Psst... quick, kill the Hayhoe articleby Clifford F. Thies
Newt says that wasn't him sitting next to Nancy Pelosi on the sofa. No, not him. Maybe it was a pumpkin, but not him.
To keep up the charade that Newt is not committed to the climate change agenda, he just had an article on climate change by Katharine Hayhoe exorcised from a forthcoming book. Professor Hayhoe is a believer. More than that, she says the only people who don't believe in climate change are people with a vested interest in the status quo.
Yes, like the third world countries that are demanding $1 trillion a year in climate reparations, they don't have a vested interest.
And, GE, which received so much in subsidies for wind turbines that it doesn't pay any federal income tax, no, it doesn't have a vest interest.
And, the climate scientists who get billions of dollars for research, they're as pure as the driven snow.
Excuse me, but claiming that those who disagree with you are suspect is not becoming for an academic. Similarly, claiming just about any scientific proposition, no less one generated by a emerging field of inquiry, is beyond question, is not scientific. Science is not memorizing a list of facts. It is a process of inquiry in which presumptions are always compared to facts.
Now, there are some things that are pretty clear: the earth has warmed several degrees since the Little Ice Age and there is more CO2 in the atmosphere than in recent history, part of the increase having been the result of hard to identify natural causes and the other part the result of human activity.
The consensus of climate researchers is now that human activity has contributed to global warming. The present consensus replaces, most recently, the denial of natural variation and the assertion that the entire recent uptick in global temperature due to human activity.
However, the extent of the human contribution - given the fact of natural variation - is debated. The sources of natural variation are not well known. And, the recent leveling out of global temperature is difficult to reconcile with the climate models that are based on the assumption that CO2 in the atmosphere is a major cause of global temperature.
As to what should be done about the possibility that CO2 emissions that have already been made and will inevitably be made in the near future, will cause catastrophic climate change, one thing is clear: Kyoto has not worked and was never going to work.
You can't reduce total emissions by capping the emissions only of a minority of countries and exempting the rest of the world. All that will happen is that industrial activity will shift from the controlled to the uncontrolled part of the world, with no net reduction in emissions. This is something I, an economist, can speak to with authority. This is why Kyoto received zero votes in the United States Senate, being defeated 0-97 when it was brought up for consideration.
What would be needed is a global budget for CO2 emissions. But, the development of such a budget and its allocation across the nations of the world has been hindered by Kyoto, because of all the money that would be involved in Kyoto. Why would the nations that see climate change as a reason to get a trillion dollars a year because of the problem of climate change want to solve the problem?
Sweet music to libertarian ears...Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney told supporters in Iowa Wednesday about his plan to shut down funding for programs like PBS.
