Barack Obama’s words “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” have come to stand as the motto of his presidency. (Their author was actually the black Caribbean bisexual poetess June Jordan.) Similarly, “This is the one we’ve been waiting for” is a succinct representation of the issue of climatic change the international left has taken as its Gaia-sent pretext for a global government, or rather global governance, by the scientists and other “experts.”
A review of almanacs going back a couple of centuries, national and international records, economic history, and common sense shows that the change in global climate observable today is both real and at least partly caused by the Industrial Revolution that got under way at the start of the 19th century. Industrialism was the material result of the deliberate replacement of speculative and theoretical science, known up until the 17th century or shortly before as “philosophy,” by practical science as a determined attempt to give humanity the greatest achievable power over nature, a self-conscious intellectual project building on Sir Francis Bacon’s dictum “Knowledge is power.” Industrialism, on the other hand, was not a concerted program but the ad hoc opportunistic pursuit of technique necessary to build machines of increasing utility to men and nations, their business and...