[Vision2020] Comments to Nick's article

[Phil Nisbet]

I posted this to New West, where Nick placed his article after previewing it 
to V2020.

Nick

Wow, a treatise worthy of a freshman Philosophy Major.  I somehow expected 
far more of you on the Problem of Evil and something that at least covered 
the Holocaust Philosophers and their refutation of the G-d is dead schools 
you seem to prefer.

But my real bone with you and this article is your last paragraph.  You 
might want to study more fully prior to posting to areas with which you have 
less knowledge than Philosophy.

Passage of Kyoto was related to Katrina how?

Let’s assume that though Clinton failed to get Kyoto passed through the 
Senate, somehow the minute he was elected, G W Bush put a full court press 
on and the United States of America instantly not only passed Kyoto, but 
implemented all the provisions of the Treaty.  The treaty calls for emission 
reduction to the level of 7% below 1990 for CO2 for the United States, which 
with the added 13% which we have grown from 1990 levels now in 2005, is a 
20% reduction in total US CO2 emissions.  Of course the treaty does not 
actually say that we have to meet this goal until 2012, but heck, lets say 
that Bush was really gung ho and in the first four years of his actually 
being able to get things done prior to Katrina hitting shore, they managed 
to get the reductions wished for.

That would be a reduction in New CO2 added atmospherically of about a 
billion tons by the USA, which accounts for 22% of total world emissions.  
That sounds like a pretty large number and a real backslapper victory for 
some, but what does the figure really mean in terms of either Global Climate 
Change or total global CO2?

There are 2.70 trillion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere and we are not likely 
to wish to remove it all, unless of course you want massive cooling and the 
next glacial epoch to come screaming in on us.  The global use of carbon 
based technology adds 25 billion tons of CO2 to the mix every year now.  
Non-Annex B countries are exempt from reduction of their inputs to the 
system and they account for 45% of the total global emissions currently with 
a growth rate of 18% annually.

So let us assume that Bush had managed to reduce the increase of global 
emissions by 4% on a global basis; that would be a change in total CO2 
atmospherically of 0.03%.  So, how exactly is it that failure in this, that 
0.03% of change in total atmospheric CO2 over the years 2001-2005, was 
responsible for Katrina?

Even if you assumed that Bush in his best of the best reduced US CO2 
emissions to Zero, it’s only a change in global CO2 of 0.15% on a global 
basis.  That much larger change is not what spawned this season’s hurricane 
cycle, a cycle which in the past has indeed sent storms as large as Katrina 
zooming on to the Gulf Coast region.  Katrina was not the largest storm ever 
to hit that coast nor are the numbers of storms much different than in the 
normal cycle of low hurricane years versus high hurricane years.  That may 
indeed change in the future, but changes of a few hundred parts per billion 
in Global CO2 content are not going to have been the cause.

Phil Nisbet

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