The Global Warming Scare is on the Verge of Joining the Y2K Scare on the Scrapheap of History

The Wall Street Journal has an opinion piece by Robert Bryce entitled "Five Truths About Climate Change." The truths are:

1) The carbon taxers/limiters have lost. Carbon-dioxide emissions have been the environmental issue of the past decade. . . . Copenhagen became the epicenter of a world-wide media frenzy as some 5,000 journalists, along with some 100 world leaders and scores of celebrities, descended on the Danish capital to witness what was billed as the best opportunity to impose a global tax or limit on carbon dioxide.

The result? Nothing, aside from promises by various countries to get serious—really serious—about carbon emissions sometime soon.

Here's a reality check: During the same decade that Mr. Gore and the IPCC dominated the environmental debate, global carbon-dioxide emissions rose by 28.5%.

2) Regardless of whether it's getting hotter or colder—or both—we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.

3) The carbon-dioxide issue is not about the United States anymore. Sure, the U.S. is the world's second-largest energy consumer. But over the past decade, carbon-dioxide emissions in the U.S. fell by 1.7%. And according to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. is now cutting carbon emissions faster than Europe, even though the European Union has instituted an elaborate carbon-trading/pricing scheme. Why? The U.S. is producing vast quantities of cheap natural gas from shale, which is displacing higher-carbon coal.

Meanwhile, China's emissions jumped by 123% over the past decade and now exceed those of the U.S. by more than two billion tons per year. Africa's carbon-dioxide emissions jumped by 30%, Asia's by 44%, and the Middle East's by a whopping 57%. Put another way, over the past decade, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions—about 6.1 billion tons per year—could have gone to zero and yet global emissions still would have gone up.

4) We have to get better—and we are—at turning energy into useful power. In 1882, Thomas Edison's first central power station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan converted less than 3% of the heat energy of the coal being burned into electricity. Today's best natural-gas-fired turbines have thermal efficiencies of 60%.

5) The science is not settled, not by a long shot.

The whole global warming scare has always been about a massive transfer of wealth from first world consumers to third world governments and the moving force behind it has been Communists and Socialists who have transformed themselves into Eco-warriors as a way of obtaining results that could not be obtained in the traditional method of revolutionary action.

It is easily predictable that when the prospects of the global warming scare being a useful tool to accomplish the massive transfer of wealth envisaged through a global tax on financial transactions, then the whole scare will just die out like the Y2K one did after the turn of the century. It was never about science; it has been about politics all along.

Marxism has failed and true Marxists only occasionally show their true colors. In the US even socialism is discredited and such a vote-loser that socialist politicians must play semantic games to hide their true intentions. The environmentalist movement, with its apocalyptic rhetoric and scare tactics, has replaced the class warfare - revolutionary rhetoric.

In both cases the aim is essentially destructive: tear down existing economic structures in the Utopian hope that something better will emerge. For the past several decades Marxism has been hovering on the brink of nihilism and for all practical intents and purposes the distinction between Marxism, radical environmentalism and anarchism has become a distinction without difference.

One of the degenerate forms of 20th century Marxism is the Frankfurt School and its 'Critical Theory.' Whereas formerly socialists denounced capitalism for producing poverty, Critical Theory denounces it for producing abundance, which they label "consumerism" and claim is incompatible with high culture. But the commitment of Critical Theory to high culture is tenuous at best. Critical Theory lumps in Enlightenment rationalism, "positivist" science, logic itself and natural law and calls them totalitarian.

And one can see their point: if there is such a thing as objective truth (be it moral, scientific or logical) then the all-important, exalted, autonomous individual must bow to that fact and acknowledge it. In their romantic striving to get free of the "despotism of logic and mathematics" they stamp their feet and declare their independence of such wicked and inconvenient truths.

Lesek Kolakowski, in his magisterial history of Marxism entitled, Main Currents of Marxism (3 vols.), says something interesting in Part III: Breakdown, Chapter X "The Fankfurt School and 'Critical Theory'" that is extremely relevant to the whole global warming hoax (although he never even mentions global warming in his book). He writes:

The Dialectic of Enlightenment contains all the elements of Marcuse's later attack on modern philosophy, which allegedly favours totalitarianism by maintaining a positivist 'neutralism' in regard to the world of values and by insisting that human knowledge should be controlled by facts. . . the truth of science is subordinated to the criteria of any interest whatsoever; this simply means that anything is right which suits the interests with which the scientist identifies himself." (pp. 1088-9, my bolding)

The sentence in bold print in particular jumped out at me and I wrote in margin "eg. Global Warming." This is obviously the source of the attitude displayed in Climategate and in the sloppy, ideologically driven work of the IPCC. Science has been corrupted by people who have imbibed a corrupt, degenerate, postmodern worldview and whose twisted form of Marxism (they would likely call it 'social justice') justifies them in their manipulation of the data to accomplish what they consider to be a good end.

Kolakowski also says:

Their 'critical theory' is in fact not so much a theory as a general statement that theory is of great importance, which few would deny, and a plea for a critical attitude toward existing society, which we are invited to 'transcend' in thought. This injunction, however, makes no sense as long as they cannot tell us in what direction the existing order is to be transcended. (p. 1090)

Those insiders who know how to read the coded language know that the goal is revolution, but the vagueness allows naive idealists to read in whatever they cherish. The Obama campaign with its vacuous "hope and change" slogan was a prime example of this approach.

Marxism is already intellectually and morally bankrupt and is in the process of becoming an historical curiosity like phrenology or alchemy. Yet its hold on degenerate Western universities remains strong. Increasingly it takes on the trappings and feel of a death cult, as can be seen in the increasingly violent rhetoric of Michael Moore, for example.

Despite, the intellectual bankruptcy of Marxism, however, there will be more dangerous nonsense in the years ahead before the universities can be reformed in accordance with the classical, Western, intellectual tradition embodied in the metaphysics of the Great Tradition. We may soon look back on the 'good old days' when all we had to worry about was global warming alarmism.