Of Public Policy and Fairy Tales...

I recently heard that Governor Pawlenty will meet up with the esteemed explorer Will Steeger on an excursion to the Arctic Circle this spring, to engage in a "global warming" fact finding mission (h/t AAA). Steeger reportedly plans to explore the Arctic as a means to prove that the actions of the human race are having a detrimental effect on the earth's climate.


If Governor Pawlenty and Mr. Steeger would have checked, they may have found out that someone already performed that mission:

"A considerable change of climate inexplicable at present to us must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been, during the last two years, greatly abated."

"2000 square leagues of ice with which the Greenland Seas between the latitudes of 74° and 80°N have been hitherto covered, has in the last two years entirely disappeared."

"The floods which have the whole summer inundated all those parts of Germany where rivers have their sources in snowy mountains, afford ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened ..."

Yes, someone had already noted this problem with global warming. The Royal Society, London. Nov. 20, 1817; Minutes of Council, Vol. 8. pp.149-153, to be exact.


Well before the age of industrialization; well before the age of the internal combustion engine, there has been global warming. And global cooling. And there will continue to be periods of global warming, and global cooling, as long as there will be a planet earth. To be so audacious as to say that the actions of man have an impact on global warming, or any kind of climate change that has been happening independently of man since time immemorial is the stuff of fairy tales.


Now, I have nothing against fairy tales. I used to tell them to my kids all the time.


But when fairy tales become the basis for public policy as a means to forward socialism, that's where Governor Pawlenty, Mr. Steeger, and myself must part ways.


To put it in fairy tale terms, The Emperor Has No Clothes.