The Great Harold Lewis Resignation Non-Event.

I followed the global warming discussions, back when it was a true controversy among climatologists, probably from about 1980 to some time in the 90s -- casually, not being invested one way or the other -- picking up Scientific American in the doctor's office or when I was in a library.  Like other scientific debates it went from "Hey, some people think this and have this evidence" to "Looks rather convincing" to Yeah, but ..." to "Yeah, it's probably true" to "Everybody who can read the literature is convinced". It was a normal scientific debate, it went from speculations to apparent solidity much the same way the continental drift debate went a couple of decades earlier. Now I did, just the other day, see a guy in a ballcap that "Stop Plate Tectonics", but I suspect he was being ironic. Climate change didn't seem particularly political back then. When did it turn into the supposed giant conspiracy?

Hal Lewis may be quite competent for an ex-physics professor of no great distinction who's been retired probably 20 years, or he may be losing his marbles. It's not uncommon at that age for even truly brilliant people to get somewhat obsessed with how bizarrely different the world looks from when they were young and think it's all going to Hell in a hand-basket. Hell it's hard for me to think about "hooking up", and it pains me to hear someone say "one of the only" -- an expression people didn't use 15-20 years ago (It is tending to replace "One of the few").


Prof. Lewis's resignation, over what he regards as the "AGW Hoax" just strikes me as hardly newsworthy.  So when people declaim "The MSM is suppressing this very important event", because they aren't making a big deal of it, while Rush Limbaugh mentions it several times a day, it makes me wonder "What's up with that" to coin a phrase.

Over the years, I've examined several stories that went viral on anti-liberal blogs, that supposedly put the "final nail in the coffin of AGW". And each one seemed to depend on weak arguments, or misunderstanding what some scientist said, or the old standby, beating up on Al Gore.

The "Cap and Trade" idea, which has been operating in the northeastern states based on state laws for some years now, is a sort of artificial market. The right to emit X tons of carbon into the atmosphere is no more nor less of an artificial market than all the various forms of "Intellectual Property". It's an idea thought up by people who long ago bought into the idea that markets can make things happen that central planning would make a mess of.

Waste disposal is and always has been problematic for the most simple and obvious sort of market system. If my local government wants to charge me $10 to pick up the TV I want to put on the curb, I'll be tempted to put it in somebody else's dumpster or something. People used to use any old spot in the woods, and probably still do in parts of WV, where I grew up.

Political parties usually lie to get voted into office, not to get voted out. So why are most liberals holding on to the need to do something about global warming? My theory is it's because they believe in it and can't in conscience claim not to. The alternative sounds to me like cartoon logic, like Crabby Appleseed ("rotten to the core") wants to steal all the snow in the world or some such, as happened in cartoons I watched decades ago, which for some people must have served as lessons in how the world works.