EnviroSpin Watch

The 'Great Global Warming' Scam.....

Over 6,000 delegates have just polluted our skies by flying to Buenos Aires for the latest climate-change jamboree so poetically entitled COP 10. The vested interests in the 'Great Global Warming' Scam are now legion. The most eager neophytes are the carbon emission traders, a bunch of Jabba the Hutts - parasitic capitalist slugs - who would trade their grandmothers if they could. For them, carbon dioxide is the new gas, the new metal exchange, the new tin. After all, they have been trading sulphur dioxide for years. Unfortunately, virtual carbon trading is likely to increase real world emissions of carbon dioxide, especially at the lowly prices predicted. Still, it’s all good fun for the barrow boys. Isn't there pub somewhere called 'The Slug and the Barrow Boy'?

But we must call 'Time!' on these shenanigans. It is vital that no politician or pundit, most especially a grinning Mr. Blair, is allowed to get away with the Alice-in-Wonderland nonsense that the Kyoto Protocol and carbon emission trading will help to manage climate change in a nice, friendly, predictable manner. They won’t. And that is a fact which should be shouted from every smoke stack.

Climate changes: that is what it does. And humans have been affecting climate change for thousands of years through all sorts of factors, not just carbon dioxide emissions. Climate is the Christmas pudding of world systems, more chaotic than a Nigella Lawson chocolate cake and more packed with ingredients than a Delia Smith seven-cheese recipe. The idea that we can manage climate change in a predictable fashion by fiddling at the margins with a couple of ingredients out of the millions involved is fatuous and dangerous poppy seed.

This is what is so wrong with the current debate on climate change. The questions aren't: 'Is climate changing?' and 'Are humans the cause?' The only question worth asking is: 'Can we do anything predictable about climate change?' To which the answer is a resounding: 'No!' In a coupled, non-linear system as complex and as chaotic as climate, it is crucial to remember that 'not-doing-something' at the margins is as unpredictable as 'doing-something'.

Extreme global warming fanatics have come up with the fantasy idea that industries and governments might be sued over extreme weather events. I wonder if it has dawned on them that so might they. If non-emitting triggers a move to a climate that we don’t like, they will be equally culpable.

Please do let's grow up over the inexorable reality of climate change.

Philip, "If I hear the words 'Kyoto Protocol' once more, I'll reach for my patio heater!" Espresso doppios all round! Perhaps cappuccinos might be better - then we can all froth at the mouth!