Global Warming: Bali Update

People are watching, and it's not pretty. Not very environmentally sound either.

Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year.

The delegates each will produce an average 4.07 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or CO2, to reach the resort island 950 kilometers (600 miles) from Jakarta, according to estimates e-mailed to Bloomberg by the UN agency holding the conference.

I will believe it's a 'crisis' when the people running around with their hair on fire telling me that I have to cut energy usage, begin setting the example -- They flock to far away places to bask at luxury resorts for a week. I guess no one thought about video conferencing instead of laying on tropical beaches.

Of course, they are using carbon offsets, those tree planting scams, to make them all feel good. So I have an idea, why not everyone plant trees for themselves and put the middle man out of business. BTW, the NGO with the biggest footprint at the conference is, you guessed it, a carbon offset company, looking to see how to drum up business with the scam.

When you consider it's all a hoax, a scam to rid you of the burden of your money, what better way to get to the beach than on someone else's nickel. If you want to know more how the hysteria works, read this WSJ article about "availability bias". I have run my own survey about what people actually know about what they claim to know, and it turns out they know nothing. It's a form of the fine art of availability of information, fact based or not -- They learned what they profess to know from what others said about the subject. In general the root goes back to what someone said on TV, the highest standard for the populists "as seen on TV" -- As if that makes any real difference except someone had the money to put it on TV. If you want to run your own test, ask the simple question about global warming "how do you know"? End it with "I wonder why no one ever talks about the sun?"

The reason this all works is that the average person is woefully ignorant of all aspects of science and it's methods.

Read more here.

The lure of easy money sure attracts a crowd.

If you tire of the din, some light reading might be in order:

NUCLEAR winter, mega-famines, global cooling, acid rain, bird flu, death by fluoride, Chernobyl. I've seen it all and nothing scares me now. I can't remember exactly what I wrote that was so evil. So much to choose from. Was it that I refused to be freaked by this latest panic attack that global warming was blasting in and . . . Oh, God, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE! Or was it that I wouldn't listen to that frenzy of activists insisting the genetically modified canola oil I use to fry my chops would nuke us all into an explosion of pustulating tumours?

Anyway, one young reader was furious that I'd yet again stood snobbily apart, while his mob ululated warnings of some fresh horror. "You'd be on your own," he sneered in an angry email. True enough, my young critic, I do often feel lonely in this astonishing age when to panic is a sign of virtue and to reason a sign of a cold heart.

Read the rest here