The Wierding of Thomas Friedman

First, the recent snowstorms that hit DC were a product of an el Nino event. These have been documented going back centuries and are known to cause heavy snowfall. Things were made worse by a stagnant air mass over Canada which is causing storms to track further north than usual and which has caused a snow-less Winter Olympics. That said, warming skeptics should still be allowed a victory lap since just a year and a half ago, RFK Jr was writing about how DC will never know another Winter.

Enter Thomas Friedman, a true believer of global warming. In a recent column, he threw a hissy fit. In Friedman's world, a handful of brave climate scientists are fighting a losing battle against a sea of crazy skeptics who are awash in funding from oil and coal companies and the Chamber of Commerce.

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.

That was supposed to be the job of the IPCC. Unfortunately, its sources turned out to be impeachable. The actual science says that warming to date has been mild and beneficial. All talk of uncontrollable warming in the future are based on computer models which are unverifiable and are coded to assume that the worst outcome is also the most likely. An honest discussion about the climate would have ten pages of "What we know" and forty pages of "What we don't know."

At the same time, they should add a summary of all the errors and wild exaggerations made by the climate skeptics — and where they get their funding. It is time the climate scientists stopped just playing defense.

This works both ways. I would like to see a summary of all of the errors and wild exagerations made by the warmists and where they get their funding. Twenty years ago James Hansen predicted that the sea level would have risen enough by now that part of Manhattan would be flooded. Al Gore believes that the IPCC is too conservative and has his set of preferred scientists whose predictions are scarier. The head of the IPCC knew that predictions about Himalayan glaciers were wrong but did not admit it because he had grants to study these glaciers based on this false prediction. Is Friedman willing to disown these wild exaggerations?

Among Friedman's points:

1) Start calling it "global weirding" instead of "global warming".

That makes it easier to implicate any unusual weather.

2) What the current debate is about is whether humans — by emitting so much carbon and thickening the greenhouse-gas blanket around the earth so that it traps more heat — are now rapidly exacerbating nature's natural warming cycles to a degree that could lead to dangerous disruptions.

I agree with Friedman. This is a matter for debate. The thing is, he doesn't want a debate. He wants the other side to shut up and go home.

3) Those who favor taking action are saying: "Because the warming that humans are doing is irreversible and potentially catastrophic, let's buy some insurance — by investing in renewable energy, energy efficiency and mass transit — because this insurance will also actually make us richer and more secure." We will import less oil, invent and export more clean-tech products, send fewer dollars overseas to buy oil and, most importantly, diminish the dollars that are sustaining the worst petro-dictators in the world who indirectly fund terrorists and the schools that nurture them.

We could import less oil if we were more aggressive about exploiting our own oil and coal reserves and if we used more nuclear power. Most of these options are off the table because of the pipe dream of renewable energy.

4) Even if climate change proves less catastrophic than some fear, in a world that is forecast to grow from 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion people between now and 2050, more and more of whom will live like Americans, demand for renewable energy and clean water is going to soar. It is obviously going to be the next great global industry.

Friedman is hedging his bet. If you want to do something because of population growth then make your case but don't throw that into a discussion about global warming (excuse me, "weirding".

Friedman closes with one of his many comparisons with China and how much better they are than us.

China, of course, understands that, which is why it is investing heavily in clean-tech, efficiency and high-speed rail. It sees the future trends and is betting on them. Indeed, I suspect China is quietly laughing at us right now.

Friedman is a big believer in an elite government that sees what needs to be done and does it without all of the messiness that democracy entails.

Another aspect of China that he probably approves of - the intelligentsia don't have to live by the same rules as the rest of us. Friedman preaches green living but he lives in a huge mansion and jets all over the world. His carbon emission is many times that of regular people.