杏吧原创

THERE is a busy and sometimes quite lucrative business retailing stories about a supposed global conspiracy to invent the perils of global warming. Practitioners don鈥檛 worry too much about the science, which they often seem to regard as largely incidental to the politics.

Patrick Michaels is one of that breed, dividing his time between professorial duties at the University of Virginia, studying the environment at the right-wing Cato Institute and giving his opinion to all and sundry. His book Meltdown is, well, very predictable.

Its theme is the notion that there is a worldwide business designed to scare us into worrying about climate change. As an avalanche of weird weather engulfs us, this particular narrative will probably go the same way as all those stories from the 1980s and 1990s about an 鈥渋ndustry鈥� of doctors making up lies about AIDS. Meanwhile this notion is mangling science and poisoning the well of public debate.

Let鈥檚 be fair. In among the invective, Michaels does rehearse some real issues concerning uncertainties in the debate about how climate change will progress 鈥� though he seems to believe that all uncertainties will resolve themselves on the side of the complacent. And he perfectly reasonably points out some of the exaggerations and falsehoods that percolate through the lazier media, and which some scientists equally lazily let pass.

But I found his assumption of base motives on the part of his opponents to be tiresome.

He is himself far more compromised than those he decries because of his connection to the Cato Institute, which is indeed the publisher of Michaels鈥檚 book.

The Cato Institute has a political agenda about free markets and small government that is inimical to tackling global problems such as climate change. The Cato Institute would like to wish them away. Unfortunately the climate, which has a life of its own outside the world of think tanks and leader columns, may not prove quite so obliging.