By Stephen Moore
Sunday, March 15, 2015
National Geographic’s latest cover story has generated
lots of attention because it sneers at those close-minded Americans — mostly
conservatives, of course — who do not accept scientific “facts.” Only 40
percent of Americans (according to Pew Research Center) “accept that human
activity is the dominant cause of global warming,” and the magazine finds it
“dispiriting” that so many “reasonable people doubt science.”
National Geographic compares global warming doubters to
those disbelieve NASA’s moon landing and those who think water fluoridation is
an evil plot. How could so many dismiss “established science?”
Well, here’s one reason: The public has come to distrust
government warnings and the scientific experts; they are often wrong.
Ironically, National Geographic’s sermon on settled
science could have hardly come at a more inopportune time. In recent months,
leading scientists have reversed themselves and have admitted their expert
findings and advice were wrong on eating fat. After decades of telling us not
to do so, we now learn that fat can be good for your diet and for weight loss.
What we all thought to be true based on the expert testimonies, turned out to
be precisely the opposite of the truth. Oops.
Forty years ago the experts warned of a coming ice age,
now they are absolutely certain the earth is warming — and some of the same
“experts” were onboard both scares. National Geographic even acknowledges this
inconvenient fact, but it explains that this somehow actually helps make the
case for global warming. If a scientific theory isn’t refutable — i.e., warming
and cooling both prove climate change — then how is it science?
The magazine is incredulous that so many skeptics
“believe that climate activists are using the threat of global warming to
attack the free market and industrial society generally.”
Wait. Climate change activists are using the issue as a
means of attacking free-market capitalism. This past summer major environmental
groups gathered in Venezuela to solve leading environmental problems like
global warming, concluding: “The structural causes of climate change are linked
to the current capitalist hegemonic system.”
How is it paranoia to believe that the climate change
industry wants to shut down capitalism when the movement plainly states that
this is its objective? And how can a movement be driven by science when its
very agenda violates basic laws of economics? I am no scientist, but I’m highly
skeptical of a movement whose first advice is to steer the U.S. economy off a
cliff toward financial ruin.
National Geographic’s next scientific claim is that
“Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, one of the most powerful Republican voices
on environmental matters, has long declared global warming a hoax. The idea
that hundreds of scientists from all over the world would collaborate on such a
vast hoax is laughable.”
Laughable? The entire history of the green movement is
full of grand hoaxes and even catastrophic advice, dating back to the
modern-day birth of this movement with Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” This
was the green anthem that played a big part in the banning of DDT around the
world — a move that contributed to millions of Africans losing their lives from
malaria.
As for the claim that scientists would never “collaborate
on a hoax,” what about the Climategate scandal, which the left to this day
pretends didn’t happen? Shouldn’t the fact that some the leading climate change
researchers were caught red-handed manufacturing evidence and suppressing data
cause some degree of skepticism by even the media and the scientific community
as to the validity of the “science”?
Nearly every environmental scare of the 1970s backed by
hundreds of scientists as well as media, like National Geographic, was proved
to be a hoax. We were assured then by the “experts” that the world was
overpopulated, running out of energy, food, water, minerals, getting more
polluted, and that the end result would be massive poverty famine and global
collapse. Every aspect of this collective scientific wisdom was spectacularly
wrong.
In 1980 top scientists in the United States government
issued a report called “The Global 2000 Report to the President,” which was a
primal scream that by 2000 the world would run out of oil, gas, food, farmland
and so on. Just a few brave souls such as Julian Simon and Herman Kahn dared to
contradict this conventional wisdom. They were disparaged then — just as climate
change skeptics are today — as dangerous lunatics. Yet on ever score, these
iconoclasts were right and the green scientific consensus was wrong. Start with
the fact that hundreds of millions of Chinese — mostly girls — are
demographically missing today because of the barbaric one-child policy, which
the greens all supported as a way to save the planet.
The final insult of conservatives by National Geographic
is this: “It’s very clear, however, that organizations funded in part by the
fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s
understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.” So
everyone who dares question the climate change theology has been bought off by
industry polluters, but the climate change research brigades are pure as snow.
Really?
In 2010 the Climate Depot identified more than 1,000
international scientists doubting the science of global warming. Are 1,000
scientists “a few,” and are they all bought off by the Koch brothers?
Nearly every environmental scare of the 1970s backed by
hundreds of scientists as well as media, like National Geographic, was proved
to be a hoax. We were assured then by the “experts” that the world was overpopulated,
running out of energy, food, water, minerals, getting more polluted, and that
the end result would be massive poverty famine and global collapse. Every
aspect of this collective scientific wisdom was spectacularly wrong.
In 1980 top scientists in the United States government
issued a report called “The Global 2000 Report to the President,” which was a
primal scream that by 2000 the world would run out of oil, gas, food, farmland
and so on. Just a few brave souls such as Julian Simon and Herman Kahn dared to
contradict this conventional wisdom. They were disparaged then — just as
climate change skeptics are today — as dangerous lunatics. Yet on ever score,
these iconoclasts were right and the green scientific consensus was wrong.
Start with the fact that hundreds of millions of Chinese — mostly girls — are
demographically missing today because of the barbaric one-child policy, which
the greens all supported as a way to save the planet.
The final insult of conservatives by National Geographic
is this: “It’s very clear, however, that organizations funded in part by the
fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s
understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.” So
everyone who dares question the climate change theology has been bought off by
industry polluters, but the climate change research brigades are pure as snow.
Really?
In 2010 the Climate Depot identified more than 1,000
international scientists doubting the science of global warming. Are 1,000
scientists “a few,” and are they all bought off by the Koch brothers?
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