by MICHAEL BARONE December 27, 2016 12:00 AM @MICHAELBARONE Unlock Free Digital Access
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443345/donald-trump-climate-change-entitlement-reform-action-torpedoed
He’s on particularly strong ground on climate change. Global-warming alarmists proclaim that their dire scenarios are certain to occur, and they would be clearly right if the only thing affecting temperatures were carbon dioxide emissions. But many other things (e.g., the sun) affect climate as well, and the interactions among them and their differing effects are not fully understood, as the failure of climate scientists’ models to explain past observations shows. Liberal elites tell us that “the science is settled” and that people must have faith in their predictions. But science is never settled. Scientists produce theories and test them against observations. When Albert Einstein announced his relativity theory in 1905, he didn’t ask people to have faith. He claimed that his theory would do a better job than Isaac Newton’s of predicting observations in a solar eclipse in 1919. It is religion, not science, that demands that people have faith in things that otherwise seem unlikely, brands those who do not as “heretics” and “deniers,” requires participation in repeated rituals (recycling, anyone?), and permits sinners to purchase indulgences (carbon offsets for Al Gore’s private jet). The sensible thing to do about possible climate change is to learn more, to fund research (and not just by believers in the alarmist faith), to think seriously about how to mitigate possible bad effects — and to take advantage of possible good ones. (I grew up in Michigan, where I would have been happy to experience a little warming.) In the meantime, we are not going to be bound by the Paris climate agreement and we are not going to phase out fossil fuels. We may even stop harassing “heretics” and “deniers,” at least for the next four years. We are not going to be bound by the Paris climate agreement and we are not going to phase out fossil fuels. Conservative elites’ concern about entitlements is based on solider numbers than liberal elites’ concern about climate. We know just about how many Americans will turn 67 in 2082 (they were born last year), and we can make reasonably good estimates of how many immigrants will. We also have a pretty good idea of how much Social Security beneficiaries will be entitled to then — though we have a somewhat less firm idea of how many people will be in the workforce paying taxes and less firm estimates of Medicare costs.
Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443345/donald-trump-climate-change-entitlement-reform-action-torpedoed
