This post is dedicated to Geitner Simmons for an email Hat Tip:
I have to hand it to the Hard Left and the Transnational Progressives, they will leave no stone unturned in their quest to acquire undemocratic and unaccountable control over the rest of us. That in the process they trivialize and ultimately devalue important and meaningful concepts such as " Genocide" and " Human Rights" is at best, an afterthought in their view, if not a bonus.
The latest lunacy is brought to us by Counterpunch which reports that a group of NGO leftists appointed to represent Eskimos by the UN ( why can't Inuit elect their own representatives ? How does Kofi Annan decide who legitimately speaks for Eskimos ?) intend to sue the United States for causing Global Warming and failing to implement the Kyoto Treaty as a violation of Inuit " Human Rights ". I am not making this up. Moreover the venue selected is not even properly speaking, a judicial body, much less one the United States is legally obligated to give any heed. What it most likely is is a forum stacked with sympathetic left-wing activists who will help create a propaganda circus.
The Kyoto Treaty is designed to do one thing, to be a heavy carbon tax on the American economy and slow American economic growth. If it was truly designed to halt Co2 emissions and Global Warming more than half of humanity would not be exempt from its standards and it would be a mechanism to transfer anti-pollution technology as rapidly as possible to India and China while preserving Amazonian and African rain forests from further deforestation. Nuclear power plants would be springing up all over South America, Asia and Africa and so on.
That the United States, even under Bill Clinton, refused to go along with this global con game and shakedown is understandable which is why Leftists are now attempting to describe the refusal as " Genocide". I wonder how the people of Dar Fur are feeling about their victimization at the hands of Islamist nightriders being equated to the political agenda of Canadian leftists? Or Holocaust Survivors for that matter?
Global Warming itself is relatively poorly understood and while that is not to say the phenomenon is not a real one it is a slim reed to justify massive government intervention in the American economy. The same kind of interventions, regulations and taxes that the same leftists who now fret about the planet used to advocate on behalf of " the people" and socialism. How fortunate for them that their 19th century solutions just happen to fit every crisis that comes along. Consider the odds.
Socialists posing as environmental activists like to take a rather liberal view of scientific methodology when it suits them. Below, Lubos Motl, a real scientist, describes the " scientific" stance of a popular green propaganda website - Realclimate.org
"Let's return to Connolley, Mann, Bradley, and their six friends. That's a very interesting company. And I think that their website is not encouraging a serious scientific debate. They describe their new blog as
"a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists. ... The discussion here is restricted to scientific topics and will not get involved in any political or economic implications of the science."
Of course that this description itself is another lie. The whole web is a collection of incredibly clearly politically twisted statements for which science is just an unimportant hostage, which are intended to brainwash the readers, especially the naive ones. Moreover, they only accept the comments that flatter them - all comments submitted under their articles are filtered before they appear - it's a "1984" approach to the problem. Let me list the recent titles of their articles, to show how "non-political" they are, and add a short abstract of mine:
A welcoming Nature - It is difficult for us to write a scientifically sound article, but it is much easier to convince our friends in Nature to publish an un-reviewed advertisement of our brainwashing blog :-) Just what is this Consensus anyway? - Everyone agrees with everything we say, and if she does not, we will erase her and destroy her
Fox News gets it wrong - Fox quoted a person who said that we don't understand global climate well enough, but it is unfair because Fox should have quoted the whole life of that person and the person also said that it is dangerous for people to do anything because it could destroy the world
Statistical analysis of consensus - We are getting overwhelmingly effective in destroying the articles that whose results we don't like, and if we make one little step of progress, we will be able to codify our viewpoint in the constitution
Michael Crichton's state of confusion I,II: return of the science - Crichton is wrong, and perhaps an alien described by Carl Sagan - and the reason why he's wrong is that there is consensus, and we can eliminate everyone who is wrong
Climate change disinformation - Every article we don't like can be linked to oil, and because oil is dirty, we will always be able to humiliate everyone who disagrees with us. A few examples of recent articles in the newspapers follow
Welcome to RealClimate - Global climate is a field in which everyone feels that he has something to say. But we're really better than an average crackpot because there is consensus between 9 of us that we're better
Weren't the temperatures warmer during the Medieval Warm Period? - It's a myth, myth, myth. Did you hear? A myth. Forget about all papers that describe MWP, and believe us because we have a consensus. Read our crappy papers and avoid all other papers that show why ours are crappy, which is the only path for a true believer
But we do know that it was warmer 6000 years ago, don't we? - It's also a myth. In this case, we don't have even crappy papers that would indicate it's a myth, but don't forget that we have a consensus that we're better than others :-)
Will you finally shut up and agree that 100.00% of people agree with all of this global warming theory? There are 9 of us plus a lot of powerful friends and we will beat you up if you disagree."
OK, I added the last entry for the sake of clarity, ;-) but at least I always tell you if there is any twist in my postings. They will not tell you anything like that. They know very well that the Arctic region is warming, and Antarctica is cooling, and therefore there must be at least 3 times as many articles about Arctic than those about Antarctic. Just look at the ratio of these two apparently symmetric and equally important places on Earth in their blog! This itself is enough to calculate how unbalanced scientists they are.
They will keep on repeating their lies about the "scientific consensus" until everyone will agree, following the famous dictum due to Goebbels that a lie repeated 100 times becomes the truth. They will never tell you that the influential Russian Academy of Sciences identified the "science" behind the Kyoto protocol as "scientifically unfounded nonsense". Well, Putin's advisor Illarionov compared Kyoto to fascism, as you can see in the same article, but it is a different story.
The United States does not need to bow to the demands of kangaroo courts run by Transnational Progressives any more than we should grant manipulated and incomplete data scientific credibility. Or attempt a systemic solution for the planet only within the borders of the United States. We need to call such things what they are - a hostile and dishonest bid for power moved by the Spirit of Tyranny- by a small class of networked international activists.
When people propose solutions that do not address a problem and lie about their justifications we can be pretty sure they wish us nothing but harm.
¶ 10:49 AM
Thank you and thanks for the tip which I will pass on to Geitner whose interest in the malevoleny antics of the Trans-Progs predates my own.
Happy New Year to you as well !
Is anyone entitled to a lifestyle? To whom does such a right belong and when does it begin? In my grandfather's day minorities had few rights, there were very few women in the workplace, and cars had a fuel economy of 8 miles per gallon. Do we have a right to return to such a lifestyle now? Why not?
Excellent point.
Perhaps we should all get to pick our own state subsidized lifesyle. I'm going to opt for a Turkish Sultan...though an English Dukedom would also be appealing.
First, of course, there are perfectly clear treaty negotiating reasons for the differential between developed and developing nations. Second, there are perfectly good economic reasons for doing so as well (marginal cost of implementation, expected capital resources), so characterizing the differential as some kind of conspiratorial tax on the US and growth is half way daft.
Now, at the same time, I agree that Kyoto is not a well designed treaty and rather should have been reworked.
Second, the long quote from Lobos is .... well hardly the material of a real scientist in tone or content of rebuttal [Lobos seems to be a physicist] (e.g. a white Xmas in Texas is not in any way relevant to rebutting the general consensus on global warming). Lobos' characterizations are... extreme and in my read, unfounded (ex as directed at the popularizing NGO Hard Greenies, admittedly the actual focus of much of the comment). As far as my read goes, the consensus is fairly robust; the conclusions about what to do do, of course are something rather more dodgey to my read.
Overall, I have to say this is more than slightly over the top and subpar for you.
Col
: Monday, 27 December, 2004-- Matt McIntosh
: Monday, 27 December, 2004Col,
I think in terms of marginal cost, encouraging polluters to relocate to China and India is a particularly bad ecological strategy. These countries are attractive enough in terms of comparative advantage in labor costs without adding further incentives to industrial " bad actors".
Dual standards that encourage building up large industries in relatively poor( per capita) and exceedingly populous countries where they did not previously exist helps delay high environmental standards there as long as possible. It does not help a global ecosystem to require Americans to be bailing water twice as fast in the lifeboat if the Indians and Chinese are going to be drilling more holes. Many, many more holes. Better ( and cheaper) that we invest/subsidize upfront in high standards for new industries everywhere than try to clean them up after the fact.
Col & Matt,
Lubos was being very breezy and partisan in his attack on RealClimate because they are extreme greens and are not making scientific arguments anyway, by his standards ( Harvard theoretical physicist). If you read him regularly he's usually on a more serious plane in most of his posts.
That was one of my more partisan and less serious posts I'll agree and I was probably more incensed by the transnational progressive tactics of suing the United States over Kyoto than by anything else.
If you are interested in a more temperate and serious post on the topic of Global warming and Kyoto regs, Becker and Posner ( blogroll) are on the same issue this week which I meant to link to and excerpt to but I simply ran out of time. Perhaps I'll update later today.
<< Home
