Wizblog

More Warming

As a follow up to the Kyoto Trifecta post, we'll link you to Wretchard's look at environmental policy vs. environmental science, and the seduction and debasement of that science by political forces.

Then there's Mark Steyn's musings on what had been the routine comings and goings of species:

Evolution posits that species will come and go: some die out, some survive and evolve. I don't regard myself as anything terribly special but in a typical year I'm exposed to temperatures from around 98 degrees to 45 below freezing, in the lower part of which range I evolve into my long underwear.

Maybe if the Antarctic food chain is incapable of evolving to cope with a two-degree increase in temperature across many decades, it isn't meant to survive. Science tells us that extinction is a fact of life, and that nature is never still: long before the Industrial Revolution, long before the first lardbuttus Americanus got into his primitive four-miles-per-gallon SUV to head to the mall for the world's first cheeseburger, there were dramatic fluctuations in climate wiping out a ton of stuff. Yet scientists and their cheerleaders, the hyper-rationalists at the progressive newspapers, have signed on to the idea that evolution should cease and the world should be frozen - literally, in the case of Prof Peck and his beloved algae - in some unchanging Edenic state.

UPDATE 12/17: More from TCS...Kyoto is Dead!

The conventional wisdom that it's the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development...

..."I've been wondering if a cap and trade system for reducing carbon emissions would be successful," said Taishi Sugiyama, a senior researcher at Japan's Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry. "I think the answer is no. The market for carbon credits will likely shrink to be only within Europe after 2012." Sugiyama was participating in a panel discussion looking at "Options for post-2012 global climate regime". The consensus of the panel members including Henrik Hasselknippe of the Point Carbon trading consultancy, Jonathan Sinton from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Axel Michaelowa the head of the International Climate Policy Program at the Hamburg Institute of International Economics, was that the Kyoto process is over. Sugiyama flatly predicted that Kyoto signatories Canada, Japan, and Russia will withdraw from the treaty after 2012.