Live Stupid
Remember when a bunch of rock musicians got together and solved third world poverty? (Most of the money was stolen by corrupt Ethiopian politicians, and there is good evidence some was used by thugs to forcefully oppress several hundred thousand people.) Heck, forget about free trade, capital markets, democracy, property rights, civil order, and global investment - lets just transfer a bunch of money to them and they’ll be all right.
After all subsidies have been working for the natives in North America, fishers in the Atlantic, car producers in Windsor, and forestry mills in BC for years. Right? Nope, this little economic truth called rent seeking means all that money has been flowing into the hands of thieves and lawyers for years.
Why the heck, me included, are people so willing to pay money to screw themselves?
(In Western culture, foolish gluttony is often represented by a continually growing Leviathan that is difficult to kill)
Real scientists ask questions, and are rarely willing to go on TV and make broad ranging statements. Scientists tend to be cautious and always re-evaluate the evidence.
Thats why when respected researchers like Roger A. Pielke, a climatologist with hundreds of papers in climate journals makes statements like:
In terms of climate change and variability on the regional and local scale, the IPCC Reports, the CCSP Report on surface and tropospheric temperature trends, and the U.S. National Assessment have overstated the role of the radiative effect of the anthropogenic increase of CO2 relative to the role of the diversity of other human climate climate forcing on global warming, and more generally, on climate variability and change.
Or William Gray, who said:
Gray acknowledges that we’ve had some warming the past 30 years. “I don’t question that,” he explains. “And humans might have caused a very slight amount of this warming. Very slight. But this warming trend is not going to keep on going. My belief is that three, four years from now, the globe will start to cool again, as it did from the middle ’40s to the middle ’70s.”
And Richard Lindzen (an author of IPCC 1 who withdrew from what he calls quackery) and Chris Landsea (who withdrew from IPCC 4 because it was too politicized and not scientific) and so on.
I tend to believe these scientists over people with no credibility like David Suzuki or Al Goreacle. Now don’t get me wrong, Pielke, for example, believes in climate change on a local level due to anthropogenic effects and that is what his research is focused on. What he stresses is that we really don’t know what we are talking about on the global picture. I think he’s right on there.
(Watch this commercial and tell me why Suzuki isn’t telling people to shut off their wasteful outside lights, instead of recommending bulb changes. This just sums up their mentality - simply dumb)
The IPCC has been infiltrated by horrible politicos, bent on only one thing - transferring wealth. The real goal of Kyoto is to transfer money to third world countries in the form of imaginary CO2 credits. I mean even if we followed Kyoto to the nuttiest of its conclusions we’d only be reducing the increase in theoretical global warming by 0.2 degrees. Its like throwing a 2 cm piece of Black and Decker fridge ice into a volcano. It isn’t doing anything.
The reality is the IPCC conclusions are constantly being challenged. When some IPCC scientists that have signed the document have asked to have their names removed, and some have quit the organization altogether one should start to some raise flags of one’s own. Especially when scientists left because they felt science was becoming political.
A recent article in the journal, Science, points how how flawed the computer generated projections likely are, and more insidiously, how ad hoc they may be.
But the group of three atmospheric scientists–Charlson; Stephen Schwartz of the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York; and Henning Rodhe of Stockholm University, Sweden–says the close match between models and the actual warming is deceptive. The match “conveys a lot more confidence [in the models] than can be supported in actuality,” says Schwartz.
To prove theirpoint, the commentary authors note the range of the simulated warmings, that is, the width of the purple band. The range is only half as large as they would expect it to be, they say, considering the large range of uncertainty in the factors driving climate change in the simulations. Greenhouse-gas changes are well known, they note, but not so the counteracting cooling of pollutant hazes, called aerosols. Aerosols cool the planet by reflecting away sunlight and increasing the reflectivity of clouds. Somehow, the three researchers say, modelers failed to draw on all the uncertainty inherent in aerosols so that the 20th-century simulations look more certain than they should.
Just as flawed are the new Live Earth concerts. A bunch of musicians are going to travel the world releasing tons of CO2 putting on a concert to tell everyone to stop releasing CO2. This is not much different, except on a larger scale, to David Suzuki’s recent tour across Canada in a gas guzzling tour bus used simply for his own comfort. We’re all going to pay to see it, releasing even more CO2. This series of concerts could themselves release more CO2 than many third world nations.
(Genesis on Stage. What would Suzuki and Ontario Hydro say about all those bulbs?)
This planet has ranged from friggin hot to not over milennia. Moreover there is a lot we don’t know.
Update:
Another CTV poll gone horribly wrong, as in not the way they wanted it to go. Usually they leave their polls up so that about 10000 people can vote, but they stopped this one quickly.
