The climate change hysteria is driving us mad. We have been told that the climate is the worst threat in the history of the planet. Even though the climate has been much warmer than now and humans not only survived, but the Vikings colonized and farmed Greenland, we have been told that we have never faced such peril—apparently not even the threat of nuclear conflagration.
Don’t fly! Don’t drive! Don’t air condition your home! Eat only locally grown produce—to heck with the needs of developing world farmers! Don ‘t take public transportation! Wait a minute: Don’t take public transportation? Yup, according to a recent study. From the story:
[T]aking public transport may not be as green as you automatically think, says a new US study. Its authors point out an array of factors that are often unknown to the public. These are hidden or displaced emissions that ramp up the simple “tailpipe” tally, which is based on how much carbon is spewed out by the fossil fuels used to make a trip. Environmental engineers Mikhail Chester and Arpad Horvath at the University of California at Davis say that when these costs are included, a more complex and challenging picture emerges.
In some circumstances, for instance, it could be more eco-friendly to drive into a city — even in an SUV, the bete noire of green groups — rather than take a suburban train. It depends on seat occupancy and the underlying carbon cost of the mode of transport. “We are encouraging people to look at not the average ranking of modes, because there is a different basket of configurations that determine the outcome,” Chester told AFP in a phone interview. “There’s no overall solution that’s the same all the time.”
That’s enough! People are not going to look at complicated comparative tables of carbon emissions to decide how to live their lives. Too, too complicated. Not to mention, futile. Not to mention completely crackers.
And here’s the thing—so much of this is ideology. Ideology is the antithesis of science, indeed it corrupts science when it pretends to be what it is not. If this keeps up the science sector will lose public support, perhaps even become a laughing stock.
