Opinion : Global Warming

Another round of political negotiating over the Kyoto protocol seems to be on the horizon, now that Tony Blair has made it his priority this year to get the US on board with the Kyoto treaty. Good luck Tony. Not going to happen. It is time to face reality on 2 fronts, 1, why the US won’t scale back its CO2 production and 2, how much of a problem is global warming anyway.

Nobody is really against lowering emissions in this country but now an obvious question: where are the cuts going to come from? First, industrial production in this country is just as efficient (or close) and environmentally safe as in any other western country (EU, Japan). Let us face it, computers do not burn oil. So why does the US produce so much emissions? What do we do that is fundamentally different from say the Japanese? The answer is driving long distances and more frequently, and driving bigger cars. So basically, to bring the US in line with the rest of the world the government would need to essentially tell people when and what to drive. I would love t see Blair come over and try that…Not a big surprise that neither party is in favor of that solution. Of course, the only viable alternative would be to force huge cutbacks on American industry that make them uncompetitive and penalize them on behalf of the American public. Also a ridiculous alternative.

So what should we do, just sit back, and toast? How bad could global warming be? Well, actually not that bad. Apparently the temperature is rising a few degrees every 100 years or so and the polar ice caps are melting. This threatens to raise water levels marginally and increase extreme temperatures in extreme regions. So what. People seem to claim that this will make violent weather phenomena and kill thousands of people who live near shorelines. Yet there is no evidence that weather is getting anymore violent. And when it comes to rising water levels killing people, I must point out that a hurricane storm surge raises the water level at the shorelines by many feet in a few hours, and how many people died this year in the Florida hurricanes? Maybe 2? A few inches in a 100 years …RUN… Human beings and all other life has adapted to climate change for millions of years, and will continue to do so. The current rate of temperature change is barely more that the earth would expect in a warming period, and I suspect that some of that discrepancy has to do with the fact that there weren’t a lot of digital thermometers or climate monitoring satellites 2 million years ago. And finally, anyone who tells you that irreversible damage is occurring is a crackpot. It is fact that the earth has gone between much warmer and much colder periods and always come back around. That is the way that the global ecosystem works. Nothing is irreversible. The ozone hole is closing up nicely…Anyway I have to go outside and enjoy the snow before my love of driving turns Boston into a warm/mild cesspool (like Washington DC).