More Bellyaching from the Times

Today's New York Times editorial, entitled "America's Shame in Montreal", continues to further the notion that the United States is to blame for the world's global warming problems. The Times maintains that "[I]t cannot be easy for America's competitors to move forward with costly steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while the United States refuses to carry its share of the load." They also make their way down the path of blaming the Bush administration for what will happen if China and India do not join in talks about halting global warming.

Nowhere in their chiding of this administration does the Times even approach a positive message, or a solution for that matter. But then again, when has the Times ever been positive about anything the Bush administration has one? Apart from a miniscule mention of the thriving economy, which should warrant a front page headline, positive news on the economic upturn is lacking in the Times' pages. That brings us back to the editorial; there seems to be some foreshadowing of blaming the United States for China's not joining in the fight to curb greenhouse gas emissions. However, it is entirely the fault of the Kyoto Protocol for not including developing countries like China and India, both of which are among the biggest "polluters".

Kyoto was not ratified by the United States Senate because it was the sense of the Senate that the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol that did not include binding targets and timetables for developing as well as industrialized nations or "would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States". Competing economic analyses reported that there could be a net benefit from Kyoto and that there could be a potentially large decline in GDP from implementing the Protocol. Did anyone stop to think that corporations forced to cut emissions by a drastic amount would have to waste profits to do so, in turn hurting their stockholders and subsequently the stock market?

I suppose nobody at the New York Times remembers the 1970s when the popular theory was "global cooling". Back then, researchers pointed to a 0.5 degree Fahrenheit drop in global temperature between 1945 and 1968 and predicted the coming of a new Ice Age. Dan Flynn devotes an entire chapter in his book, Intellectual Morons, to "Enviornmentalism's False Prophet", Paul Ehrlich.

This complete waste of intelligence predicted numerous doomsday scenarios were approaching. These included global cooling (and global warming), global starvation resulting from famine, the evaporation of our GNP, pandemics causing the deaths of one-third of the world population, and nuclear conflict. None of them happened, yet he described himself as "an eternal optimist". He has nevertheless received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", a World Ecology Award, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and the Blue Planet Prize, among numerous others. All this for a man who has done nothing productive for environmentalism apart from scaring the world into believing the Exodus is nigh.

Back to global warming, or cooling, or whatever is going on in the world today. The truth is, the world has undergone numerous cycles. The Industrial Revolution was an era of enormous pollution, in a time when there were no government controls. Yet we made it out alive, no catastrophic floods or anything of the sort. There are constantly famines and droughts and freezes and heat waves, all part of a worldwide cycle where the temperature goes up and down and up and down, eternally repeating the process like a skipping record.

The world saw a period of cooling less than half a century ago. Perhaps in a decade or two there will be another one, perhaps not. But to assume that the global temperature will increase up to 10 degrees by 2100 is absolutely, positively absurd. Science has a better chance of proving the existence of God than the threat of global warming, but the MSM continues to play to the tune of Kyoto and its advocates. Don't worry, they'll be proven right when the Earth floods ... or maybe when it freezes ... oh well, they've prepared arguments for both occasions.