Monday

Intemperate Thoughts on Global Warming


-- I keep seeing "green" issues of this and that outdoor magazine. But if they really wanted to save the environment, they should do a "green nonissue" and go a month without printing millions of magazine pages (which are mostly ads anyway).

-- People creep me out by how emotional they get about Priuses. Promise you bro, those extra couple MPGs really aren't the meaning of life.

-- Forgive me if I don't trust a single word Newsweek has to say on the subject considering their not-too-distant cool-mongering. And anyway, if they really were so hot and bothered about global cooling thirty years ago, wouldn't the advent of warming be an answer to prayer? In other words, shouldn't the effects of this warming trend be welcomed with grateful relief as being the noncatastrophic solution to our parents' worst fears?

-- Read the Copenhagen Consensus 2004, do the cost/benefit, and then try and tell me with a straight face that spending trillions (with a "t") to gain a couple degrees over the next 100 years is not absurd.

-- The hypocrisy of the mansion-owning, motorcade-driving, private-jet-flying Reverends of Climatology really pisses me off. I'll listen to their breathless warnings when they start to live like they really believe it. (And anyway, there's not much more I could personally be doing as it is- I recycle, use those fancy light bulbs, share 800 square feet and a 40mpg car with my wife and baby, and walk to work. And funnily enough, I somehow do all of that without taxing you to death or regulating the hell out of your business.)

-- Carbon offsetting is a joke. But Tetzel would be proud.

-- Read Scrappleface.

-- And Steyn:

"A COUPLE of days before Al Gore was awarded his Nobel Peace prize, Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al's Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to "alarmism and exaggeration" and identified nine major factual errors.
For example, the former vice-president predicts a rise in sea levels of 6m "in the near future". "The Armageddon scenario he predicts," declared Burton, "is not in line with the scientific consensus."
I'll say. The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere between 15cm and 60cm, with about 30cm being most likely. An Inconvenient Truth insouciantly adds a zero to the worst-case scenario.
And nobody minds. His Honour was examining the vice-president's acclaimed crockumentary because the British Government, in its wisdom, has decided to force-feed it to hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren. It would be nice to think it would have to be preceded by a warning that any resemblance between this film and any actual planet living or dead is entirely coincidental, but it seems more likely that the Nobel Peace imprimatur will completely insulate the picture from even the most modest quibbles.

[...] That's where Gore comes in. No matter how you raise the stakes ("It might take another 30 Kyotos", says Jerry Mahlman of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research), Saint Al of the Ecopalypse can raise them higher. Climate change, he says, is the most important moral, ethical, spiritual and political issue humankind has ever faced. Ever. And not just humankind, but alienkind, too. "We are," warns Gore, "altering the balance of energy between our planet and the rest of the universe".
Wow. It's not just the Maldive Islands, but the balance of energy between Earth and the rest of the universe. You wouldn't happen to have the stats on that, would you? Universal "balance of energy" graphs for 1940 and 1873? Gore is the logical reductio of what the popular Australian blogger Tim Blair calls global warm-mongering: Worst-case scenario, with all the zeroes you want on the end, and then a few more for holes in the ozone layer as yet undreamt of. Anyone can, as the environmentalists advise, think globally and act locally, but only Gore thinks cosmically and acts not at all.
[...] Well, the average US household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours of electricity. In 2006, the Gores wolfed down nearly 221,000kWh.
221,000kWh? What's he doing in there? As his spokesperson explained it, his high energy usage derives from his brave calls for low energy usage. He's burning up all that electricity by sending out faxes every couple of minutes urging you wastrels to use less electricity. Insofar as he's made any contribution to global peace, it's in persuading large swaths of a narcissistic Western world to busy itself with non-solutions to pseudo-crises to such a distracting degree that al-Qa'ida may wind up imposing the global caliphate without having to fire a shot."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ask the Prius people what they plan to do with the giant chemical battery in their Prius after 100,000 miles. (That's all they're rated for.) A few thousand of those things being disposed of will probably impact the environment quite a bit more than the CO2 emissions would have in the first place.

Although, I'm sure junkyards across the U.S. will go out of their way to make sure they're disposed of properly and legally.

Anonymous said...

Love the Tetzel reference!