RUTHFULLY YOURS

The November 28, 2015 issue of The Economist magazine has a 14 page special report on climate change. It is a pathetic example of how the media intellectual elite can get science wrong. It is apparently very easy for the self-interested and crony capitalist driven global warming establishment to fool the media elite. When The Economist does get a few important things right, it fails to draw the obvious conclusions. I don’t think it is just a matter of economics majors not understanding science. The problem is that the economics majors are listening to special interests without a proper degree of skepticism. They should have consulted with and listened to some of the many distinguished scientists that are protesting the climate scare. (See, for example, here, here, here and here.)

The promoters of the climate scare are loud and very positive that they are right. They accuse the skeptics of being tools of the fossil fuel companies, an outright lie. This crude approach seems to work, at least with The Economist or The New York Times.

One thing the Economist gets right is that wind and solar are ruinously expensive and create ancillary costs borne by other parts of the electric grid. Wind and solar are not the answer to reducing CO2 emissions. But, The Economist fails to draw the obvious conclusion that nuclear power is the solution. Nuclear power is proven and does not emit CO2. (The discussion is academic because there is little reason to undertake CO2 limitation. The science that predicts global warming doom is flimsy and global warming has been absent for a long time.)

Incredibly, The Economist does not bother mentioning the massive benefits of having more CO2 in the atmosphere. Plants take in CO2 from the atmosphere and create plant bodies from the carbon in CO2 and the hydrogen in water. It is an observed fact that plants grow faster when the atmosphere is enriched with CO2. Greenhouse operators often place CO2 generators in their greenhouses to promote growth. Enriching the air with CO2 makes plants more drought resistant. In one experiment soybean yield was increased by 68% when CO2 levels were doubled. There is no doubt that the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere during the 20th century greatly benefited agriculture, creating billions or even trillions of dollars of increased production.

From “Universities Must Defend Free Speech” in the May 6, 1991, Journal, adapted from remarks by Benno C. Schmidt Jr., who was at the time president of Yale University:

The most serious problems of freedom of expression in the U.S. today exist on our campuses. Freedom of thought is in danger from well-intentioned but misguided efforts to give values of community and harmony a higher place than freedom. The assumption seems to be that the purpose of education is to induce “correct” opinion rather than to search for wisdom and to liberate the mind.

On many campuses, perhaps most, there is little resistance to growing pressure to suppress and to punish, rather than to answer, speech that offends notions of civility and community. These campuses are heedless of the oldest lesson in the history of freedom, which is that offensive, erroneous and obnoxious speech is the price of liberty. Values of civility, mutual respect and harmony are rightly prized within the university. But these values must be fostered by teaching and by example, and defended by expression. When the goals of harmony collide with freedom of expression, freedom must be the paramount obligation of an academic community.

Much expression that is free may deserve our contempt. We may well be moved to exercise our own freedom to counter it or to ignore it. But universities cannot censor or suppress speech, no matter how obnoxious in content, without violating their justification for existence. Liberal education presupposes that a liberated mind will strive for the courage and composure to face ideas that are fraught with evil, and to answer them. To stifle expression because it is obnoxious, erroneous, embarrassing, not instrumental to some political or ideological end is—quite apart from the invasion of the rights of others—a disastrous reflection on the idea of the university. It is to elevate fear over the capacity for a liberated and humane mind. . . .