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Kyoto takes one amidships According to our good friend Iain Murray, the Russians have really put the boot to cherished theories at the World Climate Conference.
According to Iain, the head of the Russian Academy of Scientists said the only effect of dropping Kyoto “would be on several thousand people who make a living attending conferences on global warming”.
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Boo to the Russian unilateralists ! Did they consult their French partners on this ? They should have obtained a UN resolution before making such sweeping statements.
Kyoto was never about global warming. It was always about throttling the economies of the industrial nations, especially the US, to let the rest “catch up”.
That’s why emissions were strictly limited for the industrial nations but poor nations had no limits at all.
Given that the US kissed it off (in 1997 when the Senate unanimously passed the Byrd-Hagel resolution), and given that the US was the primary target of it, then in fact the treaty has already failed. It’s been a dead letter ever since 2001, but no one’s really been willing to be the bad guy willing to announce its death and bury the body.
A sad day in Enviro-Nazis for sure. Too bad I don’t entirely trust the Russians…I tend to suspect a Putin deal in the works here. Russia could very well be pulling a Chirac (i.e., playing hard-ball to get exemptions for Russia, then signing on and paying lip-service to the dire threats posed by global warming). Yeah, I’m cynical, but geez, look at the players. This crowd tends to acknowlege a well known truth only when it suits their ends.
The politicization of a fact does not therefore make the fact less factual.
If Kyoto was indeed an attempt to throttle US industry in order to let the third world “catch up,” well, that’s stupid, and predictable, and politics as usual.
Nonetheless, Global Warming is something it makes sense to be concerned about. Just look at a map, and then imagine what happens if sea level rises a single foot.
It seems like the current conventional conservative view of Global Warning – which amounts to “don’t ask, don’t tell” – makes no sense in respect to any rational usage of the word “conservative.”
Anyone got some bs-free references to real data? CNN is currently reporting that the ice breakup in Hudson’s Bay is occurring earlier each year with a resultant possibility of a species die-off of Polar Bears.
It would seem to me merely prudent to make the worst-case assumption – that dumping huge amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere might conceivably have some effect and act to reduce those emissions.
Inasmuch as it also appears that worldwide petroleum reserves are much smaller than formerly thought (I saw this somewhere, but can’t seem to google it) it would make urgent, economic sense to pursue alternative power anyway, as an urgent national security issue.
Heck, this is reason enough.
Enviro-Nazis serve to cloud the issues as badly as those who keep their heads in the sand.
They always seem to forget that we ARE part of the environment!
We desperately need to understand what the heck IS going on with global climate and how we are (and indeed, how we CAN) affect it.
I point out that a global ice age would be no less disastrous than a global steam-bath – and the retreat of the glaciers may well have some relationship with human activity. Or not. I, for one, would like to know if reducing emissions past a certain critical point might not just be an extremely bad idea.