Quiet?

The blog has been quite quiet. Most of us are quite busy at work and school which is probably contributing. Plus the fact that pointing out the failures of the left is now just a child's game and takes little effort or intellect.

That being said, I had a thought this morning while taking the bus to my last week of work.

That is the problem of cascading information. Many people liked to say that "Bush lied about WMD". Over here in Englandia people are upset with Blair and say he lied about WMD. It is a common claim that we're all familiar with. The argument from the right is that all the best intelligence from multiple countries indicated Saddam had WMD. It turns out that the intelligence communities were all copying each other and not doing their own research. Ergo, bad research and the desire to not be different from the group led to poor intelligence and war (which we won with the surge btw).

This brings us to Climategate. A favourite (note British spelling) topic of mine. Scientists and politicians proclaim with certainty that this is settled science. We must act now and take a pre-emptive strike against global warming. Impose trillions of dollars of new costs on businesses and countries to avert impending disaster.

Ask Scientist A why we should take such a course and his answer is "Scientific consensus on this issue makes it settled." Ask Scientist B and he will give a similar response. This continues until you get to Scientist M who it turns out has been changing numbers and adding "value added" temperatures to his model to make the problem seem worse than it is. Surprisingly, Scientist M gets millions of dollars in grant money and the figure goes up as the model predicts more dire consequences.

As I think of the 2 situations I am struck by a similarity and a key difference. In the one it was sloppy intelligence that led to a war that cost billions in blood and money though still will give us a potentially good outcome. In the climate situation it isn't sloppy science, it is deliberately misleading and falsified science and it is setup to cost trillions of dollars and many lives.

What was that? I just said the effort to reduce global warming will cost lives. When you live in the real world there are opportunity costs. For every dollar the US dedicates to this junk-science that is one dollar less we can send to Africa to combat malaria, AIDS, starvation, etc. Every dollar that is raised by charities to combat the rising tide and melting glaciers is one less dollar (actually it might be less than a dollar because some people give to charities for global warming that would otherwise spend that money on ski trips to Aspen) to send to improve the lives of less fortunate in our own country.

Every dollar spent on a costly cap and trade program or subsidizing the Ethanol industry is ONE LESS DOLLAR to spend on providing health care to everyone. That's right, we could be using all the money we've wasted on this junk science to give universal healthcare to the poor/unemployed.

Consider that next time you feel run into those Greenpeace dudes soliciting money standing on the street corner. We should be putting our money where we can improve the lives of people that are suffering today, not on the bad science practiced by second rate scientists.