That Pledge

Last night, the BBC news soberly reported that world leaders had pledged to limit the rise in world temperature to 2 degrees. I like to think that headlines like that will afford much innocent entertainment to future generations. What it actually means is that a few world leaders have made a meaningless and unenforcable non-commitment to limit 'greenhouse gas' emissions to the point where - if the anthropogenic model of global warming is correct, and IF the computer models run on that basis prove accurate - the rise in temperature (by when? against what base year?) can be expected to be less than 2 degrees. Well, we'll see... Here's an alternative scenario, which could save the politicians and all of us a lot of grief. A couple of years down the line, having managed to do very little - and faced with the prospect of destroying their own economies if they took the drastic measures proposed - the governments might take stock, begin to seek out the evidence (it's already there) that the world is actually cooling and say 'Hey look, the measures we've taken already have been much more effective than we expected, so we can scale this whole thing down.' This would seriously annoy the consensus scientists and the many others who stand to make huge amounts of money out of the global waming scare, but it would be very good news for the rest of us. On the other hand, governments might prove unable to resist the prospect of ever increasing taxation and state control opened up by such delusional projections as the latest 'pledge'.

A Green Defeat

Interesting times. No sooner has humanism been outed as a faith than belief in global warming is defined as a 'philosophical belief'. This ruling might appear to be a victory for the greens, but is in fact a defeat. The consensus warmists tell us repeatedly that the case is closed, facts are facts, there's no debate, you can no more disbelieve in global warming than in gravity or the laws of thermodynamics - it's scientific reality. This indeed was the line taken by the defence in this interesting case - and the judge rejected it. The claimant's commitment to the green cause amounted, he decided, to a 'philosophical belief' (which, legally, is halfway to a religious belief - but let's not go there). Well, the thing about a philosophical belief is of course that it is, by definition, open to debate. This ruling therefore confirms that the case is not closed on manmade global warming. Unfortunately it also means that any troublemaking greenist pain in the butt who's making his fellow employees' lives a misery is probably now untouchable.

Brrr...

I've lifted this from a link on Frank Wilson's invaluable blog - couldn't resist it. Thanks, Frank!