A few weeks ago I read somewhere that if all of the ice cap on Greenland melted the oceans would rise 21 feet.

My initial reaction was disbelief. I quickly calculated in my head that it would only be a few inches. It turns out that I was wrong. Later I got some data from my Rand McNally Atlas and did the math and with worst-case assumptions I had the oceans rising 50 feet. With best case assumptions the oceans would still rise 20 feet. My friend David B., who is much more diligent than me, calculated that the rise would be 24.42 feet confirmed the data. So why was I so wrong?
First I am an extreme skeptic about global warming. I’m not convinced that the world is warming at all outside of its normal cycle. The reported rise may be the result of new instrumentation. I’m also not convinced that if global warming is happening humans cause it. And I am certainly not convinced that we should have the hubris to try and do anything about it. So it is easy to see that I was wrong about the mathematical effect of the ice cap on Greenland melting because I am looking for support for my “confirmation bias.”

There is another reason however. The environmentalist movement, that is now acting like “Henny Penny” about global warming, was the same group who were so “magnificently wrong” about DDT and about nuclear power. DDT was banned after Rachel Carson wrote “Silent Spring” linking DDT use to decreases in the number of birds. It now turns out that according to the Wall Street Journal a lot of the data Carson used was not correct and that DDT is the only economically effective way of controlling the spread of malaria in Africa and Asia. Tens of millions of children have died from malaria in the third world since DDT was banned.
Construction of nuclear power plants was stopped in the United States in the 1970’s as a result of “Three Mile Island”, where no one was killed and an active campus based political movement to stop building nuclear plants. The result is that the United States is now dependent on fossil fuels for 75% of its electricity while the French are making 80% plus of their electricity with nuclear power. With hindsight which policy seems to be wiser. Which policy, nuclear energy or no nuclear energy, would lower carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Which one would make a nation less dependent on imported oil?
These bad decisions by the environmental movement don’t show malfeasance, they only show that it is hard to choose policies that will stand the test of time. Cutting our standard of living now to try to affect the earth’s temperature at some point in the future seems to me to be another one of these bad choices.

If you doubt that the global warming movement is asking us to cut our standard of living read the last line of this story in the Pasadena Star News. The City Manager says that it will cost $100,000 a year to add a junior planner to make it possible for Pasadena to comply with the Kyoto protocol. One hundred thousand dollars is a cost of about $1.40 for each family in Pasadena. It means one less ice cream treat for a lot of children. Environmental conformity has a real current cost and an uncertain future benefit.