Dennis Prager explains why liberals are more prone to believe in, and fear, Global Warming.

— The Left is prone to hysteria. The belief that global warming will destroy the world is but one of many hysterical notions held on the Left. As noted in a previous column devoted to the Left and hysteria, many on the Left have been hysterical about the dangers of the PATRIOT Act and the NSA surveillance of phone numbers (incipient fascism); secondhand smoke (killing vast numbers of people); drilling in the remotest area of Alaska (major environmental despoliation); and opposition to same-sex marriage (imminent Christian theocracy).

— The Left believes that if The New York Times and other liberal news sources report something, it is true. If the cover of Time magazine says, “Global Warming: Be Worried, Very Worried,” liberals get worried, very worried, about global warming.

It is noteworthy that liberals, one of whose mottos is “question authority,” so rarely question the authority of the mainstream media. Now, of course, conservatives, too, often believe mainstream media. But conservatives have other sources of news that enable them to achieve the liberal ideal of questioning authority. Whereas few liberals ever read non-liberal sources of information or listen to conservative talk radio, the great majority of conservatives are regularly exposed to liberal news, liberal editorials and liberal films, and they have also received many years of liberal education.

— The Left believes in experts. Of course, every rational person, liberal or conservative, trusts the expertise of experts — such as when experts in biology explain the workings of mitochondria, or when experts in astronomy describe the moons of Jupiter. But for liberals, “expert” has come to mean far more than greater knowledge in a given area. It now means two additional things: One is that non-experts should defer to experts not only on matters of knowledge, but on matters of policy, as well. The second is that experts possess greater wisdom about life, not merely greater knowledge in their area of expertise.

That is why liberals are far more likely to be impressed when a Nobel Prize winner in, let us say, physics signs an ad against war or against capital punishment. The liberal is bowled over by the title “Nobel laureate.” The conservative is more likely to wonder why a Nobel laureate in physics has anything more meaningful to say about war than, let us say, a taxi driver.

— People who don’t confront the greatest evils will confront far lesser ones. Most humans know the world is morally disordered — and socially conscious humans therefore try to fight what they deem to be most responsible for that disorder. The Right tends to fight human evil such as communism and Islamic totalitarianism. The Left avoids confronting such evils and concentrates its attention instead on socioeconomic inequality, environmental problems and capitalism. Global warming meets all three of these criteria of evil. By burning fossil fuels, rich countries pollute more, the environment is being despoiled and big business increases its profits.

— The Left is far more likely to revere, even worship, nature. A threat to the environment is regarded by many on the Left as a threat to what is most sacred to them, and therefore deemed to be the greatest threat humanity faces. The cover of Vanity Fair’s recent “Special Green Issue” declared: “A Graver Threat Than Terrorism: Global Warming.” Conservatives, more concerned with human evil, hold the very opposite view: Islamic terror is a far graver threat than global warming.

— Leftists tend to fear dying more. That is one reason they are more exercised about our waging war against evil than about the evils committed by those we fight. The number of Iraqis and others Saddam Hussein murdered troubles the Left considerably less than even the remote possibility than they may one day die of global warming (or secondhand smoke).

One day, our grandchildren may ask us what we did when Islamic fascism threatened the free world. Some of us will say we were preoccupied with fighting that threat wherever possible; others will be able to say they fought carbon dioxide emissions. One of us will look bad.

David Harsanyi of the Denver Post has a suggestion.

You’ll often hear the left lecture about the importance of dissent in a free society.

Why not give it a whirl?

Start by challenging global warming hysteria next time you’re at a LoDo [Lower Downtown Denver] cocktail party and see what happens..

..next time you’re with some progressive friends, dissent. Tell ’em you’re not sold on this global warming stuff.

Back away slowly. You’ll probably be called a fascist.

Don’t worry, you’re not. A true fascist is anyone who wants to take away my air conditioning or force me to ride a bike.

Agence France-Presse via Yahoo tells us that the UN is now warning us about “endangered deserts.”

The world’s deserts are being threatened “as never before”, particularly by climate change, but can still be used as a key resource if action is taken to protect them, according to a report released on Monday.

The study by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) highlights the problems facing desert areas but also their potential uses in vital sectors such as energy, food and medicine.

Shafqat Kakakhel, from UNEP, said: “Far from being barren wastelands, (deserts) emerge as biologically, economically and culturally dynamic while being increasingly subject to the impacts and pressures of the modern world.

“They also emerge as places of new economic and livelihood possibilities, underlining yet again that the environment is not a luxury but a key element in the fight against poverty and the delivery of internationally-agreed development goals.”

At least 25 percent of the Earth’s surface — 33.7 million square kilometres (13 million square miles) — has been defined as desert and is home to more than 500 million people, according to the report, “Global Deserts Outlook”.

But one of its authors, University College London geography professor Andrew Warren, said the unique landscapes, ancient cultures, flora and fauna in deserts were at risk of disappearing….

Kaveh Zahedi, deputy director of UNEP’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre based in Cambridge, eastern England, added that action was needed.

“These deserts are unique and dynamic eco-systems and, if sensitively treated, can provide the answers to many of the challenges that we face today, whether it’s for energy, for food or for medicine,” he said…

“The pharmaceutical potential of desert plants has yet to be tapped,” the report notes.

This, plus sustainable eco-tourism and conservation schemes, could benefit not just the local desert communities but the wider population, it added.

Isn’t it amazing how all the world’s most worthless real estate is unique and precious, and always (whatever the climate, no matter how barren) a treasure house of marvels just waiting to be found?

There seems be no hierarchy of desirability to any of this marvellous uniqueness.

Suppose we could convert some miserable arid, baking, rocky desert into a nice wet, fever-ridden swamp. Or, alternatively, we decided to change it into a hot, steaming and impenetrable jungle. Or we changed our minds again and froze the whole thing into the precise equivalent of Alaska’s North Slope (solid ice 10 months of the years; open water, soggy ground and a mind-boggling number of mosquitoes for two months — but fewer snakes). Or we waved our magic wand, and produced… New Jersey!

Exactly which of all these unique and marvellous alternatives would offer the most intellectually and aesthetically intriguing diversity of life? Which would offer the richest gifts to Science? I hate to admit it (since I loathe New Jersey and kind of enjoy a good snake), but, if you think about it, you know exactly what would win.

The Center for Disease Control is about to begin investigating a possibly imaginary disease called Morgellons, the first modern case of which was identified by a mother in a small town in Southwestern, Pennsylvania on the basis of a disease description in a 1690 monograph by Sir Thomas Browne.

Not altogether surprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area is a hotbed of Morgellons affliction.

Morgellons Research Foundation

News is slow this week, so some clever journalist is breaking some old information as news, and the same story is bouncing all over the MSM echo chamber. In reality, the Paleoene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was detected by James Kennett and Lowell Stott as early as 1990.

AP‘s story:

Scientists have found what might have been the ideal ancient vacation hotspot with a 74-degree Fahrenheit average temperature, alligator ancestors and palm trees. It’s smack in the middle of the Arctic.

First-of-its-kind core samples dug up from deep beneath the Arctic Ocean floor show that 55 million years ago an area near the North Pole was practically a subtropical paradise, three new studies show.

The scientists say their findings are a glimpse backward into a much warmer-than-thought polar region heated by run-amok greenhouse gases that came about naturally.

Mesonyx probably drove too many SUVs.

Today’s Washington Post has a surprisingly sympathetic article on some Global Warming skeptics.

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Hat tip to Reid Detchon.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has produced three amusing 60 second television ads responding to Al Gore’s about-to-be-released Global Warming agitprop motion picture. link

Al Gore’s agitprop documentary opens in theatres next week, and all our liberals friends will soon be running around in circles, crying: “The sky is falling!” Editorials will proclaim that Gore has definitively proven environmental disaster stemming from anthropogenic climate change is well underway, and dangerously accelerating. My college classmates will be buzzing like a hive of bees on the class email list.

Time to read the National Center for Policy Analysis’ debunking study No 285: Climate Science: Climate Change and Its Impacts. Swimming polar bears and color-changing coral reefs are rapidly headed your way.

Scientific debate continues regarding the extent to which human activities contribute to global warming and what the potential impact on the environment might be. Importantly, much of the scientific evidence contradicts assertions that substantial global warming is likely to occur soon and that the predicted warming will harm the Earth’s biosphere.

The Earth’s climate began a warming trend after the “Little Ice Age” ended in the mid-1800s, long before global industrial development led to substantial increases in greenhouse gases beginning in the middle of the 20th century. About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming.

To assess future climate trends, climatologists rely upon General Circulation Models (GCMs) that attempt to describe Earth’s climate. The many climate models in use vary widely with respect to the variables they include and in the assumptions they make about how those variables interact. Yet some official reports, including the U.S. National Assessment published in 2000, report only the most extreme predictions, ignoring others that project only moderate warming in the 21st century.

Reports the London Free Press.

Personally, I always thought liberals were born that way.

Connecticut, once the land of steady habits and Yankee common sense, has become another state inhabited by suburban numbskulls ready to react to every news meme with coercive action at the state level. The Connecticut legislature on Thursday responded to the progressing peril of portly pubescents by banning carbonated soft drinks, including diet sodas (!), from all elementary, middle, and high schools, starting in July.

Reuters:

Connecticut’s state legislature voted on Thursday to ban sales of sodas and other sugary beverages in state elementary, middle and high schools as part of an effort to stem teen obesity.

Gov. Jodi Rell has pledged to sign the bill, which would make Connecticut the fourth U.S. state with a strong law in schools to trim the growing American teenage waistline.

The ban includes all regular and diet sodas, along with “electrolyte replacement beverages” such as Gatorade. The only drinks allowed to go on sale in schools would be bottled water, milk or 100-percent fruit and vegetable drinks.

“The bill clearly won’t solve all food and beverage questions that lead to the increase in excess weight and obesity that we are seeing among children and adults in our society, but it’s a good start,” said state Rep. Andrew Fleischmann.

The House approved the bill on Thursday by a slim 76-to-71 vote margin largely on party lines in the Democrat-controlled state Legislature. Last week it passed the Senate 24-to-8.

Republicans proposed multiple amendments that were all voted down and said the issue should be left to local communities and not decided by the state.

It’s becoming just as bad as California back there.

Manga Author James D. Hudnall examines the problem, and concludes what’s going wrong is located not in the Earth’s atmosphere, but between the ears of a sizeable segment of the contemporary human community.

America became the pre-eminent super power after WWII with the invention of the atomic bomb. We used the bomb on two cities in Japan. Having killed so many people, so easily, had a double edged impact. It made people confident in American supremacy. It also made people afraid that it could happen to them. Then scare stories about the effects or radiation came out. Suddenly, the public came to worry that science had gone to far and we had opened a pandora’s box.

Popular culture began to churn out stories about mankind creating monsters by fooling around with science and the power of the atom. In addition to this, the holocaust forced the culture to look honesty at discrimination, which resulted in social upheavals in the form of various civil rights movements. The Vietnam war, the assassinations of John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and Watergate made a generation question the government. People started looking for reasons to doubt everything because the reality they had previously accepted was thrown into turmoil.

Previous to all these events, most Americans had a positive view of their society. The Europeans looked at us favorably. But things began to change.

Around this time, the environmental movement began to form. Among the many causes they championed was the reduction in air pollution. The concern was what it was doing to people’s lungs. How it was effecting the environment. At some point the theory of the greenhouse effect was born, and it was considered mostly a good thing. Because CO2, a greenhouse gas, is beneficial to plant life. But then the environmental movement became a big money making machine. The EPA was formed by President Nixon and began to grow exponentially in size. To justify this, it found more and more excuses to engage in every aspect of society. Government grants to study environmental issues soon became a great way for scientists to make a living. A whole industry blossomed around it. To justify their grants, some scientists looked for things to scare politicians, so they could keep that grant money flowing.

The Green movement is ironically named.

And to keep the green rolling in, they had to concoct crises to frighten the public with. In the 1960s it was pesticides. In the 1970s it was Nuclear Power plants. In the 1980s it was the Ozone Hole. In 1990s it was global warming.

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ibid.

I think there are several very obvious ways.

MIT Climate Scientist Richard Lindzen, in the Wall Street Journal, discusses one of the ways you can tell: by the ongoing pattern of intimidation of dissenters and stifling of debate associated with Global Warming in the scientific community.

If it wasn’t bunk, they wouldn’t have to punish dissent and censor debate, would they? If they weren’t liars and opportunists, they wouldn’t act with the ruthlessness and dishonesty which have become characteristic features of Global Warming orthodoxy enforcement.

A “for instance” seems obligatory, so I’ll just point to Scientific American‘s threatening to sue Björn Lomborg for daring to quote the special hatchet job they published on his book The Skeptical Environmentalist in a web-published reply to their attack.