"Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?"
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Sowell’s line works like a street-smart hustle: take something everyone has rolled their eyes at (tomorrow’s forecast), then slide that skepticism straight into a far bigger target (climate policy). The intent isn’t to litigate climate science point-by-point; it’s to reframe the entire question as a wager made by gullible elites with other people’s money. “Your paycheck” is the key phrase. It personalizes risk, making the reader the imagined victim of bureaucratic overreach and technocratic arrogance. Billions become not a collective investment but a forced stake you didn’t agree to.
The subtext is a familiar Sowell move: institutions that claim expertise are often insulated from consequences, so their confidence should be treated as self-serving. The rhetorical question structure does the heavy lifting. It offers a single “reasonable” answer (no), then treats that answer as moral permission to doubt anything predictive at scale. It’s less argument than social sorting: prudent, grounded people versus ideologues spending freely on speculative models.
Context matters because the analogy is crafted to collapse two different kinds of prediction into one bucket. Weather forecasting is a chaotic, short-term problem; climate projections are probabilistic statements about long-term trends under specified assumptions. Sowell’s comparison is effective not because it’s scientifically tight, but because it’s culturally legible: everyone has lived through a wrong forecast. The line weaponizes that everyday annoyance to cast climate action as reckless faith, not governance under uncertainty.
The subtext is a familiar Sowell move: institutions that claim expertise are often insulated from consequences, so their confidence should be treated as self-serving. The rhetorical question structure does the heavy lifting. It offers a single “reasonable” answer (no), then treats that answer as moral permission to doubt anything predictive at scale. It’s less argument than social sorting: prudent, grounded people versus ideologues spending freely on speculative models.
Context matters because the analogy is crafted to collapse two different kinds of prediction into one bucket. Weather forecasting is a chaotic, short-term problem; climate projections are probabilistic statements about long-term trends under specified assumptions. Sowell’s comparison is effective not because it’s scientifically tight, but because it’s culturally legible: everyone has lived through a wrong forecast. The line weaponizes that everyday annoyance to cast climate action as reckless faith, not governance under uncertainty.
Quote Details
| Topic | Decision-Making |
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