Save the World

I've been accused of being a denier. Yes, that's right, a denier. I don't take it personally, but I think my accusers misunderstand my stance. I absolutely believe in climate change (that's what they like to call it these days. The nasty right-wingers (and the facts) have ruined their favorite scary words - global warming).

Yes climate change is very real, been going on for, oh, say, a couple billion years now. It's even possible, maybe probable, that the globe is warming. Doesn't sound denialist to you does it? Me either.

Is mankind to blame if it is true? I'm not sure, but then no one is. However, I do deny is that the insane remedies the greenies prescribe for America and Europe (basically all the majority white countries) would be in any way helpful. In fact what they want the West to do is to slit our own throats.


The pain and suffering that the greenies want to impose on humanity spreading outward from the West will be far more devastating than any slight warming of the planet could ever be. What they want is energy starvation. At a time when it's abundantly clear that it takes energy to create and sustain wealth and it is rising wealth that will help the most people far and wide. More than one "global warming believer" sees this as the essential truth. The biggest barrier to improving societal resilience to the vagaries of climate change is poverty. Therefore the spending of ungodly sums of money to try to alter the planet's climate will only lessen the well-being of the great bulk of humanity, and drive us all even further into poverty.

In an article posted at the The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) they say exactly that. It's poverty that is the biggest problem for human climate interaction. Read "What the world needs now is a lot less poverty". It's short and convincing.

At the Global Warming Policy Foundation Matt Ridley, hardly a denier, says essentially the same thing - the world will need more energy not less. Take a minute to read MATT RIDLEY: CLIMATE CURE WORSE THAN THOUGHT. Its real food for thought whatever side your on.

FTA:
One IPCC scenario assumes we'd be burning an astonishing 10 times as much coal as today, producing 50% of its primary energy from coal, compared with about 30% today. Indeed, because oil is assumed to have become scarce, a lot of liquid fuel would then be derived from coal. Nuclear and renewable technologies contribute little, because of a “slow pace of innovation” and hence “fossil fuel technologies continue to dominate the primary energy portfolio over the entire time horizon of the RCP8.5 scenario.” Energy efficiency has improved very little.

These are highly unlikely assumptions. With abundant natural gas displacing coal on a huge scale in the United States today, with the price of solar power plummeting, with nuclear power experiencing a revival, with gigantic methane-hydrate gas resources being discovered on the seabed, with energy efficiency rocketing upwards, and with population growth rates continuing to fall fast in virtually every country in the world, the one thing we can say about RCP8.5 is that it is very, very implausible.

Notice, however, that even so, it is not a world of catastrophic pain. The per capita income of the average human being in 2100 is three times what it is now. Poverty would be history. So it’s hardly Armageddon.
But there’s an even more startling fact. We now have many different studies of climate sensitivity based on observational data and they all converge on the conclusion that it is much lower than assumed by the IPCC in these models. It has to be, otherwise global temperatures would have risen much faster than they have over the past 50 years.  As Ross McKitrick noted on this page earlier this week, temperatures have not risen at all now for more than 17 years. With these much more realistic estimates of sensitivity (known as “transient climate response”), even RCP8.5 cannot produce dangerous warming. It manages just 2.1C of warming by 2081-2100.

What I have believed all along is that warming is better than cooling. I just don't buy the doomers that claim that all hell will be unleashed if the planet warms by 1 or 2 degrees celsius. The Medieval Warming Period is case in point. Life on Earth was better for more people than the subsequent period known as the Little Ice Age. It's only common sense.

To save the world we need to encourage wealth creation and anti-poverty measures in the poorest places on Earth. It means that the rich will get richer, and the West will continue to rise, and these are good things. This means we will all need greater access to more and more energy. What is it that the greenies and their progressive buddies continuously rally against. Yep, you got it, wealth and energy.

Who is really on the side of the poor?



Ugh (denier)