When looking around for articles on Global Warming, I ran into something very different, but thought it valuable to share. As conservatives, we value the free market and reject government intervention in the economy. Our detractors often interpret this as a strict love of money and imagine this leads to everyone trying to cheat everyone else to gain any monetary advantage possible. For example, they claim that without food safety laws, our food producers would poison us to make a little more money. (Think Melamine in the milk.) My response is that these acts of deceit are quickly revealed and, even though some short-term gain is made, the resulting loss of trust more than cancels that gain. John A. Baden, Ph.D. wrote about this (and its converse - building trust) in his article, "Building Trust as an Asset". Read, enjoy, comment.
Okay, that's a sensational headline, but there's some good articles that've come out backing up the conservative idea that maybe there's not global warming. First, from mises.org, David Evans asks "Are Carbon Emissions the Cause of Global Warming?". He shows the problems in 1) the ice core data, 2) the missing greenhouse signature and 3) the IPCC models. Secondly, a more mainstream article in the UK Telegraph gave me the headline above: "2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved". In it, Christopher Booker goes through the failure of computer models, the cracks in the supposed "consensus" and how the current economic crisis has revealed many grandiose projects to "save the world" as not providing benefit appopriate their cost. I'm happy we're not falling into this trap that leads pretty straight to a world government policing carbon emissions in every country.
Clay Shirky gives a great presentation on an internet/technical phenomenon that is transforming the software industry. Watch the video for the details, but a key idea is "With love, you can organize a birthday party. With love and collaborative tools, you can build an operating system." We've got a lot of love for the conservative movement, but what are we doing to share that love with others in our group? How are we helping each other stay on top of issues? What tiny piece of effort do we contribute? Enough snowflakes of effort make an avalanche. It looks like we'll need an avalanche to wipe away the problems our government is creating.
