PrintMay 29, 2009
Alarmist Scientists Compare Climate Change to Thermonuclear Warfare
A London meeting of 60 scientists, including 20 Nobel Laureates, has issued a global warming manifesto which actually compares itself to the Einstein-Russell manifesto on the worldwide threat of H-bombs. And they’re quite serious.
Attendees of this week’s St James's Palace Nobel Laureate Symposium concluded that a temperature rise of more than 2°C would create "unmanageable climate risks." They insist that the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen in December must finalize a plan by which worldwide greenhouse-gas emissions are cut in half by 2050 to avoid “droughts, sea level rise and flooding leading to mass migration and conflict.” According to the manifesto:
“This in turn means that developed countries have to aim for a 25-40% reduction by 2020. A robust measure of assessing the necessary emission reductions is a total carbon budget, which should be accepted as the base for measuring the effectiveness of short-term (2020) and long-term (2050) targets.”
The document states that the global economic recovery must include “a path towards a low carbon economy” in order “to meet the global sustainability challenge.” Yikes! And it brazenly admits their painfully hysterical long-term goal that “A zero carbon economy is an ultimate necessity and must be seriously explored now.” Brilliant -- and just how will you geniuses arrive at subsequent symposiums, by schooner or nuclear sub?
There’s the usual wealth-redistributing talk of developed countries “acknowledging their historical responsibility as well as their financial and technological capacity” by bearing most of the load. And, of course, providing both financial support and free technology to developing countries. As well as paying them to stop cutting down their own trees, for “Without a solution to rainforest protection, there is no solution to tackling climate change.”
No? What about the one proposed by Barack Obama’s favorite Nobel Laureate at the Symposium on Tuesday? US Energy Secretary Steven Chu suggested we leverage the "albedo effect" by painting all the roofs of all the buildings in the world white. Chu told his fellow Laureates that if “we also made sure the world's roads and sidewalks were light-colored, it would have the same effect on global warming as taking all the cars in the world off the world's roads for 11 years.” I kid you not.
Somehow, Chu’s inspired idea didn’t make the manifesto.
But this outlandish heralding of the “The Contribution of Science” did:
After the signing, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the summit-organizing Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research defended the nuclear analogy:“The solutions to the extraordinary environmental, economic and human crises of this century will not be found in the political arena alone. Stimulated by the manifesto of Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein, the first Pugwash gathering of 1957 united scientists of all political persuasions to discuss the threat posed to civilization by the advent of thermonuclear weapons. Global climate change represents a threat of similar proportions, and should be addressed in a similar manner.”
"It is comparable in magnitude. With business as usual we will have another five or six degrees Celsius – that could not sustain civilisation as we know it, which is quite comparable to a nuclear shoot-out. It would mean 80 metres rise in sea level – London, Paris and Copenhagen would disappear. This could not sustain nine billion people."
He later added:
"After the cold war, mutually insured disarmament was the logic of good global governance. Facing the global climate challenge, mutually insured emissions reductions should become the logic.”
And we thought Al Gore was too loony to win a Nobel Prize.
