Topic category:  Climate/Climate Change/Weather

Steven Chu, entertainingly described as an “Energy Secretary”, says we can Save The Planet from “global warming” by painting our rooftops and roads white. He says making roofs and roads paler would have the same effect as taking every automobile in the world off the road for 11 years.

Rush Limbaugh, entertainingly as always, but pointedly, asks –

“Now, would somebody explain to me how he knows this? … If we can do something that will effectively remove the carbon emissions of every car on the road for 11 years, then why are we doing anything else? Why are we doing cap and trade? Why are we getting rid of SUVs? … How much paint is this going to take, by the way? How much of a footprint does paint manufacturing leave? … I need a scientist to answer this for me. I understand how clouds at altitude can help reflect the heat, but I want to know … where does that reflected heat go? … Are we being told here that reflected heat is not damaging at all, but direct heat is? It seems to me that, if we had ‘global warming’, wouldn’t we want dark roofs to absorb the heat?”

Steven Chu, like the Chattanooga locomotive whose name he proudly bears, is all steamed up about nothing, exists in a previous century, goes slowly and pointlessly backwards and forwards over the same ground, pulls a lot of fellow-travellers along with him, makes scary hooting and howling noises from time to time, keeps on missing points, and needs massive Federal subsidies to keep the whole show on the rails until the gravy-train hits the sand-trap.

Rush Limbaugh is really asking three questions:

• Does the Chu-Chu’s science make the grade, or is he off track?
   
• Does his proposal make any more economic sense than your average steam railroad?
   
• Is “global warming” a global crisis rather than a signal failure of prediction?

[Editor's note: Monckton's complete very entertaining and informative answer to Rush's excellent questions can be enjoyed by reading this PDF document (2.1 Mb). The remainder of this article (below) is from Monckton's concluding remarks to that document.]

The bottom line: “It’s not about climatology, it’s about freedom”

Even if there were a “global warming” problem (which there isn’t), and even if we could do anything to prevent it (which we can’t), painting your rooftop white and covering the roads with slippery white paint would cost trillions to achieve more or less exactly nothing. Don’t buy paint shares yet.

Likewise, the Waxman/Markey Bill is a non-solution to a non-problem, and the correct policy response to the non-problem of “global warming” is to have the courage to do nothing.

What is really going on? The world’s governing elite has decided to try to scare the people into giving up democracy, freedom, and prosperity to a newly-empowered organization, to be established by binding international treaty in Copenhagen in December 2009. Details of the organization’s new powers will not be released until the Copenhagen summit: until then, there will be endless diversionary stories in the media about how China and India are at loggerheads with the US and Europe about carbon emissions cuts.

Don’t expect a deal on emissions cuts at Copenhagen. That’s not the real objective. The real objective is “world government”. And world government won’t be democratic government. You heard it here first. It will be a bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship, elected by no one, accountable to no one, and sackable by no one, just like the dismal and corrupt European Union, but on a global scale.

The world’s “leaders” will gladly cede their nations’ constitutional independence to the new global dictatorship, glibly reciting the pretext that “pooling” of sovereignty is necessary to save us from ourselves and to Save The Planet from destruction through our folly. Like the short-sighted statesmen of Carthage, who eagerly sold out their nation to Rome and were duly killed in the streets by their own justifiably-enraged citizenry as the walls of their citadel fell to the legions, they will be willing to desert their own populations, and ignore their oaths to uphold their national constitutions, because, just as “leaders” of European nations now do, they hope that one day they will pass comfortably from the “leadership” of their nations to “world leadership” as front-line members of the new ruling junta of the entire globe.

In short, the “global warming” scare is not about climatology. It’s about freedom, as the President of the Czech Republic has rightly said. Will you let President Obama ignore the oath of office he never quite took, and sign away the US Constitution he is supposed to defend to the new, dark, global tyranny that will come into being at Copenhagen? Yes, you will, because you elected him, and now you’re powerless to stop him.

Farewell, America! Your love of freedom, your “athletic democracy”, your governments of the people, by the people and for the people, were beacons of hope to us all, before they perished from the Earth. Thank you, and goodnight. There will be no electricity tomorrow. But there will be lots and lots of shiny whitewash.

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Biography - Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Christopher, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, was Special Advisor to Margaret Thatcher as UK Prime Minister from 1982 to 1986, and gave policy advice on technical issues such as warship hydrodynamics (his work led to his appointment as the youngest Trustee of the Hales Trophy for the Blue Riband of the Atlantic), psephological modeling (predicting the result of the 1983 General Election to within one seat), embryological research, hydrogeology (leading to the award of major financial assistance to a Commonwealth country for the construction of a very successful hydroelectric scheme), public-service investment analysis (leading to savings of tens of billions of pounds), public welfare modeling (his model of the UK tax and benefit system was, at the time, more detailed than the Treasury's economic model, and led to a major simplification of the housing benefit system), and epidemiological analysis.

On leaving 10 Downing Street, he established a successful specialist consultancy company, giving technical advice to corporations and governments. His two articles in the Sunday Telegraph late in 2006 debunking the climate-change "consensus" received more hits to the newspaper's website than any other in the paper's history: the volume of hits caused the link to crash.

His contribution to the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 - the correction of a table inserted by IPCC bureaucrats that had overstated tenfold the observed contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise - earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate. His Nobel prize pin, made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented to him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York, USA.

He has lectured at university physics departments on the quantification of climate sensitivity, on which he is widely recognized as an expert, and his limpid analysis of the climate-feedback factor was published on the famous climate blog of Roger Pielke, Sr.

His lecture to undergraduates at the Cambridge Union Society on climate change has been released by http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/ (SPPI) as Apocalypse? NO!, a full-length feature movie on high-definition DVD (available from http://www.greatswindle.com). Apocalypse? NO! been described by Professor Larry Gould of the University of Hartford, Connecticut, as the best film ever made on climate change.