THE BUENOS AIRES CONFERENCE

I guess I should say something more about all the hot air coming out of the big Greenie conference in Buenos Aires at the moment. Choosing a city with a name that means "Good Air" for a conference designed to tell us that the atmosphere is going to hell in a handbasket may even indicate a rare Greenie sense of humour, I guess. There is one report here. Excerpt:

"Clear-eyed enviros know they're losing. A frank new report, "The Death of Environmentalism" (available at www.TheBreakthrough.org), issued last week by two Green strategists, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, admits that warming advocates have failed. They haven't "come up with an inspiring vision, much less a legislative proposal, that a majority of Americans could get excited about."

True. But don't wait for the Greens to lead. Instead, responsible advocates are building a consensus around the right approach, which concentrates not on destroying the economies of developing countries through limits to growth, but on improving those economies through the use of more energy -- the best leverage for boosting living standards. Wealth, after all, makes health. As a nation gets richer, it gets cleaner.

Poor farmers in China, India and Africa burning dung and charcoal are releasing not just CO2 but real pollutants into the air. The role of rich nations should be to transfer technologies that produce cleaner energy more efficiently.

Meanwhile, there's important research to be done. We still don't know whether the rise in temperatures is natural and cyclical (it was warmer many centuries ago when the Vikings colonized Greenland) or human-induced.

But the radicals are losing. Michael Crichton, author of science-based bestsellers like "Jurassic Park," has a new book, "State of Fear," which casts serious doubt on global warming and extremists who espouse it. As Crichton says, "Why are we not feeding people in this world who are hungry? Why are we not giving clean water to the almost billion people who don't have clean water? The greatest source of environmental degradation is poverty. Why aren't we cleaning up poverty?"

Those are the right questions for the multitudes in Buenos Aires".






LOMBORG AT BUENOS AIRES

"A former member of Greenpeace who became disillusioned with what he saw as bad eco-science urged a United Nations climate change conference to "save the world" by ignoring global warming. "Climate change is a huge thing, but there is very little that we can do about it," Bjorn Lomborg told CNSNews.com following a speech in Buenos Aires on Monday. Lomborg, the author of the new book Global Crisis, Global Solutions, also wrote The Skeptical Environmentalist, a book devoted to debunking many of the alarmist claims of environmental groups. He is attending the U.N.'s Conference of Parties or COP-10 meeting on climate change here.

In an essay published Monday in the London Telegraph, Lomborg wrote that "global warming has become the obsession of our time" and "is the moral test of our age." Lomborg believes that global warming is real and is caused by C02, but he adds that mankind can "do very little about the warming." Lomborg, an associate professor of statistics at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, is in Buenos Aires trying to convince world governments to worry less about climate change and concentrate instead on what he considers solvable problems, such as AIDS, poverty and inadequate sanitation.

Lomborg organized the "Copenhagen Consensus," an international team of economists and others who conducted a cost-benefit analysis of the world's most pressing problems. "So in a curious way, global warming really is the moral test of our time, but not in the way its proponents imagined. We need to stop our obsession with global warming and start dealing with the many more pressing issues in the world, where we can do [the] most good, first and quickest," Lomborg argued. According to Lomborg, any effects that global warming may have on people 100 years from now will be muted because poor nations are projected to be much wealthier and thus better equipped to deal with any climate complications. "The people who are going to be affected by it in 2100 are likely going to be much richer," Lomborg told an audience at the Universidad de Ciencias Monday night. "By the U.N.'s own scenarios, everyone [in poor nations] will be at least as rich as we are today in the developed world in 2100; and much more likely, they will be 2 to 4 times more wealthy than the developed world is today. Of course, the developed world will be even much richer than that," Lomborg predicted.

"Imagine if you were a rich Chinese or a rich Rwandan or a rich Bolivian in 2100, looking back on 2004, saying how odd that the people of 2004 were so concerned about helping me a little bit through climate change and so relatively unconcerned about helping my grandfather and my great-grandfather who needed the help much, much more," he said. "If we can't do everything, let's make sure that we actually do something that is going to help the world a lot rather than just a little," Lomborg said".

Source





THE ACTUAL IMPLICATIONS OF REDUCING CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS

One way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions would be to stop us all from breathing, of course, but, as much as they would no doubt like it, the Greenies are not proposing that. So what are the realistic options? Below is one excerpt from what the engineers have presented at Buenos Aires. I don't think the Greenies will like it. Why can't having your cake and eating it too be allowed?

"Let's take a look at some of what it would take to achieve the WBCSD goal of stabilizing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the next 50 years. First, new low carbon technologies would need to begin being deployed almost immediately. To reduce projected emissions by 1 gigaton per year in 2050, the world would have to build 1400 new combined cycle gas turbine 1 gigawatt power plants rather than coal fired plants. A gigawatt is enough electricity to power about 400,000 homes. That translates into a growth rate of 2.6% per year -- or building 2 new gas power plants per month for the next 50 years. The International Energy Agency projects a 2.4% rate of growth through 2030.

To avoid another gigaton of carbon emissions by 2050 would require building 700 1 gigawatt nuclear power plants rather than the equivalent conventional coal facilities. That means that the rate of growth in nuclear power generation needs to be 4 percent per year rather than the current 2.5 percent. One more gigaton of emissions could be cut if the world's projected 2 billion vehicles in 2050 got 60 miles rather than 30 miles to the gallon. Another could be curtailed by 300,000 5 megawatt wind turbines. Of course, the wind turbines would need to be deployed in an area the size of Portugal and 5 megawatt wind turbines are only prototypes now. Biofuels derived from 250 hectares of high yield crops could avoid another gigaton of carbon emitted per year in 2050. This would mean that a sixth of the world's current cropland would be devoted to producing fuel. That can't be good for biodiversity"

More here

***************************************

Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Comments? Email me or here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************