"It isn't about money."
I understand your primary point, but I disagree with this one. The Kyoto Protocols were not about the 'environment', they were about forcing the US to pay the lions share of funding. This explains why, in a rare moment of sanity, the Senate voted the treaty down 99 to 0. Even though Al Gore forced the vote on it in the Senate, every other Democrat voted against it because it was bad policy. Everyone seemed to recognize this except Gore. (I know, you don't care about Gore, but he is such fun to rag on.)
Another major problem with Kyoto was it exempted several developing nations, such as India and China, from financial responsibility for funding the treaty. These two countries are by far more the cause of most of the problems you speak toward, as opposed to the US. This exemption existed while simultaneously sticking the world's wealthiest nations (i.e. America) with economic restraints harmful to their economies. America doesn't have the money to funnel down this massive drain.
But remember, we have been down this road before. Those who recall The Montreal Protocol, enacted some 20 years ago, will recall that it banned the use of CFCs. This deadly chemical was said to be destroying the ozone layer, and would thus expose us to deadly UV rays. Well, the hole in the ozone layer is still there, shrinking and expanding over the course of each year. Additionally, as opposed to this hole forming over the most populated centers where the release of CFCs would be assumed to be or have been the greatest, it forms and exist over Antarctica, where there is hardly any release of CFCs at all. The threat of CFCs was supposed to have been anthropogenic as well, but after almost 20 years of the Montreal Protocols combined with an ever present Ozone hole, wouldn't a logical conclusion be that the hole in the Ozone layer is a naturally occurring phenomena? If the scientist were wrong then, is it not possible they are wrong now?
The Kyoto Protocol is the Montreal Protocol on steroids. Unlike the banning of CFC, however, cutting energy use will impede economic growth of nations around the world. In particular, developing nations are the ones likely to be hit the hardest, for in general they are the ones with older, less efficient, carbon fuel guzzling power plants. They are also the ones whose governments are more likely to care the least, unless someone else pays for any changes or upgrades. In the end, the poor will be hit harder than the rich.
"why is it so scary to think maybe we should be told "No, you can't consume this much gasoline to drive to the grocery store in your Hummer"?
The word totalitarianism comes to mind. However, I say as we 'clean up our act', we insist that other nations pay their own way rather than they insist we do it for them.
On another note and as an add-on to one of my previous post, a few more words about C02. The correlation of CO2 and temperature in the ice cores consistently illustrates that the temperature changes preceded the CO2 changes by an average of 800 years, in every glacial cycle. Thus, it is only reasonable to assume the CO2 changes could not have caused, or been the driving force behind, the temperature changes. Even the global warming gurus at RealClimate.org have trouble explaining the lag-time.
The data from the Vostok and other ice cores are available from NOAA. By downloading them into Excel anyone can graph them out. Here is an example of what 'Hockey Stick' Mann's people have to say about the lag times:
Quote:
The reason has to do with the fact that the warmings take about 5000 years to be complete. The lag is only 800 years. All that the lag shows is that CO2 did not cause the first 800 years of warming, out of the 5000 year trend. The other 4200 years of warming could in fact have been caused by CO2, as far as we can tell from this ice core data.
The 4200 years of warming make up about 5/6 of the total warming. So CO2 could have caused the last 5/6 of the warming, but could not have caused the first 1/6 of the warming.
LINK
As an argument, post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy. Just because "B" happens after "A" does not mean that "A" caused "B". However, the Pleistocene temperature-CO2 correlations in the ice cores aren't even candidates for examples of post hoc ergo propter hoc because the temperature increases
consistently preceded the CO2 increases.
I maintain that there is little evidence in the last 600 million years of Earths geological history of CO2 driving climate change. If atmospheric CO2 concentrations could cause climate change, there would be evidence of it in the historical geology of the Earth. But there is no such evidence in the entire Phanerozoic Eon.
