SOLO-NZ Press Release: A Switch in Time?

May 7, 2008

The government's confirmation it will not introduce petrol and other liquid fuels into its Emissions Trading Scheme until 2011 is cause for optimism that the move and rubbish like it will never proceed at all, says SOLO Principal Lindsay Perigo.

The measure was due to be introduced in January, and was likely to push petrol prices up by between 6c and 8c a litre. It's been deferred for fear of an electoral backlash.

"By 2011," says Perigo, "what is already obvious to credible scientists and any other non-hysterical observer will surely have dawned on all but the most demented Global Warmonger: the ETS itself, not to mention the Kyoto Accord and the whole theory of man-made Global Warming, is just a smelly swirl of fart-gas—the ineffectual in pursuit of the unnecessary.

"It will be clear that warming has eased or ceased; that it was cyclical; that it has happened before and will happen again; and that nothing man does makes a blind bit of difference.

"TIME magazine, which recently greened its cover and warned of the imminent drowning of the planet under boiling water, might have to revert to stories like its June 1974 one entitled 'Another Ice Age?' This prize piece of 'climatalogical Cassandra-ism' began as follows:
In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone's recollection.

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

"Having identified the cooling as the product of differences in the amount of energy that the earth's surface receives from the sun, the article went on:
Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend. The University of Wisconsin's Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth.

Climatic Balance. Some scientists like Donald Oilman, chief of the National Weather Service's long-range-prediction group, think that the cooling trend may be only temporary. But all agree that vastly more information is needed about the major influences on the earth's climate. Indeed, it is to gain such knowledge that 38 ships and 13 aircraft, carrying scientists from almost 70 nations, are now assembling in the Atlantic and elsewhere for a massive 100-day study of the effects of the tropical seas and atmosphere on worldwide weather. The study itself is only part of an international scientific effort known acronymically as GARP (for Global Atmospheric Research Program).

Whatever the cause of the cooling trend, its effects could be extremely serious, if not catastrophic. Scientists figure that only a 1% decrease in the amount of sunlight hitting the earth's surface could tip the climatic balance, and cool the planet enough to send it sliding down the road to another ice age within only a few hundred years.

"It ended:
University of Toronto Climatologist Kenneth Hare, a former president of the Royal Meteorological Society, believes that the continuing drought and the recent failure of the Russian harvest gave the world a grim premonition of what might happen. Warns Hare: "I don't believe that the world's present population is sustainable if there are more than three years like 1972 in a row."
"Yes, by 2011 it's just possible that mankind will have rejected the current form of apocalyptic hysteria, realised that the agenda of the Global Warmongers is to shut down industrial civilisation ... and sent the troglodytes back to their caves.

"And perhaps Comrade Cullen's successor will be abolishing petrol taxes rather than raising them in a vain attempt to offset the sun," Perigo concludes.

ends

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