How to clean up the mess created by the global warming mass hysteria

Have you heard the recent statements from some of the most important global warming scientists? If not, you can read some of the reports at the Sunday Times Online, the BBC and read some excellent commentary at Best Of the Web Today. 

For the purposes of this article you need only know that there is a lot of backtracking and clarification occurring. Some are saying the case for global warming melted. A colleague told me the other day that he thought that global warmists had hijacked the legitimate environmental movement. Whatever the interpretation you accept, there is the inescapable fact that the global warming movement wasted a lot of resources and reputations.

While others focus on what has been, I want to focus on the future. We need to clean up the mess. I have a proposal as to how to do that.

I want to begin with an assumption, followed by a question. Let’s assume that we are going to develop a plan to do something good with at least part of the resources that were applied to the problem of global warming. Yes, I know, no good deed goes unpunished. But I have an advantage here that I can use to promote a good cause; no one expects kindness from a blog titled, Mind Your Own Damn Business Politics.

Now the question: What could have been done with those resources in order to do good? And therefore, what can we do going forward?

According to CNN and TED, Esther Duflo is a poverty economist. This means that Professor Duflo tests ideas for alleviating poverty. That is a far different approach than the normal approach of providing foreign aid, most of which ends up in the hands of dictators, making the people receiving the aid worse off. What if she had been given the resources that went to global warming?

I can give you a couple of thoughts as to how that might have worked. She might be on her way to lifting large groups of people out of poverty, thus saving lives, creating new economies to trade with in the world, and reducing terrorism and crime. And you know what else? Had she succeeded at lifting people out of poverty, and the planet’s climate does change in the future (science shows that climate change is a constant and has been since long before humans appeared) those people would be able to rely on their resources to take care of themselves, and the entire world would be richer and better able to assist them.

Instead, we are here at what appears to be the beginning of the end of this wave of mass hysteria with nothing to show for it. We can change course. We can find more of the Duflos and dump the Gores.

I would like to see what other ideas people have for using resources that would have been lost fighting global warming.  What ideas do you have that are related to the concept of enabling people to become educated, self reliant, and to achieve things via self reliance, education and freedom that make the world a better place?

Readers – your thoughts?

Tagged as: alternative energy, anthropogenic global warming, climate change, Climate Research Unit, cru, east anglis, environment, global temperature record, global warming, green, green energy, ipcc, melt, phil jones, statistically-significant global warming