What’s stunning here isn’t that yet another pointy-head insists that “all informed scientific opinion” agrees with him. Yawn. I’d say we’re rather used to that.
No, what’s amazing is the demand that Kyoto II regulate . . . forest fires. If your forests burn, why, you need to pay someone else for carbon offsets.
VICTORIA’S bushfires have released a massive amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – almost equal to Australia’s industrial emission for an entire year.
Mark Adams, from the University of Sydney, said the emissions from bushfires were far beyond what could be contained through carbon capture and needed to be addressed in the next international agreement.
“Once you are starting to burn millions of hectares of eucalypt forest, then you are putting into the atmosphere very large amounts of carbon,” Professor Adams said.
… Carbon emissions from forest fires are not counted under the Kyoto Protocol. But he said he thought it likely they would be in future agreements.
“All informed scientific opinion suggests that whatever new protocol is signed (at the UN summit) in Copenhagen or elsewhere will include forest carbon, simply because to not do so would be to ignore one of the biggest threats to the global atmospheric pool of carbon dioxide, the release of carbon in fires.”
Once carbon dioxide went from being what we always knew it was to the subject of a treaty calling it, like cow farts, man-made “pollution” (because CO2 was a proxy for economic activity, meaning wealth; the other’s a proxy for meat-eaters and we know how the Kyotophiles feel about them), how much of a stretch was it to then demand that forest fires now be treated as pollution even though, just as climate changes — always has, always will, that’s what it does — forests catch fire?
But now, you need to pay some U.N. fund in absolution, just as for the bovine turbulence. (You know, in some households they just blame the dog and speak no more of the issue.)
Here’s an idea. How about a treaty demanding that governments stop doing what they do to cause annual fires to get so massive? Too sensible?