Monday, December 04, 2006
DEBATE NOT OVER, SOMEHOW
Academics George Chilingar and Leonid F. Khilyuk examine global warming:
The two researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (USA) conclude that “the theory of currently observed global atmospheric warming as a result of increasing anthropogenic carbon dioxide emission is a myth,” and that it has “proved to be an enduring one.”
All of this is apparently peer-reviewed, as Andrew Bolt notes. Continuing:
The take-home message of Khilyuk and Chilingar’s analysis, as they describe it, is that “any attempts to mitigate undesirable climatic changes using restrictive regulations are condemned to failure, because the global natural forces are at least 4-5 orders of magnitude greater than available human controls.”
What is more, they indicate that “application of these controls will lead to catastrophic economic consequences,” noting that “since its inception in February 2005, the Kyoto Protocol has cost about $50 billion supposedly averting about 0.0005°C of warming by the year 2050,” and that “the Kyoto Protocol is a good example of how to achieve the minimum results with the maximum efforts (and sacrifices).”
This being the case, they conclude that “attempts to alter the occurring global climatic changes have to be abandoned as meaningless and harmful,” and that in their place the “moral and professional obligation of all responsible scientists and politicians is to minimize potential human misery resulting from oncoming global climatic change,” hopefully by more immediate, rational and cost-effective means.
Reviewing Chilingar and Khilyuk’s work, World Climate Report writes:
The debate on climate change is never boring, the debate is full of surprises, and anyone claiming the debate is over is simply dismissing a significant number of papers that appear regularly in the major journals.
(Via Petrarchan Motif and J.F. Beck)