Just in case what?

Now that science, reason and logic has left the climate change debate, one thing stands behind: The Just In Case (JIC) argument. Its core and soul is that mankind must cut his use of carbon based fuel drastically down. If that isn't done, men will "tip the ice" of drastic human-induced climate change that will lead to famine, droughts, floods, freezing, drying, rising ocean levels, more hurricanes and what else there is that is bad and can be blamed on mankind.

This is just about the only "climate science" left in the debate. The numbers show nothing of interest: A slow and steady increase in temperature, measured in points of degrees for each decade. A swinging number of hurricanes, falling nicely into a pattern of at least 50 years of varying hurricane-frequency. Ever-shifting ice on the poles, where ice is somewhere on the run and somewhere gaining ground. Shifting solar spot activity, often matching a change in temperature but sometimes not. The examples are endless and conclude nothing, which would in any case not make any difference, because hundreds of millions of people rising out of poverty is far more important than hundreds of millions being kept there, and rich people can adapt to anything much more easily than poor people.

So we have the JIC-argument standing alone behind as a useful tool to influence the way people think about the climate and its ever-changing nature. The JIC-argument is the core feature of the recent Oscar-winning propaganda-film, "An Inconvenient Truth", and of the famous report sponsored by the climate-alarmist Tony Blair's government, "The Stern Report" (as it is known as). Thousands of reports and pamphlets are published to promote the JIC scenario, and more or less have one thing in common: The message that men must cut down on carbon based fuel consumption, or else!

Of course there are ways to do that, and the fact of the matter is that for the last decades, energy consumption of any kind has been on the run because of better technology and alternative sources of cheaper energy (nuclear, hydro power and so on). This trend will continue on the free market because fuel is expensive, and less use of it is cheaper than more! But this is neatly ignored, because action is needed "now" according to the JIC-alarmists, not in 10 years or 20 years.

So how to tackle this debate? An analogy comes to mind. How was the nature of Communism exposed to the public? Communists could for some years claim that communism is some kind of science - that Karl Marx and his followers had somehow managed to create a system of thought that was consistent with reality and could be implemented in a human society. This myth was exposed, but it took time and energy. Decades went between the earliest predictions of the Soviet collapse (such as these), until the collapse finally took place. By then, everyone knew what communism really stood for. Will it take decades to expose the JIC-alarmists, and will we have suffered greatly in material well-being and standards of living by then, while hundreds of millions of people still live in desperate poverty?

I truly hope that now when the science is out of the debate, and alone stands the weak argument of JIC, we will slowly but surely be able to stall all expansion of State-control and green taxing as much as possible, and hope that the coming of the next Ice Age will cool the global warming debate down (as it happens, the alarmists shift between the coming of the next global warming and global cooling period, thereby resetting the debate every 20 years or so). Is it enough to stall the statism of green State-expansion? Perhaps not. But for now, it seems to be the most practical thing to do in terms of effort and results.