Here’s a shamelss plug (but for your own good, of course). Tuesday we’ll have an editorial on the first-in-the-nation fees imposed for CO2 emissions, the first of many to come, no doubt. In part, here’s what we say:
“There is no proven cause-and-effect relationship between increasing CO2 – a natural gas essential to life on Earth and not a pollutant as the U.S. Supreme Court has concluded – and increasing temperatures. Indeed, in the past decade while CO2 levels have greatly increased, global temperatures have declined. Temperatures over next decade are projected to decrease even more, while greenhouse gases are expected to continue increasing in the atmosphere.
“Perhaps this explains the pell-mell rush to pass new laws, impose new regulations and adopt more fees and taxes. The passage of time seems to be working against global warming alarmism, cooling off opinions even as the atmosphere cools.
“Virtually every human activity, from exhaling to laying concrete to generating electricity, emits CO2. The alternatives government would impose either are impractical, exorbitantly costly or simply don’t exist. But in the meantime, a rash of new regulations and taxes can do great economic harm, putting this state and nation at a competitive disadvantage with the booming economies of China and India, where such economy-crippling impediments aren’t about to be imposed.”
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Thanks for the warning. We can look forward to an editorial based on old data (2007 was the second warmest year on record, obviously not part of a cooling trend), fringe scientists, and poor journalism.
Get your heads out of the sand. Just what if they are right and you are wrong?
As the Register’s circulation continues it’s precipitous decline (almost 12% of their daily circulation disappeared in 6 months), their editorial team will continue to churn out this stuff.
The anti-science brigade can’t put two and two together, but maybe someone on the business side will figure out that their loss of readership stems directly from the quality of their product.
Since I’m not aware of the nature, extent, or stage of adoption of these fees, I’ll only make a couple of notes here.
1. The notion that since CO2 is a “natural” by product of human activity and existence, that therefore it shouldn’t be regulated, is a classic fake argument. To be blunt, so are feces, but that doesn’t mean we don’t regulate how and where they’re put into the environment, or that we don’t charge money to ensure that they’re disposed of properly and safely in a manner that doesn’t harm the environment. Every poison is “natural,” as people from leading scientists down to George Carlin have noted - they all come from the “natural” environment. To shrug and say that since they’re “natural” we needn’t worry about them is - well, I’l lleave it at that.
2. I doubt that any regulatory scheme would go after emissions of CO2 from humans. That’s again a straw man argument, designed more to invoke fear (”They’re going to tell you how often to BREATHE!!!”) than to start a serious discussion. The question, as always, is one of degree: where and how can the issue of such emissions be efficiently addressed? Some activities will be easier to tackle from a CO2 reduction standpoint than others, and any rational person picks off the easy targets first.
3. I have serious doubt about the efficiency of any CO2 “fee” arrangement, on purely practical grounds. But I think this editorial, like much of Mr. Landsbaum’s outcry on climate change, is itself alarmist - not to mention the questionable ( to say the least) science he cites to support his position, and his endlessly repeated and utterly unsupportable claim that the consensus version of the climate change hypothesis is somehow tottering amid a sea of scepticism (led, of course, by himself). It rather appears to me to be refining itself, integrating its ideas more closely into the complex web of other natural phenomena with which it interacts, and so becoming more precise and coherent. This process will inevitably involve jettisoning some earlier claims and predictions - things Mr. Landsbaum notes with unrestrained glee, but which in fact prove quite the opposite of his intended point. The discussion a couple of weeks ago about a study indicating that warming trends may well up colder ocean water to temporarily ameliorate the trend is a good example - it hardly disproves the climate change hypothesis, as Mr. Landsbaum claimed in trumpeting it, but rather demonstrates how that warming may trigger passing (in the planet’s time frame, of course) counteractivity in the course of overall warming.
As I’ve said, I retain doubt and questions about this whole subject, but Mr. Landsbaum’s implicit premise that the whole theory is about to come crashing down as some sort of intellectual fraud is so much hooey.
Intersting Landsbaum that cites a graph at metoffice.com. Because IF HE ACTUALLY READ the information there, he would have read the following:
“A simple mathematical calculation of the temperature change over the latest decade (1998-2007) alone shows a continued warming of 0.1 °C per decade.”
and
“2005 was also an unusually warm year, the second highest in the global record, but was not associated with El Niño conditions that boosted the warmth of 1998. … 2007 was 0.37 °C above this average, 0.11 °C warmer than 1999.”
You are right dishonesty comes to mind. Except in this case it is you who are the one I have in mind.
Just for clarification, the “Mark” above isn’t this one. Good to see you here Mark, whoever you are.
At your service in Christ . . .
Mark Landsbaum
My mistake - I confused the Marks.
My apologies.
I find it amusing that the bulk of the arguements against global warming “alarmists” focus on the economic impacts of possible regulation, or all I have read in the Register anyway.
We don’t know for sure who this Mark above is, but we sure like his newspaper research.
And apologies always are gracious and welcome.
At your service in Christ . . .
Mark Landsbaum