Global Warming – Ironies Abound

The world – sadly including northern California – is locked up in a deep cold, and still Al Gore took his dog and pony show to Washington, D.C. Neither snow, nor ice, nor other freezing stuff will stay the alarmists in their never-ending quest to sow panic among the uninformed – and reap obscene profits thereby.

James Lovelock, a British scientist approaching a 90th birthday in July, and a dedicated global warming alarmist himself, recently commented on the futility of current efforts to combat global warming by reducing carbon dioxide, saying:

Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It's absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt - that's an awful lot of countryside.

Please allow me to append other examples of idiocy that I presume Mr. Lovelock would find agreeable. In the United States, and in states like California, in cities like San Francisco (and Berkeley, of course), laws are being passed to fight global warming by reducing CO2 emissions in those jurisdictions. Their primary means of reducing CO2 emissions involve the simple act of taxing them, or placing a cap on their creation. What will this do to reduce global CO2 emissions? If you answer fairly and honestly, you will say “nothing.”

If being burdened by added costs drives businesses away from San Francisco, or Berkeley, or California, will atmospheric CO2 be lessened?

Obviously, China, India, and other developing nations are not going to stop their rapid economic development. As we tax and cap ourselves into being increasingly uncompetitive in world markets, the developing countries will take business from us at increasing rates, and in the bargain pollute far more than we would if we continued to do “business as usual.” In this regard I’m not counting CO2 as pollution. The developing countries will, of course, be releasing additional huge quantities of CO2 – that’s how they generate power to increase their production. But they will also be producing the good old standard, garden variety of pollution too – of the air, the water, and destruction of natural habitat.

We’ll be congratulating ourselves as good Californians saving the world from global warming, not considering that if we eliminated all forms of carbon-based energy production in California, including campfires to heat our homes and cook our food, the climate of the world would not notice. Not now, not a hundred years from now, nor a thousand years or more.

We would make of ourselves a monument, dedicated to our arrogance and irrelevancy.