Short on Science, Long on Politics

Need a legacy? Al's got a hot one
By Wesley Pruden

All the wiseheads keep telling us that Climate is headed south, but Weather keeps getting in the way.

Global warming is scheduled to kill us all before next Christmas, but since Christmas is going the way of the hula hoop to avoid offending Osama bin Laden, the ACLU and assorted grinches, we might yet muddle on.

The United Nations sponsored a session for wiseheads the other day in Valencia, where they dined in expensive Spanish restaurants, basked in luxury hotels and took the waters on a government dime, obligated only to listen to each other talk about the coming death in the afternoon for those who don't die first of bird flu, AIDS, staph infections and other plagues that were supposed to dispose of us by now.

Read the whole article, but notice the following two paragraphs.

Short on science, the faithful are long on politics. Politics, says Michael Crichton, the novelist and inventor of Jurassic Park who made cloning popular, leads to belief and science leads to facts. Or ought to. He recalled in a speech to the National Press Club two years ago how quickly politics can intimidate science.

"In the first Earth Day in 1970," he said, "Kenneth Watt [of the University of California-Davis], said: 'If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder in 1990, but 11 degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.' International Wildlife warned 'a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war' as a threat to mankind. Science Digest declared that the world 'must prepare for the next ice age.' The Christian Science Monitor noted that armadillos had moved out of Nebraska because it was too cold, glaciers had begun to advance, and growing seasons had shortened around the world."

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Kenneth Watt missed it by a mile in 1970. So has Al Gore in 2007, but he doesn’t care about the science. The alleged science is junk science, but it serves the politics of government control of people. The doomsayers must have a sufficient reason to justify all the governmental regulations they need to save the earth.

Also read this Brit’s comments on measures to counter global issues in England, which he calls "planet-saving madness." He understands.