David Warren essay

Here.

Excerpt:

Hardly for the first time, I touched this last week on the strange conceit of the environmentalists, who are making an international campaign of “global warming.” (Have you heard?)

The puzzle is why they put almost all their effort into pushing a case that is so abstract and speculative, and which, as they ought to know from common sense, is as likely as the last few environmentalist scares to prove a crock. (Nuclear winter, the population bomb, global famine, etc.) Why do they dwell on the unproven long-term climatic effects of the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide -- which is not itself a pollutant, but a necessary condition for life? Why not turn their rhetorical spears on what is tangible, material, demonstrable? On what is blowing out of the smokestacks and draining through the spillways of the filthiest and most poisonous industrial operations on the planet?