How the left get hysterical over global warming

Left wing academics and journalists continue to get increasingly agitated and hysterical over global warming. The more evidence there is against their cause, the angrier and louder they become, as they claim that we must take more action now to appease Gaia before she destroys us all in her rage. Hybrid cars, windfarms, Kyoto protocol are the first step. Further measures would include cutting back on consumption of food, electricity, water and implementing population control.

So what happens when an environmentalist takes a responsible and calm look at climate change and what measures can be taken? Well Bjorn Lomborg wrote The Skepitcal Environmentalist in 2002, a devastating critique and sober analysis which refutes the commonly accepted hysterical notion that we must do everything now !

And as expected, prominent lefty Johann Hari has attacked him:

Lomborg perpetually points to the relative ineffectiveness of Kyoto (even if the US did adopt it) as an argument against restrictions on gas emissions. But real environmentalists have always argued the Kyoto is a feeble first step, valuable only because it would demonstrate our ability to make baby-steps together before we get to the serious jogging necessary. The pathetic impact of Kyoto is an argument for doing far more to hold down CO2 emissions, not for junking the whole idea of restraint and opting for climatic anarchy.

So Lomborg has shown that Kyoto is ineffective AND costly. And Johann Hari says "Ahah ! So we should do it as a first step and then pay more". So who is using science and reason, and who is hysterical ?

Bjorn Lomborg's book uses widely accepted statistics to show that on ALL major issues such as air pollution, sanitation, disease, famine, poverty, water quality, the figures have been and continue to improve with time.

But look at Johann Hari's devastating proof of global warming:

When I was in the Democratic Republic of Congo recently, one of Christian Aid’s agronomists, a sober, melancholy man called Sampson Cherwa, took me to meet farmers who are going hungry because of global warming. We stood in a battered banana field where the trees lay, flaccid and dying, all around us as he explained, “There has been a dramatic change in the weather here over the past decade, for the first time in living memory. We have always had two rainy seasons, one in winter when we do the planting, and one in spring, when we harvest. Since there is no irrigation here, we are totally dependent on them. But now the rainy seasons have suddenly changed. They have always lasted three months, but now they last only two. The same amount of water falls, but instead of coming as rain that irrigates the fields, it comes as hail or torrential rain that destroys the crops.”

So some farmer gives an anecdote about how the rain pattern has changed, and Johann Hari believes every person on earth should be governed by the Kyoto protocol !

Note how the total rainfall hasn't changed, just the fact that it comes down in a shorter season. Johann Hari repeatedly links and refers to the hysterical fear-mongering report issued by Christian Aid about climate change in African nations. And of course, in true left-wing fashion, he has to end his report with some hand-wringing collective guilt:

Jiamungo Danasie, the Congolese farmer with seven children who owns this field, told me tearfully about the day his field was destroyed by the Weather of Mass Destruction. He rubs his stomach and says in English, “Hungry.” As I stand listening to him, I think of all the SUVs on our streets and all the plane journeys we have taken (including, yes, the one that brought me here) and thought – we did this.