There'd be a huge scramble of egg, vegetable and waste matter on the faces of, and obstructing the vision of, the vast worldwide army of over-sensitive and deeply concerned prognosticators in politics, academia, journalism, workplaces and kitchens, who have been scolding us all about our carbon emissions for nearly 2 decades.
And, make no mistake, this is now a completely legitimate question. Anyone genuinely interested in and curious about climate change must start asking themselves this in the light of the confirmation from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Institute and the British Met Office that there has been no no material change in the Earth's surface temperature in the last 15 years.
CO2 emissions have continued to rise unabated over that same 15 years but the planet has stubbornly refused to heat up. It looks mightily like there must be an explanation other than increases in atmospheric CO2 for the global warming in the 20 year odd period between 1976 and 1997.
Mike Stopa has now started the ball rolling on the rethink. There are many intriguing further questions consequent on this too, including, as Mike Stopa puts it, how will the history of this colossal mistake be written?
He suggests that:
Most of the rest of the world have just entangled themselves in words and bureaucratic waste over this false alarm in the past decade. But Australia actually did something more than blow hot air in UN IPCC forums and at COP conferences. The Australian Labor government legislated last year to tax the country's largest 500 businesses with an impost of $23.00 per tonne of CO2 produced by those businesses, commencing 1 July 2012.
Now that it appears likely that CO2 probably does not contribute meaningfully to the warming of the planet, this tax is just a pointless handicap on Australian business. This pointless tax makes all Australian industry less competitive with the rest of the world. For no benefit. Not even the mystical benefit of "moral leadership" in the world. Just the dunces prize for being sucked in by all the smoke and mirrors from self-appointed important people who wanted to save us all from ourselves.
Just how this massive group-think folly is going to be backed away from by the educated opinion making elites in the West will indeed be intriguing.
These folk are not good at eating crow. So is there a face saving mechanism by which all the great and the good in the world who jumped on this absurd prosperity depleting bandwagon, can be redeemed?
We watch and wait.
It might take a while for these rubes to even realise that the game is over. But as it dawns on them gradually over the coming years that they got it so badly wrong, both the shrieks of pain and the silence of denial will be deafening. Indeed the deafening silence has already begun. This emergence of this clear conclusion of no warming for 15 years based on apparently rigorously collected and collated data remains pretty much unremarked on in the mainstream media to date. The dam will break soonish, methinks, especially here in Australia as the commencement date of the Carbon Tax looms closer.
So we might yet just be saved from both the oppression of unnecessarily intrusive world government edicts seeking to save us from climate perdition and the irritation of constantly being belittled by our betters for the mortal sin of high energy usage. Is it too much to hope that at some point soon it might even be possible to be able to resume creating prosperity for all without being told we can't use the cheapest, easiest and most abundant sources of energy?
And, make no mistake, this is now a completely legitimate question. Anyone genuinely interested in and curious about climate change must start asking themselves this in the light of the confirmation from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Institute and the British Met Office that there has been no no material change in the Earth's surface temperature in the last 15 years.
CO2 emissions have continued to rise unabated over that same 15 years but the planet has stubbornly refused to heat up. It looks mightily like there must be an explanation other than increases in atmospheric CO2 for the global warming in the 20 year odd period between 1976 and 1997.
Mike Stopa has now started the ball rolling on the rethink. There are many intriguing further questions consequent on this too, including, as Mike Stopa puts it, how will the history of this colossal mistake be written?
He suggests that:
- "... They will say that the theory was seemingly invalidated by the decrease in global temperatures from 1940-1975, but that the adherents patched this up by explaining the cooling with pollution, specifically sulfur, from industry"...
- "... They will say the theory was seemingly invalidated by the evidence that the atmosphere was already nearly opaque in the wavelengths that are absorbed by CO2 and so the additional CO2 could have, on its own, little effect, but that the theory was patched up by positing a feedback mechanism between the small temperature increases directly due to CO2 and the production of water vapor which is the main greenhouse gas..."
- "... They will note that the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) proceeded much like any scientific theory (cf. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) in that it was modified and patched up and adjusted to fit empirical challenges until it finally collapsed altogether under the weight of incontrovertible evidence..."
Most of the rest of the world have just entangled themselves in words and bureaucratic waste over this false alarm in the past decade. But Australia actually did something more than blow hot air in UN IPCC forums and at COP conferences. The Australian Labor government legislated last year to tax the country's largest 500 businesses with an impost of $23.00 per tonne of CO2 produced by those businesses, commencing 1 July 2012.
Now that it appears likely that CO2 probably does not contribute meaningfully to the warming of the planet, this tax is just a pointless handicap on Australian business. This pointless tax makes all Australian industry less competitive with the rest of the world. For no benefit. Not even the mystical benefit of "moral leadership" in the world. Just the dunces prize for being sucked in by all the smoke and mirrors from self-appointed important people who wanted to save us all from ourselves.
Just how this massive group-think folly is going to be backed away from by the educated opinion making elites in the West will indeed be intriguing.
These folk are not good at eating crow. So is there a face saving mechanism by which all the great and the good in the world who jumped on this absurd prosperity depleting bandwagon, can be redeemed?
We watch and wait.
It might take a while for these rubes to even realise that the game is over. But as it dawns on them gradually over the coming years that they got it so badly wrong, both the shrieks of pain and the silence of denial will be deafening. Indeed the deafening silence has already begun. This emergence of this clear conclusion of no warming for 15 years based on apparently rigorously collected and collated data remains pretty much unremarked on in the mainstream media to date. The dam will break soonish, methinks, especially here in Australia as the commencement date of the Carbon Tax looms closer.
So we might yet just be saved from both the oppression of unnecessarily intrusive world government edicts seeking to save us from climate perdition and the irritation of constantly being belittled by our betters for the mortal sin of high energy usage. Is it too much to hope that at some point soon it might even be possible to be able to resume creating prosperity for all without being told we can't use the cheapest, easiest and most abundant sources of energy?
Comments