Noah’s Ark Left High And Dry At Global Warming Conference
Greenpeace built a big Noah’s Ark in downtown Buenos Aires for the global warming conference last week. Placards said it represented the “millions at risk” from flooding as more CO2 melts the polar ice caps.
It was good street theater—but short on reality.
The Earth’s warming trend, 0.8 degree Celsius since 1850, has raised world sea levels by only about six inches in 150 years. That isn’t enough to float the Greenpeace ark, or frighten human society into renouncing electricity.
The activists were supposed to rejoice in Buenos Aires. The Kyoto Protocol to limit greenhouse emissions is finally going take effect in February, after seven years in limbo. The Russia’s signature has brought the membership to the required 55 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions.
Instead, the Buenos Aires conference was steeped in gloom. No agreement could be reached on future reductions in greenhouse emissions. The United States, China, India, and Brazil all refused to accept binding limits on their greenhouse gases.
Delegates fear that the Russians only signed Kyoto to get into the World Trade Organization on favorable terms, and to sell the Europeans billions of dollars worth of emission credits left over from the shutdown of the dirty old Soviet heavy industries. There’s serious doubt that Russia will enforce energy constraints on its economic growth—or its future gas and oil exports.
Global temperatures, after an El Nino spike in 1998, have dropped back virtually to the level of 1940, despite huge CO2 emissions over the past 60 years. The Greenhouse Theory explains neither the warming before 1940 nor the lack of it since.
Italy shocked its European neighbors at Buenos Aires by calling for the Kyoto treaty to end in 2012. Sweden and Britain are the only European countries on target to meet their Kyoto-agreed 8 percent reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2008, but all of Europe has been giving lip service to the idea of much larger emission cuts after 2012.
Now, with Kyoto coming into force, European governments face the prospect of rationing electricity and diesel fuel to meet its requirements. Even the Europeans who praised the signing of the Kyoto treaty may rebel at rolling blackouts or redoubled gasoline taxes. Europe would prefer to meet Kyoto constraints with leftover Russian emission credits than by truly shifting to solar panels—in a cloudy Northern climate.
Noah’s Ark in the middle of downtown Buenos Aires was a good visual. But why does Greenpeace equate a sea level rise of six inches in 150 years with global disaster? Why was the World Wildlife Federation demonstrating against fossil fuels in Buenos Aires? No documented species extinctions have been linked to the global warming of the past century and a half and making Kyoto global would push the Third World to cut down more forests for firewood. Remember that the environmental activists were against human affluence before the Greenhouse Theory became fashionable.
I call these activists “the children of the well-fed elite.” Ironically, to rebel against the technological success of preceding generations, they must also rebel against the Internet and the low-cost airplane tickets that let them organize international protests.
At Buenos Aires, however, the shock value was long gone, reality was dawning and the street-theater seemed much less clever.
