Monday, December 7, 2009

Copenhagen: The Climate Fiction Experience Begins Today


In the time-honored genre of the science fiction disaster movie, some kind of Doomsday mechanism, like a runaway nuclear missile, a sneak attack by an approaching asteroid, or a death-dealing mutant virus, threatens the earth's entire population with immediate destruction, forcing antagonistic world leaders to convene. After a brief period of intense convincing by heroic, far-seeing scientists (often with a child in tow), the world's heads-of-state beat their swords into microphones and issue dire warnings to their various populations.

If the threat is being issued by an advanced alien life form from Planet X, the invader impatiently skips the messy step of getting governments to agree to do anything, takes over the world's television broadcasting facilities, and informs Earth's inhabitants that they better shape up or meet their doom. Otherwise, in Hollywood versions at least, the president of the United States mops his brow with his handkerchief, tightens his disheveled tie, and delivers the bad news himself.

But who needs Henry Fonda, Morgan Freeman, or invading aliens when we have the world-wide Leftist press? Today, 56 newspapers in 45 countries are running the same Doomsday editorial, many of them defying convention by giving the editorial front-page space. (H/t Legal Insurrection). That might help explain why these 56 newspapers have been pretty much ignoring the mounting evidence of the use of fraudulent data and methodologies in the development of global warming models that promise that humans will soon be worth our weight in Soylent Green.

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. . . .

In the typical sci-fi disaster flick, the Doomsday message is an honorable one, a brave one, and, above all, a truthful one, in which politics are transcended to deliver salvation. In our real world, of course, the Doomsday message is a pack of lies. Here is a temperature map based on information from one of the IPCC's own publications:

As anyone can tell at a glance, the only way that 11 of the last 14 years have been the warmest on record is if temperature record keeping began 14 years ago. Earth's temperature has been declining or flat since 1998. You do the math. Furthermore, the Arctic sea ice melt was greater in the 1920s than it is today, and was followed by a period of ice thickening. Antarctic and Greenland glaciers have been in a phase of thickening for some years.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. [I can just about hear Henry Fonda making that announcement.] The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea.

This is hogwash, utter hogwash (with apologies to hogs). One result of the melting of glaciers following the last Great Ice Age was rainfall that turned the arid plains of North Africa into areas of lush vegetation supporting increasing populations of all kinds of life. Significant rain fell over what is now the Sahara desert. Human and animal populations migrated northward. If Alaska, Northern Canada, Northern Europe, and Northern Asia were to become warmer, they could serve as breadbaskets to the world. And about that "whole nations would be drowned by the sea" scare, think about it. When was the last time the melting ice in your water glass caused the water to spill over the top? It just doesn't work that way.

Whichever profit-and-power manipulators lurk behind the united effort by the world's press to scare the stuffing out of the people of the planet, you can bet that it is not concern for you or anyone you are likely to know, unless you exchange solar equinox cards with Al Gore or George Soros. Barack Hussein Obama isn't doing too well as Savior of the United States. Perhaps he thinks he can give a kick-butt speech in Copenhagen to market himself as Savior of the World.

Just for fun, here's a lighthearted view of the non-impending non-catastrophe, by the intrepid Freezing Explorers at Minnesotans for Global Warming:



__________
Related posts:

1 comment: