The Carbon Credits Scam

It didn't take nearly as long as I thought it might for the nascent cottage industry of carbon offset trading to be exposed as yet another scam. The Guardian (yes, they do occasionally produce some good journalism) has an article today headlined: "Truth about Kyoto: huge profits, little carbon saved". For a program run under the auspices of the UN and the European Commission it's really to be expected that the thing should turn out to be incompetently administered (at best), massively corrupt and not just ineffective but totaly counterproductive in trying to achive its purported goals. Read the whole article (h/t: Instapundit).

I have a degree in Geography which included some course work in Climatology. When I was in college, the environmental Chicken Littles were running around yelling about an imminent ice age. Now it's global warming or climate change. They act as if climate change is something new. Well, it's not. If I took anything away from that course it's that climate change is constant. It always has been. It always will be. Even if global average temperatures are rising, and there's plenty of evidence they aren't, it is not necessarily true that the causes are anthropogenic and before we embark on economically ruinous regimes such as Kyoto to try and reverse it we need to understand our ability, if any to influence it.

One of the things often cited as evidence of global warming is the retreat of the Greenland ice caps yet from 1940 until today they grew enough to cover a Lockheed P-38 in ice to a depth of 260 feet to cite just one example.

There is a lot of misinformation out there about climate change and one of the best sources to cut through the clutter is probably The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism) by Christopher Horner. I read it a couple of months back and highly recommend it as a reference sourcebook on the subject. For all the assertions the environmentalists make, Horner has the counter evidence. Don't let anybody try to tell you "the debate is over". Read this, then decide for yourself which side to believe.