Twilight of the Climate Change Movement....

This essay at The American Interest blog takes a peek at the climate wars.  First, the author suggests we take the long view:

It’s an amusing irony that fears of global warming have arisen during what is technically an ice age, namely the Pleistocene Ice Age, which began about 2.6 million years ago. A geological “ice age” typically lasts millions of years and is characterized by cycles of glaciation, during which glaciers grow and oceans recede, punctuated by warmer interglacial periods, in which glaciers recede and oceans rise—such as the current Holocene interglacial, in which human civilization has flourished.

The history major in me is comfortable with the long view.  Besides, the composition of much of the soil in our county is a direct result of the Late Wisconsin glaciation.  When you contemplate that our neighborhood was under a vast sheet of ice only 20,000 years ago, the thought occurs that warming may not be such a bad thing.

Our essayist then takes pains to note the politics involved in the whole controversy, suggesting that some folks may be using the "crisis" to advance their own unspoken agendas.  Color me shocked. 

 Moving on, these two paragraphs were among my favorites:

Imagine something that is entirely possible—that a single such technological breakthrough enables us to control the world’s average temperatures. Could we then agree on what the ideal temperature should be? Is the current global average temperature the ideal one? Many would take that for granted, and climate alarmists appear to presuppose it, but the proposition is hardly self-evident. That is especially true given that even in the worst-case scenario, higher temperatures would not be completely devoid of benefits. Far more people die of cold than of heat. Marginally higher temperatures and carbon dioxide levels would likely increase the world’s overall production of plant biomass, and lengthen growing seasons, thereby reducing the proportion of the world’s land required for agricultural production and increasing the amount of land available for high-quality natural habitat.

To read the IPCC reports, alarmists find the idea of adapting to climate change far less satisfying than the idea of preventing it. But their focus on worldwide economic controls boils down to a kind of climate engineering, because it presupposes that humanity should not learn to live with a changing planet. Hence we are to believe that the most adaptable species that has ever existed, a species so sophisticated that it can survive in outer space, requires an absolutely stable average temperature and sea-level in order to survive. This defies common sense.