The Unrealism of C02 Reduction

I thought this column by Peter Geddes captured the complete lunacy of the global warming fanatics, who somehow imagine that we can turn back the clock 100 years or more, maintain roughly the same lifestyle we have, and thereby defeat the phantom menace of global warming:

Policies such as the Kyoto Protocol and U.S. cap-and-trade legislation focus solely on reducing CO2 emissions. But these are symbolic acts, mere posturing, while doing little or nothing to achieve their stated goals. Stubborn reliance on this approach is now the main barrier to an effective climate policy.

The 1,200-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, known as Waxman-Markey, is an example. It sets an ambitious target of reducing total U.S. greenhouse emissions 83 percent by the year 2050. In 2005, the year chosen as the baseline, the U.S. emitted about 6 billion tons of CO2. An 83 percent reduction by 2050 means that U.S. emissions must be just over one billion tons.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Steve Hayward puts this in context. He writes that the U.S. last emitted one billion tons of CO2 in 1910, when our population was 92 million and total GDP (in 2008 dollars) about $572 billion. (2008 GDP was $14.2 trillion.) In order to reach the target, per-capita CO2 emissions will have to be no more than 2.4 tons. The last time U.S. citizens emitted this low level of carbon was 1875. These kinds of reductions are so absurd they will not even be seriously attempted.

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The Politics of Global Warming

It has become fashionable among fashionable people to “know” that global warming is real and threatens danger.  Most of these people don’t know that we exhale C02 every time we breath, that most of the atmosphere’s warming is caused by water vapor, that the earth has warmed and cooled before mankind existed, and a great many other things that you should learn in junior high. They are quite proud of themselves, but their “knowledge” is not scientific.  Its only recommendation are authoritative claims of others, typically in government.

It now turns out that mass deception has been afoot by scientists, encouraged by funding decisions and the well-known preferences of their public policy customers.  Upper level atmospheric cooling since 1979 has been explained away by focusing on the alleged surface warming trend.  But it turns out the surface warming trend may also be nonexistent, the data having been rigged by placing measuring instruments next to heat-generating sources such as building and generators.  In normal times, this would cause a few scientists to lose their jobs and reputations.  But here the stakes are much higher:  global warming is being used as a catch-all crime of modern societies to encourage a massive shift of power from nation-states to international organizations and a massive shift in wealth from the western, industrialized world to the Third World.  This is why the facts are so malleable:  they are harnessed to a 100 year old nihilistic goal of destroying western civilization that has manifested itself at different times as Bolshevism, the New Left, the Progressive Movement, multiculturalism, and now the anti-global warming movement.

Incidentally, local goals of preserving land, protecting endangered species, setting aside open space, and reducing air and water toxins are agreeable ones, consistent with both free markets and global warming skepticism.   But these prosaic concerns also reveal the contradiction of creating more of these problems through socially engineered population growth via mass immigration, and thus these concerns for real tangible problems play second fiddle to global warming hysteria.

While the global warming movement has some momentum, it is intellectually brain dead. We are now intellectually faced with a mere mopping up operation.

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Climate Change True Believer

Obama is about to jet off to Copenhagen to pledge to destroy the American economy. Isn’t it funny that he’s still buying this global warming nonsense, after a decade of cooling, and recent revelations that many top level scientists have been conspiring with one another to “cook the books” and create evidence of global warming where none exists.

We all should have known what a fraud this was a few years ago when “climate change” began to replace “global warming” as the preferred nomenclature.  Climate’s always changing, you see, so this allowed hot, cold, dry, rainy, and every other anomaly to prove that “something bad is afoot and it’s man-made!”

 

 

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Web Round Up

Lots of interesting things going on out there in the blogosphere.

Lawrence Auster takes Charles Johnson of LGF to task for his idiosyncratic anti-left and anti-right criticism of Islam.  For Johnson, everyone that doesn’t dislike Muslims as much as Charles Johnson while also disliking Europeans as much as Charles Johnson is a fascist and anti-Semite.  For all his popularity with knuckle-draggers, Johnson’s view is thoroughly modern and useless because it inevitably alienates Christians, Europeans, and everyone but Israel in the fight against radical Islam. Well, guess what, this may take some cooperation.

Jared Taylor cooly explains why the “achievement gap” in our schools isn’t going anywhere soon.

The War Nerd enjoys the Southern California fires.

Redacted sounds like typical Hollywood anti-war insanity. Hold your breath for a movie about Paul Smith or other heroes of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Andrew Sullivan approvingly quotes the utter apotheosis of the “Natural Republican” theory, applying it to Barack Obama, a well-known liberal and Democratic Party candidate for President.

Kathleen Parker echoes Tom Wolfe’s noting that the “hook up” culture on campus leads to spiritual and physical pain.

Robert Levy roots for the Second Amendment in an upcoming Supreme Court case.  I join him in hoping the Supreme Court will put some teeth in the amendment, of course.

Ace rains on Al Gore’s parade citing a study that the Arctic Ocean changes may likely be naturally occurring.

A Vermont blogger has an interesting discussion of paleoconservatism versus traditionalist conservatism.

Jim Kalb reviews a book by Thomas Molnar on the purpose of philosophy.

Child rapist and murderer continues to gum up the machinery of justice delaying his well-deserved execution, even though everyone knows he is guilty of an atrocity.

New piston-based operating systems for the AR-15 should rival the excitement that greets new operating systems for computers.  This change might actually lead to saved lives and a cleaner, more effective infantry weapon.  Of course, the sclerotic Pentagon bureaucracy will sit on this for who knows how long. But hopefully it works as advertised and will lead to the adoption of the HK 416 or a similar platform to succeed the finicky M4.

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