In case anyone thinks we skeptics tend to exaggerate the extent to which the AGW crowd has gone completely over the top into a frenzy of self righteousness and exaggeration, please go to http://green-broadband.blogspot.com/, which is produced by Bill St. Arnaud, chief technologist for Canada’s backbone university computing network.
Amidst many interesting and possibly quite useful notions for making energy consumption more efficient – no objections here – we find the two excerpts below and the absence of any mention, however disdaining, of climategate.
Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists – Climate Change, Environment -
The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. …
Note the date, relative to the East Anglia CRU hack. Also of interest, in the article cited in part above, the authors of the alrmist report were a group of scientists called the Global Carbon Project study:
“The Global Carbon Project study, led by Professor Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia and the British Antarctic Survey, which found that there has been a 29 per cent increase in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel between 2000 and 2008, the last year for which figures are available.”
uh-huh. Why are we not surprised? and further….
Thursday, October 15, 2009
[Some people may think this commentary is too strident and over the top, but Robin Chase I believe eloquently captures the urgency of doing something about climate change -- bSA]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robin-chase/fossil-fuel-is-the-new-sl_b_310007.html
Fossil Fuel Is the New Slavery: Morally and Economically Corrupt
A century and a half ago, fossil fuels replaced slaves as the underpriced energy source driving American economic growth. And like slavery, our deep economic dependence makes change difficult, despite the incontrovertible reality that our fossil-fueled system is profoundly wrong. America could not thrive while captured by the slave economy, nor can she thrive while in thrall to a carbon-based economy.
It required almost a hundred years and a devastating civil war to rid the US of slavery. Business interests fought to retain the morally and economically corrupt status quo. Favorable economics prompted blindness and slow response to the moral imperative for ending slavery. Favorable economics today cloud the minds of many legislators and business interests to cling to our system of underpriced fossil fuels. Despite the best efforts of Congressmen Waxman and Markey, the climate bill out of Congress proposed 2020 goals of only 17 percent reductions in CO2 over 2005 levels and passed by the narrowest of margins. Science tells us our 2020 goals need to 25 to 40% reductions over 1990 levels. Senators Boxer and Kerry have proposed 20%, a step in the right direction.
Ownership of another human being and reaping the benefit of their labor is repugnant. While burning fossil fuels is not as intimately observable or viscerally felt, a direct link from our actions to real individual suffering can be traced. [snip]
And there will be more casualties. The best estimates of the slave trade’s death toll are 15 to 20 million people over its 400-year history. Failure to move to a new low-carbon energy source will result in a similar magnitude of unforgivable suffering and death. The World Health Organization says that climate change was responsible for 300,000 deaths this last year, predicting as many as 9 million excess deaths over the next 20 years alone. Almost all of these initial victims will be among Africa and Asia’s poorest who have no voice and no vote with regard to what happens in the US Congress. [snip]
Delaying real change is intolerable. Unlike slavery, the global warming legacy will be forever irreparable and unrecoverable. New predictions indicate a good chance of a nine degree global temperature increase this century. What we eat, where we live, how we live, and indeed who lives will be changed. Forever. Again, we face an undeniable moral imperative.”
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So it is nine degrees in this article up from six in the previous one.
And if I burn the logs I cut in my woodstove, is this the moral equivalent of slavery. or merely feudalism?