Oscar For A Hypocritical Panic Merchant

David W

2007-05-16 00:06:27 UTC

Post by Bonzo
Andrew Bolt
February 28, 2007 12:00am
Article from: Herald Sun
ANDREW Bolt writes: LET'S check what these past two mad days say about us and
global warming.
First, we're terrified of global warming.
How can we not be, when on Monday Al Gore wins an Oscar for a documentary
warning it will bring us plagues and famines, and so much
melting that the seas could rise 20 feet this century, drowning whole cities?

I saw this last week, but I found it hard to pay attention after about half an
hour. I'll watch it again soon, and try to concentrate this time. A few
observations from what I did listen to:
- I need to know more about the past measurements of CO2 and temperature from
ice cores, i.e., exactly how they are done and how reliable they are. I'm not
willing to just accept the figures. In particular, if there is anything common
between these two measurements, then any errors could well produce an apparent
correlation.
- Assuming the correlation is true, it doesn't prove cause and effect. How do we
know the temperature didn't rise for some other reason, and the rise caused
large changes to life on earth, which in turn raised the CO2 level?
- The frog in boiling/slowly heated water is an urban legend. It's complete
nonsense. That they didn't check this throws into doubt their rigour in checking
everything else. I was aghast that they were stupid enough to let this howler
into the film.

Post by Bonzo
But second, we're just as terrified of doing anything remotely likely to stop
it.
That's clear, given how furiously Labor yesterday denounced the reported plan by
Ron Walker and two associates to build our first
nuclear power plant, for greenest baseload power we could hope for.
Or note how Labor, nervous of losing votes, also rejected the Greens' call to at
least ban coal exports. Or how Brisbane City
Council is running a million ergonomic miles from its consultants' plan to fight
warming by banning private pools and forcing people
to aircondition no more than one room of their home.
This balance of terror - of the sickness and the "cure" - now gives us the
comedy act of our times, in which green-preaching humbugs
propose "solutions" to global warming that are so painless none could work.
Take The Sydney Morning Herald's latest stunt - to promise to turn off some of
its lights for just one hour on one Sunday evening.
Or take the Howard Government's plan to ban incandescent light globes, and make
us use low-energy ones instead.
How much of our emissions will this cut? Just 0.14 per cent at best, in a
country with just 1 per cent of the world's gasses anyway.

This isn't just about the emissions those measures will save in themselves.
Their main benefit will be to help get global warming and energy conservation on
people's minds, so they'll save energy in other ways. It's all about changing
community attitudes, not saving 0.14%.

Post by Bonzo
But did anyone really think we'd stop the warming, or is the hype just a call to
prayer by earth worshippers, or a pitch by
mainchancers with schemes to sell and votes to get?
Take Al Gore. While this jet-setting gas-belcher was getting his Oscar, the
lights were still burning so brightly at his 20-room
Nashville home that the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research yesterday announced
he used more power every month than the average
household used in a year.

So Al Gore is (possibly) a hypocrite. I have my doubts on global warming and
Gore's film, but whether Gore is a hypocrite or not is irrelevant to whether
global warming is a disaster around the corner.

Post by Bonzo
So let's drop the terror-mongering, and calmly check something else. As in: is
global warming really that bad, and is it really
worth the pain of trying to stop it?

David