Red alert for the green home guard! According to the daily press, B.C., along with Ontario, has become a straggler in the battle against greenhouse gases (GHGs).
If Christy Clark doesn’t start doing something soon to change the weather, the legislature will have to consider meeting in a bunker atop Mount Washington to escape melting Arctic icecap floodwaters.
Or maybe not.
Being a GHG straggler might not be so bad after all.
Consider that investment in carbon-capture and cap-and-trade shell games is coming under increased scrutiny, not only from members of the dismal science but also from members of other science fraternities that are still dedicated to pursuing truth rather than government handouts.
Global warming is turning out to be far less than advertised. A half-dozen years ago, for example, the United Nations warned that, as of 2010, the world would be dealing with 50 million climate refugees.
Thus far they haven’t shown up.
Dire weather disasters are also proving predictably unpredictable. On the local front, weekend ski season on Grouse Mountain has been extended to Canada Day as the West Coast registered its third coldest April on record.
From an economic perspective, the global warming spin cycle has skewed more than science. A new book by Larry Bell provides insights into much of the folly generated by climate change panic.Bell is professor of architecture and the founder of the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture, an organization involved in research, planning and design of habitats in extreme environments.
Climate of Corruption, Power and Politics Behind the Global Warming Hoax is a good companion tome for Steve Gorham’s Climatism! Science, Common Sense and the 21st Century’s Hottest Topic.
Both focus on the politics of the new climate change business and both question the science – or lack thereof – upon which it’s based. The two books also raise concerns about investments in and public policy aimed at changing the weather.
For example, in Climate of Corruption’s foreword, Fred Singer, a former director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service, opines that “the international climate business has degenerated into a scheme to transfer resources … ‘from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor countries.’”
Bell lands some telling blows in the mid-section of government-decreed climate change schemes like cap and trade.
He likens the system that allows fossil-fuel-dependent corporations to buy carbon offsets from other entities to the “sale of indulgences by medieval churches through divine authority.”
Writes Bell: “Unlike futures markets that can be defended as a means to secure long-term investments essential to stabilize volatile energy and food prices, trading of carbon credits involves creation of a market that arbitrarily prices a fictitious commodity that has no value whatsoever.”
Cap and trade might help promote pollution reduction and develop more energy efficient technologies, but no one should be fooled into thinking that it will do anything to affect climate change.
Both books assemble a lengthy inventory of evidence showing that climate change results from an extremely complex set of factors. The release of man-made CO2 plays little, if any, part in it.
Government and business, however, continue to ignore those complexities in favour of defaulting to simplistic political expediency when making major decisions aimed ostensibly at reversing climate change.
That won’t do much for the weather; it will do even less for the economy.