By Anthony J. Sadar and Susan T. Cammarata - COMMENTARY: Global-warming politics - Washington Times

In our combined 50 years of professional atmospheric and environmental science experience in government, academia, activism and consulting, we have observed a dichotomy between the real and the academic-bureaucratic worlds of environmental science.

Scientists and engineers who work hands-on in the trenches with real-world environmental-science challenges on a daily basis are skeptical of claims of a substantial influence on global climate from human activity.

Academicians who view the world from their computer screens, theories, limited field investigations and well-read published reports are not only true believers but avid promoters of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

The academics, whose student and public admiration and financial well-being depend on an urgent topic, have a powerful incentive to focus on a simple human-produced cause and therefore a human-correcting solution to the incredibly complex challenge of global climate warming. This narrow focus limits the creativity so necessary to scientific discovery that truly resolves issues and serves society efficiently.

Are today’s poorer generations morally obliged to solve problems that may or may not confront tomorrow’s much wealthier generations? « Watts Up With That?

[Indur M. Goklany] In fact, this raises the question whether it is moral to require today’s poorer generations to spend their scarce resource on anthropogenic GHG-induced global warming - a problem that may or may not be faced by future, far wealthier and technologically better endowed generations - instead of the more urgent, real problems that plague current generations and will continue to plague future generations as well.

Bruce Walker, American Thinker: The Next Ice Age

The only issue of course is power. If we are entering a new ice age, what should government do? It should encourage private initiative and stockpiling, gradual relocation of people away from the poles and toward the Equator, and maybe the creation of new ways of keeping generating heat. What if Hoyle was wrong and we are entering a period of global warming? What should government do? The same fundamental thing: rely on personal initiative, private enterprise, trial and error over time at that most effective level of the marketplace. These, not massive government control, are the answer to man's well-being and survival.

We live in a world that is constantly changing in a million different ways. We may enter an ice age or a warming period. We may dodge asteroids and we may avoid the collapse of the West Coast into the Pacific. Whatever our unpredictable future, only one thing is sure: man, the adaptable and rugged animal, guided by his own initiative and enterprise is the answer. Politically correct science and earth-worshipping priests are not.