An antidote to climate-change hysteria

After the most prolonged spate of “global warming” I can remember, Spring seems finally to be arriving here in the Northeast.  Yes, it was snowing a few days ago, and there are still little piles of the dirty white stuff strewn around. But “for all this,” as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it in his exquisite sonnet “God’s Grandeur,” “nature is never spent”:

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things”
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward springs

Etc. etc. Al Gore really ought to read Hopkins.

He also ought to read Climate Change: The Facts.  Just published by The Institute of Public Affairs, this scintillating collection of essays (or do I mean “this collection of scintillating essays”?)  offers a tonic and refreshing breeze after all the lucrative posturing by scientific illiterates (but commercially savvy mountebanks) like Al Gore and litigious frauds like Michael “tell-the-truth-about-me-and-I’ll-sue-you” Mann. I linked to the Amazon page for the book above, but if you’re like me you’ll want to get a personalized  copy.  The book, edited by the Australian economist  Alan Moran, includes many top-drawer contributors, including the national treasure Mark Steyn.  Order Climate Change from his web site and you can get an autographed copy.

I’ve only read a few of the essays so far, but it’s clear already that this volume is a necessary antidote to the hysterical yet cynical bluster that surrounds the topic.  Some 30 years ago, the philosopher Harvey Mansfield observed that “environmentalism is like school prayer for liberals.” It seemed funny at the time. As the church of environmental nuttiness has attracted more and more adherents and more more overheated rhetoric, it seems less funny than ominous.  It has become clear that environmentalism is a political, not a scientific, tool, whose end is not staving off ecological catastrophe (for none threatens) but mere to blackmail productive countries and institutions to fork over money to salve their consciences (and, not incidentally, feed the greed of the eco-warriors). The first essay, “The science and politics of climate change” by Ian Plimer, a retired professor of Earth Sciences, is worth the price of the volume. Plimer goes through the various charges leveled by eco-nuts one by one and shows just how preposterous they are. His conclusion:

Climate change catastrophism is the biggest scientific fraud that has ever occurred.  Much climate “science” is political ideology dressed up as science. There are times in history  when the popular consensus demonstrably wrongs and we live in such a time. Cheap energy is fundamental for employment, living in the modern world. and for bringin the Third World out of poverty. . . .  

[T]hree short decades of irresponsible climate policy will take at least a generation to reverse because there are now armes of bureaucratics, politicians, scientists, and businesses living off the climate catastrophe scare. Furthermore, the education system has been captured by activists, and the young are inculcated  with environmental, political, and economic ideology.

Good stuff!  And when I tell you that this is only one of more than 20 essays, and that the others are written by such stars as Mark Steyn, Andrew Bolt, and James Delingpole, you will want to get not one but several copies of the book in order to arm yourself and your friends against the nonsense of environmental catastrophism.