Murray Dobbin Writes the Most Telling Paragraph in the History of the Global Warming Debate

Sometimes they let the mask slip

For years, those skeptical of climate change alarmism (however the alarmists may be defining the change) have been told that the debate over the matter was settled. Moreover, they were told that the alarmists were merely acting in the global pulbic interest, and that the skepticism of those skeptics was an obstacle to, quite literally, saving the world.

With the alarmist side of the climate change debate increasingly beset by the kind of scandal that can only come when they take the most generous of liberties with the very foundations of scientific discourse, it's simply impossible to put an overabundance of faith in those assertions.

After all, it turns out that the climate change debate may never have been about saving the world at all, only about changing it to the liking of climate change alarmists. The following paragraph from a recend op/ed penned by Murray Dobbin seems to make it rather clear:

"We need to keep reminding ourselves that if we want to inspire people to change the world we have to do more than scare the hell out of them. The issue of global warming is becoming less and less important to Americans (I haven't seen recent polling regarding Canadians) and the reason, according to a couple of prominent environmental analysts, is what they call apocalypse fatigue."

In other words, the arguments of climate alarmists have never been about "saving the world". They've merely been abotu implimenting a specific political agenda, one that encompassed Kyoto, then threatened to run entirely amok at Copenhagen.

Dobbin goes on to write about the decreasing levels of belief in the alleged oncoming apocalypse. He notes that numbers of those who bought into the panic were declining as recently as September 2009 -- before the damning Climategate emails.

But consider how much more revealling Dobbin's admission is if the first two paragraphs of his column are switched in place:

"The numbers are not encouraging. The major increase in public attention and concern brought about by Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth film, and his media blitz, seemed to promise a permanent change in attitude. But according to Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger that concern is rapidly decreasing. 'Belief that global warming is occurring had declined from 71 per cent in April of 2008 to 56 per cent in October [2009] -- an astonishing drop in just 18 months. The belief that global warming is human-caused declined from 47 per cent to 36 per cent.'

We need to keep reminding ourselves that if we want to inspire people to change the world we have to do more than scare the hell out of them. The issue of global warming is becoming less and less important to Americans (I haven't seen recent polling regarding Canadians) and the reason, according to a couple of prominent environmental analysts, is what they call apocalypse fatigue."

What climate alarmists seem to be learning right now is that they can't put the genie back in the bottle -- that they can't coverup their dishonest hubris once its been fully exposed to public scrutiny.

As Murray Dobbin makes clear, climate alarmism isn't about saving the world. It never has been. It's about fear-mongering and politics played to win. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with the latter in and of itself. But the former simply must not be tolerated.