- Apparently if you’re a climate politician jaw-jaw is better than work-work. At any rate Canada’s Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, spent $140k to take a seven-person delegation to a two-day Chinese communist gathering on the environment. And sure, it’s not as though he had anything urgent to do at home, like actually reducing carbon emissions. That stuff is for the drudges whose taxes pay for his jaunts.
- And another thing. The clueless Guilbeault recently attempted to excuse a delay in announcing the actual details of yet another glorious policy initiative by saying “No government has ever put in place regulations to ensure that the oil and gas sector reduces its overall pollution. It’s never been done.” What insolent rubbish. Anyone who knows the actual history of environmentalism is aware that back around 1950 there were mighty few pollution controls on industry generally and oil and gas in particular, and that the revolution in public consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s led to enormously effective rules about emissions of everything from sulphur dioxide to volatile organic compounds, and an astounding improvement in air and water quality throughout the industrialized democracies. He is of course confusing carbon dioxide with “pollution”. But also his own ministry’s inept self-satisfaction with the get-it-done attitude of earlier generations who knew poison from plant food.
- Scientific Alarmism jettisons the precautionary principle for hey, let’s starve everyone, what could go wrong, with a piece “It’s Time to Engineer the Sky” cheerleading geoengineering on the basis that “Global warming is so rampant that some scientists say we should begin altering the stratosphere to block incoming sunlight, even if it jeopardizes rain and crops”. Just not the crops we eat, you understand. Those of some Third World peasant who’s part of the overpopulation problem anyway.
- Speaking of losing touch with responsibility, MSN reprints a piece from Euronews entitled “Macron’s climate hypocrisy will sink us all” that complains that “Europe’s banks have helped fossil fuel companies raise more than €1 trillion since the Paris climate agreement in 2016”, a sin illustrated with a photo captioned “A man sits on a hospital bed after being treated for an eye injury at Bor hospital, Jonglei state, South Sudan, July 2013”. So climate change is poking out eyes in Sudan in 2013. Wow. There really is nothing it cannot do.
- From the “weather porn” file, GB News seeks to panic Britons with “UK weather forecast: Storm deluge strikes as creepy ‘radiation fog’ descends on Britain”. As in heat radiating up from the ground, not the glow-in-the-dark die-of-cancer kind. But the interesting part of the story, other than the discovery that there’s such a job as “social commentator and senior meteorologist for British Weather Services” is that “The so-called radiation fog threatens an eerie Dickensian run up to the festive season, as a White Christmas continues to hang in the balance.” A white Christmas in Britain? What an intriguing possibility for all those kids who won’t know what snow is.
- Oh, and a belated entry from the “settled science” file, just in time for COP28: “The amount of CO2 the world can emit and still limit warming to 1.5C is much smaller than previously thought and could be used up in six years at current pollution levels, according to research published on Monday. Scientists said the revised ‘carbon budget’ meant that humanity was now more likely than not to blow past the Paris Agreement’s safer temperature threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius since the preindustrial era. ‘The window to avoid 1.5 degrees of warming is shrinking, both because we continue to emit and because of our improved understanding of atmospheric physics,’ said lead author Robin Lamboll, of Imperial College London. But with climate impacts magnifying as warming increases, the researchers stressed that the findings make every fraction of a degree worth fighting for.” And remember: just because the science keeps evolving, always in worse directions, doesn’t mean all those predictions from decades back that failed to come true were no good. Or that science could ever change again, especially in an encouraging way.
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20 Dec 2023 | News Roundup
It seems we have at least ten more years.
Above has been said for 4decades and still true
CDN, JUST, WOW!!
How is it, these 'intellectuals' are so ignorant to history? Just one example; Let us not forget the 'Great sparrow extermination' that China did, because the birds were eating their grains crops. What could possibly go wrong? Oh yeah, the birds ate far more destructive bugs 🐛 than grain. The bugs devastated crops, famine persuade.
Let's block sun light! What could possibly go wrong?? 🤔🤔🙄
I'm often reminded of the apocryphal story of Pope Gregory IX declaring war on cats as satan's creatures. It resulted in a mass extermination of cats across Europe, which was (of course) a boon to the rat population, in turn causing the Black Death. Whether true or not, it serves as a great allegory for the consequences of demonising carbon-dioxide.