Bush Herds G8 Summit Leaders Into Global Warming Corral
July 15, 2005
You thought Texans were just hard-riding gunslingers. Yet George W. Bush has just evaded a huge ambush at the Gleneagles summit in Scotland and herded some of the world’s cleverest politicians into his global warming policy.
European leaders for the past two decades have been screaming that humanity was overheating the planet with too much CO2 from fossil fuels. Never mind that the Modern Warming’s biggest surges were from 1850-1870 and 1920-1940—too early for man-made CO2 to have made much impact. Never mind that today’s warming follows a Medieval Warming in the 12th century, and a Roman Warming in the 1st century. It’s an article of faith in today’s Europe that humanity is frying the planet.
After the G8 summit at Gleneagles, however, the world leaders signed a consensus statement that they would “slow and, as the science justifies, stop and then reverse the growth of greenhouse gases.”
“As the science justifies” is a new phrase in the summit communique—and it came right from George W. Bush’s “Climate Change Policy Book.”
Bush won over seven other key world leaders to his supposedly “rogue” global warming policy? How?
The Europeans’ first problem is that the catastrophic overheating they’ve been predicting hasn’t happened. Earth’s Polar Regions have actually been cooling, and the lower atmosphere is warming less than half as fast as the Earth’s surface thermometers. The Greenhouse Theory and global climate models both tell us the lower atmosphere must heat up faster than the Earth’s surface since it’s got all that extra CO2.
Either the surface thermometers are too hot, due to urban heat and rural land-clearing, or the Greenhouse Effect is much smaller than claimed. Or both.
Europe’s worse problem is that its found no way to cut greenhouse gas emissions without threatening its own economic health. Almost every EU economy is on target to emit far more CO2 than it pledged under the Kyoto Protocol. For 2010, Spain is projected at 60 percent over its limit, Denmark 26 percent over, France 19 percent over, and even the “green” Netherlands 10 percent above its promised limit. Politically risky nuclear power is the only cost-effective way out, and only Finland has dared build a new atomic power plant.
Italy has already suggested that Kyoto be scrapped.
In contrast to Europe’s Kyoto failure, President Bush told a Hudson Institute audience in Washington on June 30, “Some have suggested the best solution to environmental challenges and climate change is to oppose development and put the world on an energy diet. But at this moment, about two billion people have no access to any form of modern energy. Blocking that access would condemn them to permanent poverty, disease, high infant mortality, polluted water and polluted air. We’re taking a better approach. In the last three years, the U.S. has launched a series of initiatives to help developing countries adopt new energy sources, from cleaner use of coal to hydrogen vehicles, to solar and wind power, to the production of clean-burning methane, to less-polluting power plants . . . that approach is reflected in an explosion over the last three years in the U.S. in new technological advances. . . .”
Former British energy minister Brian Wilson admitted after the Bush speech that “The U.S. is doing more than the rest of the world put together on technology like hydrogen and clean coal technology and on fusion . . . in the longer term, they are the fundamental answer.”
While the global warming debate continues, remember also the key Gleneagles summit phrase: “as the science justifies.”
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