The debate on global warming to the lay person tends to be:

One: We are polluting, and if we don’t stop, we’re all gonna die (It’s Bush’s Fault).

or Two: It’s nonsense.

Being a doctor, Climatology is outside my field, although if one knows history, one is aware that the Sahara was once a prairie, and Minnesota was once covered with 200 feet of ice, so something has obviously changed.

The problem with the global warming scenerio is that it reminds me of the 1970’s “population bomb” scares that said we’d all be dead of famine by 1990…whoops. The only famines nowadays are in Africa, where murderous dictators and civil wars allow them to go on. As for the scenerios of wall to wall people, newer predictions say the earth will stablize at 10 billion and then the numbers will start going down.

That is why I am happy that this BBC4 Report has unearthed a couple global warming experts, both economists and scientists, who question the recent Stern report on global warming, especially how it was inaccurately covered by much of the press.
The BBC4 Report link has links to PDF files of both the Stern report and links to all sorts of other reports telling us we are all going to die of the heat, and why. (the BBC is, of course, one of the worst culprits on promoting Global warming hysteria).
The dirty little secret about the Kyoto Treaty is that implementing it would be devastating to local economies. So most European nations who signed the treaty haven’t met their goals. And the growing economies of India and China are exempt from Kyoto, even though China often uses high sulfur coal to generate electricity.

And scientifically, those who concentrate on proving that pollution is changing the climate ignore that solar cycles have much to do with global warming.

Now, pollution is a bad thing. I see how smog has improved since implementing enviromental laws, and having lived in Appalachia, I have seen environmental degradation of stream and forests burned by acid rain. And how many cancers are due to pollution? How many childhood malformations?

Yet I am quite skeptical about the hysteria of those pushing Global warming, because the most strident voices seem to be using the movement for other purposes (Gore, to give his life purpose after losing an election, leftist yuppies to give a new aim after the fall of the Berlin wall, Eugenics/population bomb devotees who now see untermensch in India and China taking over the world economy, and Bush haters European anti Americans who use it to justify their paranoid hatred of America) .

So my take on all of this is:

One:Global warming is real.

Two: Pollution is bad.

Three: Pollution contributes to, but is not the main cause of Global warming.

Four: If we radically get rid of pollution, we will destroy economies, leading to a lot more problems (and deaths) from poverty than from climate change or even from pollution.

Five: I won’t give up my air conditioner, ozone hole or no ozone hole.

My prediction on all this?

Well, when Hillary is elected and signs Kyoto, nothing will change in the USA (she is, after all, too smart to wreck the economy) and Europe will continue to ignore Kyoto, so it will die a quiet death. But the press and the many lost who need a cause to justify their existance will merely go on to find a new real problem to exaggerate.

Unless, of course, if NYCity or Tel Aviv are nuked, then all bets are off.

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Nancy Reyes is a retired physician living in the rural Philippines. Her webpage is Finest Kind Clinic and Fishmarket

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