♠ Posted by Emmanuel in Environment,Europe
at 5/24/2011 12:00:00 AM
Something makes me rather certain that Czech President Vaclav Klaus would have made it big in America. Given that one of its major political parties doesn't even believe climate change exists, there is a lack of an American consensus that there is a problem at all. How can you then have global consensus when the world's second largest carbon emitter doesn't even recognize the existence of these life-threatening hazards? While similarly palaeolithic reasoning is familiar from deficit deniers--these pathologies tend to go together--climate change denial is IMHO more deleterious given its globe-spanning and life-endangering implications.Today, it is my great displeasure to bring you further ramblings from Vaclav Klaus, Czech primitivist par excellence. Aside from providing a treasure trove of references from obscure climate change deniers, he now makes a stunning claim: Alike central planners of the Communist era that he so abhors, he believes that those advocating for controls on emissions are, you guessed it, today's totalitarians. He made this speech at Cambridge University, no less:
As someone who personally experienced central planning and attempts to organize the whole society from above, I feel obliged to warn against the arguments and ambitions which are very similar to those we had to live with decades ago. The arrogance with which the GWD [global warming debate] alarmists and their fellow-travelers in politics and media want to suppress the market, control the society, dictate the prices (directly or indirectly by means of various interventions, including taxes) is something I know well from the past. All the old, already almost forgotten economic arguments against communism should be repeated now. It is our duty to do so.There's no convincing some folks. Maybe he'll name his grandchildren after Ayn Rand or something. In the meantime, comrade, don't drive an SUV lest I send you off to the gulag ;-)
To conclude, I agree with many serious climatologists who say that the warming we experience or is on the horizon will be very small. Convincing argumentation can be found in Ian Plimer’s recent book. I agree with Bob Carter and others that it is difficult “to prove that the human effect on the climate can be measured” because “this effect is lost in the variability of natural climate changes”. From the economic point of view, in case there will be no irrational interventions against it, the economic losses connected with such a modest warming will be very small. A loss generated as a result of a completely useless fight against global warming would be far greater.
