the argument is headed. But Hayward is no denier. You might say his article answers the question of how far intelligent skepticism can go. Hayward concludes,

Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s–as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil (such as the forced sterilizations of thousands of Indian men in the 1970s, much of it funded by the Ford Foundation).

I don’t know where I stand just yet, but my instincts tell me the alarmists may be advocating solutions that are as nonsensical as the deniers’ evidence.