Saving The Planet

A link below to a well-reasoned flogging of climate change hysteria by Conrad Black (NRO) in his typically declarative style. A few choice segments follow.

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZDA4NWUzN2VhMWM3OWJjM2I3M2Q0ODgxOTQwYmRiN2M=&w=MQ==

Colossal spending and regulatory programs impend, based on the Al Gore conventional hysteria that unreduced carbon emissions will destroy the earth. This will eventually be seen as one of the modern world’s most inexplicable descents into public-policy madness.

Even the IPCC admits that the upper end of its forecast would, in fact, substantially increase world food production. There is no chance of achieving stated, or even (by some countries) committed, emission-reduction targets, nor any reason to believe that the attainment of these targets would accomplish anything useful. Yet the president of the United States has been promising radical progress toward an international covenant in Copenhagen this month to spend trillions of dollars in pursuit of this unattainable, undesirable target.

Nor is this the grim “tipping point” Al Gore has made scores of millions of dollars and won a Nobel Peace Prize for decrying as the imminent Apocalypse. Gore’s scurrilous film, An Inconvenient Truth, is based on no original research and is a teeming rain forest of false and irrelevant claims, such as that the Pacific island country of Tuvalu is losing population because the sea level around it is rising under the relentless pressures of global warming on the polar ice caps; and that, for the same reason, mosquitoes have afflicted Nairobi, Kenya, with a constant epidemic of malaria.
The inconvenience of the truth falls on Gore, not his opponents. Water levels have in fact declined slightly at Tuvalu, and the country’s modest population shrinkage is due to economic migration. Malaria was much more prevalent in Nairobi a century ago, and has risen slightly in recent years only because of the ecologists’ attack on the use of insecticides. The polar ice caps aren’t melting at all; the ice sheets over the oceans are, but the ice over land is actually thickening, so water levels are not being affected.

One of the more absurd after-effects of the great Green immersion is eco-neutrality — corporate and even personal claims to expiate and atone for formerly non-soul-destroying indulgences such as jet travel, by installing solar panels or planting trees. News footage from the 1950s of families scrambling under their kitchen tables to take shelter from a Soviet nuclear attack seems the very essence of common sense compared to some current eco-posturing.

As Lord (Nigel) Lawson wrote in his book An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, those concerned about imminent environmental catastrophe — as compared, for example, to the real danger of nuclear terrorism — “need not worry about saving this planet. They are already living on another one. . . . We appear to have entered a new age of unreason. . . . It is from this, above all, that we really need to save the planet.”