Phil Jackson: Real debate is no longer possible when platitudes become indistinguishable from policies

The Hopelessness of Debate

...A solar power car would be great – if there's a strong enough market demand to justify the billions of dollars of research and development needed to expedite its arrival. Windmills are a fantastic source of cheap, clean energy, unless they happen to spoil Ted Kennedy's oceanfront view, at which point good old fashioned gas guzzling cars will do just fine.

If Al Gore's prescription for responsible environmental management makes sense, he should be able to propose it without the intellectual legerdemain of over-hyped, value-laden judgments disguised as impartial analysis. It's one thing to illustrate a point with a dramatic example. It's quite another to have the example itself stand as a substitute for any further thinking about the matter. If the issue is real, the evidence will support it.

But to get the evidence, one first has to collect all the relevant data. When dealing with an issue as monumental as global climate change, 10, 20, 50, even a 100-year "trend" is nothing more than the blink of an eye in geological terms. If global warming actually exists, and further, if man is the principal cause of its existence, there should be clear, convincing evidence of this before we begin substantially rearranging important chunks of our current way of life. Why spend thousands of dollars to place your house on stilts so it won't be flooded if you're living in the middle of a desert? Such an expenditure may be perfectly reasonable for those homes along Gulf Coast beaches. But before I dip into my life savings to retrofit my house, I'd like to see a little evidence that central Utah is about to get inundated with water.

When confronted with this question, the typical answer we get from the Protectors of the Planet is that we can't afford to wait until all the data is in. By then it will be too late, so we must act now! That's why it was so important in the 1970s to take strong measures against a fast-approaching ice age – that is, until global warming became the problem. So, now we're told that we need to work just as quickly in 2006 to stop the warming of the earth, except recent studies have indicated that we may be in for a mini-ice age after all. [Via CO2 Sceptics]