Global Warming Goes Up in Smoke
Are America’s lefties finally ready to dismiss Global Warming? Tom Harris and Dennis Prager tried to talk sense to us but lefties refused to listen.
Citing the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), George Will writes:
The left fails to grasp that Stone Age people need heat and energy too. In Calcutta, refugees use cow dung (photos) for cooking and heating. Liberals might celebrate their imaginative use of cheap organic alternative fuels, but the city was so polluted that I sneezed gray soot for more than three months AFTER my departure.
I’ve inhaled smog in LA, Paris, Nairobi, Mexico City, Rio, Tokyo, Sydney, and Bangkok, but nothing compares to the heavy soot that smothers Calcutta for most of every year – blanketed by people who don’t rely on cars or coal-burning power plants. I’ve always wondered how liberals planned to force the planet’s homeless to stop dirtying our air.
Here’s an idea – just say no.
As for the dynamics of climate change, I suppose that a few lefties may have to relocate from the planet’s coastlines one day. Even so, Humanity has done pretty well in adapting to poisonous gases like oxygen over the millennia. In the meantime, if liberals gave up their hysterical opposition to nuclear power, they’d probably enjoy cleaner skies in LA during their lifetimes.
I’m also glad Al Gore got his movie out before his ideas were completely debunked. I, for one, am glad that the Global Warming issue is laid to rest – finally!
Citing the latest report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), George Will writes:
We do not know how much we must change our economic activity to produce a particular reduction of warming. And we do not know whether warming is necessarily dangerous. Over the millennia, the planet has warmed and cooled for reasons that are unclear but clearly were unrelated to SUVs. Was life better when ice a mile thick covered Chicago? Was it worse when Greenland was so warm that Vikings farmed there? Are we sure the climate at this particular moment is exactly right, and that it must be preserved, no matter the cost?Even LA Times’ Alan Zarembo reports that if everyone in America switched from cars to bikes, the Chinese closed their factories, and Europe stopped using electricity, none of those steps would stop global warming. Zarembo quotes Princeton University’s Robert Socolow, who says that if the entire world stopped burning fossil fuels, carbon wouldn't approach pre-Industrial Revolution levels for hundreds of years. Drastic measures could slow warming, but not stop it.
It could cost tens of trillions (in expenditures and foregone economic growth, here and in less-favored parts of the planet) to try to fine-tune the planet's temperature.
We cannot know if these trillions would purchase benefits commensurate with the benefits that would have come from social wealth that was not produced.
President Clinton and his earnest vice president knew better than to seek ratification of Kyoto by a Senate that had passed its resolution of disapproval 95-0. Fifty-six of those 95 senators are still serving. Two of them are John Kerry and Barbara Boxer.
If the rest of the world returned to the Stone Age, carbon concentrations would still rise.When I worked at the US Consulate in Calcutta, India, an estimated one million illiterate Bengali refugees lived on the streets. None relied on SUVs for travel or fossil fuels for electricity. These people were so poor, they made America’s ragged homeless seem ostentatious by comparison. These refugees lived as close to the Stone Age as can be imagined.
The left fails to grasp that Stone Age people need heat and energy too. In Calcutta, refugees use cow dung (photos) for cooking and heating. Liberals might celebrate their imaginative use of cheap organic alternative fuels, but the city was so polluted that I sneezed gray soot for more than three months AFTER my departure.
I’ve inhaled smog in LA, Paris, Nairobi, Mexico City, Rio, Tokyo, Sydney, and Bangkok, but nothing compares to the heavy soot that smothers Calcutta for most of every year – blanketed by people who don’t rely on cars or coal-burning power plants. I’ve always wondered how liberals planned to force the planet’s homeless to stop dirtying our air.
Here’s an idea – just say no.
As for the dynamics of climate change, I suppose that a few lefties may have to relocate from the planet’s coastlines one day. Even so, Humanity has done pretty well in adapting to poisonous gases like oxygen over the millennia. In the meantime, if liberals gave up their hysterical opposition to nuclear power, they’d probably enjoy cleaner skies in LA during their lifetimes.
I’m also glad Al Gore got his movie out before his ideas were completely debunked. I, for one, am glad that the Global Warming issue is laid to rest – finally!
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