National Review Online highlights a recent column from former British cabinet minister Nigel Lawson about the dangers of climate alarmism.
… [A]t bottom this is not a scientific issue. That is to say, the issue is not climate change but climate-change alarmism, and the hugely damaging policies that are advocated, and in some cases put in place, in its name. And alarmism is a feature not of the physical world, which is what climate scientists study, but of human behavior; the province, in other words, of economists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, and — dare I say it — politicians.
And en passant, the problem for dissenting politicians, and indeed for dissenting climate scientists for that matter, who certainly exist, is that dissent can be career-threatening. The advantage of being geriatric is that my career is behind me: There is nothing left to threaten.
But to return: The climate changes all the time, in different and unpredictable (certainly unpredicted) ways, and indeed often in different ways in different parts of the world. It always has done this and no doubt it always will. The issue is whether that is a cause for alarm — and not just moderate alarm. According to the alarmists it is the greatest threat facing humankind today: far worse than any of the manifold evils we see around the globe that stem from what the pope called “man’s inhumanity to man.”
Climate-change alarmism is a belief system, and needs to be evaluated as such.
