<DIV>It's plausible the icecaps could be partially melted and the upshot might be a cooling trend, perhaps even an eventual ice age.</DIV> <DIV><BR><BR> </DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid">05jan06<BR><BR>http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,17729019,00.html<BR><BR>HEAT, bushfires. Just another Australian summer, some hotter, some wetter, <BR>some cooler, some drier. As per usual, the northern hemisphere freezes and <BR>the blame game is in overdrive. At the 2005 UN Climate Change Conference in <BR>Montreal, Greenpeace's Steven Guilbeault stated: "Global warming can mean <BR>colder, it can mean drier, it can mean wetter, that's what we're dealing with."<BR><BR>It is that simple! If it's hot, it's global warming; if it's cold, it's <BR>global warming. Demonstrators in frigid temperatures in Montreal chanted: <BR>"It's hot in here! There's too much carbon in the atmosphere!"
The same <BR>apocalyptic Guilbeault says: "Time is running out to deal with climate <BR>change. Ten years ago, we thought we had a lot of time, five years ago we <BR>thought we had a lot of time, but now science is telling us that we don't <BR>have a lot of time." Really.<BR><BR>In 1992, Greenpeace's Henry Kendall gave us the Chicken Little quote, "Time <BR>is running out"; in 1994, The Irish Times tried to frighten the leprechauns <BR>with "Time running out for action on global warming, Greenpeace claims"; <BR>and in 1997 Chris Rose of Greenpeace maintained the religious mantra with <BR>"Time is running out for the climate". We've heard such failed <BR>catastrophist predictions before. The Club of Rome on resources, Paul <BR>Erlich on population, Y2K, and now Greenpeace on global warming.<BR><BR>During the past 30 years, the US economy grew by 50 per cent, car numbers <BR>grew by 143 per cent, energy consumption grew by 45 per cent and air <BR>pollutants declined by 29 per cent,
toxic emissions by 48.5 per cent, <BR>sulphur dioxide levels by 65.3 per cent and airborne lead by 97.3 per cent. <BR>Most European signatories to the Kyoto Protocol had greenhouse gas <BR>emissions increase since 2001, whereas in the US emissions fell by nearly <BR>1per cent. Furthermore, carbon credits rewarded Russia, (east) Germany and <BR>Britain, which had technically and economically backward energy production <BR>in 1990.<BR><BR>By the end of this century, the demographically doomed French, Italians and <BR>Spaniards may have too few environmentalists to fund Greenpeace's business. <BR>So what really does Greenpeace want? A habitable environment with no humans <BR>left to inhabit it? Destruction of the major economies for .07C change?<BR><BR>Does it matter if sea level rises a few metres or global temperatures rise <BR>a few degrees? No. Sea level changes by up to 400m, atmospheric <BR>temperatures by about 20C, carbon dioxide can vary from 20 per cent to 0.03 <BR>per cent,
and our dynamic planet just keeps evolving. Greenpeace, contrary <BR>to scientific data, implies a static planet. Even if the sea level rises by <BR>metres, it is probably cheaper to address this change than reconstruct the <BR>world's economies.<BR><BR>For about 80 per cent of the time since its formation, Earth has been a <BR>warm, wet, greenhouse planet with no icecaps. When Earth had icecaps, the <BR>climate was far more variable, disease depopulated human settlements and <BR>extinction rates of other complex organisms were higher. Thriving of life <BR>and economic strength occurs during warm times. Could Greenpeace please <BR>explain why there was a pre-Industrial Revolution global warming from AD900 <BR>to 1300? Why was the sea level higher 6000 years ago than it is at present? <BR>Which part of the 120m sea-level rise over the past 15,000 years is <BR>human-induced? To attribute a multicomponent, variable natural process such <BR>as climate change to human-induced carbon
emissions is pseudo-science.<BR><BR>There is no debate about climate change, only dogma and misinformation. For <BR>example, is there a link between hurricanes Katrina and Rita and global <BR>warming? Two hurricanes hit the US Gulf Coast six weeks apart in 1915, <BR>mimicking Katrina and Rita. If global warming caused recent storms, there <BR>should have been more hurricanes in the Pacific and Indian oceans since <BR>1995. Instead, there has been a slight decrease at a time when China and <BR>India have increased greenhouse gas emissions. The impact of hurricanes <BR>might seem more severe because of the blanket instantaneous news coverage <BR>and because more people now live in hurricane-prone areas, hence there is <BR>more property damage and loss of life.<BR><BR>Only a strong economy can produce the well fed who have the luxury of <BR>espousing with religious fervour their uncosted, impractical, impoverishing <BR>policies. By such policies, Greenpeace continues to exacerbate
grinding <BR>poverty in the Third World. The planet's best friend is human <BR>resourcefulness with a supportive, strong economy and reduced release of <BR>toxins. The greenhouse gases - nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and methane - <BR>have been recycled for billions of years without the intervention of human <BR>politics.<BR><BR>Ian Plimer is a professor of geology at the University of Adelaide and <BR>former head of the school of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne.<BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>extropy-chat mailing list<BR>extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org<BR>http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat<BR></BLOCKQUOTE> <DIV><BR></DIV><BR><BR><DIV id=RTEContent><EM>nattering nabob of positivism since 1976</EM></DIV><p>
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