Monday, March 01, 2010

Keep the camp fires burning

Easily the main story in the British dailies is the Cameron speech, a path down which we do not want to follow, other than to note the comment of a fellow blogger who took the Boy to task for his faux patriotism, declaring of himself that it was his patriotic duty to push for a referendum on the EU.

There is little temptation either to have a go at the Gore op-ed in the New York Times.

When you are confronted with a man who tells you that the "climate crisis" is still growing because "we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere - as if it were an open sewer," you know immediately that there is no place to go. Dialogue here is an impossibility.

Much more sense comes from Richard Tol on the Klimazwiebel blog. He has ventured into WGIII territory, arguing that the costs of climate mitigation have been vastly understated. This allows us to put together a composite picture of AR4. The first part overstates the extent of warming, the second exaggerates the consequences and the third plays down the costs of dealing with it.

That apart, as Booker noted, there is something of a lull in the tempo of the campaign. There is nothing much new emerging and what is new does not have quite the same impact of the blizzard of revelations of the past few months.

Such in fact is the hiatus that the BBC manages to report the storms in Western France and elsewhere in Europe without once mentioning global warming or climate change. Despite unusually high winds and an unfortunate number of deaths, it is perhaps a measure of how things have changed that the warmists so far have not sought to exploit this event.

Even the polar bears seem to be coming out in our support, having refused to die out over the last 150,000 years as it got steadily warmer, something which little Al somehow forgot to mention in his overlong op-ed.

However, we still have a long way to go. Lancashire County Council, we are told, has launched a new educational resource pack for the Scout and Girl Guides, to educate them "about the modern threat of climate change through a series of fun and interesting activities linked to their existing awards and badges."

Presumably, that will include details of how to calculate the carbon footprint of the average camp fire, and the joys of sustainable camping, all leading to the awards of badges in climate change prevention - on proof of purchase of the requisite number of carbon offsets. One suspects that Baden Powell would not have been amused.

CLIMATE CHANGE – END GAME