Kyoto Clock
Posted by Richard on August 5, 2005
Thanks to Hold The Mayo for pointing to the Kyoto Count-up at JunkScience.com. It keeps track of the Kyoto Protocol’s cost (since going into effect on Feb. 16, 2005) and its potential temperature saving by the year 2050. At this time, the cost counter is spinning fast and approaching $70 billion. The temperature counter is at 0.000725775 °C and holding. The site notes parenthetically that "to get activity on the clock we had to go to billionths part of one degree, which obviously cannot be measured as a global mean."
… and yes, that really does represent about $100K per billionth of one degree allegedly "saved." Guess that means for the bargain price of just $100 trillion we could theoretically lower global mean temperature by about 1 °C.
JunkScience.com also has The Malaria Clock, which counts up the number of cases of and deaths from malaria since William Ruckelshaus declared DDT a "potential human carcinogen" and banned it. The death rate is one every 12 seconds, and WHO estimates that 90% of the deaths are pregnant women and children under the age of five.
How is it that Gaia can be painted an Earthmother nurture-figure whilst demanding an annual sacrifice of roughly two million, four hundred and thirty thousand infants, pending mothers and their untallied unborn? This is not ecology. This is not conservation. This is genocide.
Let’s be unequivocal, spraying DDT inside dwellings presents no discernable human or environmental hazard. "Resistance" is not an issue since this mostly takes the form of avoidance and keeping mosquitoes away from human prey is the intended object anyway. DDT presents no patent issues to upset anti-globalists/anti-capitalists and, at pennies a pound, DDT is affordable and cost-effective health care for developing nations.
In short, anti-malarial use of DDT allows more healthy populations to work, generate wealth and climb out of the poverty/subsistence hole in which "caring greens" apparently wish to keep them trapped. DDT bans are not pro-environment – they’re anti-human. Worse, they attack impoverished, developing societies least able to protect themselves.
JunkScience.com is published by Steven J. Milloy, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, among other places, and the author of several Cato books, including Junk Science Judo, and hundreds of papers, columns, and articles. It looks like a great resource with a plethora of interesting links. I’m going to add it to my Miscellaneous Links list, which I’ve been neglecting lately.
VRB said
Can’t figure how this figure is calculated. What kind of statistics are they using? Don’t see the scientific method there. Enlighten me!
Anonymous said
VRB: You must have clicked the JunkScience.com link instead of the Kyoto Count-up link. The former shows the counters (and has a “more info” link), but the latter explains their math.
Basically, there’s broad agreement, they say, on how much the global temp will drop in 45 years if Kyoto goals are met. So the temp change per year is based on that. The dollars is based on an estimate of the annual cost of implementing Kyoto. Both are converted to change per second, and there you have the counters.
I suspect you could find people who’d insist that the temp change estimate should be twice as big or that the cost estimate is 50% too high. You could probably find people who’d argue the opposite. But regardless of how you tweak the estimates, it won’t change the basic message of the clock: vast piles of dollars translate into tiny little temp changes. 🙂