Jump to content

The Downside of Kyoto


Recommended Posts

The Downside of Kyoto

 

I note here that in August Queensland instituted a 20 year moratorium on the development of oil shale. The reasoning being to save the state from man-made global warming by cutting down on carbon dioxide emissions.

 

I'm thinking the economic cost of such a move is a huge mill stone to carry on a leap of faith aboard a straw horse. Here's why.

 

Carbon Dioxide

Mother Nature has installed a huge number of "Carbon Dioxide Sequestering Units" around the Earth. These consume carbon dioxide by the uncounted billions and billions of tons. She calls them "trees".

 

Some little things called leaves and grass are her willing accomplices. They use this nasty old carbon dioxide to make chlorophyll (which I learned about maybe in my third year or so in school), which then makes for green leaves and grass.

 

I don't think Mother Nature would take kindly to man's contrived efforts to curtail the supply of that necessary nutrient from her forests, farms and prairies. She might even consider that a "Brown Movement".

 

Green House Gases

It seems to me from maybe a bit later in school I learned that the principal constituent of green house gases is water. Now, one of Queensland's other concerns is the current three year drought.

 

So I would have imagined the inhabitants of that state might have welcomed the "onslaught" of green house gases. That might end their drought. After all, when was the last time anyone observed a drought in a greenhouse?

 

What is the color of your footprint

One of the favorite images of the "Greenhouse Gases Are Bad" movement is to characterize generation of carbon dioxide as a black footprint. I think they have that all wrong.

 

To me it seems that anything that makes leaves green and keeps them wet might better be viewed as a Green Footprint. One covered with leaves and bits of grass. Sort of the thing left behind by Tolkien's Hobbits or his Ents (tree monsters) when they walked down the road.

 

Other images

Another image from the Green House Movement, championed by their Chief Scientist Al Gore, is that of a rapidly melting Antarctic ice sheath. However, from what I read this is simply not the case, in fact that ice sheath is larger than it has ever been.

 

Not quite large enough yet to bump into Tasmania off of Australia's south shore, but at least one would have thought someone living in Australia and tapped into this movement would be aware of this embarrassing fact.

 

Other embarrassing facts that unravel the "proof" of man-made global warming are erroneous predictions of Greenland's ice cap melting and slipping off (thereby one presumes offending the world's sense of propriety by revealing its derrière). That won't be happening, the models are all wrong. Another myth was that polar bears were dying off. Happily, current reports from Hudson's Bay are that the reverse is happening. Polar Bear population is greater than it has been in 25 years.

 

The Right Stuff

One suspects that the science and engineering that came up with all these predictions were not of the "right stuff". Hardly the caliber of stuff that could have led to discovering the DNA double helix, microbes, viruses, deciding phlogiston vs. oxygen, determining that all adepts are inept, atomic physics, Pluto or the cause of and cure of diseases like polio, diabetes, and so on. Nor of the engineering stuff that invented microchips, sent man into space (where we find plans are afoot to create a greenhouse on Mars to allow man to survive there), came up with cell phones, and brought us HDTV's.

 

Note too that a lot of "the stuff" that is used in greenhouse gas predictions is also "the stuff" which weathermen use. I have trouble planning picnics around what the weatherman says. And they want us to shut industry down, diminish fuel supplies, curtail jobs, send manufacturing over to China, raise the cost of living and alter our lifestyles based on the same stuff?

 

Kyoto

The enhanced concerns about greenhouse gases arises from Australia's recent signing of the Kyoto Protocol. However one views the ability of man to change such massive components of the Earth's atmosphere, simply put "the evidence" is neither conclusive nor indicative of either way. The predictions, a few of which were mentioned above, have consistently been either abjectly wrong or of such little demonstrable impact as to be specious.

 

But of one thing we can be sure about Kyoto, the evidence is abundantly clear that it economically favors those who do not comply with it - such as China. So our choices are either (a) we can all sign on and all be uniformly poor, (B) have some sign and some not sign, in which case wealth flows towards the non-signers, or © let non-political science guide our hand (the one holding the pen), in which case I dare say none will sign on.

 

One of the lessons that the Luddite experience in the early 1800's taught is that wholesale banning of the benefits of science and industry was not the answer. The textile mills that the Luddites arose over (their inefficient, labor intensive jobs were being replaced by high volume machinery) provided more cloth, cheaper cloth, greater variety cloth, and made that cloth available to everyone. The search for new technology (a great buzz-word on everyone's lips today) will always have the same effect - those clinging to the old technology (if non-competitive) will be left behind. Social ills may still require the politician to resolve them or ease the transition (retraining?), but the debate over real technical issues is never well served by delusional science, hype and mindless activism.

 

In short myths, even those embedded into legislation (and protocols), are still fairy tales.

 

Augurelli

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...