It Causes Earthquakes Too?

From the opening ceremony's video of a little girl running from an earthquake to the promises of emissions reductions, everything taking place in Copenhagen is contrived. The outcome of climate talks -- no treaty, no emissions reductions -- was known in advance. And yet participants pretend there is an unfolding drama. As such, Copenhagen is history's first completely postmodern global event. It's a festival of phoniness. With the ambitions of Versailles but the power of Davos, Copenhagen creates a cognitive dissonance for its creators, which results in ever-more manic displays of apocalypse anxiety and false hope. In the end, Copenhagen tells us more about ourselves -- our post-American world, our fragmented media environment, and our hyper-partisanship -- than about any attempt to slow global warming.

- Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
of the Breakthrough Institute

And further in a paean to the bobo-ism that typifies academia, the European world view, and a moderate-seeming resolution to the impotent rage of “our betters”:

In this, Copenhagen represents the first truly postmodern global event in human history. Other generations had Versailles, Yalta, Bretton-Woods -- agreements that re-organized nation states and shaped the modern world. We, by contrast, have Copenhagen, which has no power to do anything. In reality, Copenhagen is no more effectual than the made for media confabs like Davos. But the United Nations, multinational green groups, and sympathetic reporters have succeeded in creating the impression of action where there is, in fact, none at all.

Don’t be surprised if they DON’T understand that what they want will result in the enlargement of the poverty gap, and thanks to the “science” that they will take to be “better than nothing”, founded on nothing. Absolutely nothing, as there is no objective proof that man can passively alter the temperature of the world’s atmosphere, let alone hack nature out of it’s own patterns and force it to refrigerate itself.

But “correction” of anything real is not the purpose, given this unaddressed trend that continues today:

Between 2000 and 2005, European emissions grew twice as fast as America’s. Emissions in Canada grew a whopping five times faster. Since 1990, Germany and Britain reduced their emissions, but they did so for prior reasons having nothing to do with global warming: Margaret Thatcher broke the coal miners’ union in the early 1980s, moving Britain to cleaner-burning natural gas, and the East German economy collapsed after the fall of communism, reducing a reunified Germany’s reliance on dirty coal plants. When you remove these two from the calculation, European emissions rose almost 12 percent between 1990 and 2005.

I hope this puts the anger, the lectures, the vile harangues, and the looks askance in some kind or perspective, one that’s doesn’t set out to scare children or convince an otherwise able population to believe that Global Warming caused a tsunami or an earthquake.

Goodnight, Copanhagen. Like the response to the name “Kyoto”, as a city you are now just another place linked to a massive fraud, and possibly the most oppressive limitation placed on the human potential of the poor humanity ever imposed on itself.