Financial letters

The Exxon funded "newspaper", the Financial Times wrote in an editorial on 8 June 2007 about how we are right to be suspicious of any positive Bush position relating to climate change to emerge from the G8.

They then corrected their position by publishing Myron Ebell's letter to the editor on June 12. As an Exxon-sponsored compulsive falsifier with a very established reputation, few people are less qualified to get their verbage into a newspaper, but it's easily explained by the advertising revenue.

Ebell likes to point out that the Kyoto Protocol was all words and no deeds, and that Europe failed to cut its emissions in the time period in spite of all the talk. The Climate would have it be known that since the Kyoto Treaty was essentially killed by his Bush Administration in 2001 by the withdrawal of the the greatest polluter in the world, the United States (how is it an agreement if one of the sides is not there?), it's difficult to hold the European economy to it.

Kind of like if one major industrialized country in the world is allowed to use child and prison sweatshop labour, they end up owning the entire international manufacturing base. Or we all sink to that level.

In the domain of atmospheric sciences, we stuck with the same level. After all, it only belongs to the whole world, and no one gets hurt today. In some ways the Chinese appear to love their children less than we do in the United States or Europe, or they wouldn't stand for it.

As an intellectual hit man, Ebell's job is to hold to rigged standards, and ignore the mitigating circumstances. So, he writes:

The nations that have agreed to cut their emissions are incurring significant costs but are not cutting their emissions, although they do continue to talk incessantly about doing so. Since Kyoto was negotiated in 1997, emissions have increased in every one of the EU-15 nations, despite all the talk. In fact, EU-15 emissions have been rising faster in percentage terms than in the US, where emissions have been going up about one point for every three points of economic growth.

Okay... It's not that he's just found a negative comparison between the third differential of the carbon emissions, as I had originally thought. It's the second differential (the rate of change in the rate of emissions) divided by the GDP!

This is greenhouse gas intensity hogwash all over again. Such bogosity I had thought had been buried years ago. Trust Myron to scrape it up again.

Let's be clear: The climate does not care how many iPODs or champaign breakfasts you make per year to bump up the GDP!!! Only the total physical quantity of CO2 matters. You might as well divide it by how many times you've had sex with your wife before your first child, for all the relevance it has.

And the Financial Times publishes this bonkers. Yeah, well the whole financial thing is an entirely fictitious godforsaken invention of the human mind. Unlike the future, death, and mass extinctions, it's an entirely imaginary construct. You can watch the stock-market metrics as hard as you like, but if you don't care if the destiny of the children of your grandchildren will be to live and die in unnecessary misery because you used your time and talents to make an extra buck by lying and misleading people in the generation today, then they get what's coming, don't they?

Since we have shown how little we care, no future generation will shed a tear for us. We will be remembered as the biggest bone-heads in the history of the species. The ones who threw it all away for nothing. There is nothing that could be written now that will come close to the level of contempt that we are in for.



P.S. For some light relief, there's this exchange from Michael Moore on the the TV: "Just apologize to the American people and to the families of the troops for not doing your job four years ago. We wouldn't be in this war if you had done your job. Come on. Just admit it. Just apologize to the American people."