George W Bush's strategic approach to climate change

I recently read about a leading climateologist who run a climate simulation on thousands of PCs across the world. The first stage of the process was to run multiple climate models on decades worth of historical data to find the models that worked best. The second stage was to run these selected models into the future and find out what the climate is likely to do.

The bad news is that we have just five years to stabilise atmospheric carbon dioxide, after that the natural CO2 sinks, such as the Amazon, fail and instead of removing CO2 from the atmosphere they contribute to it. If the computer models are correct it’s a pretty bleak situation.

I then started thinking about when I was at primary school, more than 30 years ago. In those days they used to talk about a coming ice age, which if it happened I seem to have missed. I don’t know what evidence they had then, but we certainly have more powerful computers, but it just shows how scientific opinion can suddenly flip.

After that I was thinking about the cold war years (and Ronnie Raygun) and the side effects of a nuclear war. Obviously most people get wiped out and the ones who survive lose their hair. But one of the predicted outcomes is a so-called nuclear winter, where the debris thrown into the atmosphere by all the giga-tonnes of warheads means that the sunlight can’t get through and so dramatically cools and we have permanent winter for decades.

And so it finally dawned on me that I’ve been underestimating George W Bush for all these years. He can continue to helm one of the world’s biggest polluters and carry on raising CO2. And he can wipe out the Iranians, the Koreans, the Chinese and Europe, completely offsetting the damage to the climate, solving planetary overpopulation and wiping out all US competition. While we’re at it, better target the Japanese too so the American car industry can pick up again.

This surely demonstrates that it really does pay to see the big picture in politics with a clear, strategic approach to all the world’s problems.

Categorised in: humour, life

This post was written by David