Essays in Idleness

Perhaps it is wrong to paint the “environmentalists” and “climate change” hysterics with the label “Greenies,” as I just did over yesterday’s post. This is because they are enemies not only of human life, joy, and flourishing; and animal life (especially livestock); but also of plant life in its magnificent diversity, including all that grows in forests and farms. Carbon dioxide is, with water, the principal food of our vegetation, which in turn supplies the principal food for our animals. It takes little education to understand this. Carbon dioxide and water are the principal means by which photosynthesis is effected in nature, at levels of sophistication that our technologists have never approached.

The increase in this atmospheric gas, which has certainly happened in recent history and has an unmistakably anthropogenic cause, has a very slight influence upon the weather, and will have none at all above a certain maximum. But it has had dramatic “greenhouse” effects, nonetheless, and is responsible for the remarkable greening of our planet during the same period.

Note the implied contrast: carbon-based fuels and other products, good; environmentalism and environmentalists, evil.

I recommend that the reader, if he has not already, vary the aggressive media diet of lies and impostures on this subject by consulting several of the genuine experts touching the climate field. For instance Richard Lindzen, William Happer, Steven Koonin, Alex Epstein, Patrick Moore, Judith Curry, John Christy, Benny Peiser, are to be sought on the Internet. All of these disagree with the “97 percent of scientists” in the knowingly false media account. All those named have impressive credentials; each knows what he is talking about, and has nothing to add when he knows nothing. Nor have any been bought off by government agencies, nor are they living off “big oil.” Each carries painful scars from the malice of “the Greenies.”