Link:

http://dougreich.blogspot.com/2009/06/if-global-warming-is-real-freedom-is.html

Myrhaf, on the deepest level you are of course right. The Ecology movement has in common with all the other isms you mentioned that it is based on the arbitrary. These are all non-reality based ideas.

None of them is right, so why should we waste time answering their fantasies?

Even if we knew that man’s acts of production today and over ensuing decades would cause ocean levels to rise by something like 1/2 inch per year for a century, that would not constitute a “man-made ecological disaster” for which some kind of extraordinary action is required.

The fact is, all of man’s activities affect the ecology and even other men. Car exhaust, overflowing garbage cans, unpleasant smells are facts of life. They are mere inconveniences. More than that, there is no way to counteract them without imposing an injustice on the offenders (e.g., banning offending perfumes).

The same principle applies to the global warming issue. The only way to stop the gradually rising ocean levels — if we are to accept the environmentalists’ arguments at face value — would be to shut down or severely hamper industrial production, transportation, and all the benefits we derive from the use of electricity.

Given that choice, I would consider a gradually rising ocean as a minor inconvenience on the order of all those breathfuls of car exhaust or noxious perfumes or visions of unsightly garbage that I must encounter over the course of my life.

Now, if there were a *real* ecological disaster that would constitute a grave and imminent threat to man (global warming is neither), then what should we do? Well, I can think of several answers. Better yet, I would like to see someone put those answers into an interesting science fiction story where the protagonists wrestle with this issue and resolve it in rational terms. That’s a proposal for any philosophically-minded fiction writers out there.

Then we’ve discovered that we are now sufficiently powerful to *control* the climate. I say, take advantage of it!

madmax:

“I think that environmentalism ultimately comes down to the collectivist premise that “rational man if left free will destroy himself by means of capitalism and technology.””

The deeper root of *that* is the Pandora’s Box phobia. It is the end-of-road of primitive minds; to them, the products of reason are indistinguishable from magic, and only gods should wield such power — so let us relinquish it, lest we anger them. It is the inverse of the healthy mind’s eager anticipation of all the cool things that we could DO with the power of our minds.

To use Billy Beck’s term: where the latter is the mindset of the Enlightenment, the former is that of its opposite: the Endarkenment.

We are actually living in a great geologic time period where the earth is rather stable. Hopefully this will continue for a few thousand years more; time enough for mankind to solve its philosophic problems, establish laissez-faire, and colonize other planets along with building such high-tech societies that we are basically immune to ecological disasters (terrestrial or extra-terrestrial; ie volcanoes or asteroids).

That being said, I still feel that the Objectivist commentary on this lacks a really good answer to the all too common question: “but what if mankind really is causing unstable ecological conditions?” This is sort of like the plot to the Superman comic: Jor-el warns the Kryptonians that Krypton was destroying itself and nobody listens to him. I think this is all nonsense but what would be a really good answer to that question, which in one sense is not totally unreasonable.

I think that environmentalism ultimately comes down to the collectivist premise that “rational man if left free will destroy himself by means of capitalism and technology.” This reduces to “man is by nature flawed/sinful/destructive, etc.” But I would like to see a comprehensive answer to the possibility of man-caused disaster and the claim that government must regulate us to prevent our destruction.

Andrew Dalton, excellent point. You are making the key point about the global warming debate. The issue of whether AGW is true is nearly a red-herring. It is so because even if true, one cannot prescribe the violation of rights as the “solution.” In exchange for forestalling an alleged couple feet increase in sea levels over one hundred years, the global warmers want to extend ultimately dictatorial control over the economy, as Myrhaf pointed out in his earlier post. That cannot be justified. Moreover, individuals who are *free* to adjust and adapt will use their freedom and wealth to adjust to such a slow-moving phenomenon as a sea level that rises one-half inch per year.

In concrete terms, we need to be free like Holland (but even more free) to effectively deal with land that lies below sea level as they do (2/3 of Holland lies below sea level). Otherwise, we will suffer the fate of Bangladesh where people die every year from predictable and preventable flooding because they are too poor to take the measures to prevent the floods.

The global warming legislation moves us in the direction of responding to natural disasters the way the Bangladeshis do. Impoverished and in tune with nature, they do not sully it with technologies such as dikes, damps, and water pumps.

Leonard Peikoff sets out three levels of knowledge of reality: probably, possible, and certain. This sounds great, if certainty is only an epistemological truth status. He goes on to suggest that to be the case, using the example of taking a commercial airline flight. When one steps on the plane they fully expect to reach their destination alive. They are certain, even if their is a vanishing chance of catastrophe.

I have no problem with that, because the chance of catastrophe IS vanishing. That is, metaphysics and human engineering all but guarantee a *Platonic* (i.e. Intrinsically guaranteed) safe arrival. Its epistemological status is “certain”, even if not metaphysically so.

But there is NO chance that Evolution occurs by Lamarckian methods; it is Darwin, Mendel & modern organic chemistry, ALL the way metaphysically. What ‘kind’ of Certainty is that? Can Objectivism have degrees of certainty?

Is it at this point that a (epistemological) certainty becomes a (Natural) Law, a metaphysical fact apart from Mankind?

The Environmentalists would not hesitate to publicize a comment by a single *blind* elder if he were to say that the white man is destroying polar bear population. This is no different from their shameless use of two drowned polar bears, that “could not find solid ice”, as an indication of what GW will do to the bears. Polar bears, as a species, ‘know’ to head for the coastline in the Arctic spring. Logically, some will be late, and may drown, especially if *weather* systems, GW or not, cause a year of rapid thawing.

Why might the PB population be increasing?

While PB brings to mind jars in garbage dumps, there might be a better reason. If, at least in N. America, Arctic conditions are warmer —as I think they are, whatever the cause— then surely there must be more natural growth. That growth simply adds to the food chain, both on land and at sea. The first organisms to benefit from it will be indigenous. If the change of conditions is lasting, then there may be a northward movement of a number of non-indigenous species… *but that does not mean a wholesale invasion*. On average every Celsius degree warmer one can expect a pole-ward shift of habitat by some one~ to two~ hundred kilometers. Per degree, the shift will be slow, and will vary with water body locations, mountains, and the resistance of those indigenous species and, of course, the natural ability of the organisms to move —wings and legs being faster than seeds and spores.

Since the globe was significantly warmer one millennium ago, we know we are no where near any sort of catastrophe of the sort predicted by the Goron and his AGW followers.

Why do we never hear about the Medieval Warm Period? There are several sources where you can quickly learn how McMann contrived the “hockey stick” graph (used by the Goron) using data transformations that virtually guaranteed a “hockey stick” curve with any data set. Here is one, and if you scroll down you will also see the actual data plot of the MWP.

In India this is threatening to undo the gains made from free-market reforms in recent years as the western environmentalists are increasingly influencing and boosting the anti-business lobbies .

One of the examples is the start of mandatory CNG fuel for commercial vehicles in New Delhi which have an unfortunate tendency to burst into flames and have caused dozens of horrible deaths by burning. Besides the obvious costs in coversion and the the losses suffered by poor auto-ricksaw/taxi drivers, it is literally killing people.

Just goes on to show the real motives of the environmental movement – people be damned, at least the air is cleaner.

Most conservatives don’t understand this distinction, and they fall into the leftists’ trap when they make (frequently poor) arguments against AGW science in order to attack AGW politics. (That’s not to say that some of the arguments that we hear in favor of AGW theory — such as blaming single weather events on AGW — aren’t genuinely bad.)

I’m sure that there are many honest climate scientists who are uncomfortable with the manner in which these two issues are conflated as one “consensus” by the national media. But scientist-activists such as James Hansen (whose vices go far beyond epistemology) bear a large share of the blame for this confusion, and so do non-activist scientists who remain silent about Hansen and his ilk.

“Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about.” This from the man that thinks Obama isn’t spending enough!

Krugman has divorced moral concepts from human values to the same absurd extent that religionists do when they describe pro-gay legislation as an “offense against God.” The fact that he uses the bullying language of tyranny (“treason,” which was narrowly defined in the Constitution for a very good reason) foreshadows the endgame of environmentalist politics.