By Dr. Harold A. Black
blackh@knoxfocus.com
haroldblackphd.com
I have lunch once a month with a close friend who thinks Biden is doing a great job. We agree on very little. Although we both think the education industrial complex does everything but teach reading, writing and arithmetic, he favors “teaching” critical race theory. I don’t. He opposes charter schools. He thinks climate change is an existential threat and cites current weather as justification. He fears for the planet. I told him that I am in the middle. I am not a denier but I am not a zealot. You cannot infer anything about climate change from today’s weather. He thinks global warming is “settled science.” I told him there is no such thing and that there is a large literature from agnostic scientists – including a Nobel Laureate in physics – who have found otherwise. Much like the Hunter Biden laptop and COVID, the mainstream press, social media and many “scientific” journals have chosen not to publish contrary opinions and research. I told him of the falsification of climate data by British scientists and how US government agencies have fudged the numbers. I mentioned that I published an econometric paper that confirmed two conflicting hypotheses using the same model and the same data set. I told him of the research that showed that over 50 percent of the scientific empirical work in several disciplines have been shown to be false. Didn’t the president of Sanford recently resign when it was discovered that his research was not original? It should come as no surprise that the scientists whose research was funded by Dr. Fauci dismiss the assertion that COVID originated in the Wuhan lab. Eminent scholars reach different conclusions analyzing the same data. Dissect their models, the choice of data, the choice of data period and the statistical technique and make a decision as to the efficacy of each. My friend rejects contrary evidence out of hand.
But my training makes me a skeptic. Even if the earth’s temperature is 1 degree higher, is that a bad thing? Certainly more people die from exposure to cold than to heat so a little warming may not be a bad thing. If the oceans rise, can’t we adapt much like the Dutch? Some have argued that more carbon dioxide is a good thing. Doesn’t the earth heal itself? Even the assertion that climate change is manmade is disputed. One thing is clear to me. I believe that China is funding the radical environmentalists like Just Stop Oil and groups like Black Lives Matter. Both endorse policies aimed at weakening western countries while enriching China. The Chinese make all the sympathetic clucking noises regarding the Paris Accord while building coal plants. The Accord will fail anyway because neither China nor India will sacrifice economic development to satisfy the global warming crowd who enrich themselves and their buddies at the expense of their citizens,
Biden’s industrial policy where the politicians pick the winners and losers will also fail. Industrial policy always results in poor choices based on political favors trying to force products down consumers’ throats. The political choices kill alternatives and result in less innovation and efficiency much like the politicians choosing catalytic converters over a simpler, cheaper, more efficient system pioneered by Honda. It is also true that “renewable” energy such as wind farms and solar panels are costly to the environment and highly inefficient. It is also true that EV batteries are more damaging to the environment than fossil fuels. Nickle and cobalt mining are ecological disasters. Windmills kill birds onshore and sea mammals offshore. Solar panels present a disposal nightmare. All the mandates coming from the Biden administration to get rid of today’s gas stoves, dishwashers, furnaces, lawn equipment, gas powered vehicles will only make us worse off economically without any net benefit to the environment. Indeed, I just read a study that said that because of the sun and axial tilt of the earth, that the one degree increase in temperature was baked in and would not change even if all of the actions of the overlords in the western world were enacted. So pardon me if I think all this climate stuff is just because politicians love imposing their dictates on the rest of us as a power grab while enriching themselves and handing out subsidies to their green donors.
