In the last few posts (here, here and here) I have done on Global Warming I have been bombarded with a few lefties who display much of the same traits as this poor excuse for a writer, Ellen Goodman:
By every measure, the U N ‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change raises the level of alarm. The fact of global warming is "unequivocal." The certainty of the human role is now somewhere over 90 percent. Which is about as certain as scientists ever get.
I would like to say we’re at a point where global warming is impossible to deny. Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers, though one denies the past and the other denies the present and future.
This is the crux of the Global Warming religion. You must, MUST, believe or you are doomed to damnation. Nevermind that the new report is cutting the "effects" of global warming by one half from the 2001 report, nevermind that, as Jonah Goldberg aluded to earlier, the goal post of what IS global warming keeps moving down the field, nevermind that many scientists dispute the alarmists and the religion of global warming. Nevermind all that. We must obey and believe or we are all Holocaust deniers.
What a disgusting religion to be a part of. Mark Kilmer:
Without viewing the related science, she has accepted the words of the bureaucrats who hyperbolize the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because what they say frightens her, the "level of alarm" has been raised and she has concluded in her little, round head that "[t]he fact of global warming is ‘unequivocal.’" She’s scared; in fact, she seems to have wet herself and is now blaming the rest of us.
Earth got about 0.7 degrees Celsius warmer in the 20th century while it increased its GDP by 1,800 percent, by one estimate. How much of that 0.7 degrees can be laid at the feet of that 1,800 percent is unknowable, but let’s stipulate that all of the warming was the result of our prosperity and that this warming is in fact indisputably bad (which is hardly obvious).
That’s still an amazing bargain. Life expectancies in the United States increased from about 47 years to about 77 years. Literacy, medicine, leisure and even, in many respects, the environment have improved mightily over the course of the 20th century, at least in the prosperous West.
Given the option of getting another 1,800 percent richer in exchange for another 0.7 degrees warmer, I’d take the heat in a heartbeat. Of course, warming might get more expensive for us (and we might get a lot richer than 1,800 percent too). There are tipping points in every sphere of life, and what cost us little in the 20th century could cost us enormously in the 21st — at least that’s what we’re told.
And boy, are we told. We’re (deceitfully) told polar bears are the canaries in the global coal mine. Al Gore even hosts an apocalyptic infomercial on the subject, complete with fancy renderings of New York City underwater.
Skeptics are heckled for calling attention to global warming scare tactics. But the simple fact is that activists need to hype the threat, and not just because that’s what the media demand of them. Their proposed remedies cost so much money — bidding starts at 1 percent of global GDP a year and rises quickly — they have to ratchet up the fear factor just to get the conversation started.
The costs are just too high for too little payoff. Even if the Kyoto Protocol were put into effect tomorrow — a total impossibility — we’d barely affect global warming. Jerry Mahlman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research speculated in Science magazine that “it might take another 30 Kyotos over the next century” to beat back global warming.
Thirty Kyotos! That’s going to be tough considering that China alone plans on building an additional 2,200 coal plants by 2030. Oh, but because China (like India) is exempt from Kyoto as a developing country, the West will just have to reduce its own emissions even more.
Now count me in the group that does NOT believe Global Warming is caused by humans. Thirty years from now we will have the same liberals, well the children and grand children of today’s liberals, crowing on and on about humans causing a global ice age because guess what? The globe will be cooling by .02 degree’s.
In the end all we have is a bunch of kids scaring themselves in the closet, as Richard S. Lindzen said recently on Larry King:
RICHARD S. LINDZEN, MIT PROFESSOR OF ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE: Well, I think my read on it is that there is a certain climate of fear, to quote Mike Creighton. You know, for instance, Nye was talking about fresh water perhaps shutting down the Gulf Stream.
But that isn’t what physical oceanographers think.
First of all, you know, we’ve measured the heat transport from the tropics to high latitudes. It’s almost all in the atmosphere. The Gulf Stream is mostly driven by wind. To shut it down, you’d have to stop the rotation of the Earth or shut off the wind.
And there’s a lot of confusion in this and, you know, at the heart of it, we’re talking of a few tenths of a degree change in temperature. None of it in the last eight years, by the way. And if we had warming, it should be accomplished by less storminess. But because the temperature itself is so unspectacular, we have developed all sorts of fear of prospect scenarios — of flooding, of plague, of increased storminess when the physics says we should see less.
I think it’s mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves.
Even worse then a bunch of kids locking themselves in the closet we have a bunch of politicians and celebrities taking up the cause to serve their own arrogance and political careers. This is one reason why Chris Landsea resigned from the IPCC. The taking over of the global warming science by politics to be exact:
It is beyond me why my [IPCC] colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming
They pushed this agenda for politics, plain and simple. And they, along with the moronic Al Gore, are continuing to use the media and the even more moronic celebrities to push the even bigger agenda of the "doom" we will all surely suffer if global warming isn’t addressed.
Hype, hyperbole, and ignorance….thy name is the Global Warming Industry.
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