Maybe at least one other country is finally coming around to realizing that the Kyoto Protocol (see also wikipedia) is nothing more than an economic disaster.
There is no scientific consensus on the extent to which anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions impact global climate change. There is a consensus, however, that the Kyoto Protocol has already cost the world billions of dollars. By one estimate, it has cost the world $176,247,622,865 as of this evening, while the potential temperature saving by the year 2050 so far achieved by Kyoto is 0.001827759 °C. Yes, that’s less than two thousandths of a degree, the decimal is in the right place.
As a group of scientists wrote in a letter urging Canada’s new Prime Minister to review that country’s participation in the treaty:
If, back in the mid 1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.” Despite claims to the contrary, there is no consensus among climate scientists on the relative importance of the various causes of global climate change, they wrote.
‘Climate change is real’ is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified.
Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural ‘noise’.
Now if we can just get this chorus to pipe up a bit louder. Maybe then the global warming books will out of print, left to languish on the dusty shelves of a used bookstore, much like the 1970s chronicle of global cooling that I tracked down online the other day: Lowell Ponte’s The Cooling. It just arrived in the mail…I’m anticipating a great read. It’s subtitle has already grabbed me:
Has the next ice age already begun? Can we survive it?
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February 11, 2007 at 8:40 am
Pingback from Notes in the Margin · Global Warming Alarmists: Time Out
April 24, 2006 at 5:07 pm
Anonymous
Obviously any perceived realization of ’savings’ in the whole warming issue is highly dependent on the top economies making similar efforts. Since this guessed potential benefit (.02 or .07 degrees C) is so small, any impact by the listed countries should be expected to be washed out by the expanding emissions of the top 3 economies.
There is no way to know what things will happen in the future to affect the balance sheet (like taking today’s climo numbers and just extrapolating them out 50 years…not really worth anything), so speculation about the ‘true cost’ is usually one-sided since the source of such information is trying to make a point. While I surely don’t know much about the protocol as a whole (outside of a few target percentage cuts by certain dates), I find it a pointless exercise to put some fancy cost calculator on a website based off an arbitrary $150b/year. Amusing to see that on a site called juckscience:)
Innovation and (gasp) free market/enterprise can’t be counted on finding/exploiting other energy sources? Efficiency won’t improve? As an aside, I also throw out that one factor that I don’t think is really taken into account in any long-term progs is that the planet’s population growth is slowing as more people transition from a subsistance lifestyle to one more like a ‘western’ consumer (showing up as negative birth rates in some countries and smaller family size in the U.S., excluding immigrant or first generation families). Can’t say whether this would eventually lead to contracting energy demand, but feel the need to point out that the population ‘j-curve’ no longer seems to be valid.
Also, economic doom and gloom was expected when environmental regulations were established or greatly strengthened a generation ago in this country (mainly air/water). To the contrary, unprecedented growth has occurred and these ‘earth friendly’ efforts even helped to reduce the cost of doing business by reducing waste…the results of which are even touted now by coal/oil companies in their marketing campaigns (emission cuts and such).
Having said all that, I will again point out that I do not know much about the Kyoto Protocol and don’t want the above to be considered an endorsement of it. I just think it is important to remember that it isn’t an economic versus environmental choice as some would like to believe.
-JL