Global warming: Do ‘green’ initiatives matter?

George W. Bush has blown his final chance on climate change, said The Washington Post in an editorial. With only nine months left in office, the president still had time to correct his “terrible legacy of inaction” on global

George W. Bush has blown his final chance on climate change, said The Washington Post in an editorial. With only nine months left in office, the president still had time to correct his “terrible legacy of inaction” on global warming. But last week, in what the White House hyped as a major Earth Day speech, Bush proposed some meager fuel-economy standards and a “low-ball goal” of halting the growth in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 17 years from now—in 2025. These minor measures served only “to inflame his critics,” said Zachary Coile in the San Francisco Chronicle. Bush’s proposals fell far short of the 50 percent reduction that leading climatologists say is needed to curb mounting temperatures, rising seas, and extreme weather throughout the globe. Nor did the president offer any enforcement mechanisms. “By the time President Bush’s plan finally starts to cut global warming emissions,” said Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), “the planet will already be cooked.”

Says who? asked Patrick Michaels in The Wall Street Journal. In the past 30 years, climatologists claim, the earth has warmed by only a “paltry” 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit. “And even that 0.31 degree figure is suspect.” Though surface thermometers have detected a warming trend, “temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming.” But since the myth of global warming has now been embraced by the scientific establishment and the alarmist media as an established fact, any contrary evidence or opinion is ignored. Meanwhile, any piece of melting polar ice or uptick in temperature is proclaimed proof of the coming apocalypse. Even if things are as bad as Al Gore’s acolytes insist, said Roy Spencer in National Review Online, our current “green” initiatives—“buying compact fluorescent light bulbs and hybrid cars, turning off the light when we leave the room”—are producing minuscule reductions in greenhouse gases. “There is simply nothing we can do, short of shutting down the global economy, that will substantially reduce carbon dioxide emissions.”

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