Self-Absorbed

Michael Barone is one of my favorite political commentators. His methods and reasoning are those of a scientist — he gathers facts and observations, looks for patterns, and tests hypotheses just as a scientist in the “hard sciences” would do. This sort of rigorous analysis is sorely lacking in most political commentary. But in addition, he is a remarkably clear and lucid writer, with an occasional witticism thrown in just to lighten things up. I’ve often thought that if we could somehow get Mr. Barone and Mark Steyn to collaborate on something, the result would be a marvelous concoction of both rigor and wit.

Today Mr. Barone weighs in on global warming, and not just the political aspects of it. Here’s how he concludes:

Gore and his followers seem to assume that the ideal climate was the one they got used to when they were growing up. When temperatures dropped in the 1970s, there were warnings of an impending ice age. When they rose in the 1990s, there were predictions of disastrous global warming. This is just another example of the solipsism of the baby boom generation, the pampered and much-praised age cohort that believes the world revolves around them and that all past history has become irrelevant.

We’re told in effect that the climate of the late 1950s and early 1960s was, of all those that have ever existed, the best of all possible climates. Not by science. But as a matter of faith.

Now go read the whole thing.