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December 9, 2009

Barbara Anderson: Not yet ready to board to global-warming bandwagon

Barbara Anderson

"Wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen

Friendly old girl of a town

'Neath her tavern light

On this merry night

Let us clink and drink one down

To wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen

Salty old queen of the sea"

— Frank Loesser lyrics for "Wonderful Copenhagen," first performed by Danny Kaye in the 1952 film "Hans Christian Andersen"

Well, according to the climate-concerned, if someone doesn't do something soon, wonderful, friendly Copenhagen will be a very salty old queen when the globally warmed sea rises over the world's oldest Ferris wheel in Tivoli Gardens.

I was there 20 years ago, and I recall the city already sits low on a coastal island.

I arrived in Denmark by boat, from Norway, then took the train back to Sweden. Though I did fly to and from Scandinavia, tourist-class, I didn't leave as much of a carbon footprint as the delegates to the United Nations climate-change conference who are flying in on private jets this week. Hope they at least carpool from the airport.

Maybe some of the Beautiful People from here who have been fighting Cape Wind will see the beautiful wind farms off the Danish coast.

Delegates to the conference could have saved fuel by teleconferencing, though it wouldn't have been as much fun to "clink and drink" from home. I heard that Leonardo DiCaprio and Daryl Hannah are dropping by. He once played someone who was killed by an iceberg (freed from a melting glacier?), and she was a mermaid in another movie (Copenhagen is famous for its statue of The Little Mermaid, from the Hans Christian Andersen story, that sits in the harbor).

One mission of the conference is to reduce greenhouse gases by letting people who want to make a lot of gases get "credits" from other people who don't want to make as many gases. This sounds like, once again, the rich get to buy whatever they want, while the rest of us fly coach.

Europe is presently using this carbon trading scheme, and much of the resulting international criminal activity originates in Denmark because it has a VAT (value added tax) rate of 25 percent. Don't ask me what the VAT has to do with carbon credits or how this scam works, but rest assured — it was inevitable, and lots of euros were involved.

Denmark recently rushed to pass laws prohibiting this criminal activity, whatever it was, before the climate conference at which other countries would be urged to consider trading in carbon credits.

Speaking of scams, have you heard the one about the climate-concerned British researchers who decided to ignore data that didn't fit the global warming scenario? Unfortunately for them and the credibility of their research, they put their discussions in e-mails that hackers found and publicized.

Professor Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia referred to a "trick" used to adjust statistics to "hide the decline" in recent temperatures. Jones insists that the word "trick" was just a euphemism for "clever thing to do." No doubt.

Now I must say that hacking into private e-mail isn't nice. But neither is using unproven "man-made global warming" to empower governments to wheel and deal with favored polluters, take over entire economies, and, of course, raise taxes on all of us who pollute because we live and breathe.

Left to my own devices, I'd be an environmentalist. My first political activity was membership in Zero Population Growth; I believed the Earth would be better off with fewer people. I still think so, but I haven't figured out how to determine who gets to stay, or where the others will go.

I'm concerned about endangered species, and would rather save tigers and whales than, say, the hypocrites who are flying on their private jets from their mansions to Copenhagen. I worried about birds flying into windmills until the Mass Audubon Society supported Cape Wind and I read that most birds have learned to avoid them off Denmark. I think photos of nature look better without people in them — though, of course, I value the photographer.

It's just that the professional environmentalists are so annoying! All that preaching makes me think of the Beautiful People who drive large SUVs in circles around farmers markets looking for a parking space so they can "buy local."

I honestly don't know if the globe is warming or heading for another ice age as we were told in the '70s, in both cases by experts who want to scare us for reasons that seem to have something to do with an urge to control us. I don't pretend to understand this urge, but I see it in government activity every day.

Some of us are so busy resisting the effort to control that we forget what we'd likely be doing if left alone — trying our best to take care of our planet and its varied species, avoiding waste and compulsive consumption, and creating a green revolution.

I want to save wonderful Copenhagen, from either rising seas or another ice sheet like the one that covered it and also New England, long before mankind discovered fire and polluted anything. I want an honest, non-manipulative conversation about climate change.

Until I get it, I'll refuse to play the "sky is falling, sea is rising" game and just write irreverent columns like this one.

¢¢¢

Barbara Anderson of Marblehead is a regular contributor to Viewpoint.

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