Climate-mania over?

From the March 8 issue of National Review......

"Exaggeration and alarmism have been a chronic weakness of environmentalism since it became an organized movement in the 1960's. Every ecological problem was instantly transformed into a potential world-ending crisis, from the population bomb to the imminent resource depletion of the 'limits to growth' fad of the 1970's to acid rain to ozone depletion, and there was always an overlay of moral condemnation for anyone who dissented. With global warming, the environmental movement thought it had hit the jackpot - a crisis sufficiently long-range that it could not be proved nonexistent and broad enough to justify massive political controls on resource use at a global level. Former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth was unusually candid when he remarked in the early days of the climate campaign that:

'we've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing - in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.'

Not surprisingly, after Wirth left the Senate and the Clinton administration, he ended up at the UN.

The global-warming thrill ride looks to be coming to an end, undone by the same politically motivated serial exaggeration and moral preening that discredited previous apocalypses. On the heels of the East Anglia University 'Climategate' scandal have come embarassing retractions on an almost daily basis from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regarding some of the most loudly trumpeted signs and wonders of global warming, such as the ludicrous claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear within 30 years, that nearly half of the Amazon jungle was at imminent risk of destruction from a warming planet, and that there was a clear linkage between climate change and weather-related economic losses. The sources for these claims turned out to be environmental advocacy groups, not rigorous peer-reviewed science. Then Phil Jones, the scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University (he is the author of the now infamous phrase 'hide the decline') dropped several bombshells in a surprisingly candid interview with the BBC. He admitted that his surface temperature data are in such dissarray that they probably cannot be verified or replicated; said the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today; and agreed that there has been no statistically significant warming for the last 15 years - three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting.

To be sure, these revelations do not in and of themselves mean that there is no anthropogenic global warming. But this is probably the beginning of a wholesale revision of the conventional wisdom on climate change. Al Gore and the climate campaigners cannot go on saying with a straight face that the matter is 'settled science'. One of the central issues of Climategate - the veracity and integrity of the surface temperature records used for our estimates of warming over the last few decades - is far from resolved. The London Times ran a headline last week: 'World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists'. The next frontier is likely to be a fresh debate about climate sensitivity itself. There have been several recent peer-reviewed papers suggesting much lower climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than the IPCC 'consensus' computer models predict. And alternative explanations for observed climate change in the Arctic and elsewhere, such as shifts in ocean currents and wind patterns, should receive a second look.

Dissenters who pointed out these and other flaws in the IPCC consensus were demonized as deniers and ignored by the media, but they are now vindicated. The American media are still averting their gaze, though the British press - even the left-wing Guardian and The Independent - is turning on the climate campaigners with deserved vengeance. The IPCC is mumbling about non-specific reforms and changes to the process by which it will produce its next massive climate report, due otu in three or four years. It should emulate a typical feature of American government commissions and include a minority report from dissenters or scientists with a different emphasis. But the next report may not matter much, with the collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen talks, and the likely rejection of cap-and-trade in Congress, climate mania may have runs its course."

Swiss ban islamic minarets

This is another great article by one of my favorite pundits, Mark Steyn, who is a writer for National Review magazine....

"The Swiss minaret ban and the leaked climate e-mails are really the same story - or, more precisely, are symptoms of the same disease. In the Times of London, Olive Kamm deplored the results of Switzerland's referendum, consigned it to the garbage can of right-wing populism, and for good measure dismissed my analysis of euro-demographics. Instead, Mr. Kamm called for a 'secularist and liberal defense of the principles of a pluralist society'.

"That's not the solution to the problem, but one of the causes. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for liberalism and pluralism and whatnot. And, in the hands of a combative old bruiser like Christopher Hitchens, they're powerful weapons. But most people are not like Mr. Hitchens. And so in much of the post-Christian West 'a pluralist society' has subsided into a vast gaping nullity too weak to have any purchase on large numbers of the citizenry. In practice, the 'secularist and liberal defense' is the vacuum in which a resurgent globalized Islam has incubated."

"It is only human to wish to belong to something larger than oneself, and thereby give one's life meaning. For most of history, this need was satisfied by tribe and then nation, and religion. But the Church is in steep decline in Europe, and the nation-state is all but wholly discredited as the font of racism, imperialims, and all the other ills. So some (not all) third-generation Britons of Pakistani descent look elsewhere for their identity, and find the new globalized Islam. And some (not all) 30th generation Britons of old Anglo-Saxon stock also look elsewhere, and find global warming. 'Think globally act locally' works for environmentalism and jihad. Adherents of both causes are saving the planet from the same enemy - decadent capitalist infidels living empty consumerist lives. Both faiths claim their tenets are beyond discussion. Only another climate scientist can question the climate-science 'consensus':you bus-boys and waitresses and accountants and software designers and astronomers and physicists and meteorologists are unqualified to enter the debate. Likewise, on Islam, for an unbeliever to express a view is 'islamophobic'. As to which of these competing globalisms is less plausible, I leave it to readers: Barack Obama promises to lower the oceans; Hizb ut-Tahrir promises a global caliphate. The Guardian's ecopalyptic Fred Pearce says Australia will be uninhabitable within a few years; Islam4UK says Britain will be under Sharia within a few years. I'm not a betting man but if i had to choose....."

"Think globally, act locally, but if you're on the receiving end of globalized pathologies, it's very hard to act locally. A conventional if tyrannical nation-state is free to act against both Islam and 'the environment'. China is happy to stick it to the Uighurs and to turn the Yangtze into a frothing toxic cauldron. But these days non-tyrannical nation-states are barely nations at all, and certainly not to the extent of having anything so declasse as a 'national interest'. If the Swiss are indeed the raging right-wing populists Oliver Kamm says they are, their knuckle-dragging neofascism is a limp and effete strain. If you truly believe Islam is the cuckoo in your clock, you might ban new mosque construction or even muslim immigration. Instead they have banned a symbolic architectural flourish, while the mosque building and the immigation continue, which means that one day the minaret ban will be overturned. And were the country a member of the European Union, even this forlorn gesture would not be permitted."

"In Switzerland's defense, it was pointed out that Saudi Arabia prohibits not just church spires but churches. But this argument went nowhere, except to give detractors an opportunity to tut that the Swiss had chosen to become Alpine Saudi. To progressive opinion, it's taken as read that 'multiculturalism' is a one-way street: it seems entirely reasonable for a Wahhabist to say an Anglican church in Riyadh would see, gee, i dunno, just somehow kinda un-Saudi, whereas it is entirely unacceptable for Heidi's grandfather to say a Deobandi mosque in Lucerne is un-swiss. In contemporary Western discourse, a commitment to abstract virtues - secularism, pluralism - must trump any visceral sense of ethnocultural allegiance."

"That's a very shifting patch of sand to draw a line in. Recently, the writer Barbara Kay testified to the House of Commons in Ottawa about a jewish teacher at a francophone school in Ontario. Around 2002 she began to encounter explicitly anti-semitic speech from muslim students: 'Does someone swell a Jew? It stinks in here'. 'You are not human, you are a jew.' Had Anglo-Saxon skinheads essayed such jests, Oliver Kamm's warriors of pluralism would have crushed them like bugs. But when the teacher went to the principal, and the school board, and the local 'hate-crimes unit', they all looked the other way and advised her that it would be easier if she retired. 60 out of 75 French teachers at the school opted to leave: a couple were jewish, a few more practicing catholics, and most of the rest were the liberal secularists on whom Oliver Kamm's defense of the west rests. The francophone children withdrew too. And now the principal and most of the students and faculty are muslim."

"Maybe it would have wound up like that anyway. But having nothing to stand in your way except liberal progressives certainly accelerated the progress. And as it went at one schoolhouse, so will it go on the broader horizon: if you believe in everything, you're unlikely to stand for something."