George Will on global warming

You think he's grasping and that it's "painful to read" because you're not reading opinions that are in lockstep with your views and the rest of the global warming crowd.

I won't deny the world is getting warmer. I will deny that it's all the fault of the U.S. Of course, it's our fault for everything bad in the word today.

 

OK, hondo, it's not all our fault.

Now, should we wait for every other nation in the world to start working on the solution, or should we start now that we KNOW there is a problem, and try to work out things with other countries as we go?

 

I love Hondo's "Global Warming Crowd" reference.

As if the scientists who have been working on this problem for years now are some kind of rabble that just graduated from Podunk U.

And Will's column smelled like he dug it up from a couple of years ago.

He should stick to writing crappy baseball books.

 

The "debate" over global warming is going to go the way of the "debate" over the harmful effects of cigarettes that wasted everyone's time and energy.

And if Will's contribution -- "No one else is going to do it, why should we?" -- is the best that the other side can come up with these days, it's going to get there much more quickly than I thought.

 

George Will is awesome.
(Except when he writes about baseball.)

 

Will's not reaching. He brings up some key things to consider, things average people don't seem to think about.
Most people are not considering the difficulty of swicthing away from oil, the cost of it and the effect it will have on a lot of people.
The idea 'It's a good thing. It won't hurt.' is naive.
Of course, any situation like this would create new economic opportunities, but that doesn't change the fact that there will be real consequences for real people.
Ozone control in California's San Joaquin Valley will cost $7.8 billion. That's just seven counties, and it only addresses the ozone problem. That money doesn't even cover the regions massive PM10 pollution problem.
And that's barely a spot in a drop in a bucket when your contemplating the cost of the kind of massive change required to swicth from oil.
Again, I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, but Will's points are good ones.
We shouldn't be naive about it. Best to have eyes open.

 

But you understand the gloom-and-doom from those whose have a vested interest in the continued pursuit of climate research? Just checking.

 

I wonder if George Swill took money from an anti-global warming group to write this. Of course, this is none of our business.

http://www.fair.org/activism/will-disclosure.html

 

Lucky? You might want to ask the Nigerians about that.
The situation in Nigeria is terrible. It would be worse without a market for oil.

 

It all comes down to market economics for George:

We do not know the extent to which human activity caused this. The activity is economic growth, the wealth-creation that makes possible improved well-being—better nutrition, medicine, education, etc. How much reduction of such social goods are we willing to accept by slowing economic activity in order to (try to) regulate the planet's climate?

We do not know how much we must change our economic activity to produce a particular reduction of warming. And we do not know whether warming is necessarily dangerous. Over the millennia, the planet has warmed and cooled for reasons that are unclear but clearly were unrelated to SUVs. Was life better when ice a mile thick covered Chicago? Was it worse when Greenland was so warm that Vikings farmed there? Are we sure the climate at this particular moment is exactly right, and that it must be preserved, no matter the cost?

It could cost tens of trillions (in expenditures and foregone economic growth, here and in less-favored parts of the planet) to try to fine-tune the planet's temperature. We cannot know if these trillions would purchase benefits commensurate with the benefits that would have come from social wealth that was not produced.

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Whattaya mean nobody's run the cost-benefit analysis on this project? What exactly was so bad about the days when our rivers were like sewage and we were sucking carbon monoxide into our lungs? Hell, for all we know scientists may discover that PCBs are good for us, afterall. That leaded gas made our cars run smooth. And remember, the good old US was on top of the automotive industry before all this talk about fuel efficiency (damn that Jimmy Carter). Next thing you know we're being invaded by Datsun and Toyota and trying to figure out what a goddamn catalytic converter does besides screw up the way our cars run.

Maybe we should outsource the global warming issue to a private business that knows how to tackle these things?

 

Remember the "global cooling" rage in the 1970s?

This hyperbole now sounds like that hyperbole then.

 

Lyman --

No, I don't. But then again, I wasn't around for much of the 1970s.

I'd be interested in hearing if "global cooling" was, in fact, the near-unanimous opinion of the scientific community at the time, or whether is was a smaller phenomenon at the time that is now being exploited by right-wing politicians who are no longer able to cling to their tired "The jury's still out" talking point.