Friday, February 8, 2008

Thanks for setting us straight, Andy - Charlie Menchions

An editorial in The Telegram, Feb. 7th, 2008, p.A6 (not on the Telegram's website)

Well, thank you, Mayor Andy Wells. You gave me my first good night's sleep in ages. I no longer have to worry about my personal carbon footprint or try to convince the world that we must cut our emissions drastically or face the consequences.

SPIN CYCLE
No sir, it's those nasty, natural planetary cycles that are causing global warming and all those scary side-effects. Whew! It must be comforting to the oil barons to know that now we can spew as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we can generate, and yay, we can even exponentially increase the amount and get on with making piles of money in the process. Andy, please give me a call or do another piece as soon as possible and inform my ignorant being of where all those CO2 emissions end up. Do they spiral into outer space or are they being absorbed by all those forests we are not destroying? But wait - maybe that greenhouse effect is all hooey as well. How can gases trap the sun's energy? Who came up with that weird notion, anyway? Ah, those "junk" scientists had a hand in that, I suspect. what do you think, Andy? And Andy, all those mainstream scientists from every major country, some of whom were at the Bali Conference - they are leading us all down the garden path while the groups that you have kindly informed us about that have the real "truth" were excluded from the Bali fiasco. What a bloody shame!

SMOKING SCREEN
It's starting to remind me of how we railroaded Big Tobacco. Remember how we accused them of hooking folks on nicotine and jimmying the amounts put in cigarettes and they brought in their eminent scientists to refute all that nonsense and, by golly, we laughed at them. Shame on all of us who were so close-minded! All the tobacco companies ever wanted was to provide us with a safe, enjoyable product, right? Hmm, I understand some of their scientists were hired to refute that global warming nonsense, too - and rightly so. Back to those nasty planetary cycles that are to blame. I swear to God I thought I learned from my early studies that these occurred gradually over long periods of time - tens of hundreds of years, that sort of thing. Obviously, I got that all wrong - don't know why I didn't flunk all my courses. So, the fact that the ice caps are melting at a rate that is surprising all those junk scientists and the coral reefs are bleaching out and dying as we speak - well, I guess maybe those cycles have speed up, eh Andy? A couple of months ago, I heard some climate/forestry people talking about how the wildfires in the United States have gotten completely out of hand in the past decade: the areas burned in that time and the number of big fires have no precedent when they look back at their records. And guess what, Andy? They were stupidly relating this to global warming and appealing to those in Washington to act quickly and start curbing emissions. Bet they haven't heard about those planetary cycles. Ah, the ignorance! And that heat wave in Europe last summer (temperatures in the 40s C) and those huge fires in Greece when hundreds died - I'm sure the surviving relatives will be comforted to know that a natural, perfectly understandable cycle is behind it all.
Charlie Menchions writes from Sandy Cove.

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