There are many columnists whose contributions I like to read. Some, like JP's Jonathan Rosenblum and Caroline Whatshername, are there to make me smile on a down day, letting me remember that I am far from the stupidest person in the world. Those two prove that not only horses lose their "horse-sense" when wearing blinkers. But I have to say that Mark Steyn, in any of the multiple modes he writes, is in a class on his own, because he not only says things that are interesting and thought-provoking, but he actually says what I am thinking, usually in much more articulate and witty ways.
This week has a case in point. ( see http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1136361101756&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull) He sets about debunking the "proven fact" of global warming, taking on the whole industry that has built itself around this self-perpetuating myth. And the best thing he says goes to the very root of the problem, because it talks not about the merits or otherwise of the various sides of the argument, but about the motives of the protagonists. To quote ... "activist lobby groups ought to close down the office after 10 years. By that stage, regardless of the impact they've had on whatever cause they're hot for, they're chiefly invested in perpetuating their own indispensability. "
This phrase tells the whole story about global warming propaganda. And it's also applicable in so many other areas. Any "special interest" group should be forced to declare, as part of their publications, how many employees it has, and to what extent they derive their daily sustenance from their participation in these activities. Let's face it - if someone sent you an article claiming that cigarettes don't cause cancer, wouldn't demand to know how whether he was being paid by the tobacco industry? (Of course, the issue cuts both ways; anyone writing about global warming who works for the oil industry should say so.)
I can declare that my investment in oil is zero. I run a tiny, gas-sipping car. I haven't bulldozed any forests in the last 100 years. So when I say that the "evidence" for global warming is more polluted than the atmosphere that they are telling us to worry about, you can take my comments or leave them, but there's no agenda behind my words.
Look at the picture at the start of this piece. It's an example of the "scientific proof" of warming. This is a graph of CO2 levels over the last 650 thousand years (don't ask me how they measured 649850 of those, because that's a whole article on its own). Now, let's hit the panic button. We're in an upsurge. These upsurges happen rythmically, and the current one is pretty much in-phase. It's gone higher than the last one, but not by that much - last peak was around 300, we're now at 370, so it's about 25% up, but those previous levels are far from accurately determined, whereas ours today are spot-on, so who can confidently say that this actually has meaning.
Well, to tell you the truth, the GW industry can say it, and it does ... "Compared with other factors that influence climate (including solar variation, volcanic eruptions, and pollutant emissions such as sulfur dioxide), human activities-primarily burning fossil fuels and deforestation-have been a major contributor to climate change over the last 50 years." (http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/hockeystickFAQ.html).
Pardon the scepticism! Come knocking on my door again, when you've got another job, and a somewhat better product to sell.
