Re: TownHall.com – 5/31/2008 – “Environmentalists Pick Up Where Communists Left Off” – Charles Krauthammer

Except for his use of the word “entirely” in the last sentence of the second paragraph I agree with Krauthammer’s first two paragraphs:

“I'm not a global warming believer. I'm not a global warming denier. I'm a global warming agnostic who believes instinctively that it can't be very good to pump lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, but is equally convinced that those who presume to know exactly where that leads are talking through their hats.”

“Predictions of catastrophe depend on models. Models depend on assumptions about complex planetary systems -- from ocean currents to cloud formation -- that no one fully understands. Which is why the models are inherently flawed and forever changing. The doomsday scenarios posit a cascade of events, each with a certain probability. The multiple improbability of their simultaneous occurrence renders all such predictions entirely speculative.”

But from here on, our opinions diverge.

Krauthammer says “Yet on the basis of this speculation, environmental activists, attended by compliant scientists and opportunistic politicians, are advocating radical economic and social regulation”, but the science of global warming is better established and more widely accepted than many predictive economic theories on which economists routinely advocate radical economic and social regulation and on which free-market economists dogmatically reject such regulation.

Krauthammer says “If Newton's laws of motion could, after 200 years of unfailing experimental and experiential confirmation, be overthrown, it requires religious fervor to believe that global warming -- infinitely more untested, complex and speculative -- is a closed issue”, but he’s way off base here. First of all, Newton’s laws weren’t overthrown, they were shown to be limited to a domain now understood to be a subset of the universe, the huge sub domain of small mass, low speed, and low acceleration. The domain where Newton’s laws do not apply was not discovered until relatively recently and no evidence has ever been found to overthrow Newton’s laws in the huge domain of its applicability. And secondly, very few people believe that global warming is a closed issue. Science is never closed --- science is always open to better explanations of known fact and discovery of new fact. In time, some scientific theory becomes so successful and useful it is used as if it is fact, but of course it never is fact. And very few think that the theory of global warming is nearly that successful.

Krauthammer says “For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class -- social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies -- arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism)”. He apparently forgets that for centuries before that, ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous right wing monarchists believed (or claimed to believe) that by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress, and by the will of God, only they (and their progeny) were fit to rule. He ignores the dogmatic beliefs of today’s right.

Krauthammer says “Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher's England to Deng's China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history”. But communism lives on in North Korea, China, Cuba, and elsewhere; elements of socialism (central planning and legal enforcement of those plans) prosper in every country in the world; and two decades of current history wouldn’t prove the death of communism or socialism even if it were true that communism and socialism completely disappeared from the face of the earth over that time span. Can Krauthammer’s acceptance of the defeat of socialism by free-market capitalism really be better supported by evidence than the belief others have in the validity of global warming?

From here, Krauthammer’s arguments become even worse. He apparently does not understand the positions of liberals or environmentalists and the economic consequences of their beliefs. He clearly doesn’t understand scientific theory validation or the degree of validation necessary for theory application. But above all, he has done exactly what he accuses people who disagree with him of doing --- letting his own personal prejudices cloud his ability to think rationally. I doubt he even really understands the positions he instinctively and reflexively espouses.