Talking Down

Jet-setting public intellectual Thomas Freidman is trying to rescue the climate change movement from what he sees as its main problems - a few regrettable bits of scientific misconduct, mixed with wide ranging public ignorance. Here's Freidman's proposal for restarting the debate: Global Weirding Is Here

Although there remains a mountain of research from multiple institutions about the reality of climate change, the public has grown uneasy. What’s real? In my view, the climate-science community should convene its top experts — from places like NASA, America’s national laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, the California Institute of Technology and the U.K. Met Office Hadley Centre — and produce a simple 50-page report. They could call it “What We Know,” summarizing everything we already know about climate change in language that a sixth grader could understand, with unimpeachable peer-reviewed footnotes.

50 whole pages? Written by experts?! My God, man, how can we handle such a stampede of knowledge??!!

Let me put this in a way that even a NY Times "public intellectual" can understand. Global Warming/Climate Change was an outrageous con. No one disagrees that the climate changes, but the idea that humans could have any significant effect on that change is laughable. And believing that you could "reverse the change" by driving Priuses, using half sheets of toilet paper, and hiring Van Jones to lead the effort to create "green jobs" is on a par with believing in water sprites.

The main proponents of AGW/CC were (1) a few scientists and (2) a lot of non-scientists willing to believe in the apocalypse. But that second group was comprised of virtually the entire elite of the western world, whether from the media, business, politics, or the academy. Thus, we had the spectacle of, say, a world famous public intellectual, flying around the world, and living in a house like this...

...telling the rest of us that we must "change" our lifestyles and material expectations. You first, buddy.

And now Freidman wants to rescue his failed "theory" by convening some "experts?" That's what got us into trouble in the first place! He, and the rest of the liberal arts educated elite could have spared themselves a lot of anguish if they had listened to skeptics, rather than to themselves. But, they would prefer to cling to the dream of apocalypse, rather than have to listen to the Jim Inhofes of the world.