If it’s winter here, the global warming conference must be in the southern hemisphere. And yes, of course, it’s in Durban, whither thousands of global warmists are now flying, in order to confer at colossal expense and tell us to cut our carbon dioxide emissions, or else. Else what?
Else, they’ll have another global warming conference even sooner than scheduled — maybe next summer, in Cannes, or Split, or San Francisco, or Sharm-El-Sheikh. Though maybe not there, because the Muslim Brotherhood will then be running Egypt, and who wants a climate control conference without booze?
Email is the swiftest and cleanest means of communication in world history. But far more importantly for those who wish to swap ideas about global warming and the evil USA, email has no beaches. It has no topless lovelies with a pubic postage stamp for public modesty, with a pina colada for one to sip upon while one gazes upon their winsome undulations. Email has no nightclubs where delegates can gather after soaping off their weddings rings, there to begin the smooch-n-snog-n-shag cycle that makes global warming conferences essential for those who wish to save the planet (naturally, I exclude the Hibernian delegates, whose austere and vegetarian celibacy makes even Gandhi seem like President Zuma on Viagra). But if only email had beaches, our eco-warriors could share their thoughts that way, thereby sparing the world the airliner-laid carpets of stratospheric condensation and carbon dioxide to Durban and back. But where’s the fun in that?
If you want to discover the biggest assembly of lies and falsehoods, it is in the internet boasts about how the EU has led the way in cutting CO2 emissions, unlike the evil USA. But the reality is different; in as much as I can interpret the smog of “facts” and empty promises, the EU’s greenhouse emissions rose steadily after the famous Kyoto conference of 1997, despite the carefully created illusion that the EU was far holier and greener than the US. The claim now is that the EU’s emissions are actually going down. No doubt they are — because A) of the economic downturn and B) we’re importing so much from China, thereby shifting CO2 from here to there. Hold on to this; with 15 years of global conferences, world CO2 emissions have risen steadily, to 3,600 million tons last year.
So, just about every eco-boast is relative. China has agreed to cut its global warming emissions, but only per unit of production. Since Chinese production continues to soar, so too will China’s CO2 emissions, thus ensuring the total world emissions will rise also. And almost no one points to one major cause of global warming: the destruction of the African rainforest. Any description of Africa’s woes is usually limited by ideological and diplomatic sensitivities: most greens, for example, solely blame the west’s CO2 production for the vast dustbowl that is spreading north and south of the tropical belt across Africa. But that is not quite the full picture. Trees that should be inhaling the CO2 have been felled, to make fresh farmland which soon, in the absence of trees and shrubs, becomes an ecological disaster, spelt M-A-L-A-W-I, or some variation thereof.
Furthermore, African countries double their population every 22 years, requiring more arable land to feed the people, and the forests pay the price. It took Britain from 1881 to 2011 to double its population: African countries do this in one sixth the time — an exponential, demographic nightmare.
However, it’s not politically acceptable for the UN to be frank about the economic, social and ecological catastrophe that is enveloping Africa, and so the conversation hastily moves on to more congenial topics. I’d be all in favour of paying a lung levy to African countries to plant trees: but the leaders of which African country could be trusted to spend the money on combating greenhouse gasses rather than increasing them by importing Mercedes?
Of course, Africa is not the primary problem; it is simply the largest undiscussed one. The trans-Himalayan civilisations of the Yangste and the Indus will probably overtake the US as the main per-capita carbon dioxide emitters in the next 10 years: and who is to tell them they should not use fossil fuels to haul their peoples out of drudgery and poverty? It is hypocrisy and ecological colonialism — ecolonialism — to prevent them doing what we in the west have already done. And speaking of hypocrisy — does anything anywhere quite match the nauseating humbug of the Irish law that bans civil servants from even examining the CO2-free nuclear option?
If only for the sake of a peaceful letters page, I’m prepared to accept that global warming is happening and is man-made; but there’s absolutely no reason to believe that mankind really has the willpower to do anything about it. Indeed, all the evidence suggests the opposite. Which means that the primary purpose of these regular world climate change conferences is the personal gratification of the participants (apart, that is, from the Irish delegates, bawling their pious hosannas at the rising seas). So all I ask, dear God, is that the rest of us are spared the viral effusions of their self-congratulation and their communicable diseases.