Hot Air

HOT AIR....Last night David Appell emailed to draw my attention to a post in which he calculated that the IPCC Conference on Climate Change in Bali will produce 26 million metric tons of CO2. "I'll start thinking global warming is a crisis when the people telling me it's a crisis act like it's a crisis," he concluded.

I was uninterested in this sophistry, but Glenn Reynolds (natch) decided to pick up on it, the third or fourth time he's done so just for this one conference. "They're certainly not acting like global warming is a crisis," he agreed — though with a caveat that Apell's arithmetic was off by three orders of magnitude. It's .026 million metric tons, not 26 million.

But who cares? This is just an example of the current craze in global warming denialism: don't literally deny that warming is happening (the actual facts make that too hard), merely mock every possible effort to fight it. International agreements? Obviously ridiculous. Federal regulation? Just an excuse for more anti-business spleen from the Birkenstock crowd. Carbon taxes? You'd like that, wouldn't you? Government spending on amelioration? Forget it. We should spend the money on, um, clean drinking water for Chad instead. Yeah. Private efforts to inspire conservation? Just a bunch of hectoring, self-righteous Hollywood elites. Al Gore? He doesn't live in a cave, so he's a hypocrite.

So that's that. Sure, global warming is real, but we shouldn't fight it with international efforts, federal efforts, local efforts, personal efforts, higher taxes, or additional spending. And if you support any of that stuff but still drive a car or use electricity yourself, then who the hell are you to pretend you're better than the rest of us?

Alternatively, we could all cut the smarmy posturing (mirrors in space!) and actually do something. Unfortunately, merely typing these words and posting them has produced CO2, so there's no reason to listen to me, is there? I'm just another liberal hypocrite.