The policy wonks are getting weirder and weirder. There’s an environmental website at Yale, and a couple of greenies writing what appears to be a blasphemous piece, entitled “Freeing Energy Policy From The Climate Change Debate”. It starts out well enough:

The 20-year effort by environmentalists to establish climate science as the primary basis for far-reaching action to decarbonize the global energy economy today lies in ruins. Backlash in reaction to “Climategate” and recent controversies involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2007 assessment report are but the latest evidence that such efforts have evidently failed.

While the urge to blame fossil-fuel-funded skeptics for this recent bad turn of events has proven irresistible for most environmental leaders and pundits, forward-looking greens wishing to ascertain what might be salvaged from the wreckage would be well advised to look closer to home. Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy. Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.

Can’t say that there’s much to disagree with there. They’re just among the first to admit what was obvious to those of us non-cult members all along.

So, why this post? Because as much as they seem to be arguing that climate change and disaster scenarios are not a pressing matter, they don’t want to drop “decarbonization” (a buzzword among policy wonks) as a primary goal.

In the end, there is no avoiding the enormous uncertainties inherent to our understanding of climate change. Whether 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, or 450 or 550, is the right number in terms of atmospheric stabilization, any prudent strategy to minimize future risks associated with catastrophic climate change involves decarbonizing our economy as rapidly as possible. Stronger evidence of climate change from scientists was never going to drive Americans to demand economically painful limits on carbon emissions or energy use. And uncertainty about climate science will not deter Americans from embracing energy and other policies that they perceive to be in the nation’s economic, national security, and environmental interest. This was the case in 1988 and is still largely the case today.

That, ladies and gents, is what you call a “WTF??” paragraph. Let me see if I can sort this out:

1. There are “enormous uncertainties”, so we don’t have a clue what the relationship between CO2 and climate is.

2. We don’t have a clue what’s going to happen, but

3. “any prudent strategy to minimize future risks associated with catastrophic climate change involves decarbonizing our economy as rapidly as possible”

Dang, right over the shark! No real evidence that there’s going to be anything bad, but we have to do this massive act of self-flagellation “as rapidly as possible”. Not “as rapidly as practical”, or “as rapidly as reasonable”, or “as rapidly as economical”.

We no longer have to engage in economic self-immolation because something bad is going to happen. We just have to do it because we have to do it.

Got that? If you can read the whole thing. It’s a most amazing tapdance.

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It seems as if this is a new developing meme/narrative/strategy. Here’s another such piece in the Seattle Times.

Media coverage of India’s looming environmental crisis has been eclipsed by the debate about long-term future impacts of global climate change. The revelation that the Himalayan glaciers are not retreating as rapidly as reported in the Fourth Assessment Report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been front-page news in India day after day. Readers of these news stories could easily come away with the impression that the immediacy of the environmental crisis has been exaggerated when, in fact, it is not being given sufficient emphasis.

It’s tempting to blame the media for fixating on global warming, but we climate scientists are partly to blame for the misplaced emphasis. Over the past 20 years we have stood by and watched as governmental and nongovernmental organizations that deal with environmental issues became more and more narrowly focused on the long-term impacts of global warming.

Meanwhile, more imminent issues relating to the sustainability of our planet’s life-support system under the pressures of growing human population and the widening gap between rich and poor are not getting the attention they deserve.

See the two-step? Pay no attention to that Climategate thingy over there crashing and burning, because the earth is dying!!! And note in passing the “widening gap between rich and poor” bunk.

The greenies aren’t going to roll over and die and compost. Unfortunately.

They’re going to have to change that to something other than “climatize”. Climate is so 2009.