re: #54 Salem

The Global Warming Cult should be utterly and totally destroyed. Preferably, that should be done by showing how it’s unarguably a load of politically motivated horseshit. But what do you do when facts don’t matter to these people. The side that is right on this shouldn’t have any need to cheat. There should be no lingering questions (there’s no question in my mind, mind you), and playing by their rules will only leave these loose ends untied.

I don’t think much of George Will, though. I don’t think he pulls much water these days, anyhow. A lot of people just bust out laughing when the guy starts to speak. The guy acts like he could bend rebar with his sphincter.

Me included? I don’t feel like I’m a troofer or a cultist. You’re welcome to destroy my arguments or hunches. Data, facts, and tight reasoning will do it, IF the data and other facts tip your way.

Consider: your hot resentment of Al Gore’s enriching himself selling carbon offsets like priests used to sell indulgences, a resentment I share, may be clouding your judgment when it comes to the possibility that Al Gore’s seizing on a real problem as a starting point for a scam. Who says he’s inventing it from whole cloth? What if the problem is real, even though his warnings of the earth melting into a pile of slag and then vaporizing are overblown?

Serious people, oh, say, from China, where they put little stock in U.S. political fevers, are taking it seriously. {The article of which the quote below is an excerpt gives details.}

mass migrations and war?

Jose Endundo, environment minister of Congo, said he recently visited huge Lake Victoria in nearby Uganda, at 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) a vital source for the Nile River, and learned the lake level had dropped 3 meters (10 feet) in the past six years — a loss blamed in part on warmer temperatures and diminishing rains.

In the face of such threats, “the rich countries have to give us a helping hand,” the African minister said.

But it was Stern, former chief World Bank economist, who on Saturday laid out a case to his stranded companions in sobering PowerPoint detail.

If the world’s nations act responsibly, Stern said, they will achieve “zero-carbon” electricity production and zero-carbon road transport by 2050 — by replacing coal power plants with wind, solar or other energy sources that emit no carbon dioxide, and fossil fuel-burning vehicles with cars running on electric or other “clean” energy.

Then warming could be contained to a 2-degree-Celsius (3.4-degree-Fahrenheit) rise this century, he said.

But if negotiators falter, if emissions reductions are not made soon and deep, the severe climate shifts and sea-level rises projected by scientists would be “disastrous.”

It would “transform where people can live,” Stern said. “People would move on a massive scale. Hundreds of millions, probably billions of people would have to move if you talk about 4-, 5-, 6-degree increases” — 7 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. And that would mean extended global conflict, “because there’s no way the world can handle that kind of population move in the time period in which it would take place.”