EXPERTS

EXPERTS: Wisdom’s Antidote

French Prime Minster, Georges Clemenceau, is credited to have said, “War is too important a matter to entrust to military men.” The more popular paraphrase of the quote is, “War is too important to be left to the Generals.” I think I can distill millions of words about what the quote means by saying the quote relates to the problem of relying on experts, or savants, to make decisions or judgments that instead requires wisdom concerning the whole of the matter rather than specialized knowledge. All to often, activists, government, and those competing for power, uses experts to prevent full and rational discourse on a matter by insisting that only their supporting expert(s) has the definitive knowledge of the subject. A case in point; Global Warming alarmists have lined up their experts to support their position that Man is causing climate warming and insist that the science of Global Warming is settled and anyone one who believes otherwise is just a contrarian at best or an uneducated denier at worse. The truth of the matter is that climate is dynamic and responds to a whole range of physical factors, including man’s puny activities, and is just as likely to be heading for another ice age as our current warming period winds down. In other words, the science of climate change is far from being settled and listening to experts on both sides does little to bring wisdom to bear on the subject. So why are so many influential people and practically all of the world’s Governments supporting the notion that man’s activities are causing a catastrophic warming of the earth’s climate? Fellow traveler, do you recall the Snail Darter?
The Snail Darter is a small (3 inch) river fish that was discovered by environmental activist and biologist, David Etnier, in the Little Tennessee river in 1973. When Professor Etnier saw the small fish he cried, “Eureka”, because he knew he had found the means to stop construction of the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River. By invoking the National Environmental Policy Act, the lawsuit to stop construction of the dam could allege that the dam would alter the habitat of the river to such an extent that the Snail Darter would be extirpated (wiped-out) and if that happened, it would violate the Environmental Policy law. Of course you can plainly see that the Snail Darter was not really the concern of the Environmentilists, it was stopping construction of the Tellico Dam that was the real objective. In a like manner, World Governments, Socialists and One world activists had their “Eureka” Snail Darter moment when they discovered the Man caused climate warming issue because they could use the climate warming issue as a means to obtain power by using Cap and Trade to control vast areas of their respective economies. Once they had the additional power afforded by saving the Earth from man made Global warming, their real objective of enhancing centralised government power to promote a Socialistic agenda could be well adavanced. Don’t believe me? Listen to what happened when President Hugo Chavez addressed the UN Climate Change Summitt at Copenhagen recently. President Chavez was reported to say, “there was a silent and terrible ghost in the room and that ghost was called Capitalism”, he went on to further say, “Capitialism is the road to hell…lets fight against Capitalism.” When President Chavez said those things about Capitalism the room erupted in a standing ovation and the applause was deafening. Care to advance an opinion as to what the real agenda of the Climate Change Summitt was? There are probably many and varied objectives of the attendees but you can rest assured that none of the objectives had anything to do with global warming.
This is what you get when you rely on experts to define an issue. An expert has expertise in a very narrow area and is more interested in promoting his expertise than rational discussion of all of the factors affecting the issue. Those who nefariously use experts to further their objectives and agenda will more than likely engage the public’s emotions, the best emotion to use being fear, because emotion is the best enemy of rational argument. Sound familiar? So with apologies to Monsieur Clemenceau, Decisions are too important to entrust to experts.