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Politics : The Exxon Free Environmental Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1591)	11/25/2007 1:47:19 PM
From: Ron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 49020

Teepen: U.N.'s latest environmental report is alarming — to some people By TOM TEEPEN Cox News Service The United Nation's international scientific panel that has been studying and debating global warming — and that won a Nobel Prize this year for its work — is out with its final report. The report is quite alarming, full of stuff about species dying off, rivers flooding, oceans rising, greenery turning to desert. But this is all nonsense, of course, as everyone who has been studying the issue on talk radio or in debunker blogs or with such cable savants as Sean Hannity knows perfectly well. "Global warming," you see, is a hoax, the product of a conspiracy by environmentalists — you could even say "wacko environmentalists," but what other kind are there, really? –- and by people who hate capitalism and think Adam Smith was a big silly. To the tiny degree that there really is any warming, the higher temperatures are just a spot of cyclical weather change, and human activity — mainly carbon emissions, mainly from fossil fuels — has nothing to do with it. There is no reason to take the U.N. report seriously. First, the United Nations is made up almost entirely of nations that are not ours. Second, that Nobel Prize was shared with Al Gore, or as the conservative cognoscenti say "Algore," which tells you something about him right there. True, in its basics the report reflects the near-consensus on the phenomenon among scientists in the relevant disciplines, but scientists take flight like starling flocks at any loud noise. The scientists to listen to are the few who mock such group-think. Good conservatives get a chuckle out of remembering how only Galileo was right about the sun being the center of the solar system and everybody else was wrong. (OK, so Galileo was basing his findings on scientific observation and calculation and was bucking not errant science but dogma. That's just a minor wrinkle.) The report claims that even if we could somehow stop carbon emissions dead right now, momentum from what's already in the atmosphere would continue to have disruptive consequences for long decades. Grave effects, the panel says, could begin showing up by 2020, and if nothing is done to reduce emissions sharply, long-run damage will be catastrophic and irreversible. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon characterizes climate change as "so severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action will do." (For the record, Ban is a foreigner.) The European Union, all flummoxed, has adopted policies and practices to slow the rise in its atmospheric carbons and in time reduce them, but the United States, the world's largest producer of such emissions, is doing no such thing. We're No. 1! We're the USA! The U.N. panel has it that if climate change isn't checked, North America will suffer longer, hotter heat waves and water shortages, Europe will lose many of its species, Asia will be hit by huge floods and, worldwide, new diseases will evolve. Yeah, right. Well, we'll just see about that! Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. wacotrib.com