The latest unhinged scary fable from the Cult of Climastrology comes from Jonathan Chait
The Sunniest Climate-Change StoryYOU’VE EVER READ
This is the year humans finally got serious about saving themselves from themselves.Here on planet Earth, things could be going better. The rise in atmospheric temperatures from greenhouse gases poses the most dire threat to humanity, measured on a scale of potential suffering, since Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany launched near-simultaneous wars of conquest.
Apparently, these delicate flowers are unable to deal with a minuscule 1.4F increase in global temperatures since 1850. There’s been little warming since the Japan and Germany started their wars, occurring from around 1979-1997. The rest of the time has been statistically insignificant to slight cooling.
And the problem has turned out to be much harder to solve. It’s not the money. The cost of transitioning away from fossil fuels, measured as a share of the economy, may amount to a fraction of the cost of defeating the Axis powers. Rather, it is the politics that have proved so fiendish. Fighting a war is relatively straightforward: You spend all the money you can to build a giant military and send it off to do battle. Climate change is a problem that politics is almost designed not to solve. Its costs lie mostly in the distant future, whereas politics is built to respond to immediate conditions. (And of the wonders the internet has brought us, a lengthening of mental time horizons is not among them.) Its solution requires coordination not of a handful of allies but of scores of countries with wildly disparate economies and political structures. There has not yet been a galvanizing Pearl Harbor moment, when the urgency of action becomes instantly clear and isolationists melt away. Instead, it breeds counterproductive mental reactions: denial, fatalism, and depression.
How many times have I said that this whole thing is political? Chait proves my point.
As far as getting serious, you’d didn’t actually think this was about Warmists making their own lives accord with their stated beliefs, did you?
But guess what everyone’s been missing in the middle of their keening for the dear, soon-to-be-departed Earth? There is good news. And not just incremental good news but transformational good news, developments that have the potential to mitigate the worst effects of climate change to a degree many had feared impossible. Those who have consigned the world to its doom should reconsider. The technological and political underpinnings are at last in place to actually consummate the first global pact to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. The world is suddenly responding to the climate emergency with — by the standards of its previous behavior — astonishing speed. The game is not over. And the good guys are starting to win.
As we can see, this is all about more and more government.
Oh, and if you aren’t following the Cult of Climastrology, you’re apparently a bad guy.
For human to wean ourselves off carbon-emitting fossil fuel, we will have to use some combination of edict and invention — there is no other plausible way around it.
By edict, he means force of law.
The rest is the normal whines and complaints, especially about Republicans and Skeptics, yet, not once does Chait say “hey, we Cultists should walk our talk.”
Our host quoted:
Translation: Climate change is a problem that democracy is almost designed not to solve. A benevolent fascism, a government which can command a solution without having to listen to the Little People, that might be able to “solve the problem.”
I believe that the warmists used Plato’s Republic as a study guide.
Teach typed:
My god. Are you a simpleton or just an unrepentant hypocrite?
You call edicts the “force of law” as if that is always a bad thing. Stop signs are edicts. Child labor laws are edicts. So are fleet gas mileage rules. Immunization rules are edicts. Water and air pollution rules are edicts. We get it. You don’t like rules that you don’t like.
Anyway, everyone should read Chait’s most excellent and optimistic essay. His point is that despite the brain-dead Republicans’ obstinance, the markets, with a push from governments, are making the transition anyway. This is how stuff works in the real world. Even without a carbon tax.
Of course global warming requires a political solution. So did building the interstate highway. So did civil rights. So did the catastrophic invasion of Iraq.
Humans are burning fossil fuels, adding CO2 to the atmosphere, which is causing the Earth to warm rapidly. This is already causing changes to human activities which will continue to get worse. Only the simpletons don’t understand this.
Everyone should read Chait’s essay.
jeff,
As usual, you are wrong. Only a simpleton would fall for the CO2 bull and you have not answered a single question about your religion.
“This is already causing changes to human activities which will only continue to get worse.” What changes would those be? And isn’t something always causing changes in human activity? The earth isn’t warming rapidly, because neither you nor any cult member has any comparable warming data that goes back for more than 130 years to compare it to. So only simpletons would take 130 or so years of data and say it trumps the other 4 billion that we don’t know about. But nice try, J-every once in a while you bring up the thoroughly un-proven “rapidly warming” B.S. Again, rapidly compared to what?