Thursday, April 10, 2008

Dennis Prager on Global Warming Fears

Dennis Prager wrote a column for Real Clear Politics way back in June of 2006, explaining why liberals are more afraid of global warming than conservatives are. I would have included this in my post about changing climate change, but that post was reaching critical mass.

Observers of contemporary society will surely have noted that a liberal is far more likely to fear global warming than a conservative. Why is this?

After all, if the science is as conclusive as Al Gore, Time, Newsweek, The New York Times and virtually every other spokesman of the Left says it is, conservatives are just as likely to be scorched and drowned and otherwise done in by global warming as liberals will. So why aren't non-leftists nearly as exercised as leftists are? Do conservatives handle heat better? Are libertarians better swimmers? Do religious people love their children less?

He's right, of course. Disaster doesn't save itself for the deserving and spare the undeserving. It hits everyone in its path. What Prager discovered is six likely explanations for the Left's alarm:

-- The Left is prone to hysteria. The belief that global warming will destroy the world is but one of many hysterical notions held on the Left.

-- The Left believes that if The New York Times and other liberal news sources report something, it is true. If the cover of Time magazine says, "Global Warming: Be Worried, Very Worried," liberals get worried, very worried, about global warming.

-- The Left believes in experts. But for liberals, "expert" has come to mean far more than greater knowledge in a given area. It now means two additional things: One is that non-experts should defer to experts not only on matters of knowledge, but on matters of policy, as well. The second is that experts possess greater wisdom about life, not merely greater knowledge in their area of expertise.

-- People who don't confront the greatest evils will confront far lesser ones. The Right tends to fight human evil such as communism and Islamic totalitarianism. The Left avoids confronting such evils and concentrates its attention instead on socioeconomic inequality, environmental problems and capitalism. Global warming meets all three of these criteria of evil.

-- The Left is far more likely to revere, even worship, nature. A threat to the environment is regarded by many on the Left as a threat to what is most sacred to them, and therefore deemed to be the greatest threat humanity faces.

-- Leftists tend to fear dying more. That is one reason they are more exercised about our waging war against evil than about the evils committed by those we fight. The number of Iraqis and others Saddam Hussein murdered troubles the Left considerably less than even the remote possibility than they may one day die of global warming (or secondhand smoke).

It's a great column, with more examples and analysis than I excerpted here. This is his conclusion:

One day, our grandchildren may ask us what we did when Islamic fascism threatened the free world. Some of us will say we were preoccupied with fighting that threat wherever possible; others will be able to say they fought carbon dioxide emissions. One of us will look bad.

4 comments:

Malott said...

"but that post was reaching critical mass..."

Yes it reaches critical mass and the next thing you know I'm seeing your posts leaking into "The Right Perspective" and "You Heard it Here..."

Great posts on global warming... Or the lack thereof.

Tsofah said...

Kudo's to Prager!

SIGH...guess we've a new religion started here, since mankind has messed up so much and all.

Takes G-d out of the equation, keeps us from being accountable to Him, if we think man's actions control the weather and not Him.

From now on, any change good or bad, is because of Global Warming.

Huh. Reminds me of the guy with yellow feathers squawking, "The sky is falling, the sky is fal...."

yeah, call me cynical...but I'm right! :-) ;-)

SkyePuppy said...

Tsofah,

Your "sky is falling" comment reminded me of a T-shirt a bunch of us at work bought right after Mt. St. Helens exploded in 1980. It said, "Chicken Little was right," and had a picture of the mountain and the ash cloud and a chicken jumping up and down.

Funny, but the men at work didn't get it, and the women had to explain it to them...

These days, it's the Left that does all the squawking.

SkyePuppy said...

By the way, did you two look at the second-to-last link in my Climate Change post (2nd link from the bottom)? It's long, but it has lots of pictures (OK, they're charts and graphs).

Chris, the chart on page 16 says that you're going to need a greenhouse over your garden within the next 10 years. So you might want to start saving your pennies now...