AGW Tackles the Reasonable People

cross posted at Right Michigan

Danny Glover drew the befuddled stares of millions last week as he claimed global warming caused the Haiti earthquake. Similar claims were made by others about hurricanes Katrina and Rita, rising waters in the south Pacific, wildfires in California, historic blizzards in Europe, and glacial melt at Kilimanjaro.

The only disastrous thing to occur in the past few years that was not blamed on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) was the solid defeat of the thoroughly inept Senatorial candidate Martha Coakley by Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts. That was, of course, George Bush's fault.

UN experts have themselves intimated that global warming has and will cause women in third world countries to enter the sex trade. It will kill the polar bear, increase hay fever, cause the earth to spin faster, generate child insomnia, and topple the gingerbread houses of Sweden.

If you have a problem, believe me, they can find a cause.

More thoughtful AGW theorists would like us to take a step back and ignore the hysteria. They would like us to disregard Danny Glover and that powerful blowhard Al Gore who himself lives in a castle with roughly the same carbon footprint as that of Liechtenstein.

No, they have more subtle tactics--ones designed to work on reasonable people like me.

These are just two that happen to be promoted by Gary Ridley of The Oscoda County Herald.

While I don’t think that climate change believers in the government, business and scientific sectors have been completely forthright in stating the realities of global climate change, it is utterly ridiculous to believe that global climate change does not exist simply because it’s cold outside.

It’s January in Northern Michigan; of course it’s cold outside!

Cold Michiganders should instead look overseas and identify with overheated Australians. Meanwhile, the summer snows in Australia should be ignored by Aussies who should look north to Asia where news stories stress perspiring Russians. Russians in turn should look beyond their freezing toes and concentrate on overheated Americans who are oddly worried about unprecedented loss in the citrus crop.

It is a reasonable sounding game of international climate tag in which everyone is denied the opportunity to be 'it.'

He continues...

If those who are trying to raise awareness of climate change want to try to successfully evoke change within this country they need to tell Americans how climate change will affect the thing they hold most dear — their wallets.

An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007 put the net economic cost of climate change at an average of $12 per metric ton of carbon dioxide released.

[...]

The EPA listed the average single-person household to have a CO2 output of 20,750 pounds annually, and a family of four’s output at 83,000 pounds.

According to the IPCC, that would put those households at a yearly environmental damage monetary equivalent of $112.94 and $451.80 respectively.

If global climate change activists tried to tax households based on these figures in order to combat climate change, I am sure Americans would start to pay much more attention to the realities behind climate change. [emphasis mine]

Um, tried?

What was Kyoto about if not an attempt to force wealthy nations to ante up funds to those nations who are ruled by tinpot dictators and religious strongmen? What was Copenhagen other than a brazen attempt to confiscate billions from wealthy western nations to bolster the choked economies of poverty stricken curruptocracies?

Tried?

Have CAFE standards come without a cost? Have not automobile companies and suppliers been struggling at least in part because of energy and economic policies designed to reduce man's impact on climate? Are Michigan utility rates not going up because our state's largest energy providers have been granted sweetheart deals to, get this, perhaps provide more green energy in the future? Will the next major hurricane in the gulf not result in a spike in gasoline prices?

I think that most Americans and particularly Michiganders have analyzed the way in which AGW proponents have already affected our wallets. Cap and trade legislation promises to put the screws to us even beyond what we have already suffered. It will be resisted with greater fervor than is health care legislation.

Most Americans and Michiganders do not want to further surrender freedom and wealth to global minded bureaucrats who are intent on producing positive economic outcomes in countries mired in various manifestations of socialism and fascism.

We are being told by global warming advocates to trade in our clunkers, light fewer campfires, eat only local fruits, turn down the thermostats, buy high efficiency windows, cease fertilizing, and please, knock it off with those high intensity disco lights!

America chose the free market system and because of this has succeeded in generating more than enough wealth to clean up its own environment. Our standard of living is high, our air is clean, and our kids have food. Third world nations, on the the other hand, chose every possible form of socialism, tyranny, despotism, and corruptedness, and have ergo lagged significantly behind us in every measurable factor of life quality.

The international money grab is not, as Ridley intimates, a launch into the hypothetical, for we, as consumers and tax payers, are already being blasted with higher costs for the implausible cause of preventing higher temperatures on planet Earth.

Nonetheless, I will take some of the advice offered.

In the future I will gladly ignore whatever drivel flecks the microphones positioned in front of the esteemed Nobel laureate Albert William Gore, and honestly, I've mostly laughed at Danny Glover for the last two decades anyway.

I will not, however, ignore my slippery pathway or my icy drive. Just because its hotter than blue blazes in Siberia doesn't mean that I cannot crack my skull on my ice covered steps wearing circa '78 vinyl platform dancing shoes.

Moonwalking is difficult in any climate.