Every time we have a summer heatwave invariably the media go crazy with talk of global warming. You would think they would be used to the phenomenon of seasons by now. But it is great fodder for the features producers, and since the weather is on everybody’s mind you might as well go with a segment on climate change. It’s a nice respite from the real problems in the world.
Personally, I don’t know what all the shouting is about. Global warming is great. Granted, maybe it isn’t really happening, and if it is there are strong reasons to doubt that humans have anything to do with it. But if the world is warming, I say “bravo.” People in most parts of the globe should have no objection to a warmer,
wetter climate. If the aliens were watching they’d conclude we were making our planet more habitable on purpose.
Consider the large landmasses in the northern hemisphere, say north of 55 degrees. These are very extreme climates for human habitation.
A population distribution map of Canada shows most people live in a belt running along the southern border with the United States. But add global warming and vast regions would become comfortably habitable. As well, there would be more land available for cultivation. Resources would be easier to extract. True, there might be some dislocations as crops shifted northward, but so what? Economies change all the time. And imagine the land boom up the coastlines as people rushed on up for beachfront property. If global warming is real it is creating the investment opportunity of a lifetime.
Of course, you have to factor in ice-cap melt and the possibility that today’s shoreline might move inland. The Al Gore scare film has some dramatic footage of the consequences of a 20-foot rise in sea levels. Most estimates I have read about talk about a three-foot rise at most, but let’s not quibble. In the movie, oceans are seen rushing inland, implying some kind of inundation episode. But the waters will not rise so quickly, if they do at all. And if this threatens our cities one would think some form of sea wall would be in order. The Dutch have been doing this for years, there is no reason why we can’t copy them.
And in response to Gore’s grotesque pandering — saying that if sea levels rose high enough the Ground Zero site in New York would be under water — I say no, sir, we cannot, we will not let this happen! A wall I say! We will protect that sacred ground at all costs! No patriotic American, no real American, would settle for less! Anyway, get with it Democrats, where is your traditional love of public works? Rising ocean levels will keep the government in the sea wall business for decades.
In any case there is no compelling evidence that the seas are rising. The catastrophists warn that small islands and atolls will be the first to go, and the island state of Tuvalu in the Pacific has made a habit of demanding western aid as compensation for this imminent threat to their very existence. It plays well with the liberal guilt complex. But
sea-level data from Tuvalu show basically a flat-line average since 1977 — talk about an inconvenient truth!
Think of the other advantages the Left is ignoring. A warmer wetter world could very well mean more rain forests — hence more biodiversity! We are supposed to value that for some reason, right? And if the ice caps melt and we get more ocean, well that just means more habitat for whales doesn’t it? And warmer climates might reverse the migration pattern in this country away from the frigid liberal northeast towards the warm conservative south. Imagine Massachusetts and Vermont gaining seats in Congress and then tell me how bad global warming is.
Granted, there will be some negative impacts in marginal areas. Some rare plant and animal species, hyper-adapted to highly specific climate conditions or micobiotic zones, are already unable to cope with the change. Many may go extinct; some already have. That’s tough, but chalk it up to bad evolutionary choices. When those rigidly specialist species bet everything on a small part of the world in hopes it would never change, they made a very bad bargain. For our part, we have air conditioners, lightweight fabrics, and sunscreen. Why infinitely adaptable humanity has to pay the price for the evolutionary shortsightedness of other life forms is beyond me.
It seems to be beyond a lot of others too, because the public has yet to mobilize behind the movement to save the rare burrowing mountain toads of Central America. So the global-warming crowd started talking about polar bears drowning as their ice Arctic floes melted. Presumably this happens every summer to some of the more stupid ones, but regardless, it is a great marketing gimmick. Always tie in children, dogs and bears whenever possible, in anything you do.
Basically I am questioning the premise of the global-warming alarmists, namely that this is a problem rather than an opportunity. And besides, I distrust their motives. Many are simply panicky people in need of some form of approaching eschatology. These sad folk afflicted with the “
true believer” psychology require something large and threatening to worry about in order to give meaning to their lives. It could be anything — Y2K, Ebola virus, bird flu, overpopulation, technological meltdown — any event, trend, disease, or phenomenon which could, under certain implausible circumstances, lead to the end of the world. People derive meaning from these things by being more in the know about this imminent doom than their ignorant neighbors, to whom they feel measurably superior, and whom they must protect from this looming catastrophe whether they like it or not. Global warming is the latest in an endless line of apocalyptic scenarios that have captured the imaginations of the impressionable.
Another motive, sometimes open sometimes not, is to end the free-market system as we know it. By linking the cause of global warming to the activities of the most productive economies in human history, they can take down capitalism by other means. The analogous battle cry in the 1970s was “resource scarcity,” the belief that the world was running out oil, iron, water, cultivatable land, or whatever; so in order to stave off the big crash, we had to move to immediate state controls over most human productive activity. Which leads to my third issue, which is that the solutions to the global-warming problem usually take the form of government regulations, restrictions, and of course massive wealth transfers to pay for the whole thing.
At the root of global-warming alarmism is a deathly fear of change. It is ironic that the Left, which calls itself progressive, is comprised of some of the most reactionary people on earth. They will come up with endless lists of all the changes that will result from temperature increases, exclusively focusing on the negative, as though change per se is something to be avoided.
But change is natural.
Gaia is all about change. If the climate historians can tell us anything, it is that climatic conditions have been changing radically since Earth’s creation, and there is no reason to expect that they will ever stop. Forget the idea that man is causing global warming — I think it is terribly ambitious to believe that man can stop it.
So if we see global warming for the beneficial trend that it is rather than a looming threat to life and limb, none of the “solutions” being proposed by the alarmists are necessary. There is no challenge posed by a slow-rolling phenomenon like global warming that cannot be overcome; and when deserts start blooming, blizzards stop hitting, and you are enjoying the surfing at your beach house in upper Newfoundland, you won’t care what caused global warming, you’ll just thank goodness it happened.
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James S. Robbins is author of Last in Their Class: Custer, Picket and the Goats of West Point,
and an NRO contributor. 
