The philosopher Goethe said “There is nothing more frightening than ignorance in action.” And ignorance is what is being demonstrated by all the political leaders as each rolls out his or her plan to counter a supposed “climate crisis” due to “global warming”. None of them knows what he or she is talking about. This does not indicate stupidity. All the party leaders are intelligent people. The word “ignorance” means “not knowing”, and that is the problem.
A steady stream of alarmist warnings has led our political leaders (like much of the general public) to believe that carbon dioxide is raising the global temperature and will lead to a “climate catastrophe”. This “catastrophe” can, of course, be “fought” only by their party’s scheme to force industries to reduce their emissions of CO2.
What we are seeing is “everybody-knows” pseudo-science. Erroneous information endlessly repeated. To understand climate, one has to spend hundreds of hours studying and reading. If our political leaders had done so, they would know that carbon dioxide has virtually zero effect on global temperatures. (They would also know that the most important influence on climate, by far, is water, as vapor and clouds up to 95% of the so-called “Greenhouse Effect”.) They would also know that the world has been warming since around 1830 (about half a degree C) and that the warming ended the miserable conditions of the Little Ice Age. They would also know something about the relationship between climate and the number of sunspots. And that the world has been cooling slightly for the past ten years, not warming. And on and on.
Since CO2 does not determine climate, there is no justification whatever for restricting CO2 emissions. Unfortunately, all the parties call for such CO2 restrictions. Elizabeth May and Jack Layton do not have viable plans, and hapless Stephane Dion continues to peddle his “Green Shift” plan, parodied so wonderfully by Harper’s jibe of “Green Shaft”. Dion even worsens
our perception of him by repeatedly referring to carbon dioxide as “pollution”. He thinks that this makes his tax plan more palatable, but it really shows that he doesn’t have a clue that carbon dioxide is the opposite of pollution. It is an essential plant food, vital to every bit of vegetation, and thus to our survival. No plants, no us.
However, Steven Harper and his Conservatives have their own millstone for their necks. Called “Turning the Corner”, its details can be read on the Environment Canada website at: http://www.ec.gc.ca/default.asp?lang=En&n=75038EBC-1 The website bleats “With the Turning the Corner plan the Government of Canada is putting into place one of the toughest regulatory regimes in the world to meet its target of reducing greenhouse gases an absolute 20% from 2006 by 2020.” This is the requirement for bringing Canada’s CO2 emissions within the limits called for by the Kyoto Protocol. It is legislation that has been passed and is being acted on.
And what would be the effect of implementing the Kyoto Protocol by all the countries that signed it? A pitiably small reduction in global temperature 50 years from now of only around 0.05°C. Unmeasurable! Yet reducing the CO2 emissions to 20% below 2006 levels would cripple our economy. It would reduce our ability to generate electrical power and to operate industries that require fossil fuel to power factories, with resulting closed businesses, unemployment, and misery.
A word that describes these baseless calls for reductions in CO2 emissions is “madness”. They would be a bureaucrat’s delight, with vast numbers of new regulations, regulators, inspectors, accountants, etc. but they would benefit nobody but the bureaucrats.
The Harper government, to its credit has done as little as possible to implement the disastrous provisions of Turning the Corner. But it is legislation that is the law of the land, and the bureaucrats formulating it chug on relentlessly. New “features” have been added as recently as August 9 of this year.
We can only hope that everyone comes to their senses before huge amounts of money are wasted “solving” a problem that does not exist. And whichever party forms the next government, we can only hope that they will state that signing the Kyoto Protocol was a mistake, and that they will then trash Turning the Corner before it can cause serious damage to us all.
