Tuesday, March 24, 2009

bloodbath

unfortunately, algor is less easily sated than the mayan deities:
Back in 1500... the Aztecs figured the climate debate was over, and that if you wanted rain and sunshine and other such blessings, it was simple enough what you had to do – sacrifice 20,000 lives a year to the right gods.

In the year 2009, it's an equally sure thing in the minds of some that carbon in the atmosphere is going to fry us unless we put the welfare of millions on the line, and here is the latest on President Obama's plan – it could cost industry almost $2 trillion over an eight-year period.

That hefty sum to be paid out to a cap-and-trade carbon tax would snatch money from the pockets of consumers far more than rising oil prices did, hinder economic growth and instill other ways generate human misery, and all in the name of what?...

...carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, that it is crucial to life and that it is a "bit player" in the atmosphere... at least "90 percent of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor," and that the issue is whether the carbon dioxide will "substantially increase water's contribution" to causing something awful.

The evidence from measurements of all kinds is that it won't, said Happer, pointing out that "the current warming period began about 1800, at the end of the little ice age," when there wasn't a big increase in carbon dioxide.

It wasn't fossil fuels that did the warming deed – a good deed, by the way – and a war against these energy-producing, societal benefactors would therefore be as futile in controlling climate as slicing open bodies with a ceremonial knife and ripping out hearts.

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