Peggy Noonan on Global Warming: Blaming Scientists for Her Own Ignorance

I wonder if Peggy Noonan thinks that is the fault of economist for the incessant free lunch spin that comes from the right as if no one has ever suggested that the law of scarcity applies to the macroeconomy at least in the long-run. Oh no, we economists never say there is such a thing as crowding-out. OK, her topic was really global warming. As Judd at ThinkProgress notes, Peggy wrote:

I got thinking, again, of how sad and frustrating it is that the world’s greatest scientists cannot gather, discuss the question of global warming, pore over all the data from every angle, study meteorological patterns and temperature histories, and come to a believable conclusion on these questions: Is global warming real or not? If it is real, is it necessarily dangerous? What exactly are the dangers? Is global warming as dangerous as, say, global cooling would be? Are we better off with an Earth that is getting hotter or, what with the modern realities of heating homes and offices, and the world energy crisis, and the need to conserve, does global heating have, in fact, some potential side benefits, and can those benefits be broadened and deepened? Also, if global warning is real, what must – must – the inhabitants of the Earth do to meet its challenges? And then what should they do to meet them? You would think the world’s greatest scientists could do this, in good faith and with complete honesty and a rigorous desire to discover the truth. And yet they can’t. Because science too, like other great institutions, is poisoned by politics. Scientists have ideologies. They are politicized.

Peggy must have the know-nothings at the National Review confused with scientists. Ah Peggy, next time that you are reading something from Lawrence Kudlow, realize that he is very politicized and that he is not an economist.

Update: Media Matters listens to Rush Limbaugh so we don’t have to:

Additionally, Limbaugh claimed that, in light of scientists’ belief that embryonic stem cells could be useful in medicine, “we need to re-examine this whole term ‘scientist,’ ” because “[s]cience is all about politics, and science has been so wrong about so many things.”