(Playing I Started a Joke)
RUSH: That’s such a great song, I Started a Joke by the Bee Gees. It’s a great song for the mentally disturbed, but nevertheless a great song, and that’s Algore’s cover. All right, the Global Warming Stack today. Try this headline: ‘Drought Makes Amazon Rainforest Greener.’ Drought would be global warming, because everything is global warming — and listen to the lede here. ‘Droughts, paradoxically, seem to make the Amazon rainforest even greener, a new study suggests, giving scientists hope that global warming’s effects on the lush South American ecosystem won’t be quite as bad as has been predicted.’ Some of you scientists out there, will you tell me the last time you dealt with ‘hope’ in coming up with a hypothesis or proving one. Giving scientists hope? The Bali conference starts today, the global warming conference. The story here from the New Zealand Herald comes close to winning the Dan Rather Award for Objective Journalism. ‘Rich countries are rapidly increasing the pollution that causes global warming to record levels despite having solemnly undertaken to reduce it, three devastating new official reports reveal.’
It goes on and on. Look, these people, we talked about this last Friday, are flying all kinds of private jets over there. They have to ferry a whole bunch of them to another island, empty, leaving a huge carbon dioxide footprint — and the dirty little secret is nothing will come out of this other than a plan to tax rich countries who have signed on to Kyoto who have not met their standards because they’re impossible to meet, by design. By the way, this new Australian prime minister who just replaced John Howard is going to sign onto Kyoto. We will be one of the last remaining big-time Western democracies not to sign on to it. The dirty little secret, folks — as I am wont to say — is that this is a world governed by the aggressive use of force. Ours is also a world propelled by fossil fuels. Period. Nothing is going to change that, certainly not in the foreseeable future.
All of this is simply a pipe dream. Removing emissions, eliminating them, carbon feetprints, all these things, are just absolutely meaningless. Fossil fuels propel this planet and its economy. How many of you have heard that global warming is going to lead to increased numbers of deaths? Actually, there has been a fall in weather deaths. ‘Green scientists have been accused of overstating the dangers of climate change by researchers who found the number of people killed each year by weather-related disasters is actually falling.’ They have been screaming hysterically at us for ten years now that there’s going to be a huge increase in deaths from weather-related disasters, mostly poor women and children, obviously. Now research shows that deaths from ‘weather-related disasters’ peaked in the 1920s and have been declining ever since, and the numbers are even more profound than that when you get specific. Also, divorce is now being blamed for contributing to global warming. I kid you not.