'Nuts' To Copenhagen
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Posted 09/29/2009 07:02 PM ET Climate: As alternate-energy champ Spain's green economy slides into recession, a German professor says if American "climate illiterates" don't follow, the Copenhagen climate conference will fail. And the bad news is?
King Canute, the Viking king of England, Norway and Denmark, was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. As the story goes, he once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. Rather than exercising his ego, he in fact was giving his followers a lesson in reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential.
In December, the world's kings and princes will journey to Copenhagen, Denmark, for climate change talks in hopes of replacing the failed Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto didn't change Earth's climate a wit, but it did burden the economy of any nation that embraced it.
Professor John Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, an adviser to the German government, thinks Copenhagen may also be a failure, largely because the U.S. refuses to line up behind the rest of the climate lemmings and follow them over an economic cliff.
Speaking at an Oxford University climate science conference on Monday, Schellnhuber blamed the U.S. for a decade of inaction caused by President George W. Bush. Ironically, it was a decade where the sun grew quiet and the Earth cooled as result.
Yet, ignoring the empirical evidence, he says it's we American cowboys who are "climate illiterates" for actually looking at the Earth's thermometer and daring to notice the snow in Malibu.
The Oxford conference is centered on a study predicting a 4-degree Celsius rise in global temperatures as soon as 2060-2070. Schellnhuber mourns our failure to embrace economic ruin and pass cap-and-trade legislation such as Waxman-Markey, warning: "If the U.S. doesn't move then nothing will happen."
Gee, we hope so.
Spain has been held up as a green-jobs success story, the example of what a green economy should look like. Then a study led by Gabriel Calzada of King Juan Carlos University showed that each new "green job" came at the expense of two others in the private sector.After Spain's decade-long effort, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of the U.K. Telegraph notes: "
Spain is sliding into a full-blown economic depression with unemployment approaching levels not seen since the Second Republic of the 1930s." Unemployment, including thousands of "green" workers, hit 18.5% in July.Spain's failure with renewable energy should give everyone pause. Even after $43 billion in subsidies, solar energy still accounts for less than 1% of Spain's total electric output. Spain has also embraced wind power, but clearly the wind is not at its back.
We are not climate illiterates, Professor Schellnhuber; we can clearly read the writing on the wall. It tells us the Earth is cooling and that pacts like Kyoto are recipes for global poverty that will be all pain and no gain.
According to an analysis by Chip Knappenberger, administrator of the World Climate Report, the reduction of U.S. CO2 emissions to 80% below 2005 levels by 2050 — the goal of Waxman-Markey — would only reduce global temperature in 2050 by an insignificant 0.05 degree Celsius.
Since Al Gore released his feature-length cartoon, "An Inconvenient Truth," in 2006, the Earth has cooled about 0.74 degree Fahrenheit, almost the same amount that the U.N.'s climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claims was gained in the entire 20th century.
An analysis of the Waxman-Markey bill by the Heritage Foundation projects that by 2035 it would reduce aggregate gross domestic product by $7.4 trillion. In an average year, 844,000 jobs would be destroyed. Is it worth such economic damage?Our answer to Copenhagen's and Professor Schellnhuber's demand for economic surrender should be the same as that given by a great American during another cold European winter: "Nuts!"
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I cant wait until the Cap & Trade town halls start. I missed the Health care one because Nita Lowey (D, NY) refused to hold any.
If these thieves in GOVT thought those town halls were rowdy, wait, you aint seen nuthin yet!
