Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Bullshit is a source of global warming too, you know.

If anyone has or can make a free 73 minutes of time, I would very strongly urge you to go here and watch this video, entitled "The Great Global Warming Swindle", courtesy Britain's Channel Four.
Very interesting and powerful stuff. It does not deny the Earth is warming--there's a broad consensus that it is--but it does raise many serious concerns with the idea that we as a species have anything whatever to do with it; also with the motives behind the whole global warming movement, which it likens to a religion.
These are actual accredited scientists here, not talking heads. A couple of them are Canadian. Given that people who appeared in this programme are receiving death threats and are standing by their findings, I think it important the rest of the world sees what they have to say and judges for itself.
Having watched this--which I'll admit lends credence to much of what I have been saying for a couple of years now--I now have more ammunition to use against the doomcryers:

--If carbon dioxide is so terrible, how do we account for (a) our minuscule contribution, when weighed against those of the animal, vegetable, volcanic, and especially oceanic sources and (b) the fact that see-oh-two concentrations don't seem to have a reliable correlation with climate?

--If storms, as any meterological textbook will tell you, are the product of temperature differences between the tropics and the poles, and temperature at the poles is rising, why do global warming theorists predict stronger and more frequent catastrophic storms? An attention-getting device, perhaps?

--I've also read that with global warming, such tropical diseases as malaria will move northwards. Sort of like what happened in the Soviet Union in the 1920s...all the way north to the Arctic Circle and beyond...?

--People who dare to be unorthodox on this issue are routinely being accused of being in the pay of Big Oil or right-wing cabals. The reality is much closer to the opposite: many of those who continually reinforce the prevailing "wisdom" are in the pay of government. There are enormous sums of money out there for anyone willing to link "man-made global warming" into any study they propose to undertake.
--What is the rationale behind forcing the poorest people in the world to use the most expensive power (solar, wind) in the world? Is that not a giant First World foot crushing the Third World? "Don't touch your coal. Don't touch your oil. Use this unreliable windmill instead." That's suicide. That's anti-human. That's anti-development, anti-globalization, and anti-capitalism all rolled into one. Be anti-globalist or anti-capitalist if you want, but if you're human and anti-human, it's a contradiction in terms...and if you pervert science to forward your political agenda, you're a hypocrite.

I am viscerally against fundamentalism in any form, and man-made global warming is rapidly becoming the new fundamentalist creed. As such, I feel I must speak out.

I am not, repeat NOT, suggesting that global warming isn't happening. I am also NOT a person who advocates the befouling of our nest. Indeed, I believe there are many serious environmental issues that need to be addressed worldwide, starting yesterday. I just don't think greenhouse gasses are one of them.

[EDIT: in the interests of responsible debate, be aware that this video has its detractors, and at least one rebuttalappears to be impeccably well-sourced. Still, I believe the twin thrusts of the video (carbon dioxide appears to have at best a tangential relationship with climate change, and politics and ulterior motives abound on both sides of the divide) are worth examining.]


1 comment:

Peter Dodson said...

Hey Ken. I would really suggest visiting realclimate.org and doing a search for the relationship between C02 and climate change. They also have a couple of rebuttals to the Swindle vid.

Can I also recommend this piece - it is probably one of the best in terms of balance in the climate change debate.

http://bostonreview.net/BR32.1/emanuel.html

Let me know what you think.