Climate change is all about power

November 7, 9:06 AMDallas Libertarian ExaminerGarry Reed

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"Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it." – Mark Twain
"No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while Congress is in session" – Mark Twain

Argentina's Perito Moreno glacier advances despite global warming –
headline from Associated Press article, June 15, 2009.
(Natacha Pisarenko/AP photo)

On November 6, The Market Oracle posted Robert Murphy's lengthy article, "Freaking Out over Global Warming," a review of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's book Super Freakonomics

The whole argument in the book and in the review seems to be centered on the science and economics of climate change.

Unfortunately, climate change isn't about science. Climate change quit being about science almost from the beginning.

Climate change is about raw, naked, unabashed political power.

Climate change isn't, and has never been, about economics either.

Proponents of raw, naked, unabashed political power don't care about science or about economics.

Originally, the climate changers began howling about the Coming Ice Age. First a frozen global hell was proclaimed, and then the proclaimers went looking for "science" to prove their proclamations. They had books to sell and interviews to do and power to accumulate and careers to build and reputations to make and egos to inflate.

When the time of the Coming Ice Age came and went and nothing froze over they turned the thermometer upside down. No more Coming Ice Age. Coming Global Warming.

But it still was never really science. The "scientific consensus" was built on scientific conjecture and flawed computer modeling and government bribe money and true believer's wishful thinking and the virulent human-hating of the environmental messiahs.

A "scientific consensus" is not science. "Consensus" is a political word. Politicians reach "Consensus." Scientists reach "factual conclusions" based on evidence, no matter what the politicians or the opportunists or the true believers want them to reach.

Cherry picking scientific data is not science. Cherry picking is political. Yes, the other side, the warming deniers, can also be charged with cherry picking evidence to prove that man-made climate change is bogus. But that just strengthens the argument; cherry picking, no matter who does it, or why it's done, is not science. It's still just politics.

Once any issue becomes politicized its no longer about that issue. It's then all about politics, and politics is always about power.

Government healthcare isn't about health, it's about power. The drug war isn't about drugs, it's about power. The government takeover of banking and lending institutions isn't about the economy, it's about power. Environmentalism isn't about the environment, it's about power.

Capitalism has won in every successful country in the world except in America where it's maligned and attacked and crippled. Our society, in ways it never should have been, has become deeply politicized, which means it's not about freedom and markets and trade and prosperity, it's about power.

And it's also why libertarians should be worried about the Libertarian Party. Is it really about libertarianism, or is it really just all about the Party?

The only way to ever know if anything is true about climate change is to totally divorce the science from everyone and everything that could possibly benefit from it in any way.

And it's also true about everything else that's been politicized.

Today we can merge Mark Twain's two amusing quotes:

"When power-mad politicians pretend they can do anything about the weather no man's life, liberty, or property is safe."