Saving the Rich From the Infernal Heat

Another skeptic on global warming offers an interesting take on the matter:

Herein lies the moral danger behind global warming hysteria. Each day, 20,000 people in the world die of waterborne diseases. Half a billion people go hungry. A child is orphaned by AIDS every seven seconds. This does not have to happen. We allow it while fretting about "saving the planet." What is wrong with us that we downplay this human misery before our eyes and focus on events that will probably not happen even a hundred years hence? We know that the greatest cause of environmental degradation is poverty; on this, we can and must act.

The global warming "crisis" is misguided. In hubristically seeking to "control" climate, we foolishly abandon age-old adaptations to inexorable change. There is no way we can predictably manage this most complex of coupled, nonlinear chaotic systems. The inconvenient truth is that "doing something" (emitting gases) at the margins and "not doing something" (not emitting gases) are equally unpredictable.

Climate change is a norm, not an exception. It is both an opportunity and a challenge. The real crises for 4 billion people in the world remain poverty, dirty water and the lack of a modern energy supply. By contrast, global warming represents an ecochondria of the pampered rich.

There is an oft-used but spurious Chesterton quote which reads, "When a Man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes anything." And though the phrase never emanated from his prolific pen, it is emphatically true. The hysteria surrounding global warming is all too often combated with fervor best reserved for those attempting to worship their God. Even the cause--saving the planet--reeks of moral righteousness. All we Christians are doing is trying to save a few souls from eternal hellfire.

Now, my disbelief in the pseudo-science known as global warming is founded on my insufficient credulity regarding the alleged facts. A slight rise in average temperature added to a slight rise in CO2 levels does not mean that humans are in tremendous peril, even when extrapolated over time, a dubious proposition for anyone truly scientifically minded. Moreover, I have yet to see an explanation for warmings past. It is unlikely that Noah and his contemporaries burned enough fossil fuels to earn the righteous wrath of mother nature.

But the writer's point is fascinating because even if global warming is happening, the Al Gore crowd is still very much in the wrong. I eagerly await Troutsky's taking on this, but I think any good liberal should be far more ready to mitigate poverty than eradicate the effects of CO2--even if conservatives continue to give more money to charity than holier-than-thou liberal types. A real revolutionary would of course use the impending crisis to dismantle industrial capitalism all together, a prospect which fills me with less dread than it probably ought, but even the more moderate of liberals ought to use this opportunity to strike out against poverty.

That they have failed to do so is striking. A child with AIDS in Africa is not worried about how warm the climate will be in twenty years; neither is his neighbor, who, though virus free, lacks food and water. Neither will be around in twenty years to see if the prophets of doom have forecast correctly.

Global warming isn't about the globe, and it's certainly not about helping those who live in despicable third world conditions, conditions which even now should be seen as intolerable. Instead, global warming is the cause of the "pampered rich" who must seek meaning in their shallow materialist existence. For God has parted and even the most despondent of disbelievers need a reason to be. Saving the planet is as worthy, and as ridiculous, as any such reason.