When a company says it is acting in the “public interest,” check your wallet
WSJ:
Yesterday, 10 companies, including industrial giants that make everything from bulldozers to chemicals to electricity, joined environmental groups in calling for a federal law to “slow, stop and reverse the growth” of global-warming emissions “over the shortest period of time reasonably achievable.” Tonight, President Bush, whose administration has rejected such caps as economically unacceptable, will deliver a State of the Union address in which he’s expected to announce a bigger push for such things as low-emission alternative fuels…
a broadening consensus has developed that fossil-fuel emissions are contributing to global warming; the debate has been over whether they’re the main cause. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that periodically assesses climate science, cited “new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.” In 2005, representatives of scientific societies from 11 countries, including the U.S., called the science “sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.”
The WSJ article breathlessly speaks of a “new consensus” but then points out company after company in industries from utilities to steel to autos that oppose the cap. Some “new consensus”! Our advice to the WSJ is to examine the profit possibilities of the companies that support the cap. Beware the businessman who speaks of serving the “public interest.”
UPDATE
Of course CO2 has increased in recent decades. Bert W. Rust, of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has an interesting paper, “Carbon Dioxide, Global Warming and Michael Crichton’s State of Fear” that includes this chart:
Note that the chart looks dramatic because of the scale. The change from 300 to 380 parts per million — an increase of 80 parts per million over a century — would be undetectable if the scale measured parts per ten thousand. Be that as it may; we’re not here to debate the science or superstition of Global Warming. Michael Crichton can do that on his own (as we excerpted here). As for us, we’re hoping Global Warming is real: we’ve been buying land in Canada to cash in big when it becomes the New California.
UPDATE II
Come to think of it, when a politician says he is acting in the “public interest,” you need to double-check your wallet.
January 23rd, 2007 at 10:01 am
“Similarities with our Present World” see graph 1/3 the way down.
http://www.clearlight.com/~mhieb/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html
See a correlation?
January 23rd, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Don’t worry. Nobody else does either.
January 24th, 2007 at 6:42 pm
The linked paper claims that the steady increase in temperature might be temporarily masked by a cyclical process which currently is in a downturn. So:
*Hot weather is evidence for global warming.
*Unsettled weather is evidence for global warming.
*Cool weather is evidence for global warming.
Despite the foregoing derision, I do not rule out anthropogenic global warming, and I favor continuing climate research.
It’s disquieting that the Kyoto negotiations were initiated only a year after the seminal paper about the temperature cycle which now is said to temporarily mask global warming. What else might we not yet understand?