Hi Doc Bones; Re global warming and US foreign policy...
The problem with the fear mongering on the issue of global warming is not that global warming does not exist, but that (a) it is a deadly menace, and (b) that there is anything we can do about it.
(1) Scientific consensus doesn't mean squat. Science was saying that pollution was going to cause a new global ice age back in the 70s. Scientific consensus said that we'd be out of food and fighting over it. Scientific consensus said that oil would be gone by now. As LindyBill noted, the ecologists went on and on about how if Saddam set the Kuwaiti oil fields on fire it could cause a major ecological disaster. (Of course anyone stranded in that region without a McDonalds, or at least a glass of water, will acknowledge that the regular climate is already an ecological disaster.)
Scientists tend to lean liberal, and their views on the environment follow that lean, not vice versa.
There's only one scientific consensus that has always been with us and will always remain, and that is that science needs money to study these things, and the rest of us should pony up.
The brouhaha over the missing ozone layer is a great example of fear mongering. People were running around convinced that animals in South America were being mass blinded. (As if their were some sort of "home for the blind" dedicated to keeping blind foxes with bad vision.) It goes on and on, and it hardly stops with global warming.
(2) This planet has run through extremes of temperature many times in the past 20,000 years without managing to scrape the humans off of itself. Humans populate this planet from Finland to the Sahara and are quite adaptable to extremes of temperature far, far, far greater than global warming threatens us with.
During the 70s climatologists were threatening us with a return to a full glacial epoch. Now that would have made a big dent in the population, but even this would not have eliminated humans. Humans are here to stay, and this is a simple fact.
In fact, there are some indications that the total amount of food that the planet will produce will increase as its temperature warms up. Would global warming be a disaster for people who live on low lying islands, and for a lot of ecological niches? Of course it would! But ecological niches get wiped out all the time on this nasty planet. And humans cause a lot of it.
Eventually the human population, and use of resources will stabilize, but it's not going to be for a long long time from now. Between now and then a lot of stuff is going to go extinct. Big deal. Eventually everything goes extinct; there is no such thing as eternal life, even for planets.
And don't give me that total BS about how some endangered species is going to have the cure for cancer, what a joke. The only species that is going to cure cancer (or do anything else) is the human genotype, and they're doing fine, continuing to multiply and living longer and longer lives, thank you. But the ecologists don't like this, so they make up boogymen to scare the public with. Well the problem is that they've been making up boogeymen for just a few decades too long, and consequently they're going to be ignored. You can only call wolf so many times before the village ignores you, and the ecology believers have already called.
(3) Even if we came to the conclusion that global warming was significant, there is no way in hell that we could avoid it by reducing carbon emissions. The global agreements to reduce CO2 "pollution" (which is actually a nutrient for plants) would (a) have almost no effect on current CO2 levels, and what's worse (b) have absolutely no effect at all on total CO2 production over the long term. In fact, the if the developed world voluntarily refrains from using fossil fuels, the effect is to decrease their price for the undeveloped world, which then increases their use. But in either case, the fuels do eventually get pumped or mined and used.
Reducing oil consumption only makes the oil last longer. It still eventually gets pumped out of the ground and into the air. To reduce the CO2 in the air you'd have to keep the oil / coal in the ground, and never let it be pumped / mined at all.
Reducing fossil fuel usage has proved to be nearly impossible to do politically. But that's easy compared to keeping the oil in the ground forever. What will the residents of Alaska say when they're told that in order to avoid global warming they're going to have to quit pumping oil, and that they're therefore not going to get those nifty royalty checks? Of course they're going to complain, and so will every government that has oil under its land.
During good economic times, (and the recent times have been the best the planet has ever seen), it's fairly easy to get people to refrain from doing what comes naturally, economically speaking. There's plenty of other money around. It's possible for countries that feel wealthy to protect the environment. But when budgets get tight, the natural environment always takes a second seat to the exigencies of the here and now.
With local pollution, if you allow it your backyard you're the one who has to clean it up. But with CO2, the effect is spread out over the whole planet. For that reason, it's politically impossible to convince countries that are facing tough times to refrain from pumping oil and (what's worse) digging coal.
Now the thing to note is that bad economic times inevitably arrive at all places in the world. You just have to wait long enough. And global warming is not about what happens in the next few decades, it's about what happens over the next 10,000 years.
If someone wants to believe that they can prevent future generations for the next 10,000 years from digging up and utilizing all those natural resources, well all I can say is that they're going to be in for one heck of a surprise. We can't even get our kids to brush their teeth, why should we believe that we can make them follow our (soon to be outdated and ancient) ecological beliefs?
The whole global warming concept is a farce from one end to the other. It's being promulgated by a group of scientists who have repeatedly been completely wrong with this sort of pronouncement, it's been blown out of proportion for what its effect on the environment is, and it's incurable in any case.
Here are the problems with the Kyoto accords:
(a) They apply to the developed world, rather than the undeveloped world. At least part of the reason for this is that it is politically impossible to force poor people to give a whit about the global effects of locally produced pollution. This is an exemption which is based on fundamental human nature, and it will still exist until centuries after never.
(b) The reduction in CO2 emissions was only 8% (and among the developed nations only), and that's not significantly going to change global warming. The Kyoto Accords were like putting screen doors on submarines. For example:
The Magnitude of the Task
How large is the Kyoto challenge? Consider the tons of emissions to be reduced. In 1990 the Annex I countries, with the United States leading, produced roughly 64 percent of all greenhouse gases, which then totaled 6 billion tons annually.3 The developing countries, led by China, produced the remaining 36 percent. Forecasts of emissions for the year 2015 place total emissions at 8.45 billion tons, with the developing countries producing 52 percent of the total; the developed countries by then would be minority players. By the year 2100, 19.8 billion tons of greenhouse emissions are expected, with the developing world producing 66 percent of the total.
Data on projected atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide illustrate the Kyoto challenge in yet another way. In the absence of any intervention—what some call business as usual—concentrations will rise from 1990 levels of 353 parts per million (ppm) to 383.5 ppm by 2010 (Business Roundtable 1998). With full Kyoto compliance, which means that the developed countries achieve their reduction targets while the rest of the world—largely, China and India—is unconstrained, year 2010 concentrations are projected to reach 382.0 ppm, which is roughly 8 percent higher than 1990 concentrations. Comparison of projected year 2010 business-as-usual concentrations with full-Kyoto-compliance levels shows a 0.39 percent reduction in concentrations, an amount that would be undetectable.
independent.org [page 5]
(c) If reducing greenhouse gasses really were a big concern of the ecology nuts, they'd be pushing hard for mandatory use of nuclear power. Since they're not, we can be sure that it's not that they're afraid of dying. Instead, this appears to be simply more of the same political ecology BS. What's laughable is that even the agreements that have failed would have had almost no effect on CO2 levels.
Now do you see why I agree that it's a "farce"?
-- Carl
P.S. Your statement: "Unfortunately, among top-rank scientists in the field there is exactly one who agrees ..." is incorrect, or at the very least depends strongly on how you define "top-rank", LOL!!! What's the usual statement about this? A top rank scientist (Lord Kelvin) once proved that the world was only a few thousand years old. |
