Global Warming? Blame Arthur Herzog!

You never heard about the threat of global warming until Arthur Herzog published the sci-fi novel Heat in 1977. Just so you know what you're dealing with, he also wrote Orca and The Swarm, so look out for vengeful killer whales and massive, vengeful swarms of killer bees.

Inspired by Mark Steyn's excellent takedown of the enviro-fundies in the Telegraph.

Had America and Australia ratified Kyoto, and had the Europeans complied with it instead of just pretending to, by 2050 the treaty would have reduced global warming by 0.07C - a figure that would be statistically undectectable within annual climate variation. In return for this meaningless gesture, American GDP in 2010 would be lower by $97 billion to $397 billion - and those are the US Energy Information Administration's somewhat optimistic models.

I've mentioned before the environmentalists' ceaseless fretting for the prospect of every species but their own. By the end of this century, the demographically doomed French, Italians and Spaniards will be so shrivelled in number they may have too few environmentalists to man their local Greenpeace office. Is that part of the plan? To create a habitable environment with no humans left to inhabit it? If so, destroying the global economy for 0.07C is a swell idea.