Gerhardts

Hysterical groupthink about global warming? – see below

We sup at Gerhardt’s 2-in 1 restaurant

(NW corner of Republic and William Nicol, Hurlingham)

from about 6pm on Wednesday 5 September 2007, so please join us.

(no RSVP)

cheers, Jim (who will be absent en route to where, sang Tom Lehrer, ‘they spent four dollars and fifty cents on armaments and their defence, d’you ever hear of such confidence, Andorra hip hoorah!’)

………

Jeff Jacoby (in the Boston Globe) courageously denounces the hysterical groupthink so prominent in the crusade against global warming. I am a global-warming skeptic — not of the science of climate change (for I have no expertise to judge it), but of combating climate change with increased government power.

Al Gore, Robert Kennedy Jr., and too many others dismiss the downside of curtailing capitalism in order to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. They write and speak as if the material prosperity that capitalism brings is either not threatened by increased government power, or is of only small importance when compared to the threat of global warming.

Truly reasonable people are, and ought to be, skeptical of each of these dogmas.

DONALD J. BOUDREAUX

Fairfax, Va.

The writer is chairman of the department of economics at George Mason University.

Nuclear proliferation? – see below from Lighthouse

We sup at Gerhardt’s 2-in 1 restaurant (NW corner of Republic and William Nicol, Hurlingham) from about 6pm on Wednesday 4 July 2007, so please join us.

(no RSVP)

cheers, Jim

What is the situation regarding nuclear weapons in the hands of “rogue states” or terrorist groups? Such worries were proven justified with the 2003 discovery that an international network run by Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan had been clandestinely supplying enrichment equipment and nuclear know-how to Iran, North Korea, Libya and perhaps others. Although Libya has since agreed to discontinue its program, North Korea and Iran are widely believed to be pursuing nuclear weapons programs that may result in a military confrontation with the United States or its allies.

How can the risk of a nuclear Iran and North Korea best be reduced? What policies should be adopted to deal with nuclear weapons proliferation?

What if North Korea and Iran become nuclear states? After cheating on an earlier agreement to freeze its nuclear program, North Korea once again has agreed to suspend such activities. Yet the agreement does not require the hermit kingdom to get rid of any fissionable bomb-making material already produced. As for Iran, that country seems determined to flout international opinion and continue with its alleged nuclear program – a result of its tough neighborhood and the U.S. invasion of nearby Iraq. If negotiations to eliminate both nuclear problems fail, military options don’t promise to destroy all, or even most, of these nations’ nuclear programs.

If the United States must live with a nuclear Iran and a nuclear North Korea, what policies should it adopt? Furthermore, could the U.S. change its foreign policy to reduce the risk of nuclear proliferation to even more countries?