Doubt and Belief

are two sides of the same coin: our attempts to achieve knowledge. In the CACC(GW) debate I'm still on the fence. And the recent brouhaha over the hacked emails (I prefer "the CRUtape letters" as a moniker) I'll let others parse their meaning and import before giving anything like a settled opinion.

It's the uneasy feeling that there are agendas behind some the alarmism. The movie clip that was part of the Copenhagen summit has a little girl screaming while holding on to the branch of dead tree and surrounded by raging waters. That creeps me out: "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!".

And I'm reminded that this isn't the only alarmist nonsense that was used to advance radical change in recent history. Who can forget the "Population Bomb"?

Scientists Behaving Badly:

Climate change is a genuine phenomenon, and there is a nontrivial risk of major consequences in the future. Yet the hysteria of the global warming campaigners and their monomaniacal advocacy of absurdly expensive curbs on fossil fuel use have led to a political dead end that will become more apparent with the imminent collapse of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process. I have long expected that 20 or so years from now we will look back on the turn-of-the-millennium climate hysteria in the same way we look back now on the population bomb hysteria of the late 1960s and early 1970s--as a phenomenon whose magnitude and effects were vastly overestimated, and whose proposed solutions were wrongheaded and often genuinely evil

Read the whole thing.

(Via Campaign Standard.)