Pirate's Cove

Geoffrey Lean at the Telegraph is just asking for a beat down from the rest of the True Believers (who still refuse to walk the talk)

Here’s a heretical thought, one that might even further inflame the great global-warming slanging match. Has the world set out to tackle climate change in the wrong way? It’s not, I admit, the most tactful moment to put the question. On Tuesday the heads of the world’s governments meet in New York for the first universal climate summit. This is just the most important of a series of high-level get-togethers addressing the issue, which started on Thursday with a meeting of ministers from the most polluting countries, and continues to the G20 summit in Pittsburgh at the end of the week. But it has to be asked. For more than 20 years the world has been trying to negotiate agreements to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels and felling forests. But they have gone on growing: indeed, their rate of growth has been accelerating.

Concentrating on carbon dioxide was understandable. It is, after all, the biggest single cause of climate change. Scientists have known for more than 180 years that it warms up the atmosphere, and – for more than 110 – roughly what the effects of increasing its concentration would be.

How does one type a harsh buzzer noise? Bzzt doesn’t cut it. Maybe a Gonnnnnnnnnnng!? Regardless, what is the actual biggest cause of climate change? That would be the Sun. Then you have things like water vapor, volcanoes, the Earth’s axial tilt, and other natural forces. We also know that CO2 increases tend to follow temperature increases. We also know that there tends to be an 800 year lag for CO2 increases, as in, something happened 800 years ago, CO2 concentrations go up.

But CO2 is only responsible for about half of the problem. The rest is caused by other pollutants. No worldwide attempt has been made to control some of them, even though doing so would be much less contentious and would reduce global warming far faster.

Sigh. Still wrong. And those were the first three paragraphs of the article.

Take black carbon, which gives soot its colour. It is now accepted to be the second biggest contributor to climate change, responsible for between 10 and 25 per cent of it. Formed through incomplete combustion of wood, vegetation and fossil fuels, it lands a unique double whammy.

Nope. Unless Geoffrey is specifically talking about what Mankind is doing, and then, according to the UN IPCC reports, the number one gas is methane, which pretty much elicits giggles and, um, breaking wind jokes and recollections. Speaking of which, there was this one time back in college when we made Hamburger Helper Chili Mac for dinner and….. well, maybe another time.

The real problem is that people set out to deal with a fake issue and reduced true environmental concerns to subsidies of anthropogenic global warming, a term which they couldn’t even stick with since over that period of time. We should put our energies into keeping the environment as clean as we can, a worthy goal. Besides, science is science. Once you start down the road Geoffrey has gone, it becomes politics, which is stricly where AGW is at.