alQpr

Discover Magazine is asking for readers to suggest their candidates for the Top Five Lies About Global Warming.

Here are my suggestions:

1. It has recently been proved
(False – it was “proved” in the 19th century by Svante Arrhenius. Yes there were gaps in the “proof”, and some imaginable mechanisms for the climate system to evade it, but they were always far fetched, and foolish to put a high stakes gamble on)
2. Evidence matters
(False – looking for evidentiary proof is like asking for such proof that you will eventually ht the ground after falling off a cliff and arguing about whether the fact that air resistance is reducing your acceleration means that you’ll actually be just fine)
3. We can all make a difference by changing our own lifestyle
(False – it will require universal collective action. So far, just 20% of the world have been “defectors” from abstinence and even with an 80% “participation” rate the strategy of living poor isn’t working)
4. Energy efficiency is the solution
(False – even with 100% efficiecy of all devices, with currently available of foreseeable energy sources there is no way we can continue to do what we do without causing more global warming)
5. Reducing our energy consumption is the solution
(False – Even compulsory mandated limits on travel and other forms of energy consumption would not suffice unless those limits were low enough to reduce us all to a “third world” standard of living. If we lower Western/Northern populations to any acceptable standard of living the effect would be more than offset by what would be necessary to raise all the rest to that same minimum standard.)

So what WILL bring AGW to an end?

Plan A is an immediate compulsory global one-child policy which will halve our population in about 50 years and cut it back to about 2.5 billion by the end of the century,
and if that is considered too draconian there’s always…