So far, conservatives have been pleasantly surprised by Obama’s foreign policy and national security nominations. He kept Gates at Defense and named General Jones as National Security Advisor. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State is not exactly a conservative choice but it could have been worse. Some of his campaign advisors were pretty odd. Now we are starting to see his domestic policy nominations and his leftist roots are showing. His choice for science advisor is an old fashioned eco-nut.
The Anthropogenic Global Warming movement has elements of a New Age religion. Even though the bona fides of the advocates have been debunked, the main stream media is oblivious to skeptics. This is not a good sign.
Here is more on him. Ugh !
Dr. Holdren, now a physicist at Harvard, was one of the experts in natural resources whom Paul Ehrlich enlisted in his famous bet against the economist Julian Simon during the “energy crisis” of the 1980s. Dr. Simon, who disagreed with environmentalists’ predictions of a new “age of scarcity” of natural resources, offered to bet that any natural resource would be cheaper at any date in the future. Dr. Ehrlich accepted the challenge and asked Dr. Holdren, then the co-director of the graduate program in energy and
resources at the University of California, Berkeley, and another Berkeley professor, John Harte, for help in choosing which resources would become scarce.
In 1980 Dr. Holdren helped select five metals — chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten — and joined Dr. Ehrlich and Dr. Harte in betting $1,000 that those metals would be more expensive ten years later. They turned out to be wrong on all five metals, and had to pay up when the bet came due in 1990.
I’ve worried about this before.
Tags: global warming, Obama, science
The question of AGW is one of science. However, the politics of AGW predispose how one views it. The science of AGW is both incredibly complex and effectively untestable. At least as to how AGW may impact local climates. No one really knows with certainty. However, AGW greatly appeals to those with a desire to re-distribute income globally, or even, less ambitiously, acrete regulatory power to central governments. Thus, to liberal minds, AGW provides the rationale for “doing good” writ large.
The economic crisis is well on it’s way to providing a deux ex machina for liberal overreaching as the impact will be up close and personal in ways AGW’ers could only dream about. Mike, we are about to enter a brave new world….
biglizards has some interesting views on this that are a bit off the beaten path.