Daniel Botkin: Global warming delusions

Two days ago, Prof. Em. Daniel Botkin, the former chairman of environmental studies at University of California in Santa Barbara, the author of many books, and my fellow Rutgers PhD alumnus, wrote an article in in the Wall Street Journal,

Global warming delusions.

He unmasks various myths about the hypothetical negative impacts of assumed warming on life. For example, among the mammals, only a few megafauna species went extinct during the ice ages and interglacials of the last 2.5 million years. Botkin criticizes the idea that models replace reality and their limitations are suddenly ignored.

Warming is not always bad, not all bad things are caused by warming, and Erik the Red would surely agree. ;-)

Botkin explains that the temperature is not really correlated with malaria, ice at Mt. Kilimanjaro, or the favorite holiday destinations of mockingbirds (who really moved to New York City because of the arrival of some exotic plants). He shares the opinion of many other wise men that such warming, if it exists, should be looked at with the help of a careful cost-benefit analysis.

The global warming hacks at RealClimate.ORG are irritated and respond by pointing out the highly relevant assertion that George W. Bush apparently kills people before they disagree with him for the third time (see the conclusions of their article). David Archer also writes that an animal needs millions of years to adapt to climate change (interesting that most animals live for a few years or decades only and their genes haven't changed substantially for millions of years).




Archer reveals that he is afraid of dust bowls more than malaria because "they can destroy civilizations" (interesting that the worst dust bowls occurred in the 1930s not now). Archer insists on previous RC crackpot articles that even denied that we know that melting of the Mt. Kilimanjaro ice cap cannot be reduced to warming. The punch line of Archer's answer is composed of a few additional hateful slogans against the Wall Street Journal and George W. Bush. How the moderate alarmist George W. Bush got into the picture is really beyond me.

It's pretty sad that in the environmental sciences, people like Botkin have been replaced by the likes of Archer - politicized, junk scientists - during the last 20 years. Moreover, the previously third-class science with honest but not exceptional people has turned into a science that claims to be one of the most important ones - as soon as it was overrun by the leftist intellectual trash.

And that's the memo.