Wednesday, July 05, 2006

Samuelson & The Nature Fallacy   [Jonah Goldberg]

This reader touches on something that's been nagging at me for a while:

Great article, and it almost completely sums up everything I think about the issue too.  One other point that I think should be made, and perhaps others have made it before:  A lot of us argue over whether global warming is man-made or natural.  My point is — what difference does it make?  We all (I think) concede that Earth has been much warmer, and much colder, at various times in the past than it is today.  Natural fluctuations in a system we can't begin to understand (Michael Crichton's excellent point that someone here linked to not long ago) are fully capable of doing a LOT more to the climate than what we are capable of ourselves.  If Al Gore were to be convinced that global warming WAS a natural phenomena, would he be so worked up about it?  I don't think so, yet the consequences would be the same.  Once you start to believe it is a natural event, the "moral" element is removed, and all of a sudden you are faced with a problem that feels a lot more like an insurmountable engineering challenge, rather than something "we" did, and that therefore "we" can fix.  Of course, without the morals-laced rhetoric, Al Gore would have nothing left to preach about, and since he has no skills (you know, engineering skills, numchuck skills, bow-hunting skills...) to help us solve the actual problem, he becomes irrelevant.

 Me: I think this is actually a fascinating thought experiment. What if science could prove 100% that the earth was warming dangerously but that this was 100% natural (i.e. from sunspots or some such)? I suspect this would scatter the current environmental coalitions and antagonists in all sorts of interesting and unexpected ways. To be sure, many environmentalists would still be concerned. But, I think, a large amount of the passion would be gone in certain quarters once the fun of blaming capitalism and mankind was out of the equation. I think the reluctance on the part of some on the right to fix the problem would evaporate while the reluctance to "tamper" with nature would cause at least some environmentalists to second-guess global warming science.  

07/05 11:22 AMShare