Global warming as mass hysteria

I found online a great article titled “Global warming -- the great delusion” by Matt Patterson. He pulls no punches in his attacks on the global warming crowd.

First, he refers to an old book from the 1800s that examines financial panics, medical quackery, alchemy, and witch crazes. The author of this book wanted to know why so many people choose to believe so much that is false and potentially deadly. His answer:
“We go out of our course to make ourselves uncomfortable; the cup of life is not bitter enough to our palate, and we distill superfluous poison to put into it, or conjure up hideous things to frighten ourselves at, which would never exist if we did not make them.”

Patterson sees a connection to the global warming fanatics. He calls the current debate “superstition masked as science; Western guilt over having conquered the world manifesting itself as hatred for the technologies that made it possible; apocalyptic yearning in the guise of political enlightenment.” Wow, good stuff there.

Patterson goes on to call global warming the most widespread mass hysteria in our species’ history. This wouldn’t be so bad except it has the potential to cause real problems. As he puts it, “And like every mass delusion, there is danger – danger that Man will be convinced by these climate cultists to turn his back on the very political, economic, and scientific institutions that made him so powerful, so wealthy, so healthy.” I agree totally, having watched the issue over the past several years.

Patterson is optimistic. After all, more and more scientists come forward to admit their doubts about the global warming paradigm. As an example, he talks of what happened last September: Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Prize winning physicist, resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) over that organization’s climate change orthodoxy.

In his resignation letter to APS, Giaever lambasted the society’s public stance that global warming is an incontrovertible fact:
“In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”

But this man is not an isolated case. Patterson notes that recently in the Wall Street Journal 16 prominent scientists, including physicists, meteorologists and climatologists, came forward to express solidarity with Giaever, writing:
“…large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts. Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: ‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.’”

Of course, the big question remains--why do so many still cling to the hope of climate change catastrophe? As they say, follow the money. If you can get people scared, you can wring money out of politicians for academic research and you create a reason for government bureaucracies to grow.

The other piece of good news is the reaction of the public to this alarmist rhetoric. Voters are becoming ever more suspicious of government-mandated schemes to control their “carbon emissions,” which is just a bureaucrat’s way of curbing productivity, and therefore liberty.

Patterson ends his piece with a devastating comment: “In centuries hence the global warming boogeyman will be seen for exactly what it is – The Great Delusion. Future generations will wonder how so many people could have believed something so suicidally ridiculous.” Again, I agree. It’s been wonderful to see reason coming back in style, at least in this part of life.