Vote fuelled by hysteria (global warming)

Herald Sun ^ | 12th August 2009 | Andrew Bolt

[naturalman1975]

WE'VE seen mass hysteria before, but we weren't then mad enough to make it government policy.

.....

But that's nothing when compared with today's galloping paranoia over invisible gases, which threatens to shut not just one airport, but entire industries and power stations.

This is the mass hysteria over global warming - a hysteria caught by millions of Australians who can no more explain why they're sure the world is heating to hell than they can explain why it's now cooling instead.

All this would be frightening enough - another sign of our retreat from reason - but what makes it worse is that this hysteria is not being fought by governments, but hyped, in the grossest dereliction of duty I've seen from our politicians in my lifetime.

Tomorrow marks what may turn out to be the peak of this madness, when the Rudd Government - for purely political motives - will demand the Senate pass its colossal scheme to slash carbon dioxide emissions by making us pay more for things that need coal-fired power or other gassy energy to make or move it.

What a giant con. Even the title of this multi-billion-dollar plan, the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, is a lie.

This is not a scheme to reduce sooty carbon, but invisible carbon dioxide, which is not a pollution, but a gas essential for keeping plants alive.

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The only reason this useless job-killing plan is being put to the Senate this week is to force the Opposition and the minor parties to reject it, which would then give Prime Minister Kevin Rudd the formal excuse he wants to call an early election, and on a green issue he thinks will win him votes.

[coconutt2000]

WE'VE seen mass hysteria before, but we weren't then mad enough to make it government policy.

LOL, au contraire... We've turned mass hysteria into public policy many, many, many times in the past. To think that two years of mass hysteria can create decades of problems and take even more decades to fix... Heck it was for that reason that Senators were not popularly elected (originally). The Senate was supposed to be immune to the whimsical hysterics of the masses and be subject to the authority and desires of the state legislatures which used to appoint our Senators.

I wish we could go back and restore that tradition.

[muir_redwoods]

CO2 is plant food. If temperatures rise, evaporation and precipitation will increase. With more rain, higher temperatures and more CO2, plants, such as crops, will flourish and there will be more food for all.

My scenario is at least as well founded as Al Gore's is.

[colorado tanker]

CO2 is a lagging indicator of temperature, rising when the Earth warms and declining when it cools, but slightly after the temp change. The warm times are the best for all life. In fact, the entire span of recorded human civilization has taken place in the present interglacial period. Let's hope we stay warm and maybe get a little warmer, because falling into a glacial period could be cataclysmic.

That CO2 doesn't cause the warming is also demonstrated by the fact we've been in a cool period for ten years despite strong increases in CO2 concentrations.

I have a feeling voters will become more skeptical of this junk science as more and more of the hysterical dire predictions of the alarmists fail to come true.