You always have to be wary that someone who makes off the wall, out of the ballpark statements like this is actually pulling our leg - or yanking our chain as the case may be.
But warmist advocate Steve Zwick writing in Forbes sounds deadly serious to me:
Let's take a page from those Tennessee firemen we heard about a few times last year - the ones who stood idly by as houses burned to the ground because their owners had refused to pay a measly $75 fee.
We can apply this same logic to climate change.
We know who the active denialists are - not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let's start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let's make them pay. Let's let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued. Let's swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let's force them to bear the cost of rising food prices.
They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?
Obviously, the ideal solution is to get our collective act together and prevent this from happening, but we need a fall-back - a mechanism that puts responsibility for damages on the shoulders of the shirkers and deniers who cause it and profit from it, and we need to build that mechanism before the damages materialize.
If the shirkers and deniers actually believe their propaganda, they'll go along with this - because they only have to pay if they're wrong and 98% of all climate scientists are right. (And what are the odds of that happening - nudge nudge, wink wink?)
In Zwick's view, there are no additional factors that have caused the temperature to rise over the last 10,000 years. In fact, since we can't bill the sun for any possible contribution to global warming, we'll just have to go after those he terms "denialists."
I'm not going to accept his thesis simply because most skeptics acknowledge that warming is a reality. The question has never been is it getting hotter, the question has always been how much are humans responsible? Zwick admits we'll never know:
The models have proven incredibly accurate when it comes to projecting the overall rise in extreme events, they still can't tell you exactly which specific storms arose from climate change and which would have happened anyway - and they probably never will.
Nor can the models tell us if all the extreme events would have happened anyway. If we can't tell which events arose because of human industrial activity, how can we say any of them happened because of man?
You can see the futility of debating someone like Mr. Zwick. His assumptions are based on faith, not science. The models can't tell us how much warming is the result of human activity, nor can they tell us which drastic events - weather, famine, desertification - are directly related to industrial activity. And yet we're to believe that drastically curtailing economic activity would fix a problem he can't even define?
Before the government sucks $5 to $8 trillion out of our economy over the next 20 years or so to test the theory that reducing emissions will moderate the temperature rise, even a partisan like Zwick should want more evidence than models and manipulated tree ring studies.
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