Wednesday, September 25, 2013

The Policy is Settled

If the rightness of actions we are supposed to take to combat global warming is not affected by the absence of a global warming crisis, is it accurate to say that science should guide our policies?

I find this insight into the thinking of a global warming proponent fascinating given the pause in global warming that global warmers can no longer deny but which they desperately want to prove irrelevant:

But if the scientific case for their belief has disintegrated, the problem this leaves us with is the reason why I subtitled that book four years ago: “Is the obsession with climate change turning out to be the most costly scientific blunder in history?” The political leaders of the Western world, from President Obama to our own in the EU, are still as firmly locked into the alarmist paradigm as ever, quite impervious to all the evidence. As the EU’s “climate commissioner”, Connie Hedegaard, recently put it: “Let’s say that scientists several decades from now said, 'We were wrong, it’s not about climate’, would it not in any case have been good to do many of the things you have to do to combat climate change?”

In other words, even if those scientists eventually have to admit that their scare was all nonsense, it is still right that we should pile up green taxes, make a suicidally mad shambles of our energy policy and continue to pour hundreds of billions of pounds and euros into subsidising useless windmills (while China and India continue to build hundreds of coal-fired power stations chucking out more CO2 than we can hope to save).

Well, if the newly unsettled science shouldn't actually guide our policies, at least we can insist that our settled policy choices guide our science, eh?