Friday, March 27, 2009

McKibben's Exaggerations

Bill McKibben has an article in yesterday's Boston Globe, and includes this:
In the meantime, though, scientists - and environmentalists - have figured out a more important reason to worry about coal-fired power plants, and that's the carbon dioxide they spew into the atmosphere. This is what causes global warming, and the scrubbers PSNH is talking about will do nothing to remove it from the exhaust. Which is too bad, because if the scientists are right about climate change, soon New Hampshire anglers will be able to catch salt-water species in their own living rooms.
Perhaps he meant this last sentence as tongue-in-cheek -- I honestly can't tell. If he did, he didn't set it up properly or pull it off. If he didn't, as I suspect, then it's exactly -- exactly -- the kind of completely ludicrous statement that makes people immediately dismiss him and his ilk and, with them, the entire case for anthropogenic climate change.

It really doesn't fool anybody, and does serious harm to the effort.

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