Climatologist puts boot into 'Green' Vanity (un)Fair
Climatologist Roy W. Spencer is principal research scientist at the Global Hydrology and Climate Center of the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala. Here is an excerpt from an article written by Spencer and published at National Review in which he responds to the recent eco-issue of Vanity Fair (see previous posting):
And what about those poster children for the global warming cause, the world’s poor? The latest U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report claims that they are the most vulnerable to climate change. Even if man-induced climate change does end up being serious, the biggest threat to the poor will remain poverty. Alleviating poverty requires access to affordable energy, as well as the political and economic freedom to benefit from one’s own hard work and good ideas.
It is technology that improves the living conditions of the poor, and it is technology that will provide the only practical solution to global warming. “But technology caused the problem in the first place!” many environmentalists object. When environmentalists demonstrate their willingness to forsake the many benefits of modern technological progress, I’ll take them seriously.
I have to wonder how much the writers for Vanity Fair actually know about potential real solutions to the global-warming problem. When you live in a world without physical cause and effect, where the benefits of modern life are self-existent and where pollution is nothing more than a bad choice someone else has made, maybe all you need are good intentions and creative-writing skills.
Only in a country as technologically advanced, yet as scientifically and economically illiterate, as the United States do we find such mindless hypocrisy masquerading as “environmental awareness” and “eco-justice.” Devoting column inches to an environmental version of Dante’s Hell containing, among others, George W. Bush might help sell more copies of Vanity Fair, but it is not much more than thinly disguised tabloid propaganda.
Peter C Glover
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