In a profile of the Obama administration?s energy and climate ?czarina,? Newsweek?s Michael Hirsh assures us ? with no sources, of course ? that ?The dangers of global warming are a given.?
Perhaps Mr. Hirsh should flip a few pages back in his own magazine and read the column from noted right-winger Jacob Weisberg. (The joke would work more effectively if more people knew who Weisberg is; he edits the left-leaning Slate and wrote a book called The Bush Tragedy.) Weisberg spends an entire column questioning premises, one of which is ?catastrophic? climate change:
We all know civilization is doomed if we don’t reduce carbon emissions, right? The physicist Freeman Dyson disagrees. Dyson doesn’t dispute that human activity is causing warming. But he challenges the consensus that warming will be catastrophic. In a New York Review of Books essay, Dyson wrote that warming “is mostly making cold places warmer rather than making hot places hotter.” Carbon emissions could make the earth more fertile and prevent harm from global cooling, which isn’t caused by humans. And if it really turns out that there is a serious problem, genetically engineered carbon-eating trees might fix it. (Might.)
If you?d like more evidence that global warming alarmism is overblown, check out the recent debate the John Locke Foundation co-hosted in Hickory between William Schlesinger and John Christy.