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After the Paris Climate Deal…
Not surprisingly, perhaps, many on the right dismiss the big climate agreement reached in Paris. But here is a dour take from activist and author Bill McKibben in the New York Times:
So the world emerges, finally, with something like a climate accord, albeit unenforceable. If all parties kept their promises, the planet would warm by an estimated 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, or 3.5 degrees Celsius, above preindustrial levels. And that is way, way too much. We are set to pass the 1 degree Celsius mark this year, and that’s already enough to melt ice caps and push the sea level threateningly higher.
The irony is, an agreement like this adopted at the first climate conference in 1995 might have worked. Even then it wouldn’t have completely stopped global warming, but it would have given us a chance of meeting the 1.5 degree Celsius target that the world notionally agreed on.…
But what this means is that we need to build the movement even bigger in the coming years, so that the Paris agreement turns into a floor and not a ceiling for action. We’ll be blocking pipelines, fighting new coal mines, urging divestment from fossil fuels — trying, in short, to keep weakening the mighty industry that still stands in the way of real progress. With every major world leader now on the record saying they at least theoretically support bold action to make the transition to renewable energy, we’ve got a new tool to work with.
Of course many climate activists themselves “stand in the way of real progress” with their opposition to nuclear energy. Likewise when environmental activists say we must accept a future of stagnation rather than growing abundance on a high-energy planet, they lose many potential allies on the right.
Published in Economics, Environment
This, here, is the phrase that reveals their mindset. A group of the planet’s highest elite = “the world”.
If important people agreed to it, that means “the world” agreed to it.
I don’t remember there being a referendum on the matter.
Excellent, excellent point. I let that go by without catching it. Good job.
I’m supposing that Mr. McKibben wrote and filed his manifesto on a solar/bicycle powered laptop? Perhaps on a piece of illuminated vellum as his pre-industrial progenitors did?
Jim P,
Sometimes there simply is no way to be diplomatic. Climate change is a mental disease. If someone became terribly afraid of heights and wouldn’t go to the second floor of a building, our response shouldn’t be that we will help them achieve their goal of banning all buildings with a second floor but use more free market methods to do it.
There is no global warming. For all that we can conclusively prove, there could be global cooling. The polar ice isn’t melting but is actually net increasing. More advanced & accurate instrumentation was used to measure global temperature most recently. It demonstrated no increase in global temperature for the last 20 years. This entire conference is a joke and all rational people know it. Russia, China, India, and all the emergent economies had enough with the Climate fantasy a long time ago. Kerry admits that if he made it legally binding Congress wouldn’t pass it. With tough guys like Paul Ryan running Congress (that’s sarcasm) you’ve got to know that finally the Climate bluff has been called.
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Climate Change Obsession is a childish thing that we must put away.
Regards,
Jim
As I wrote more than five years ago:
The appeal of “alternative energy” among leftists is described by a downward sloping function, which is roughly quantified by reference to Savage’s Law:
The fact that nuclear power is practical is the very reason it is unsupportable.
Whence the energy to make the CPU in that laptop? The LEDs in the laptop’s monitor?
Separately, what Mr Gawron said. What the climatistas carefully ignore is the close alignment of medium- and long-term solar cycles with planetary cooling and warming cycles; the current global average temperature being well below the geological temperature trend line, so that were warming to be occurring, it’d only be back toward Earth’s normal temperature; and this interesting timeline.
Oh, and the current sunspot cycle perhaps forecasting the climatistas‘ originally promised global cooling.
Eric Hines
No there is no global warming, it’s now climate change, which in every instance is detrimental. Sort of like heads I win tails you lose.
The quick fix, to reduce carbon dioxide production, would be to switch to nuclear power. However, I have not notice any move in this direction.
What’s missing from this analysis is the power of the administrative agencies. The Obama administration does not need congressional approval to move forward; the EPA has the authority. This has already been litigated. CO2 has (preposterously) been declared a pollutant, so the EPA can regulate it.
The only reason for changing the wording of the Paris accord (from shall to should) is to avoid any new congressional involvement. The agreement does not mandate anything so Senate approval is not required. A change in the executive branch is required to stop this foolishness, i.e., a different president.
I just overheard Bill O’Reilly’s ignorant (or lazy and ignorant) bloviating about how even back in the ’70s, while there was a bit of theorizing about global cooling, everybody has always know it was global warming.
Here’s a global warming paper from Science in 1976: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/193/4252/447.short
And a cooling paper from Nature in 1978: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v275/n5680/abs/275489a0.html
Cooling; Monthly Weather Review (J Amer Met Soc) 1983: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0493(1983)111%3C0901:GTVITT%3E2.0.CO;2
Cooling, Science, 1972: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/178/4057/190.short