We also don't link to many editorials, folks in search of same have a wealth of sources to choose from, they range from Marxist to Crypto-fascist in motivation/slant.
That said, this editorial addresses a couple questions I've had:
What is the most efficient use of finite financial resources? and,
How much temperature reduction will we be buying with the various proposals currently in congress?
If you look into the matter, very few people pushing their different agendas will talk about either quantifying the reduction of temperature, or even how much their ideas will slow down the rate of growth in temperature. What we get is a focus on CO2, rather than the end result.
In business, I've learned: "Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean it's where you should be looking."
Please note, I said this editorial addresses the questions. It doesn't answer them.
I hope this puts us back with the dead armadillos and yellow stripes; to channel Jim Hightower.
From IBD:
Climate Change:
A U.N. that can't save the world from war, famine, disease and pestilence now releases a report saying global warming will cause all of the above — and it's your SUV that's doing it.
The fourth and final assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reads like the Bible, but gospel it is not.
It is a "consensus" in that it started with a foregone conclusion — that man-made pollution is dooming the planet — and gathered in any and all opinions that supported it.
The report incredibly warns that the 630,000 cubic miles of the Greenland ice sheet will virtually disappear in the near future, raising sea levels by almost 30 feet, and the Amazon rain forest will become a dry savannah.
There will be widespread species extinction, as up to three-fifths of wildlife will die out. The Great Barrier Reef will die.
And, oh yeah, winter sports in the Alps will be a thing of the past....
...If Ban wants to prevent famine and disease, let him get busy in Darfur, which he also has blamed on global warming.Addendum:
...The Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobel Prize winners), figured that money spent on things like micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification produces 50 to 200 times the benefit for the human species than spending money to effect imperceptible declines in the Earth's temperature....MORE
The IBD editorial states that if all nations had signed and executed the CO2e reduction goals in the Kyoto protocol it would result in a temperature difference of 0.04 degrees. The number I remember was almost double that. The National Center for Atmospheric Research estimated Kyoto would lower expected temperature by 0.07 degrees. Still immeasurable, but a bigger immeasurable.
