The Saturday Afternoon Post — Tom, Jill, and Globaloney

Earlier this week, Commenter Jill, the proprietress at Writes Like She Talks, asked me to expand on some points I made in the comments at this post about Ellen Goodman calling those who doubt globaloney as forward-looking equivalents of Holocaust deniers.

In the interest of giving the exchange further exposure (and getting a weekend post done with minimal effort :–>), here goes –

I’ll pick it up here, part of the way through this comment of mine:

What is very tiresome is that there is a litany of thousands of climatologists and scientists who are not buying into the globaloney, yet we have constantly been insulted for months by people like Gore and others who tell us the debate is over. Horse manure. Despite my stridency, if someone came forward with solid evidence, I would be listening.

What is frustrating is that aggressive capitalism is showing signs of being able to lift most of the world out of grinding poverty in 50-75 years, while adopting the globalarmist agenda will lock in those who are in dire poverty permanently. Where is the compassion in that?

Specifically, Jill wondered:

Tom, you wrote: “if someone came forward with solid evidence, I would be listening.” I am not being facecious here - what would you consider “solid evidence”?

Then you wrote: “What is frustrating is that aggressive capitalism is showing signs of being able to lift most of the world out of grinding poverty in 50-75 years, while adopting the globalarmist agenda will lock in those who are in dire poverty permanently. Where is the compassion in that?”

Tom - what are you talking about “aggressive capitalism” lifting “most of the world out of grinding poverty”? I do believe that you know what you’re talking about, or believe you believe what you’re talking about. But you and I know that it’s not my forte and again, without making you give me primer on your idea here, you know I’m a studious questioner - what do you have in mind specifically when you say this kind of thing?

Last - why do you feel that concern for climate change - regardless of why it’s happening - will “lock in those who are in dire poverty permanently”?

My response back was this:

Jill …..

- “Solid evidence” would require proof that warming is occurring (it seems a bit likely that it is), and that peer-reviewed and peer-replicated research show a definitive link of human-produced gases, by-products, etc. to that warming. Right now the logic, in essence, is that “it’s happening, so it must be our fault.”

- I don’t think the science will ever get past the previous hurdle (I would suggest a daily e-mail from Benny Peiser in England that I receive, but it gets a little overbearing at times, not in content, but in sheer volume; I can’t even get past the headlines). Even then, the next hurdle would have to be to prove that warming, if proven to be human-induced, is a bad thing, or that it is even dangerous. You could make a case that increasing arable land and other benefits might outweigh the negatives. Recall that Greenland got its name for a reason — it was a perfectly hospitable place when settled by Erik the Red and the Icelanders (good name for a band, eh?). Over the next several hundred years it became insufferably cold and uninhabitable (see Wiki). Greenland’s condition today is evidence that the earth hasn’t yet re-warmed to the point it was at during the Medieval Warm Period. So it would seem we have a warming cushion to work with.

- As to the potential for aggressive capitalism lifting the world out of poverty, I have this post from the past:

http://www.bizzyblog.com/?p=3985

This is a Positivity post that mostly regurgitates what the World Bank is predicting over the next 25 years. Here’s one money quote:

A new middle class will be created in the developing nations. Today 400 million people in the poorer nations are consider(ed) to be in the “global middle class” with a purchasing power parity of between $4000 and $17,000 per capita. By 2030 there will be 1.2 billion.

That would mean that the percentage of the world living in poverty will have deceased by about 12% in 25 years. Replicate that a couple of times, and accelerate it by helping countries move to market-based approaches, and the idea that world poverty (which appears to be roughly 30%-40% of the world, depending on source, definitions, etc.) could be mostly conquered in 50-75 years is not off the wall at all.

This post also refers to an article noting that 170-plus million Chinese escaped poverty between 1990 and 2002, and which in essence credits Wal-Mart and other outsourcers for most of that improvement:

http://www.bizzyblog.com/?p=2879

- That leaves what happens if “climate change” proponents get a stranglehold on the world economy, which is clearly what they want. Even if you don’t believe, as I do, that the progess described above would be stopped dead in its tracks, you’d have to acknowledge that it would be slowed down considerably. Mandated reductions in energy use would cause cuts in output, (and) slow new construction to a crawl. At a minimum they would reduce economic growth considerably, but I think what would actually happen is a worldwide recession with the potential of bringing a lot of instability to places once thought to be under control.

- The more strident proponents of “climate change” controls have even openly stated that they don’t mind global poverty continuing, and even construct tortured “noble savage” arguments to somehow paint their situations as superior to ours. Here’s an example of one such person, a leading light in the environmentalist community, quoted from Mark Steyn:

http://www.bizzyblog.com/?p=4505

“In Madagascar, the indicators of quality of life are not housing. They’re not nutrition, specifically. They’re not health in a lot of cases. It’s not education. A lot of children in Fort Dauphin do not go to school because the parents don’t consider that to be important. . . . People have no jobs, but if I could put you with a family and you could count how many times in a day that that family smiles. Then I put you with a family well off, in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile. . . . You tell me who is rich and who is poor.”

So (back to me opining), it’s OK if they’re malnourished, unhealthy, ignorant, and unemployed. They smile a lot, which means they’re better off than we are — never mind (as noted later by Steyn) that they only have a life expectancy of 52.5 years.

I’m not okay with that. It appears that much of the worldwide environmental movement is. In fact, many of them have deluded themselves into thinking that perpetuating global poverty is the price we have to pay for “saving the planet” — which I think is demonstrably not in dire need of saving.

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UPDATE: More news that contradicts the faux certainty of the globaloney crowd.