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'.