WILLFUL IGNORANCE.

WILLFUL IGNORANCE. Over at the Corner, Jonah Goldberg has apparently made a regular beat out of arguing against taking action to prevent the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change. First, last week, he responded to my mockery of National Review's new "Planet Gore" blog and its undue respect for the delusions of novelist and climate change skeptic Michael Crichton. He wrote:

I'm not an enormous fan of Crichton's either, but let us stipulate that he knows a hell of a lot more, and has done a lot more homework, than the scores of Hollywood airhead environmentalists Adler & Co. never seem to have a problem with. Leonardo DiCaprio, I suppose, has a better grasp of the data? Moreover, Adler might have heard that Crichton and two full-fledged scientists recently beat some leading global warming scientists in a debate.

Leave it to Goldberg to bring the denizens of Hollywood into even the most unrelated discussion. For the record, liberals are concerned about climate change because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA hve issued reports on its dire effects, not because of what Leo DiCaprio thinks. But the difference between DiCaprio and Crichton that Goldberg ignores is that DiCaprio has the modesty to respect the widely-held scientific consensus, which Crichton does not. Goldberg also fails to note that the audience that voted for Crichton's side in that debate was a random collection of people, not a group of climate scientists. Which means it proves absolutely nothing, except that Goldberg/Crichton's side is good at P.R.Not content to make just one illogical attack on those of us who seek to save Goldberg's children as well as our own from the predicted ecological and economic disasters that will occur if present trends continue, Goldberg has kept blogging on the topic. Goldberg wrote a post today that simply quotes a Washington Post article on the difficulties associated with the implementation of the European emissions policy. Goldberg seems to think that this constitutes some compelling case against a cap and trade system in the U.S. It does not. First of all, as the article notes, American senators are looking at the strengths and weaknesses of Europe's system in devising our own policy. Goldberg apparently has no faith in the American ingenuity that might allow us to devise a more effective system (not to mention the fact that we have a more centralized federal government than the E.U. does). Second of all, no one is denying that controlling emissions will exact some cost on consumers in developed countries. The point that Goldberg ignores is that alternative energy programs will also generate economic growth, thus mitigating that fact, while the ultimate costs of letting climate change run amok are estimated to be much higher than the costs of reducing emissions. The fact that much of the country shares Goldberg's short-sightedness is a disaster; it would be great if he would stop reinforcing it.

--Ben Adler