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John McCain's Assault on Reason

Last week, Al Gore made headlines when he blamed the Burmese cyclone on (what else?) global warming.

"And as we're talking today ... the death count in Myanmar from the cyclone that hit there yesterday has been rising from 15,000 to way on up there to much higher numbers now being speculated," Gore said on NPR (while being interviewed about the paperback release of his book "The Assault on Reason"). "And last year a catastrophic storm last fall hit Bangladesh. The year before, the strongest cyclone in more than 50 years hit China -- and we're seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming."

For a man of reason, Gore sounded awfully Old Testament on that one. A cyclone hits in Burma? The wrath of global warming. A storm in Bangladesh? Global warming strikes again.

This week, John McCain signaled he is getting the GOP into bed with Gore and the Democratic Party on the issue: His highly publicized speech in Portland, Ore., on global warming endorsed mandantory caps on greenhouse gas emissions as (the McCain touch) a question of personal honor:

"I will not shirk the mantle of leadership that the United States bears. I will not permit eight long years to pass without serious action on serious challenges."

If he were talking about the looming Social Security/Medicare crisis, I would at least give him credit for courage in defense of reason, even if I disagreed with his prescriptions.

But by joining those who define economic growth as a serious threat to human beings, McCain has disabled effective public opposition on the issue, even as the scientific case for controlling carbon emissions appears on the verge of weakening. Not that it matters.

Because for Gore and his ilk, one wonders: Is global warming really a scientific proposition or is it a new religious faith?

I have nothing against religious faith, but scientific propositions have one particular characteristic: They are falsifiable -- that is, one can specify the set of empirical observations that would prove that your favorite theory is not true.

Global warming, no doubt a scientific theory for some people, appears to be metastasizing on the world stage -- with a push from Al Gore -- into an all-purpose explanation for human suffering, driven by human sin. More than 30,000 dead in Myanmar? They died because of our greedy human inability to contain our appetite for carbon emissions.

The interruption in the increases in global temperatures observable this year may just be a glitch -- a temporary and localized weather phenomenon -- but it is happening even as carbon emissions have increased more dramatically than the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's "worst-case" scenarios estimated in 2000. A new press release from the Earth Policy Institute notes, "With CO2 emissions currently exceeding the worst-case scenario, we can expect that temperature and sea level rise will likely do the same."

Except that a new study in the journal Nature predicts that global warming will halt (and global cooling may begin) for the next decade due to what the authors describe as "localized" weather conditions -- but the authors say that should not halt our faith that continued carbon emissions spell disaster for the planet.

Here's my question: If 10 years of global cooling while carbon emissions increase dramatically does not falsify the global warming disaster scenario, what could?

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