Pirate's Cove

Writer David Rotman is really concerned about the “moral choice”. When liberals start talking about morals, hold on to your wallet (funny, because these same liberals aren’t particularly worried about morals when it comes to killing the unborn)

Climate Change: The Moral Choices

The effects of global warming will persist for hundreds of years. What are our responsibilities and duties today to help safeguard the distant future? That is the question ethicists are now asking.

The obvious answer is that all those who believe in “climate change”, a wholly unscientific term designed to allow the followers of Gore to blame everything on Mankind, should immediately give up their fossil fueled travel and go “carbon neutral.” Weird that so few are willing to do anything of substance for their own lives, eh?

One of the defining characteristics of climate change is poorly appreciated by most people: the higher temperatures and other effects induced by increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will persist for a very long time. Scientists have long realized that carbon dioxide emitted during the burning of fossil fuels tends to linger in the atmosphere for extended periods, even for centuries. Over the last few years, researchers have calculated that some of the resulting changes to the earth’s climate, including increased temperature, are more persistent still: even if emissions are abruptly ended and carbon dioxide levels gradually drop, the temperature will stubbornly remain elevated for a thousand years or more. The earth’s thermostat is essentially being turned up and there are no readily foreseeable ways to turn it back down; even risky geoengineering schemes would at best offset the higher temperatures only temporarily.

Yup, stubbornly increase a whopping .08C (.14F) from 1997 and only .28F (.16C) since 1990. Doooooom! Anyhow, here we go

One of the most controversial issues in economic analysis of climate-change policy is how to weigh the cost of implementing changes now against the benefits that future generations will realize—or the harm they will avoid. It might be supposed that we should do everything we can possibly do now, but that would probably be wrong, suggests Broome, since extremely radical action would have such negative consequences for those alive today that the effects would be felt for generations. Broome wrestles with how to balance these factors in an ethically responsible way, concluding that economists are, in general, right in adopting so-called cost-benefit analyses to evaluate actions on climate change. But he stresses that the ethical assumptions underlying such analyses are critical—and that economists often ignore or misunderstand them.

Extreme radical action is what the Warmists want. Well, for everyone else, of course. With no regard as to how much it may hurt other people. They have their rigid dogma handed down to them to repeat like a mentally impaired parrot and shall not be dissuaded from it.

We have barely begun to grapple with the moral issues related to climate change. Indeed, few are even likely to accept the basic role that ethical issues should play in our policy decisions, and certainly our responsibilities to the distant future are seldom part of the public debate. But given the convincing evidence climate scientists have presented that our actions over the next several decades will have direct consequences for generations who will live many years from now, we must consider the moral dimensions of our response. As Gardiner puts it at the end of his book: “The time to think seriously about the future of humanity is upon us.”

Here’s a moral issue: Warmists, who tend to be white liberals living a modern lifestyle with easy access to food and power, preaching that people in developing world should be denied the same easy access to food and power because of of hotcoldwetdry. It’s easy for the New Climate Deniers to complain, but they should try living like the people in the 3rd world, see if that changes their tune.