{"id":1752,"date":"2014-07-01T10:26:42","date_gmt":"2014-07-01T17:26:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/?p=1752"},"modified":"2015-10-29T09:00:01","modified_gmt":"2015-10-29T16:00:01","slug":"matt-ridley-takes-on-the-global-warming-world-hughhewitt-com-06-30-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/2014\/07\/01\/matt-ridley-takes-on-the-global-warming-world-hughhewitt-com-06-30-14\/","title":{"rendered":"Matt Ridley Takes on the Global Warming World| HughHewitt.com | 06.30.14"},"content":{"rendered":"

The average global temperature has not risen for 15 years.\u00a0 Extreme weather events are at or below historical norms.\u00a0 In the Southern Hemisphere sea ice has hit record highs (http:\/\/bit.ly\/1vlDqP6<\/a>).\u00a0 So of course the Obama Administration has once more declared that the debate is over and that global warming is a fact, and the Supreme Court last week gave the green light to the White House\u2019s anti-climate change campaign.<\/p>\n

Matt Ridley would not be surprised.<\/p>\n

Ridley is a British scientist, historian of science and both scientific and political journalist.\u00a0 He has author of such celebrated books on science as\u00a0Genome<\/em>(1999) and on economics and science as\u00a0The Rational Optimist\u00a0<\/em>(2010).\u00a0 Two weeks ago he addressed the Competitive Enterprise Institute annual dinner in Washington.<\/p>\n

His talk was a good antidote for anyone who is close to OD\u2019ing on the climate change medicine that, like a wicked Mary Poppins, the administration is struggling to force down our unreceptive national throats.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have defended science all my career,\u201d he told the dinner. \u201cI carried a lot of water for scientists in many debates with their critics, on topics like cloning, genetically modified foods, evolution and so on.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI did so because I am passionate about science.\u00a0 And by science I meant discovering the truth without fear or favor, wherever it leads.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in our time, Ridley continued, science has become something very different.\u00a0 It is no longer about the high ideal of truth seeking, but as one \u201cguru of post-modern science\u201d has put it (Ridley quoting here), \u201ca product of social construction, of negotiation among interests, or merely relative to a professional consensus.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ridley said that such major scientific bodies as the U.S.\u2019s National Academy of Sciences and the U.K.\u2019s Royal Society \u201cno longer act as clubs of people seeking to roll back ignorance\u201d but a \u201ctrade unions\u201d lobbying politicians for funding.<\/p>\n

And what of the politicians they are so focused on influencing? A decade after reporting on American politics from 1987 to 1992, Ridley entered the British House of Lords and got to see politics from the inside. \u201cI have discovered,\u201d he recalled, that politicians \u201chave far more affection for industries that ask them for money than for the ones that don\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

Oil companies don\u2019t ask for money, so they are \u201cthe devil incarnate.\u201d Wind companies do and \u201care treated like honored guests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Long a climate change questioner, Ridley said he followed the rule of\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0science writer John Tierney (recipient at the dinner of CEI\u2019s annual Hayek Award), \u201cJust because an idea appeals to a lot of people doesn\u2019t mean its wrong, but that\u2019s a good working theory.\u201d<\/p>\n

To be clear about where he stood on the global warming consensus, Ridley offered what he called \u201ccounter-intuitive truths\u201d ranging from \u201cthe world is getting greener because of fossil fuels, not despite them\u201d (just look at global vegetation data and you\u2019ll see CO2\u2019s fertilization effect) to \u201cthe solution to global warming is to grow the world economy as fast as possible, develop new technologies and expand trade.\u201d<\/p>\n

That last truth should not be counter-intuitive, he noted.\u00a0 Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, long a fueler of global warming hysteria, has said as much in its last report.\u00a0 It offered two scenarios for the world\u2019s future \u2013 one that anticipated high economic growth, the other low growth.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe one with rapid growth,\u201d reported Ridley, \u201cis the one where climate change ceases to be a problem. The poor and miserable one is the one where climate change becomes dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Moreover, the low growth plan is the less plausible. It \u201cassumes we will be burning an astonishing ten times as much coal as today, producing fifty percent of the world\u2019s primary energy from coal.\u201d<\/p>\n

What the IPCC\u2019s data tells us is \u201ceven if you pile crazy assumption upon crazy assumption until you have an edifice of vanishingly small probability, you cannot even manage to make climate change cause minor damage in the time of our grandchildren, let alone a catastrophe.\u201d<\/p>\n

So why all the hysteria?<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, it\u2019s no great mystery,\u201d Ridley told his audience. \u201cEnvironmental exaggeration generates $300 million a year for Greenpeace. \u201c<\/p>\n

He pointed to other cheerleaders of doom, including no-growth guru Paul Ehrlich, and White House Science Advisor John Holdren, who have called for \u201ca massive campaign\u2026 to de-develop the United States.\u201d\u00a0 British green activist George Monbiot has gone even further, demanding an \u201cordered and structured downsizing of the global economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe live in incredible times,\u201d Ridley concluded. \u201cThe world as a whole is getting rapidly wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, kinder, freer, cleaner, safer, more peaceful and, yes, more equal. Yet the forces that have caused those improvements are vilified and castigated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tell it to the White House.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The average global temperature has not risen for 15 years.\u00a0 Extreme weather events are at or below historical norms.\u00a0 In the Southern Hemisphere sea ice has hit record highs (http:\/\/bit.ly\/1vlDqP6).\u00a0 So of course the Obama Administration has once more declared that the debate is over and that global warming is a fact, and the Supreme […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[212,160,12,213],"class_list":["post-1752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-climate-change","tag-global-warming","tag-hugh-hewitt","tag-matt-ridley"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1752"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1896,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1752\/revisions\/1896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}