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Wow, what an idiot that article writer is!

Let's start from the top..

Every time we have a summer heatwave invariably the media go crazy with talk of global warming. You would think they would be used to the phenomenon of seasons by now.

Right, because heatwaves in places like Paris that kill thousands happen in almost every seasonal cycle.

Granted, maybe it [global warming] isn’t really happening, and if it is there are strong reasons to doubt that humans have anything to do with it.

He doesn't support either of those contentions with any evidence. AFAIK, the first is undisputably false. The second is strongly held to be false, but there may be room for scientists to be wrong.

People in most parts of the globe should have no objection to a warmer, wetter climate.

Yeah, once the cities on the coast get flooded, atleast we'll have stopped polluting the air and cut down oil consumption due to obsolete land transportation. Boats and rafts ahoy! /snark

Consider the large landmasses in the northern hemisphere, say north of 55 degrees. These are very extreme climates for human habitation. A population distribution map of Canada shows most people live in a belt running along the southern border with the United States. But add global warming and vast regions would become comfortably habitable.

Sure, and this change will be quick, efficient, and non-destructive. Never mind the time required to reconstruct the urban infrastructure, the massive displacement. And what the hundreds of millions of people staying in the low-lying areas in Eastern India & Bangladesh. They'll just fire up their SUVs and minivans and begin the thousands of miles trek to Siberia.

True, there might be some dislocations as crops shifted northward, but so what? Economies change all the time.

The problem is the scale and speed of the change, not the mere vacuous fact that "economies change all the time".

The Al Gore scare film has some dramatic footage of the consequences of a 20-foot rise in sea levels. Most estimates I have read about talk about a three-foot rise at most, but let’s not quibble. In the movie, oceans are seen rushing inland, implying some kind of inundation episode. But the waters will not rise so quickly, if they do at all. And if this threatens our cities one would think some form of sea wall would be in order. The Dutch have been doing this for years, there is no reason why we can’t copy them.

In any case there is no compelling evidence that the seas are rising. The catastrophists warn that small islands and atolls will be the first to go, and the island state of Tuvalu in the Pacific has made a habit of demanding western aid as compensation for this imminent threat to their very existence. It plays well with the liberal guilt complex. But sea-level data from Tuvalu show basically a flat-line average since 1977 — talk about an inconvenient truth!

No cite for the catastrophists who claim that the sea-rise is already happening. Gore makes clear that a huge melt in Greenland and/or Arctic and/or western Antarctica is what will trigger the rise.

Basically I am questioning the premise of the global-warming alarmists, namely that this is a problem rather than an opportunity

It's both. Like Gore says that lot of jobs will be created. But it's only an opportunity if it's acknowledged as a problem i.e. something big has to be done about it.

And besides, I distrust their motives. Many are simply panicky people in need of some form of approaching eschatology.
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Another motive, sometimes open sometimes not, is to end the free-market system as we know it.
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At the root of global-warming alarmism is a deathly fear of change.

So Gore's a panicky communist who fears change.

Posted by: Gyan | August 30, 2006 3:47 PM