These are times straight out of Alice in Wonderland, as everything becomes an “un-birthday” and definitions are turned on their head. Climate change scientists, according to The Washington Times this last weekend, are turning to PR, rather than data, to defend their work. Then there’s Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, who yesterday continued to make patently false job-creation claims to sell the administration’s radical environmental agenda. His timing was unerringly bad, as his statements came on heels of further evidence that two front-runners—California and Europe—are discovering that their “green” policies are producing more red (ink) and less green(backs).
It is not very often that scientists need to resort to crisis communications, but we’ll take it as further confirmation that the whole world of global warming has hit a crisis point. Among the strategies being considered figure taking out a back-page ad in the New York Times. What is of more than passing interest is the defensiveness with which these scientists have met criticism. One of them groused to the Times that climate scientists were facing nothing less than “well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”
The scientific method, like its close kin the Socratic dialogue, is supposed to rest, however, on the ability of posited theories to meet and survive constant challenges. And yet it is this type of gentle jousting that the climate scientists who are championing the theory of global warming appear often to try to avoid. To seek victory at all costs is more like politics, at least as it practiced in this day and age. It is paradoxical that climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences actually complained that they were the victims of politicking, complaining to the Times they were “tired of being treated like political pawns.”
Then there’s Secretary Chu. According to the New York Times, he repeated on Tuesday the Obama administration narrative that there will not be jobs lost by enacting CO2 regulations and that by not enacting them, we prevent the U.S. from entering the global green economy.
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, should we see these policies implemented, we could see GDP losses in the trillions. And the money for the green job subsidies, upon which Chu depends for his plan? That would come from money taken away from hard working families and businesses in the form of taxes. It would be allocated by the government to less-efficient uses, causing even greater unemployment than the 9.7 % figure we are seeing now. A lesson Spain has learned the hard way.
As Europe abandons its green jobs subsidies in light of daunting unemployment levels nearly double ours, just yesterday, the climate-conscientious state of California was brought face-to-face itself with the fact that its C02 emissions limiting laws would not bring the promised green jobs, but instead would shove the state further down the rabbit hole of unemployment, hitting recent-record levels.
In a meeting in Menlo Park, CA last summer, Secretary Chu said, “At no other time in the history of science have we been able to say what the future will be 100 years from now.” This was prior to flaws in global warming science being exposed nearly daily. One might expect a more modest tone and approach now but those who would create havoc with our economy in the name of stopping global warming press onward with their radical and economically debilitating mission.
