Climate Change, Copenhagen and Futility...

Well, the FT has now also swallowed the Kool-Aid and have gotten on the bandwagon of We're All Going To Die If Copenhagen Isn't Ratified.

It's sad to see the death of a skeptical voice.

This is what I mean (from here):

...skepticism of the reality of climate change is either unfounded or, when warranted, does not mean nothing needs be to be done. We cannot be certain (until it is too late) that continuing to emit carbon at our current pace will lead to disaster; but we do know that if we do, the chance of a catastrophic outcome is high enough to make insuring against worst-case scenarios the rational response. Surely the financial crisis has taught us that a low-probability tail risk is still a risk.

First of all: there is no one amongst the skeptics who deny that there is no climate change: no one. But what is being pointed out, for those who are actually willing to listen instead of trying to silence the skeptics with shrieks of rage, is that we don't know why. If the climatologists are honest, instead of being dependent on grant money intended to prove anthropogenic warming, they tend to agree.

The fundamental dishonesty of the scientists is what drives me to distrust them: the refusal to share data, the extremely poor (at best) when not directly dishonest usage of statistics to make the data support their story. I need only point to the utter dishonesty of Mann et al with their infamous and completely constructed "hockey stick" to underscore the fact that climatologists need to prove their case openly and honestly, rather than rely on "'cause I say so" and refuse to share their data. They also need to get skeptical statisticians on their side by opening up about their methodologies in plain language and openly available.

They are not doing this: hence my fundamental skepticism, above all because they are indeed beholden to moneyed interests who are financing their work. Right now they have the believability of scientists who white-washed the risks of cancer from cigarettes.


In other words, none.

Take a look at the Copenhagen draft and you can see, as I have pointed out here before, that this is nothing less than a power grab to subsume all human activity to prevent something that happens naturally.

And that which happens naturally is climate change.

Here I am a friend of the other Copenhagen initiative: that rather than try to spend billions correcting the past - which is all that the Copenhagen accord attempts to achieve - we need to spend monies changing the future.

Impoverishing the industrialized countries to do so, based on science that has ceased to be empirical and borders on religious dogma, will go down in history as the rebirth of forced state collectivism with all the human suffering and agony that always accompanies such attempts of those who think they know better to order their lessors around...

You see, there are risks that cannot be insured against. That the world's climate is changing as it has in the millenniums before humans and will long after we are gone is not something you can change or influence except at the margins.


The FT's favored solution, global cap and tax, ignores the fundamental truth about undeveloped and developing countries: even if they were to get all that money - $500bn/year! - from that cap-and-trade regime (and it would be a regime, complete with the jack-booted enforcers to ensure that you have no pets and take only one airplane trip in a lifetime), what would they do with that money?

Create jobs? Doing what? If they industrialize, they can't sell their pollution rights. If they don't do anything, they fritter the money away and will raise a generation who can only live on the largesse of the industrialized countries. "Green jobs" are a cruel hoax and myth.

This is going to end very, very badly: it is obvious to me that the actions being proposed have not been thought through based on the fundamentals that need to be analyzed: the economics of the situation. For the ecologists/watermelon people/politicians, economic considerations are something that just gets in the way of their brave new world. So they are ignoring the real world, the economics of the situation, in order to ram a program through that gives them the powers they claim to need.



That way lies madness.

But we've seen how the road to hell is paved with the very best of intentions. The paving companies, I imagine, for this job will be exempt from having to cover their Co2 emissions for that job.

We will see the US being bullied in Copenhagen, A weak President, a servile Congress preoccupied with counting the deck chairs, and a press that has not merely drunk the Kool-Aid, but insists on making sure that everyone does, will seal the deal and turn over the key to the cupboard in the greatest looting of wealth that this planet has ever seen.