The Difference between Cats and Dogs

On blogs where I make comments, and in emails with certain friends and colleagues, I've come to a light-blub-realization moment, which I call "The Difference between Cats and Dogs."

The main thrust of that difference is an unwillingness by some of my colleagues to pursue the discussion of an issue when "inconvenient facts" begin to emerge, or an attempt at short-shrift dismissal.

For instance, recently I got into a discussion of global warming with a blogger, definitely center-of-left, who is an old friend of mine. After I'd presented various evidence, he dismissed it all with "sea temperature" being more important than anything else, anyway. This, after a number of things were cited including the inflated rates of global warming many scientists use to base dire predictions on.

Dogs will clamp down on a given position, like a tasty bone, and refuse to give it up, no matter what happens.

Many of same dogs barking now about warming were yelping about a coming Ice Age not that many years ago, within living adult memory of Baby Boomers, in fact.

The Times magazine of June 24, 1974 shocked everyone with a cover story titled "Another Ice Age?" The hysterics then were over the discovery that the atmosphere had been getting colder over a three decade period. Likewise, despite the deeply suspicious, and frequently revised, figures from international organizations, satellite and other observations point to another cooling period under way since 1998.Warming and cooling cycles are well-documented parts of the cyclical climate process.

The New Ice Age scare did not seem to get much traction, likely because meterological evidence for it was even sketchier than it is for global warming, and maybe because collectivists moved on to new tacts. The ideology of environmentalism got a boost, however, with the collapse of communism, because there were no other tents for them to take shelter in. Pack mentality? Global warming - real or imagined, catastrophic or not - became the issue du jour for thinly-disguised collectivists.

They are now proposing a vast international bureaucracy and likening the battle against global warming to war. Where have we heard that metaphor before? War on Drugs? War on Terrorism? Seems like both of those two have been unmitigated disasters and have, by the way, not achieved the stated goals. They have both been used as pretexts to expand government power, crush civil liberties, and waste thousands of lives and billions in confiscated resources.

At worst -- that is, if you believe global warming is necessarily bad -- data suggests an overall global temperature increase of .31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade over the last several decades. That works out to about 3 degrees a century, but doesn't take into account that climate is cylical with warming and cooling periods occuring regularly.

The dogs in this story refer to those who clamp down on a position -- in this case that global warming is happening at an alarming rate and the results will be disastrous -- and don't let go, no matter what. The cats are those who patiently shift through all the results over as long a period of time as possible to see what the truth may really be.

As one dedicated to being an analytical cat, I believe it is likely global warming is taking place, but at nothing near the rate Al Gore and other hystericists would have us believe. Moreover, I also think that an important, and maybe only workable, option for dealing with it -- adaptation -- has been ignored. It has been ignored precisely because adaption would require no wide new powers for government and no massive new bureaucracy to control yet another aspect of human activity. And that little inconvenient truth about cooling and warming cycles has been completely ignored.

Most of the media, and almost all academics, still infected with the progressivist notion that government management and direction of most human activity is a good thing, and further infected with "if it bleeds, it leads," want both global warming, and catastrophic effects therefrom, to be reality. They want that so much they recoil at anyone or any data that suggests otherwise, and can be counted on to marginalize such people and data.

And that's the difference between cats and dogs.