Old-Time Religion

From IBD:
Posted 4/7/2006

Environment: From high on his Olympian perch, Al Gore no longer sees global warming as the subject of mere political debate. It is now a moral issue of its own.

The step is a natural one for Gore, who appears with Julia Roberts, George Clooney and Robert Kennedy Jr. on a celebrity-salad cover of Vanity Fair's May "Green Issue." There hasn't lived a tent-revival preacher who could surpass the former vice president's talent for sermonizing.

But those preachers were concerned with the eternal. Gore's concerns and those of his pals in Annie Leibovitz's cover shot are most certainly ephemeral. In fact, they border on plain silliness.

It takes a big serving of cheek to talk about global warming in the context Gore used last week in a speech in — where else? — the San Francisco Bay Area.

"This is not really a political issue," Gore said. "It is a moral issue, it is an ethical issue." But what's moral, we wonder, about forcing the world into a restricted lifestyle based on an unproven theory?

Don't be fooled. The real reason Gore and others keep hectoring us about climate change is they want to be the controlling moral authority. They loathe capitalism and its comforts and conveniences. But they recognize its power, and so want to command it.

The case for grabbing such power hangs on a rather slender reed: the claim that the Earth is rapidly warming up, and it's all humankind's fault. What's most surprising about this is how little hard science is used to make the case.

We noted last week there has recently been a flood of new books, magazine cover stories and lengthy articles in the media on the threats posed by warming.

Yet those stories rarely include reasonable scientific objections to global warming, if they do at all. Not surprising. When thousands of geoscientists and climatologists signed a petition questioning the Kyoto global warming deal a few years ago, it was all but ignored by the media.

For instance, most estimates — including those of proponents — show that the amount of warming that can be prevented by curbing greenhouse gases is, at the most, a third of a degree.

Yet doing this will cost the U.S. economy trillions of dollars, according to U.S. government estimates. (By the way, the estimates we're referring to were made during the Clinton administration, when Gore was vice president.)

Much of the global warming movement's cultlike belief system revolves around projections that the Earth will heat up by two degrees or more over the next century. Yet those forecasts come from a statistical model that has come under repeated attack by scientists for its inaccuracy and lack of mathematical rigor.

Even using today's supercomputers, scientists can't tell you with certainty what the weather will be like in two weeks. Think they'll be any more accurate going out a century or so?

Don't ask us why we're so cynical or accuse us of shilling for oil companies. Instead ask Gore and the editors of Vanity Fair or Time or other mainstream media outlets why they no longer exercise routine journalistic skepticism.