Climate Change Made Simple

From Stephen Green, at Pajamas Media:

If we’re just going to jack up energy prices to make ourselves feel good in the name of “doing something,” fuggidaboudit. Cheap energy promotes production, it promotes trade, it promotes mobility — three of the keys to American prosperity. Any permanent “skyrocketing” of energy prices would condemn millions, perhaps billions of people to lives of continued poverty. Or condemn them to death.

Assuming we can safely determine that the coming climate change would be bad for us, we then move on to the question of how and why the change is coming. Is it due to sun cycles? Carbon emissions? Hyperintelligent Wampa terraformers from ice planet Hoth? Some combination of factors? This is a vital question, and the models only provide answers based on the untested assumptions of the programers.

But let us now assume that we know bad change is a-comin’ and that we know what’s causing it. Now we have to do something, right? Not so fast there, pardner. If it turns out carbon emissions are actually helping keep things warmer and better than they otherwise would be, it would be a mistake to play into the Hothians icy hands by reducing those emissions. But until we know, we don’t know. Ignorance is neither bliss nor a basis for swift action...

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