George Bernard Shaw famously said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.” There couldn’t be a better description of our president, who proclaimed in Berlin in July 2008: “This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.”
The vice president was not far behind, just as persuasive but less vivid. “I think it is manmade. I think it’s clearly manmade. If you don’t understand what the cause is, it’s virtually impossible to come up with a solution. We know what the cause is. The cause is manmade. That’s the cause. That’s why the polar icecap is melting,” Joe Biden said, outlining the administration’s position on global warming; apparently, “Apocalypse Now” is threatening a host of calamities. Although the vice president sounds terminally confused, if he says “I think it is manmade,” then there should be no more debate. It is settled. We should take it as gospel and blow trillions of dollars in an effort to save the planet. And according to those two delusional alarmists, this is it. There will not be another moment. Must act now!!!
I am old enough to remember that not so long ago, in the mid-1970s, the world debated “global cooling” with the same intensity and urgency as we are debating global warming today. It was also very urgent and potentially catastrophic although, back then, we needed to save the planet from freezing. The cover of the April 28, 1975 issue of Newsweek proclaimed “The Coming Ice Age.” In the article “The Cooling World,” the magazine suggested that, among other disasters, cooling “may portend a drastic decline for food production.” In the June 24, 1974 issue of Time magazine, the article “Another Ice Age” painted a bleak picture for the future of our planet. These same publications now advocate global warming.
I recently raised this argument with a renowned defender of global warming. His response was that science is a lot better today than it was forty years ago. “Does that mean science was wrong in predicting a new ice age?” I asked him sarcastically. I got my answer when he did not respond: It really does not matter what science says; we simply must believe in global warming. This and other discussions with the supporters of global warming convinced me of the futility of citing scientific and historical records to initiate an intellectually honest dialogue. I also became aware that these people would never relinquish their convictions and will continue to find arguments to justify them-even if these new arguments are diametrically opposed to those they previously espoused.