Global Warming
A March 15 article by Larry Kummer at the Fabius Maximus website discusses how global warming advocates have misused a worst-case scenario to generate panic. Titled “About the corruption of climate science”, Kummer’s piece details how politicians are misrepresenting climate projections, especially one called RCP 8.5. That their goal is to create fear should not surprise us: from the government's perspective, fear is a growth industry.
Russell Kirk called conservatism “the politics of prudence”, and prudence suggests we should pay some attention to climate change, or, to be more precise, increasing volatility in weather. That is something we can observe happening. Conservatives’ belief in stewardship means we owe it to future generations to hand them a planet in at least as good condition as we received from our forefathers. Reducing our own consumption, including of fossil fuels, is desirable.
But the Left seeks far more. In fact, its goal is nothing less than total control of every aspect of human life, which we call “totalitarianism”, justified by fear of climate change. Since everything a person does, including breathing, affects the climate, if climate change is a huge threat, someone needs to control everything. That “someone” should obviously be whoever is most concerned about the climate, i.e., the extreme environmentalists and the larger coalition of which they are part, the culturally Marxist Left.
Every totalitarian ideology offers a one-factor explanation of why it deserves power over everyone and everything. For Marxism-Leninism, it was that the whole condition of man and society was determined by ownership of the means of production. The Communist Party, through the state, therefore had to control all producers and consumers, i.e., everyone. Today’s cultural Marxists argue that all of history is determined by which groups, defined by race and gender, have power over which other groups. Therefore, they, through the state, must have complete control over all such groups and everyone in them. National Socialism justified its demand for total control by the need for racial purity, since race determined everything, and Fascism’s power derived from its theory that everyone was defined by their corporate role in society. Mussolini said, “Everything for the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.” Italy’s congenital inefficiency made sure that didn’t happen, but it is what all ideologies seek--including the ideology of environmentalism, for it is ideology, not science, that drives those sowing panic about global warming.
Theirs is an ideology of which we should warn even more strongly than other ideologies, because, again, everything we do affects the environment. This makes their demand for total control seem even more justifiable. Add in widespread public panic over increasingly volatile weather and you have an excellent basis on which everyone should surrender their freedom. Why, humanity itself stands on the brink of extinction. How can you justify your puny desires to do as you please?
We need a global warning against overstatements of global warming and its consequences. In fact, we have been for several centuries in a period of unusual climate stability. We cannot expect that to go on forever, because we know that in the past, the climate has changed and weather has become more volatile. Human ingenuity should prove adequate to deal with it, so long as we do not block that ingenuity through too much government intervention. Yes, overpopulated areas with dysfunctional states and cultures are likely to suffer, as they will under any scenario. The solution is not to let them come here, unless we want to become them.
Meanwhile, when we hear hysterical statements about global warming ending life as we know it in a few decades, we should remind ourselves that this is politics, not science. It is politics designed to panic us into surrendering our freedoms to a new, hideous totalitarian ideology. For those who want to see how such a totalitarianism might play out, read about Cascadia in Thomas Hobbes’ recent novel, Victoria.