Climate 411

Today’s guest blogger, Annie Petsonk, is International Counsel at Environmental Defense.

The Group of Eight (G8) is an international forum of eight industrialized countries representing the lion’s share of the world’s economy. High on this year’s agenda is global warming, with European countries calling for a mandatory 50 percent cut in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

Recognizing that America must take the lead, the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP) has gone even further. This group of 27 leading U.S. companies and environmental groups has urged Congress to enact legislation [PDF] mandating that the U.S. cut emissions by 60 to 80 percent by 2050.

Today the G8 Summit reached an agreement.

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ignoratio elenchi n.
A logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but has nothing to do with the proposition it purports to prove. Also known as “irrelevant conclusion”. [Lat. ignorance of refutation.]

George Will is at it again with his OpEd piece "Fuzzy Climate Math" in yesterday’s Washington Post. He makes a lot of pronouncements about global warming, and gets it all wrong. Although I already gave Richard Lindzen an Ignoratio Elenchi Award this week, Mr. Will’s piece is too deserving to go unrewarded.

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Newsweek is running an article by George Will titled “Inconvenient Kyoto Truths“. Will says, “It is time to call some bluffs … President Bush should give the world something amusing to watch. He should demand that the Senate vote on the [Kyoto] protocol.” He then goes on to say that America is not disproportionately responsible for global warming, that global warming isn’t necessarily such a bad thing, that we don’t know how to stop it anyway, and that any efforts to do so could cost “tens of trillions”. And for all these reasons, he says, the Kyoto protocol was correctly rejected by the U.S.

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