Over at RealClearPolitics.com, they have two articles up on global warming that are must reads, for entertainment as much as scientific value. But before going into that, is it not ironic that global warming (or climate change or whatever else) has reached a point of politicization that there are multiple articles on a site dedicated to politics and not science?
It’s now past ridiculous. Global warming has become just another facet of popular culture, like TMZ, or stupid questions like “boxers or briefs?”
Enough whining from the Rebel editorial staff, on to the articles:
From The Australian we have Arthur Herman’s Climate Hysterics vs. Heretics in an Age of Unreason. Once you’ve finished choking down that awful title, it becomes evident that this piece isn’t really about global warming as much as it is a rant about how eugenics was a bad science promoted by smart people, so climate change must be the same. And Arthur Herman is not a scientist, he is a historian whose last book was about the relationship between Churchill and Gandhi.
Next up we have the more modest and straightforward titled Convincing the Climate-Change Skepticsby John Holdren in the Boston Globe. Now Holdren actually has some scientific credentials, he is a professor in the Kennedy School of Government and the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard and the director of the Woods Hole Research Center.
And for the most part, those credentials actually make this a better editorial on the subject. It is structured like an argument rather than the rambling diatribe which Mr. Herman presents us. But, alas, Holdren gets sucked into the political portion of the debate:
“US polls indicate that most of the amateur skeptics are Republicans. These Republican skeptics should wonder how presidential candidate John McCain could have been taken in.”
By bringing up politics, Holdren does a disservice to his readers, and to this otherwise well written piece. His argument is a good one until this point, but by surmising that “most” skeptics are republicans (even if there is evidence to back up the claim) he once again brings politics into what should be a completely non-political issue. It is unnecessary, combative, and pugnacious; and once again the debate over how to solve climate change is slowed down by simple words like “republican,” “democrat,” “liberal,” and “conservative.”
Discussing eugenics and talking shit about republicans only serves to muddy the waters in the debate on global warming. It helps no one and gets us nowhere.
