Kevin (so 07) Rudd’s climate “war”?

I read an article in the Sydney Morning Hearld today, titled Climate war gets personal for Rudd which rankled me enough to write this post.

When did this become a War? What, do we have to add the war on climate change skeptics to the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the war on anyone else who chooses not to agree with your political agenda?

I’m a climate change pragmatist. You don’t have to spend long watching the National Geographic, History, or Discovery channels to know that the worlds climate has, is, and always will be changing. To suggest that the Earth somehow reached a magical equilibrium ideally suited to mankind, that it’s going to stay that way for ever, or we have much, or any influence over it, is pretty naive.

The way I’ve seen it up until now is that there’s an obvious benefit in efforts to combat “Climate Change” regardless of whether the science is proven or not. It’s an opportunity to clean up our act as far as the environment is concerned. I agree that we should wean ourselves off fossil fuels, adopt more sustainable agricultural practices, seek out more efficient ways of enabling developing countries to have the same advantages a we have, and to protect the planet from deforestation and the depletion of our natural resources.

I sincerely doubt that the answer to the problem, if it exists at all, is a Global Carbon Emissions Trading Scheme.

Think about it. Kevin Rudd, who has achieved nothing more than spending a massive surplus that was handed to him on a plate, is having a bout of petulance, not over Global Warming itself, but his ability to contribute to the creation of a Global Emissions Trading Scheme that allows the worlds polluters to trade permissions to pollute. It will monitored by some compromised, massively bureaucratic, and probably corrupt organization like the United Nations or G20, and we’re supposed to believe that it will be the solution to the problem? I doubt it. It’s nothing more than a tax, hence the political enthusiasm, and hence the resistance from people, now being ostracized as climate skeptics, to this approach.

You owe it to yourself to be informed on both sides of the debate. On the one hand you have the Al Gore camp, and on the other side you have the Not Evil, Just Wrong camp. Both equally persuasive, both using somewhat alarmist rhetoric to get their points across, and I would say neither completely correct or without political, or economic, agenda.

Mr Rudd, who is one of three world leaders charged with trying to generate momentum before the Copenhagen conference, which opens on December 7, said the ”legion of climate change skeptics are active across the world and they happily play with our children’s future”.

Sydney Morning Herald: PHILLIP COOREY AND MARIAN WILKINSON, November 7, 2009

This so called legion of “climate change skeptics” happen to be eminently qualified, experienced people, no doubt with families and just as much concern about the future of the planet as anyone else. Science by it’s very nature has argument, the challenging of norms and assumptions, and sound logical debate as it’s foundation, so does democracy. The participants have a right to their point of view without being ostracized or vilified. Kevin Rudd is not only demeaning himself by resorting to name calling and demonising people who dare to question his logic (or lack thereof) he is demeaning his role.

I’ll tell you this. I am a lot more concerned about my children growing up in a world where the rules are made by the G20 or some other global organization than I ever will be about the climate changing.

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