The BBC has given great prominence to Ed Miliband’s declaration that the UK must meet an 80% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. (In for a penny, in for a Euro, why not make it 101% Ed) As with all BBC coverage of AGW, there is only ever one-side to the argument. There will be many people who will view this political and legal “commitment” as more of an imposition on future generations, a scorched earth policy by a spectacularly ignorant Labour government. However they are given no voice. BBC orthodoxy requires total subservience to the AGW creed and no dissent must be allowed.
WHY NOT 101%?
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glj – will have to commit that one to memory – thanks
AGW stands for “Anthropogenic Global Warming”, i.e. caused by nasty humans. Although really we should replace the “A” with a “C”. That can stand for “Capitalist”, or….
The main objection here seems to be not just whether or not the climate is changing (which it does, always has, and always will do), but that the BBC has already decided exactly what or who is causing the specific types of changes the AGW supporters are concerned about. The thing is, all those “one-offs” about colder temperatures and increases in ice packs start to add up, yet the AGW supporters always see them as “one-offs”. Eventually there will be too many “one-offs” to ignore, and the BBC will have to back off a bit. But the AGW supporters will still go on because they have an emotional investment, similar to that of religious fanatics.
The biggest problem of all is that man does affect climate in a very real sense – locally. The average temperatures where I grew up haven’t really changed much at all. What has changed is the humidity, which looks like it’s almost double what it was 30 years ago. That’s because of the massive construction of homes, shopping malls, and office complexes, nearly all of which will have some sort of man-made water feature. There are numerous golf courses, backyards, and both residential and business complexes will have ponds and mini “lakes” and canals and swimming pools and fountains. Anyone flying in over the city during the summer will be nearly blinded by the reflection of all that water. All that grass needs water too, and it’s really dramatically different from what that environment is used to. Then add hundreds of square miles of tarmac so people can drive to and park at all those places, put it all in a desert environment – one which normally gets about 1.2 inches of rain per year, and most of that during the summer monsoon – and it’s pretty obvious that man has ruined the local weather. But that has very little to do with what the AGW crowd believes in.
Here’s where I grew up:
Phoenix heat
Have fun looking around at the various links, but don’t be seduced by the dry heat and lack of rain. A chicken will roast quite well in similar conditions, and the ability to drive a car with the top down in December doesn’t make up for that.
The record high of 122 was back in 1990. I was living there at the time, remember it well, turned a vinyl LP into the shape of a salad bowl in under ten seconds simply by placing it on the ground, and actually fried an egg in about five seconds on the tarmac of the parking lot where I worked. If AGW were as real as the supporters say, that would have been reached quite a few times and broken by now. The only reason the temperature is rising is because of suburban sprawl and water waste. That, and the temperature gauge is kept at the airport, which, once the sprawl happened, is in the center of town.
The “average”, though, is a product of both the high and the low, so if the low increases because the city no longer cools down at night with all that crap staying hot and more humid, obviously the “average” will be higher. The high temperature doesn’t go up really at all, though. So that’s not actual capital “W” Warming. In Tucson, the rise didn’t happen until the sprawl wrapped around that airport as well. Same story. I wouldn’t blame airplanes or SUVs for any of that, except that I guess the airports and suburban sprawl wouldn’t happen without them. But that’s blaming the cart and not the horse, I think.
If the eco-nutters (and the BBC) spent one tenth of the energy they spend protesting against runways and oil companies on making intelligent contributions to reducing suburban sprawl and real local environmental damage that can be cause by unscrupulous companies, the part of the world they live in would be much cleaner, and local environments would be improved.
That will never happen because this isn’t about anything as mundane as a local issue. It’s a religion, so they think big. Worse, there’s more to the movers behind this whole thing than mere love for the planet. Last year, David Gregory, a science correspondent for BBC Midlands, got into several long arguments here about this very subject. His position was that the climate was actually changing, and it was the BBC’s duty to report it. The whys and wherefores were already decided, he said, and that’s it. Some of us said that much of that should be viewed with suspicion, and the changes the AGW crowd is trying to make should be resisted because of the origins of the movement itself: Watermelons. They’re green on the outside, but on the inside, they’re people like this:
Transition Towns WIKI
They want to legislate us all back to being subsistence farmers, with a few of the intellectual elite (the movement’s leaders, naturally) in charge, telling us all how to live and what’s best for us. I’m sure this will sound very familiar.
The big picture of AGW is a false one. But it feels good. As Cassandra has said, it preys on people’s emotions, and I would add that it contributes to one’s own self esteem. Very much like religious belief. Eventually, reality will calm the fears which they try to stoke, but I hope it’s not too late by then to stop their destruction of society.
The BBC is part of that movement now. Typical story-tellers that they are, they’ve seized on the emotional impact, and have lost all objectivity. That’s a disservice to the audience, and an abuse of the trust people still have in them, because of that special position the BBC has.
So if 60% reductions in CO2 output are insufficient and 80% reductions are ‘needed’ (to do what?), then why not 100% reductions? That would be reductio ad absurdio which is exactly what is needed in this case.
The people who take AGW on blind faith should ask themselves who is the greatest advocate of it – Al Gore of course and who is Al Gores friend Jim Hansen the creator of this flawed theory.
When the “scientists” measure their “global average temperatures” they are using surface temperature readings. There are many flaws in this, not only the “heat island effect” but also the problem that they tend to only use the weather stations in the US and Northern Europe. There is a lot of ocean on this planet which does not have temperature gauges scattered all around it. So why don’t they use satallite data? Well the AGW fanatics say they only go back for a short period. But the real reason is that these don’t tell them what they want to know. I would also draw your attention to the dodgy manipulation of the data which the BBC will never tell you.
Information here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/
We’ve had a couple of rubbish summers. I was actually looking forward to an extra three degrees.
Evironmental extremist will be happy with this, even though it means nothing. Ivy-League Illuminati politicians know all they have to do is give people a date, no matter how far off it is, and it will be believeable. Then as mentioned, those that come after will carry that burden.