Climate of Failure - By Roger Pielke Jr. | Foreign Policy

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/06/climate_of_failure?page=full

The evidence that a high carbon tax is politically infeasible seems irrefutable, based on experience and common sense. Yet, even so, to try to push the debate forward, advocates constantly seek to demonstrate that climate change is taking place with high tangible costs, as if to try to rebalance the cost-benefit math. Such efforts to stoke alarm have no apparent limit, no matter how tenuous the science. For instance, even though scientists, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have observed that the magnitude of drought in the central United States has actually decreased over the past century, there has been a rush to attribute the 2012 drought solely to human causes. Thomas Homer-Dixon, a Canadian economist,cheered on the drought and its devastation, writing "It sounds harsh, but in light of these realities, this year's U.S. drought is good news ... fears about imperiled food security may be our best hope for breaking through widespread climate-change denial and generating the political pressure to do something."