Braking the global warming bandwagon

You cannot obtain objective clarity about the outside world staring through a snow-frosted windshield. As much as the passenger next to you might think he can explain what's going on outside your Neon, he sees only as well as you do. Guessing helps not at all.

Two things might assist. You could get a call from someone outside who has a clear view of what's going on. Or you could turn on the defrost and melt the frost (I guess you could get out and scrape the windshield, too, but that would ruin my analogy).

With regard to global warming, the only one external to this big blue marble upon which we're riding is God Almighty. He has told us plainly to steward the earth. He destroyed it once before by flood but promised never to do that again (by flood, anyway). Nothing within prophecy seems to indicate the demise of the earth either by man's hand or God's. From my chair, it seems man's stewardship of the earth, for the most part, is pretty good.

For those of us within the car (living within the car), it's tough to say. Ice cores from the poles have so many presuppositions that if any one of them is not right, the resulting conclusions could be 180-out. What was the temperature in Minsk like from 2000 BC to 1500 BC? Ummm...

The consensus regarding global warming is that there is no consensus. Many would have us believe that no educated person could possibly deny that we are destroying the planet, but that is simply not the case. So what's a sane person to do? Turn on the defrost.

The best that we can do, since we're not likely to determine whether global warming or global cooling is in our future, is to ask smart questions about the premises, presuppositions and conclusions about those who are certain about what's happening outside the car.

Regis Nicoll analyzed the PP&C of those pushing us to adopt the Kyoto Accords, extreme environmental government impositions to somehow reduce the heating affect upon the planet. In his article (linked here), he asked six great questions that stewards like you and me can ask about the soothsayers who see environmental catastrophe over our horizon. Here they are:

1. Is the earth warming?
2. Is warming an overall bad thing?
3. Is human activity the primary cause?
4. Would forced standards sufficiently reduce global temperatures?
5. Would they be cost-effective?
6. Would forced standards not create more—or more severe—problems than they solve?

He handles his questions in greater depth in the article. What such questions expose is that the fellow sitting next to you can't see out the window any better than you can. Perhaps the questions might defrost the issue a bit and help us all see things a bit more clearly.

Photos:
Frost from www.wunderground.com
Sun from NASA.gov