Walter Russell Mead is always worth reading. Now he has written
a two-part essay on Al Gore and the climate debate (part one; part two) that is, I think, very perceptive.
It is angry, hard-hitting, and I don't agree with everything in it,
but it somehow gets to to the core of the issue in a way that so
much other commentary has not. This is the sort of old-fashioned
polemic from somebody with historical perspective that has been
lacking on this subject. Here's his conclusion:
The green movement's core tactic is not to
"hide the decline" or otherwise to cook the books of science.
Its core tactic to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and
obviously impractical political program in the authority of
science. Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety
construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the
greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first
century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.
