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Climate of Opinion - WSJ.com

I think about Global Warming from the point of view of one who experienced and was deeply moved by both the ecstasy and later the agony associated with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" in 1962 and The Club of Rome's dire predictions in their 1972 classic "Limits To Growth." Since those early days, I've also had many debates with both; (a) my friends who some call "radical" environmentalists, and (b) the hard core conservatives I also hang around with. I find myself in the middle.

That's why Jenkins article in the WSJ today struck a nerve with me. Few of us have the time to do the hard science (even if we are capable of it) and so; 'Who are we to believe about Global Warming and the like?' I believed Rachel Carson back in the 1960's because I wanted to believe her. And, because I had personal experience with being doused with DDT as a child from government trucks that rolled through our neighborhood and smoke-bombed us. How could that be "good" I reasoned and so reinforced the image she was conveying. But it turns out that she was basically wrong about most of the evils of synthetic chemicals and hundreds of millions of people are not dying of malaria around the world because DDT actually works with few side effects.

In my opinion, the difference between Rachel Carlson and many modern environmentalists is that she was basically sincere and simply didn't have all the facts at the time. As Bjørn Lomborg pointed out in his book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" and as Jenkins alludes to in his article today, too many environmentalists make "selective and misleading use of scientific data to influence decisions about the allocation of limited resources." And when we discover this, it does make us skeptical and we don't know who to believe.

I'm basically in Peter Huber's camp. I believe there are environmental problems and they need to be addressed but in a reasoned and measured way that doesn't wreck the global economy in the process. What makes sense to me is common sense, pro-active values like; promoting conservation, good stewardship, incentives for technological innovation, etc. as opposed to exaggerating the crisis and calling for excessive governmental regulation and controls that are only likely to compound the problem.

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