Miscellaneous 178

1) According to a recent study by the OECD, by 2025, the Chinese will be emitting more greenhouse gasses than the United States, Europe, Japan, and all of the other OECD countries combined X2....So, you still wanna deep-six the Western economy, folks?............2) According to a recent survey by the American Economics Association, the impact of global warming (if in fact it happens) on global GDP breaks down as follows; 20% of economists feel that it will reduce GDP by 5%, 21% feel that it will reduce GDP by between 1 and 5%, 36% feel that it will have an effect of between -1 and +1% on GDP, 16% feel that it will increase GDP by between 1 and 5%, and 5% feel that it will increase GDP by 5%....So, there it is, folks, more than half of the economists surveyed state that global warming will either have a negligible or positive effect on global GDP and virtually every analysis that I've seen on the topic (including the one by professor Nordhaus of Yale, an alarmist himself) says that adapting to global warming will be significantly cheaper than preventing it (and how in the hell do you prevent solar forcings, volcanoes, the PDO, etc.?). Yep, I really do think that we all need to take some of Bjorn Lomborg's advice and chill.............3) According to environmental scientist, Chip Knappenberger (you know that you've arrived when that DeSmog blog starts to smear you), the effect of Waxman-Markey on global temperature would have been a .05 degree Celsius decrease in projected temperature or a two year avoidance of warming (so the projected temperature of 2050 wouldn't have happened until 2052). This, while the cost of energy would have skyrocketed and the economy shit the bed....What a couple of idiots, huh?............4) Corn ethanol has a power density of .05 watts per square meter, approximately 1/1,000th the amount of nuclear or a robust natural gas well. Couple that with the fact that ethanol emits copious amounts of nitrous oxide (a compound which the International Council of Science says is 300 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas) and radically pushes up the cost of food worldwide and you really do have to ask yourself the question here; this is "green" how exactly?