Taxes are the new climate forcing. I kid you not.
From the NYT, columnist Gail Collins:
But a carbon tax/fee is the key to controlling climate change. That or just letting the next generation worry about whether the Jersey Shore is going to wind up lapping Trenton. Currently, majority sentiment in Congress is to hope for the best and pass the baton to the grandchildren. (When it comes to rising-sea-level denial, the champion may be North Carolina, where the Legislature has voted to base state coastal management policy on historic trends rather than anything the current experts have to say. “This means that even though North Carolina scientists predict 39 inches of sea-level rise within the century, North Carolina, by its own law, is only allowed to prepare for 8. King Canute would be so proud,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in a recent speech.)
…
It’s sort of ironic. These are the same folks who constantly seed their antideficit speeches with references to our poor, betrayed descendants. (“This is a burden our children and grandchildren will have to bear.”) Don’t you think the children and grandchildren would appreciate being allowed to hang onto the Arctic ice cap?
=============================================================
I dunno, my kids haven’t used the Arctic icecap lately, I’m not sure they’d miss it with all the clutter in their rooms.
Read the whole silly essay here: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/28/opinion/collins-cooling-on-warming.html
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Sorry, the NYT hasn’t been on my reading list for years–a policy that the snippet you’ve shared with us only reinforces.
CAGW. How many people are making a good living out of it who couldn’t get a job doing anything else?
I read the essay. I also read the comments! Where does the NYT find the idiots to comment? I want to find them and sell them a bridge in Brooklyn.
Well, two things:
1) “But a carbon tax/fee is the key to controlling climate change. ”
That would be incorrect, but thanks for playing. Even if one accepts the CAGW screed lock stock and barrel, how does a carbon tax or carbon fee stop China or India? Is the West supposed to conquer the world on behalf of the IPCC in order to save it? It isn’t going to happen. Kyoto demonstrated this if nothing else, that nobody is all that interested, and everybody isn’t going to go along with the scheme.
2) “When it comes to rising-sea-level denial, the champion may be North Carolina, where the Legislature has voted to base state coastal management policy on historic trends rather than anything the current experts have to say. ”
Historic trends rather than current expert opinion? Sounds reasonable to me, considering how spectacularly climate predictions have failed to match reality for the last 16 years.
The King Canute (Cnut) story is routinely misunderstood and misused by hack media. Cnut was apparently a savvy guy, and anything but arrogant.
Gail Collins . . . proving once again that journalists are scientifically illiterate, arithmetically challenged and didn’t study Science in university because it required math.
When you have a BA in Journalism and and MA in “Government” you should stick to reprinting Obama’s teleprompter scripts and avoid topics that expose your seriously thin understanding of the topic.
Re: CLOUD
Two Danish scientists Dr.Svensmark and Dr.Svalgaard (also American) have opposite views on the effects of the Heliospheric magnetic field’s variability may have on the climate natural variability (known as the Svensmark hypothesis). Here
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AMF.htm
I compare variability in the strength of the Heliospheric magnetic field and decadal variability in the area of the N. Hemisphere’s strongest geomagnetic field
It can be observed that the Earth’s field variability is two orders of magnitude greater than that of the Heliospheric field (both fields are in shown microTesla, right hand scale)
As a climate variability reference the AMO’s 11 year moving average is plotted (left hand scale). This appears to support Dr. Svalgaard’s view.
Seeing as how the current crop of “experts” have been proven wrong time and time again, using real historic information and data on which to base policies seems like a good idea. As for allowing building on barrier islands, that is okay as long as the taxpayers and insurance rate payers don’t have to bail out the idiots who build there. When those buildings disappear in the surf, they make good fishing structure.
It is funny. Gail Collins claims North Carolina is delusional for using actual data instead of unproven and inaccurate models generated by experts who have an agenda. People like Gail Collins takes whatever the team of pro-AGW “experts” has to say as gospel. If the team said that water isn’t wet, people like Gail Collins would believe it and call others who believe differently crazy.
Asking the warming camp of climate science about their view of the future is like asking the guy with “The end is near” sign on the street. Both are empircally proven to be significantly much more often wrong than right and could only serve as counter-indicatiors to how reality will actually unfold. Most often the only thing that separates both groups is a federally or NGO funded meal ticket.
alexwade says:
March 28, 2013 at 9:15 am
It is funny. Gail Combs claims North Carolina is delusional for using actual data instead of unproven and inaccurate models generated by experts who have an agenda. People like Gail Combs takes whatever the team of pro-AGW “experts” has to say as gospel. If the team said that water isn’t wet, people like Gail Combs would believe it and call others who believe differently crazy.
Methinks you have “the NYT, columnist Gail Collins: ” confused with regular commenter here “Gail Combs” this may prove a little upsetting to the latter.
Wasn’t King Canute the guy who sat on the shoreline at low tide and commanded the sea not to rise in order to prove to his courtiers that man (or kings) could not control sea level rises?
He probably would be proud of the North Carolina Legislature.
Of course the outcome would have been different if he’d had a degree in climatology or journalism.
No matter how many independent, refereed papers show that the oceans are not rising in any catastrophic manner: these clowns will just ignore it.
Saving our Grandchildren by killing our Grandparents….
Gail Collins has been wrong on virtually every assertion she has ever made. That has never dissuaded her or her employer. She is a propagandist and facts are meaningless to her. She has her convictions and considers herself a member of an elite cadre that was entrusted with ruling the world.
How dare North Carolina base it’s policies on actual physical evidence rather than on the Warnings and Commands of the Prophets!!!!
I dunno, Tony. Who needs an Arctic icecap anyway (or an Antarctic version, come to that) while we can clutter our lives with stuff?
The NYtimes has several commentators who have to file a column a couple times a week. This results in a lot of words on subjects they know nothing. Collins, Krugman, Brooks, et. al, do this routinely. It matters not if it is international, local politics, science, social problems, legal issues, they put forth their opinion and their followers completely agree. Years ago I routinely read the NYTimes, but perhaps as I matured I recognized their extreme bias and dishonesty. The paper is now longer worth the time it takes to scan the subjects much less read them
Given enough time, Gail Collins will eventually write something worthwhile. Perhaps even a classic. Here’s the mathematical proof:
It is no accident that “New York Times” is a perfect anagram of “monkeys write.”
Sen. Whitehouse is a US Senator from RI, a state with the terrible habit of harming itself in every conceivable way. Electing him and anyone else affiliated with the Democrat Party is just one example of our repeated mistakes. We never learn. In fact, we usually double-down on them. Amoebas have more sense about what is beneficial for them, than the citizens of this place.
It’s hard to know where to even begin commenting about an opinion piece such as the one written by Gail Collins in the NYT.
I guess, for a start, may I make the observation that the opinion she expresses contains no depth whatsoever. In fact it’s positively buoyant with hot air. May I suggest that she dabble briefly in human history and allow herself to discover that our forebears also believed that their actions could cause the anger of the gods with the resultant droughts, plagues, and pestilence that would ensue. May I also be so bold as to suggest she entertain the thought that there is no reason to assume we are not cut from the same cloth as those same forebears. May she also consider that superstition can masquerade as science, that certain disciplines have no choice but to rely almost solely on observations, and that those observations are subject to the prejudices of the observer. May I point out that previous generations forfeited blood and treasure in an attempt to wean us off the primitivism of the past, and that it denigrates their sacrifice not to acknowledge there just might be at least a hint of a resurgence of that primitivism in the supposed ‘new’ theories now presented.
Ah, but that would be too much.
When I was a kid I used to lie in bed worrying about whether there would be in arctic ice cap remaining when I got old. Today I lie in bed and worry if Obama or anyone in his administration or anyone at the NY Times has any functioning brain cells or understands even a miniscule part of what constitutes genuine science. When it comes to climatescientology we have only imbeciles in the media and government.
All this talk about “saving the world for our grandchildren” is a bit hollow, methinks, when you counsider what kind of world will be left to our grandchildren if the alarmies’ agenda is fully carried out. The poorest countries in Africa today offer a glimpse of what kind of woirld it would be.
Not to mention grandchildren being sickened and starved TODAY by the lack of cheap energy in their countries.
Not to mention the effrontery of the Judge-Jury-and-Executioner-in-Chief going to Ghana and telling people there they should rely on biomass for energy. Well, shit is biomass, right? and that’s what people use for energy in Ghana and any number of other poor countries – they burn shit to cook their food. (Sorry to be so explicit, but “dung” just doesn’t get the point across.)
The only other biomass available there is wood – the use of which has inflicted horrific environmental damage.
I’ve been to Ghana myself and have seen how most people there, other than the socialist-kleptocrat elite, have to live, and I don’t think any rational person wants that for their grandchildren.
With suitable adjustment of the actual tidal data, of course.
I fail to see how a tax will result in changes to climate. What it will secure is more widespread poverty, disease, and untimely death. Like other government interventions, when the changed climate fails to materialize, government & their minions & lapdogs will insist it’s the fault of those who found loopholes in the tax, and call for punishments, fines & more regulations to ensure everyone is paying their fair share of carbon tax. What it will never ever achieve is a change in actual climate. The fact that climate change happens on such a slow scale as to be truly imperceptible to the naked body has escaped the warmhysterics, who jump lemming like into the fray parroting the party line that something must be done to fix the “problem” of a warming climate. Would that the climate would bloody warm up already. Sheesh.