These crazy Luddites are trying to return all of us to their favorite century, the seventh:
If governments are serious about the global warming targetsthey adopted in Paris, scientists say they have two options: eliminating fossil fuels immediately or finding ways to undo their damage to the climate system in the future. The first is politically impossible — the world is still hooked on using oil, coal and natural gas — which leaves the option of a major cleanup of the atmosphere later this century.
“Hooked on”? As opposed to what? Building windmills? As Camille Paglia famously said, if civilization were left in the hands of women, we’d all still be living in grass huts. Throw in lefist metrosexual Islamic sympathizers and you’ve got yourself a deal. Speak of the devil…
“The problem’s not solved because of this accord, but make no mistake, the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis,” President Obama said in a speech from the White House’s Cabinet Room. “It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way.”
But… you just know there’s a “but” coming —
Yet the landmark Paris Agreement, adopted by 195 countries on Dec. 12, makes no reference to that, which has left some observers wondering whether politicians understand the implications of the goals they signed up for. “I would say it’s the single biggest issue that has to be resolved,” said Glen Peters of the Cicero climate research institute in Oslo, Norway.
Translation: give us more money.
The deal also commits countries to deliver $100 billion a year in aid for developing countries by 2020, with a promise to increase financing in the future. The task would be enormous. One recent study said hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide would have to be removed in the second half of this century. That has led some scientists to consider controversial geoengineering solutions like fertilizing the oceans with iron to make them absorb more carbon.
Scientists refer to this envisioned cleanup job as negative emissions – removing more greenhouse gases from the atmosphere than humans put in it. Right now we’re putting in a lot — about 50 billion tons a year, mostly carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.
Carbon dioxide, by the way, is what human being like you and me exhale, and what plants inhale. Does even the nastiest, nihilistic Leftist actually believe that Nature would have designed a self-poisoning ecosystem?
There are methods to achieve negative emissions today but they would need to be scaled up to a level that experts say could put climate efforts in conflict with other priorities, such as eradicating hunger. Still, if the Paris climate goals are to be achieved, there’s no way to avoid the issue, said Jan Minx of the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate change in Berlin. “My view is, let’s have this discussion,” he said. “Let’s involve ourselves in developing these technologies. We need to keep learning.”
My view is, let’s not. What’s yours?
Related: This Is Your Brain on ‘Klimate Change.’ Okay, Naomi Klein’s Brain
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