The New Republic attempts to take George Willto task for failing to follow the AGW kool aid line, but, in the course of failing to actually rebut Will, Jonathan Chait lets slip a dirty secret
First of all, nobody says that reducing carbon emissions will “reverse” global warming. The point is merely to slow the process. This is pretty fundamental.
Gotcha. So the point of reducing CO2 output to 1990 levels, as a nice arbitrary point, is not to stop or reverse AGW, just slow it down, meaning all the draconian legislation and treaties passed and on the docket, all the silliness (such as banning black cars), the demonstrations and awareness raising stunts are all for almost nothing? The massive cost increases to, well, everything, the coming nationwide rolling blackouts, being forced to use compact florescent light-bulbs, losing 2 jobs for every 1 “green” created, etc and so on, are basically for nothing?
As I, and others, have written time and time again, the AGW movement is simply about control and money, not about sound science or even saving Gaia.
Teach instead of using loaded words like “massive” to describe the increases how about telling us what per cent our utility bills may go up. It is supposed to add 65 billion each year. But of course there are 300 million Americans so each will have to pay about 200 dollars extra. So Teach the 200 bucks are you cool with that ? The 20 dollars per month that would probably be a lot less than the utility bill increases that will happen as fuel costs go up again in the next decade.
Teach,
It takes a much greater understanding of our climate than you have demonstrated here, so I completely understand that this is way over your head. However, I’ll try to help spell it out for you. You see, there are these things called feedbacks, and they react to the changes in temperature that are a result of other factors, such as land use changes and carbon dioxide emissions. These feedback reactions are slower, which means it takes a while for the planet to reach an equilibrium state after a change in temperature as a result of a forcing. So, we are still not seeing the full effect of emissions to this date. Therefore, as we strive to reduce our emissions, we will continue to see the slower feedback effects of past emissions. That’s not to mention that reducing emissions itself is a slow process. I know this is a lot of info, so read it over a few times if you have to.
Secondly, you completely skipped over Chait’s second criticism of Will, which was that he cherry-picked the warmest anomaly in recent years (1998) to claim that there hasn’t been any warming since (a common misunderstanding among deniers).
Nope, John, that is not OK. But, hunt around, and you can find many sites that are talking way more, because the prices on everything will go up, so your $200 a year will go much much higher. How’s this for one: http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=458494
OK, thanks for you personal attacks, Reasic, which completely invalidate any sort of rebuttal you have, which takes the same line, man must be at fault, yada yada yada. If that was the case, then why do almost none of the believers, and especially the leaders, fail to reduce their actual carbon footprint?