10/10/10 4:49pm

Article By: David Kreutzer

The failure of the Copenhagen climate talks and the low expectations for the Cancun talks later this year disappoint die-hard global warming activists, but this should not be a surprise. Don’t forget that the U.S. Senate during the Clinton Administration gave the much more modest targets of the Kyoto Accord a thumbs-down verdict by a 95–0 margin.

The magnitude of carbon restrictions currently discussed would cut trillions of dollars from the world economy while providing scant moderation of projected warming. Further, making the Copenhagen deal work would have required hundreds of billions of transfers each year from the developed world to the developing world. These huge payments by the U.S. and other developed countries would be in addition to the significant losses in income from the associated energy cuts.  There just isn’t a deal to be had here.

A group called 10:10, coordinator of 10/10/10 activities for this Sunday, created a video that blows up innocent children in a sick attempt at humor. Though the video has been roundly denounced by various supporters of 10:10, the underlying theme—opponents of climate policies are evil money-grubbers whose views should not even be debated—is promoted all too frequently by many environmental groups. Further, concocted environmental catastrophes, whose impacts are beyond anything supported by the IPCC science chapters, are used to provoke the sort of hysteria that allowed some people to think the 10:10 video was a good idea.

For instance, this Greenpeace video shows angered and clearly proto-violent child threatening adults who don’t act decisively on climate policies. It’s not too hard to imagine this kid pushing the red button in the 10:10 video. However, the claims asserted in the video (that when the child grows up “there won’t be any fish left in the sea,” “rain forests and clean air will be a thing of the past,” and “polar ice caps will be gone”) are not supported by mainstream science and certainly not by the science chapters of the IPCC reports.