A redacted version of a Facebook entry from about a year ago.
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He who does not know is inclined to pretend. A world of ignorance is a world of bluster. One species thereof is climate bluster. "The science is settled!" It is not. What is settled, but only among leftists, is climate ideology. An ideology is a system of action-guiding beliefs. Beliefs needn't be true to guide and misguide action.
What drives climate ideology is hostility to individual liberty and its sine qua non, private property and free markets. Climate alarmism is part of the Left's socialist and totalitarian agenda. The ideological nature of the alarmism is betrayed in more than one way. One way is by the refusal of leftists to proffer an honest characterization of what they mean by 'climate change.' That there is climate change is a truism. But they are pushing either a falsehood or an extremely dubious thesis. Objective truth and its subjective correlate, truthfulness, are not their concerns: leftists are out for power. Their aims are practical, not theoretical: to change the world, not to understand it. (Marx) Ameliorative change presupposes understanding. The truth must take the lead. Leftists have it backwards: the truth is whatever empowers the agents of the agenda who aim to impose their will on reality (Nietzsche).
Note the obfuscatory tactic: smuggle a substantive but extremely dubious claim under cover of the truism that climate changes. Intellectual honesty is not a mark of ideologues. It cannot be since 'truth' is whatever is dictated by the needs of power. Another intellectually dishonest tactic employed by leftists is to accuse doubters of being deniers with such smears as 'climate denialism' when it is clear that to doubt a proposition is not to deny it. But the truth I just enunciated will be ignored by those for whom truth is not a binding norm.
Leftists mean by 'climate change' the conjunction of the following distinct claims. The Earth's climate is changing. The change is irreversibly in the direction of higher and higher temperatures of the Earth's oceans and land masses. The change is catastrophic for life on Earth. It is so catastrophic that extreme measures must be taken immediately, for example, the measures outlined in "The Green New Deal." The catastrophic change is imminent or near-imminent: such as to occur in 10-15 years. The etiology of this catastrophic change is well-understood. It is largely man-made: the anthropogenic causal factors are not minor, but major: they dwarf non-anthropogenic factors such as solar activity. The specific cause of anthropogenic climate change is also well-understood: carbon emissions.
Now ask yourself: Are each of these claims individually plausible? No. Only the first is. And how plausible is this conjunction of claims? It is bound to be less plausible than the least plausible of them. I humbly suggest that the Left's climate bluster is a lot of hot air.
Should we reduce carbon emissions? Yes. And explore alternative sources of energy? Absolutely.
What you have to understand is that for the Left, the (apparent) issue is never or hardly ever the (real) issue. Leftists will make a crisis out of anything if it can be used to attack individual liberty and the private property and free markets that are its foundation. The real issue and goal is a "fundamental transformation" (Obama) of the USA into a socialist state.
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