The Heritage Foundation - Leadership for America

July 28, 2009 Mike writes:

The simple fact is that the world’s climate has always varied, and long term variations tend to be bigger than short term (ice ages are bigger than any one extraordinary year). In this kind of system we would expect to get apparent long term drift which those uneducated in the science of noise might mistake for external forcing on a stable “norm” looking like a manmade cause. The truth is that we can no more stop global tempeature variation than stop the tide coming in and any attempt to do so will be entirely futile as the planet’s thermostat has been stable under far more stressful “forcings” than a plague of human ants: comets; super volcanoes, and wondering continents.

July 29, 2009 David, Surrey, B.C. writes:

Always a pleasure to find stuff agreeing with something I wrote several years ago…

I am less worried about global warming than I am about the measures proposed to fix it. Public concern about the topic is based on incomplete information. The resources and attention aimed at fixing global warming are better directed elsewhere.
A carbon tax is a bad idea. Its proponents say that it will target big, industrial polluters. Carbon tax advocates might like to surcharge pretty much everything that generates carbon dioxide, but their initial sales pitch is that carbon taxes would be limited just “to industry”. Even this would be a burden. Costs to any industry are always passed on down to the consumer. More expensive food, commuting, travel, heating, bus tickets, clothes, and housing will follow. Anything that takes money out of the hands of the citizens who make it results in less disposable income, less economic activity, fewer jobs, less personal freedom and less personal choice; but with more poverty and bigger government. Readers should reflect on the thin success record of projects that involve making governments richer and citizens poorer.
Carbon credit trading is a worse idea. Like carbon taxes, it ends up costing every citizen more to live. Unlike carbon taxes, the money doesn’t even go to our own government, but instead ultimately gets sent to someplace-or-other with credits to trade, like Russia, or disappeared into some vague international administrative body. I don’t think it is a good idea to give Canadian workers’ money to a nuclear-armed dictatorship, or multinational career bureaucrats.

Global warming activists say many things. Here are some things that they don’t:
-Global warming is happening on other planets. Ice caps are shrinking on Mars, and on the moons of Jupiter. Planetary warming is caused more by what the sun does than by what we do.
-It has been colder than it is now. It has also been warmer, because global warming has happened before. The earth has cycled between cold and warm, often. The Rockies have been a tropical seabed, the Sahara a network of lakes, the high arctic a temperate grassland. A millennium past, Greenland was warm enough to farm. A few centuries ago, Washington horsed his heavy artillery over the ice of the Delaware River. Climate has always changed. Activists think that it should stop changing for us, and that we can make it stop if only we pay and sacrifice enough. If global warming is yet again happening, it is as likely that humans caused as it is that the tide falls because we splash buckets of water away from the shore; or that if we splash towards the shore, we can stop it.
-China, with its fast-paced coal-generator construction program adds another Canada’s worth of carbon gas output about every two weeks. China alone generates something like 1/3 of the world’s output of greenhouse gasses. India, approximately another 1/3. Canada generates something less than 1/60, and British Columbia, less than one-tenth of that. Canadians could turn off every switch, cap every well and commit mass suicide, and the effect on world greenhouse gasses would be scarcely detectable. Yet while Canadian enthusiasts of the Kyoto accord and the Bali conference are demanding that Canada bind its economy with carbon taxes and that Canadian workers make less and pay more, they are ok that China and India—vastly greater carbon dioxide generators, and direct economic competitors with our workers in many areas–do not agree to reduce their carbon gas output now, soon, or ever.

Protecting the environment against real threats is effective if it is done locally. The results are visible and measurable by those who pay for it. Local oversight cleans waterways, reduces air pollution, enhances salmon habitat, installs sewage treatment, controls floods, restores wetlands, and upgrades infrastructure. Local managers are more directly accountable, and can be changed or dismissed based on whether their projects succeed or fail. When a project is done, the funding can end. Bureaucrats aiming to retain their long-term income by assuring us of some benefits, someday, some generations down the road are unlikely to be kept on.
Proposed global warming remedies are quite the opposite. Firstly, the benefits are uncertain, theoretical, and distant: Decades, generations of people and trillions of dollars are to pass before our descendants might be assured that atmospheric carbon dioxide (an invisible, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic essential plant nutrient) is below some arbitrarily-set level. Secondly, the costs are high: Once we cede to some quasi-government organization the power to take our money, it will never demand less, it will never get smaller, and it will never disappear. Lastly, some dollars are more efficiently spent some ways than others: The costs for the proposed remedies for global warming–even in the unlikely event that it is reversible–are preposterously expensive for a very long time, unlikely to succeed, and are to be borne at great disproportion by Canadians, who contribute almost nothing measurable to it. This will mean less money towards neighborhood, municipal, regional and provincial environmental projects… the ones that work.
The main problem with global warming is in the proposed solutions.

July 29, 2009 rockstar peterson writes:

[...] Video: Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself [...]

July 29, 2009 Lloyd Scallan - New Orleans writes:

Mike is absolutely correct. We cannot alter global
tempeature variation. What we all must understand is that Al Gore and groups such as NRDC are part
of a socialist movement. At this movement’s base is a origanization etitled “The Apollo Alliance” under which labor unions, green groups, and social groups are controling almost every aspect or our lives. These are just the begining of Obama’s “250,000 man civilian army”, that according to Obama, (that is rarely mentioned) will be fully funded with federal funds (our tax dollars) and have more power than our present military forces. WAKE UP people! we are at WAR with socialist and anarchist that are bent on the
destruction of our American way of life. We all
must accept the fact that we must defend our way of life by what ever means it requires. That sounds “radical” but we cannot depend on the politicans we elected because they are controled by Obama and his ilk. We must depend on ourselves to save our way of life.

July 29, 2009 Buck from Greenville writes:

Considering the accurate assessment of so-called “Global Warming” and the fact that CO2 is an insignificant part of the very real and needed greenhouse effect, I continue to be amazed that the effort to “SEQUESTER” CO2 is continuing. This effort has been ongoing since at least 1994 under Browning and continues today in a rural county in Ohio. This is Darke County and the CITIZENS AGAINST CO2 SEQUESTRATION, hopefully, will continue to put up a good fight against this sad expenditure of funds to continue the CO2 HOAX.

Buck

July 29, 2009 Frank Ansonia ,Conn. writes:

Global warming is a FARCE , Al Gore & all of his cronies want everyone to believe all of his B.S.about global warming & that everyone should go green . The only green this dirt bag Al Gore wants is the HUGE amount of (GREEN DOLLARS) to stuff in his pockets that will come from the average taxpayer.

July 29, 2009 New documentary on global warming « GOODNESS WORLD LIFE BLOG writes:

[...] Danger, danger everywhere: mostly from man-made global warming policies [...]

July 31, 2009 Leon Kaliniec, Prescott, AZ writes:

OK let’s agree that Al Gore is a clown, and I agree with your economic argument, but your CO2 argument is flawed:

1. You say that we have reduced greenhouse gasses, and extrapolate a continuing decline.

1a. Yes we’ve made our power plants and automobiles more efficient, as you say, CO2 is endemic to burning fossil fuels: we can’t get to zero emissions, and with the increase of population you can’t expect the reduction to continue.

Let’s remember that fossil fuels trapped the original Earth’s
CO2 atmosphere, and we’re reversing the process.

However we can have both, low CO2 emission and plentiful energy, if we go NUCLEAR.

(And I strongly disagree with you that the developing countries will get wealthy. My prediction is that increasing internecine wars will keep them poor, but may keep their population stable instead of increasing exponentially)

August 2, 2009 Natasha Ahmad, Bangladesh writes:

This is a documentary to use more fossil fuel, not to change our life-style and to get compulsive consumer! The way Global Warming is a problem and we need to act. We need to have a balance in life, livelihood and consumption!

September 9, 2009 Celebrity Paycut - Encouraging celebrities all over the world to save us from global warming by taking a paycut. writes:

[...] the gap, and one recently released and another soon-to-be-released video are well worth a look. Policy Peril: Why Global Policies Are More Dangerous than Global Warming Itself, produced by Marlo Lewis of the [...]

September 20, 2009 Lamont County Environment » Blog Archive » Global-warming policies more dangerous than global warming writes:

[...] Why Global Warming Policies Are More Dangerous Than Global Warming Itself [...]