Beware of global warming climate change climate disruption!
Global warming is rapidly turning America the beautiful into America the stormy, sneezy and dangerous, according to a new federal scientific report. And those shining seas? Rising and costly, the report says.
Climate change’s assorted harms “are expected to become increasingly disruptive across the nation throughout this century and beyond,” the National Climate Assessment concluded Tuesday. The report emphasizes how warming and its all-too-wild weather are changing daily lives, even using the phrase “climate disruption” as another way of saying global warming.
Still, it’s not too late to prevent the worst of climate change, says the 840-page report, which the White House is highlighting as it tries to jump-start often stalled efforts to curb heat-trapping gases.
They can keep changing the name all they want, it's still crap. It's not too late! Just give over your whole life and all your money to the government.
Today's recommended reading: Mona Charen's column on the stunning news that saturated fats aren't really the health problem we've always been told they are:
Arguably, the health establishment's embrace of the wrong ideas about nutrition have made the U.S. fatter and sicker than we might otherwise have been. We've increased our consumption of carbohydrates by 25 percent since the 1970s, which may be the reason that Type 2 diabetes is reaching epidemic levels. The switch to vegetable oil from butter and lard may have increased rates of cancer and Alzheimer's disease.
The moral of this story is not to ignore science but to stay skeptical. The scientific method remains the best way yet devised to ascertain truth. But the scientific establishment is hardly immune to politics, fads, bias and self-interest. Bad science is endemic. As The Economist magazine noted in October, "half of all published research cannot be replicated ... and that may be optimistic."
Our experience with nutrition science over the past half-century should arm us with doubt about climate science, too. The point is not to ignore scientific data but to treat all studies, models and predictions with a degree of skepticism. Don't accept the argument from authority: That the entire medical establishment endorsed the war on saturated fat did not make it true.
