Death of a Thousand Cuts

Louise
#1. July 21st, 2008, at 5:55 AM.

“the IPCC wears very few clothes indeed”

The imagery is delicious. If the climate is indeed cooling now, can’t you just see them shivering, blue, with icicles forming off their beards, refusing to admit that it’s not getting warming. “It’s warming. It’s warming. It’s warming. it’s warming….”

JR
#2. July 21st, 2008, at 10:33 AM.

I would take it a step further and point out that the “Non-profit” Carbon Credit firms failed to include hold-harmless language in the “terms and conditions” of sale.

What that means is that should Global Warming prove to be a sham eventually, they are going to be on the wrong end of an avalance of Class Action Civil litigation.

Personally, I am convinced that these folks are no longer attempting to “Save the World.” They are, more likely, attempting to “Save their Portfolio.”

Just Me
#3. July 21st, 2008, at 1:22 PM.

It seems just so ridiculous on it’s face. I keep waiting for the answer to a question I have had since the very beginning of this debate:

We know the earth has gone through huge heating/cooling patterns before, about 10-12 times. What caused those patterns and how do we know it isn’t the same thing this time…

crickets…..

Sholto Douglas
#4. July 21st, 2008, at 11:43 PM.

Jay, we don’t know for sure whether the climate is really changing, and if so, the change is as a result of human activity.
However, a lot of very smart people say yes to both. OK, some of them might be spruiking things in the quest for lucrative research grants, but not all of them would be. As Rupert Murdoch, hardly Dawg’s favourite proprietor, said, we should at least take out an insurance policy by lowering our carbon output. After all we insure our cars/houses not because we know disaster looms, but because it might.
Secondly we should be doing it anyway, even if the link between weather and carbon is not substantiated. When you see one of the lower forms of human life throwing litter in the street, you think just that – “you lowlife”. We should aspire to something better than to be environmental lowlife.
Your kids and mine will have to live in whatever mess we leave them.

DCardno
#6. July 22nd, 2008, at 8:15 AM.

Sholto, we insure against things that do happen - just not (as yet) to us: burglary, fire, flood, etc. We don’t (typically) insure against events that have not happened, so I am not sure the “insurance” analogy holds up very well. Even at that, the Carbobn-cutting decision would be simple if it were costless - but it is not. If we divert time and resources into activities that do not add value (for example, sequestering Carbon if it could be released without harm) then we reduce our economic growth. Put more simply, we make our children and grandchildren incrementally poorer.

More problematic, we make the children and grandchildren of those living in India and China today incrementally poorer. Histroically, the best way to reduce real pollution (NOx, SO2, Arsenic, etc) is to increase the welth of the society that produces it: concern for the environment is a luxury good. If we make those societies poorer two and three generations hence, we increase the likelihood that they will remain high emitters of substances known to cause problems (and coincidentally reduce their capacity to adapt to whatever changes global climate change might engender, irrespective of our Carbon-reduction activities). Doing this in the name of reducing eissions of substances that might, possibly, perhaps, and on the basis of questionable models and a false consensus, seems truly perverse.

Alarmists like to cite “the precautionary principle” - the adage taht you should do no harm, “just in case.” Aside from that being a recipe for complete inaction, since it can never be proven that any activity will have no possible harmful effects, I would ask why they don’t apply that to our economy: don’t piss around unless you can prove that you will not make our future worl poorer?

kelly
#7. July 22nd, 2008, at 2:14 PM.

“Jay, we don’t know for sure whether the climate is really changing, and if so”…blah blah blah
the climate is changing, has always and will always change grasshooper.

arctic_front
#8. July 23rd, 2008, at 11:02 AM.

I also question the theory of preventative harm reduction based on false or unproven science. The main thrust of the AGW thesis is that temperature is linked to increasing CO2. It has been proven that the relationship is inverse to that. Also, the other main contention is that all this theory is based entirely on models that use various proxies that include ice core, tree-ring and surface temperature records. All the bluster and fear mongering is claiming that all those proxies and the models they support, have gotten one very VERY important thing wrong! If CO2 is steadily increasing( no doubt it is) then explain how it can be possible that the globe is not warming in sympathy with the ever-increasing CO2? In fact, the global temperature is cooling, and has been SINCE 1998…… so that would be a decade of global cooling quite contrary to the fundamental theory of AGW.

If the ’settled science’ was in fact true, then the temperature of the globe would increase steadily with the increase of CO2, no?

Add to that the almost daily new data emerging from sources that were, at one point or other, self proclaimed Warmist groups or believers. I think we can put to bed for good, the idea that man has, or indeed, could be responsible for climate change.

It’s time to blow the lid off this debate and get the facts on the table and stop these agenda-driven leftists from highjacking the science that is potentially going to bankrupt our economy.

Bring on the debate.