When I was in high school, a friend of mine who was distressed about all social and political conflict and human suffering in the world once asked, "Why don't we get six or seven scientists together, figure out what's wrong with the world, and then just do what they say?" Perhaps we could take a trial run at that proposal with something that pertains strictly to natural science. The question of climate change, its nature, direction, and human consequences, should do just fine. Kimberley Strassel in The Wall Street Journal and Paul Krugman in The New York Times both recently summarized what we know about this issue, appealing to the discoveries of esteemed scientists.

So they must agree on the what's what of the matter, right? Uh, no. They could not be more sharply divided. Indeed, Paul Krugman calls opposition to the Waxman-Markey energy bill that the House just passed "treason against the planet" ("Betraying the Planet").

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe — a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable — can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.

He states our situation in the gravest terms: "we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself;" and he asks,"How can anyone justify failing to act?"

Kimberley Strassel is not so unsettled over the matter ("The Climate Change Climate Change"). She denies that this is a conflict between scientists and global patriots on the one side, and opportunists and know-nothings on the other.

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

Scientists have found that climate change has stalled and disasters have not materialized. Political leaders have been sobered by the economic crisis and are reassessing the panic.

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

With this much passionate disagreement over climatology, I would not expect much consensus from a commission of scientists studying moral and political matters. Perhaps scientific inquiry is not as separable from moral and political issues and the passions that attend them as we would often like to believe.

Take a second look at Harold's post to which I added a response, "Baby, It's Cold Outside!" We reflect on Australian geologist and mineral economist Viv Forbes' caution, "What we need to fear is a return of the cold, dry, hungry ice ages."

Harold Kildow adds:

It seems the Aussies are far enough out of the way to be safe from the cloud of miasma surrounding the climate debate hussled up by European and Amercian socialists. Two other Australians, Ian Plimmer (a scientist and author) and Senator Steve Fielding are mentioned in a great piece by Robert Tracinski, "Could Australia Blow Apart the Great Global Warming Scare?" .

Plimmers book, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, The Missing Science, is just about to be published in the US. It looks to be the one to read to get the arguments straight. Fielding was sceptical of the warming science, and decided to take a look for himself. Would that our own legislators had the intellectual curiosity and honesty to follow the actual science.

As to David's rumination, "Perhaps scientific inquiry is not as separable from moral and political issues and the passions that attend them as we would often like to believe" see Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions where he argued strongly for the "sociology of knowledge"--i.e., that scientific inquiry is not in fact seperable from the passions, morals, and politics of the scientists.

Innes adds:


A student has just directed my attention to this at The Heritage Foundation: "An Inconvenient Voice: Dr. Alan Carlin."

Ever hear of Alan Carlin? Probably not, and that is the way the Obama Administration wants to keep it. Dr. Carlin is an Environmental Protection Agency veteran who recently wrote a damaging report, warning that the science behind climate change was questionable at best, and that we shouldn’t pass laws that will hurt American families and hobble the nation’s economy based on incomplete information.

Despite its promise to put science above politics, the Administration has suppressed Carlin’s report, banned him from writing or speaking about climate change, told him to forget about attending any meetings that addressed his main job function—climate change—and gave him a new assignment: updating a grants database. One supposes that, by dedicating its distinguished scientists to data-entry tasks, Obama’s EPA is able to free up true-believing interns to do its research.

Here is a CBS News report of the suppressed report and gag order.

Dr. Carlin earned a B.Sc. in physics from CalTech and a Ph.D. in economics from M.I.T., and has been working in public policy since 1967.

In the comments section of this Heritage Foundation post, Tim from Australia writes:

Do you think that the alarmists have a good case ? This is the answer you get when you ask them for the evidence:
1) “Your not a scientist, therefore you have no right to ask the question”,
2) “There is something morally wrong with you to even to ask the question. Your putting us all at risk”.
3) “The time for debate is over”.

There never was a debate. The real problem here is poor thinking in the western world. We simply don’t tolerate any debate anymore. Instead governments attempt to outlaw dissenting voices or at least condemn them. That’s what happens when the media becomes the de facto policy makers. It’s really very simple;

1) Media scares public with doomsday stories
2) Political parties assess public mood by focus groups and polls
3) Political parties make policy based on results

I hoped Obama would be a leader but it seems like he just looks like one. Where’s the substance?

If a janitor at the EPA wrote a piece supporting doomsday global warming scenario he would be held up as expert of some repute. No doubt he could be sighted for his/her historical studies of the increasing water levels in the toilet bowl.

These global warming skeptics in scientific academia now know what Christians are suffering who question the frail dogmas of the evolution establishment.

The Congressional wheels are turning to give us a government-run health care system before year's end. Everything the Obama administration is planning seems to threaten to smother what is left of our liberty, squander our prosperity, and lay us prostrate before our enemies abroad. The health care issue is no exception.

George Will argues that the President, like his party, has a "dependency agenda" ("The Stealth Single-Payer Agenda," Washington Post, June 21, 2009).

Why does the president, who says that were America "starting from scratch" he would favor a "single-payer" -- government-run -- system, insist that health-care reform include a government insurance plan that competes with private insurers? The simplest answer is that such a plan will lead to a single-payer system. ... The party of government aims to make Americans more equal by making them equally dependent on government for more and more things.

Will brings out the dishonesty in President Obama's rationale's for this government initiative: competition for a system with 1300 providers competing with each other, and coverage for the 45 million uninsured, almost all of whom are either illegal aliens or could get coverage if they wanted it, whether by enrolling in an existing program or just buying it. Yuval Levin and William Kristol expand on this in "Dare To Defeat ObamaCare." President Obama said recently: " One of the options in the exchange should be a public insurance option...[because] if the private insurance companies have to compete with a public option, it will keep them honest and keep prices down."

Levin and Kristol point out what should be obvious to everyone.

It's an interesting statement. We had thought that the role of government was to set rules for honest private competition, which does keep prices down and improve products. And there are reforms that could improve the important rule-setting role government should play, and could increase private competition and transparency. But Obama wants government to be one of the competitors--in the alleged interest of honesty and price reduction. When has a government alternative produced these results?

Consider where this argument leads. Why not a government bread company to keep food prices down and keep food producers honest? Why not a government construction agency to keep home prices down and home builders honest? Why not as parallel government auto industry? Oh, but we have one of those. And a financial sector too. Obama's deceitfulness is disheartening, but only to those who expected better from him.

The Obama plan is so shrouded in terrors that not only does no Republican support it, but several Democratic Senators have positioned themselves against it, and it is opposed also by the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, and AHIP, the association of insurance providers.

If ObamaCare fails to pass, Levin and Kristol see then a window of opportunity then opening up for a market-based Republican alternative, one this is more consistent with and even supportive of American liberty.

Karl Rove lists many of these criticisms of the government's health care reform proposal in "How to Stop Socialized Health Care: Five arguments Republicans Must Make." Above all, he says, the power grab would be irreversible. In "ObamaCare Isn't Inevitable," he shares the results of a Resurgent Republic poll that shows Americans generally satisfied with their health coverage, and suspicious of a government run health system and the significantly higher government spending that would attend it.

Americans are increasingly concerned about the cost--in money and personal freedom--of Mr. Obama's nanny-state initiatives. To strengthen the emerging coalition of independents and Republicans, the GOP must fight Mr. Obama's agenda with reasoned arguments and attractive alternatives. Health care must actually be an issue that helps resurrect the GOP.

This leads us to Roberta Herzlinger's paradoxically titled article, "Why Republicans Should Back Universal Health Care" (The Atlantic, April 13, 2009). At first glance she seems to be making her peace with some form of government run health plan, but in fact she merely shows how the Republicans can pitch a market based system as universal coverage--and do it truthfully--and save the country at the same time. "With one brilliant foray, Nixon converted the massive threat posed by the isolated China into an asset, secured a favorable mention in history, and stripped the Democrats of a key issue. By embracing their own brand of universal health coverage, Republicans can do the same."

The health insurance system is approaching crisis proportions.

• "millions distort the efficient allocation of labor in our economy by opting for jobs in dying, big companies that offer health insurance, rather than productive ones in small companies that do not."

• "our employer-based health insurance system forces American businesses to pack our massive health care costs ... into the cost of their exports, a huge albatross in a globally competitive economy"

Though most Americans want a better system, and employers would love to be free of the responsibility for providing and paying for employees' health benefits, the public nonetheless has "substantial concern about the Democrats' reliance on universal coverage through a government-controlled system like Medicare." In view of the cost of a government-run, Medicaid style program, the public is also concerned about the inevitable rationing of services. Herzlinger points out that, "the truly sick constitute only 20 percent of health-care users, but account for 80 percent of health-care costs," and so the sick are "a politically vulnerable target for cost control through rationing."

In addition, either doctors will flee the country or people who would otherwise become doctors will choose a more lucrative profession, leading to a doctor shortage and waiting lists for everything from general practitioners to surgery.

There will be far less money for research. "Venture capitalists will find it too risky to invest in markets where one payer controls prices."

So Herzlinger tells the GOP to seize the opportunity to "offer a consumer-controlled universal coverage system, like that in Switzerland."

• "the Swiss choose from about 85 private heath insurers"

• "the Swiss poor shop for health insurance like everyone else, using funds transferred to them by the government"

• In that system, "The sick ... pay the same prices as everyone else in their demographic category"

The bottom line: "This consumer-driven, universal coverage system provides excellent health care for the sick, tops the world in consumer satisfaction, and costs 40 percent less, as a percentage of GDP, than the system in the US."

For more on Herzlinger's efficiency producing, consumer driven, liberty oriented proposal, see my post from February 2008 on Herzlinger's books and her address at The King's College, "Hope for the Health Care Mess."