We can go back and look at Al Gore, a documented fraud, a presenter of entirely false scientific claims, and the winner of a Nobel Prize for science. A British High Court judge found nine “glaring” scientific errors in the Inconvenient Truth “documentary” that garnered Gore his scientific credibility. But the only “inconvenient truth” was that the film was an example of “alarmism” and “exaggeration” and was not fit for viewing by British school children.
“Science” has officially and for the record made itself a propaganda tool to advance radical redistributionist social policies.
And now we have another Nobel prize winner doing the same thing to his own field of economics.
An Interview With Thomas Schelling, Part Two
CLARKE: I wanted to go back to the international climate-change negotiation process. So assuming we had a perfect U.S. bill — written by you or by 15 experts working on this full time — how would the international negotiation process work? It’s not obvious that averting global climate change is in the rational self-interest of anyone that is alive today. The serious consequences probably won’t occur until 2080 or 2100 or thereafter. That’s one problem. Another problem is that those consequences are going to be distributed in a radically uneven way. The northwest of the United States might actually benefit. So how does a negotiation process work? How does a generation today negotiate on behalf of future generations? And how do we negotiate when the costs are distributed so unevenly?
SCHELLING: Well I do think that one of the difficulties is that most of the beneficiaries aren’t yet born. More than that: Most of the beneficiaries will be born in what we now call the developing world. By 2080 or 2100 five-sixths of the population, at least, will be in places like China, India, Indonesia, Africa and so forth. And what I don’t know is whether Americans are really willing to understand that and do anything for the benefit of the unborn Chinese.
SCHELLING: It’s a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious. I think there’s a significant likelihood of a kind of a runaway release of carbon and methane from permafrost, and from huge offshore deposits of methane all around the world. If you begin to get methane leaking on a large scale — even though methane doesn’t stay in the atmosphere very long — it might warm things up fast enough that it will induce further methane release, which will warm things up more, which will release more. And that will create a huge multiplier effect, and it could become very serious.
CLARKE: And you mean serious for everyone, including the United States?
SCHELLING: Yes, for almost anybody.
CLARKE: And when you say, “exaggerate the costs” do you mean, American politicians should exaggerate the costs to the American public, to get American support for a bill that will overwhelmingly benefit the developing world?
SCHELLING: [Laughs] It’s very hard to get honest people.
SCHELLING: Well, part of me sympathizes with the case for disingenuousness! I mean, it seems to me that there is a strong moral case for helping unborn Bangladeshi citizens. But I don’t know how you sell that. It’s not in anyone’s rational interest, at least in the US, to legislate on that basis.
Well, let me at least agree with Thomas Schelling to this extent: yes, it is indeed hard to find honest people. Especially from our “experts” whom we count upon to inform us of the facts, rather than leading us by the hand to conclusions based on false premises becauses they are arrogant elitists who think only they are smart enough to handle the truth.
The article goes on – read it here – with a seriously leftist-tilted back-and-forth about climate change and the degree to which America is morally obligated to commit economic hari kari in order to atone for its sins to the developing world.
Then we get to the moral nitty gritty to end the article:
CLARKE: I wanted to ask one more question, to go back to the moral issue here. It does seem to me that the strongest case for mitigating the effects of global climate change is a moral one. It is based not on our own interest but on the interests of people in the developing world who don’t yet exist. But it also seems to me that — while I don’t know much about game theory — collective bargaining theories generally assume the participants are rational and self-interested. So how does one go about making sense of an arrangement where we must set our self-interest aside? How does one make the moral case in a situation like this? Or is my description of collective bargaining just totally idiotic?
SCHELLING: Well, I think you have to realize that most people have very strong moral feelings. I think in a lot of cases they’re misdirected. I wish moral feelings about a two-month old fetus were attached to hungry children in Africa. But I think people have very strong moral feelings. In fact, I’m always amazed by the number of people who at least pretend they’re worried about the polar bears. […]
SCHELLING: And I think the churches don’t realize that they could have a potent effect in not letting so much of god’s legacy — in terms of flora and fauna — be destroyed by climate change.
SCHELLING: But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening — you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth — that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Now, Thomas Schelling one the one hand tells us that we should feel intensely morally obligated to “beneficiaries [who] not yet born” – as long as they’re not “a two month old fetus” who is presumably about to be aborted – in which case we apparently have absolutely no obligation at all. But stop and think: the moral logic of abortion means the future generation doesn’t matter unless we subjectively want them to matter. No one who advocates abortion has any right to lecture others that they should not only care about but sacrifice for “beneficiaries not yet born.” Then Schelling proceeds to presume from his own massive personal arrogance that the American people’s moral intuitions are faulty, but that his are functioning perfectly. Which of course justifies him in lying to us to steer us toward the conclusion dictated by his own superior moral reasoning.
And then this man who presumes himself to be so morally superior to everyone “beneath” him, who is entitled to “exaggerate the threat” of global warming because Americans are not responsible to make sound moral decisions if they know the truth, says he hopes “horrid things” happen to we the poor, the huddling, the ignorant and unwashed masses.
This economist seems to live more by the law involving the telling of a lie often enough that it is believed far more than by the law of supply and demand.
It’s funny that Schelling mentions polar bears, as an admitted global warming exaggerator now proceeds to run into the pseudo-science of another global warming exaggerator. And you have – unlike Al Gore or Thomas Schelling, who have credibility in the scientific community without having any ethical integrity – a genuine scientist being persecuted because he cares about the truth:
One of the world’s leading polar bear experts has been told to stay away from an international conference on the animals because his views are “extremely unhelpful,” according to an e-mail by the chairman of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, Dr. Andy Derocher.
The London Telegraph reports Canadian biologist Mitchell Taylor has more than 30 years of experience with polar bears. But his belief that global warming is caused by nature, not man, led officials to bar him from this week’s polar bear specialist group meeting in Denmark.
Taylor says the polar bear population has actually increased over the last 30 years. He says the threat to them by melting Arctic ice — illustrated by a famous photo taken by photographer Amanda Byrd — has become the most iconic cause for global warming theorists. The photo is often used by former Vice President Al Gore and others as an example of the dangers faced by the bears. But it was debunked last year by the photographer, who says the picture had nothing to do with global warming, and that the bears were not in danger. The photographer said she just happened to catch the bears on a small windswept iceberg.
And we have the same types of people as Thomas Schelling suppresing the conclusions of science that show the opposite of what they want science to show. Consider the White House’s suppression of a scientific report by the EPA.
Or you can go back to the “hockey stick model” to see just how far “respected” scientists are willing to go in order to pass off a bogus theory for mass consumption — and just how willing other scientists are to unquestioningly accept whatever “evidence” supports their preconceived ideological notions.
Harvard economist Martin Feldstein apparently lacks Thomas Schelling’s godlike view, and thus doesn’t seem to think he possesses the divine right to distort the truth in order to lead Americans to the conclusions he ordains as “moral.”
Feldstein simply looks at the economics – which, who knows, may be a strange thing for an economist to do these days – and concludes:
Americans should ask themselves whether this annual tax of $1,600-plus per family is justified by the very small resulting decline in global CO2. Since the U.S. share of global CO2 production is now less than 25 percent (and is projected to decline as China and other developing nations grow), a 15 percent fall in U.S. CO2 output would lower global CO2 output by less than 4 percent. Its impact on global warming would be virtually unnoticeable. The U.S. should wait until there is a global agreement on CO2 that includes China and India before committing to costly reductions in the United States. […]
In my judgment, the proposed cap-and-trade system would be a costly policy that would penalize Americans with little effect on global warming. The proposal to give away most of the permits only makes a bad idea worse. Taxpayers and legislators should keep these things in mind before enacting any cap-and-trade system.
Aside from the fact that building scientific evidence indicates that global warming is a gigantic load of malarkey (just consider how the fact that the planet ISN’T warming has now led the alarmist movement to instead begin using the term “climate change”), global warming-turned climate change alarmists have an even bigger problem to worry about: the fact that the developing world has no interests in committing their own versions of hari kari for the sake of a theory. China and India are poised to become “global warming polluters” on such a scale that any reductions in American and European greenhouse gasses would be utterly insignificant. So why should we dramatically undermine our lives?
Chinese and Indians know what it’s like to live in a mud hut, which is the inevitable result of dramatically hamstringing our economic output to conform to the demands of the global warming alarmists. The western radicals either don’t know what such deplorable conditions are like, or they believe that they – being the true arrogant elitists they are – will continue to live in their glass houses or ivory towers.
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