Global Warming And The Precautionary Principle

In a follow up to yesterday's post about a clueless greenie, one commenter may have hit the nail on the head as to 'why' of the urgency so many of them have been pushing Cap-and-Trade and a host of other environmental legislation: the Precautionary Principle.

Basically, the Precautionary Principle says that it something might conceivably cause harm, you must assume it does cause harm until someone proves it doesn't cause harm. This is true even if there is little or no objective evidence that it causes harm in the first place.

Unfortunately, the Precautionary Principle now forms the basis for a large portion of environmental laws and regulation, as well as being what undergirds the Global Warming Hoax and various other environmental disaster scenarios.

Thus, for "Global Warming," although the observed evidence increasingly does not support the theory, the disaster predictive models (much of it based on faulty computer models such as the infamous "hockey stick," or incomplete or selective data sets) say it could be true and therefore must be assumed to be true until proven not to be true.

In logic, the precautionary principle is known as the "fallacy of arguing from ignorance."

Indeed. I have come across a rather large number of people that have bought the Global-Warming-Is-All-The-Fault-Of-The-Evil-Humans propaganda hook, line and sinker. They are truly ignorant of the science, the actual theories, the preponderance of data that go against the theories, the inability to distinguish between local phenomena and global trends. They also tend to look at climate history over a shorty period of time, meaning their lifetimes, without looking at the long cycles of climate variation over hundreds or thousands of years. The have no true perspective. It is that which can be called “arguing from ignorance.” Of course that's never stopped anyone before.