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COMMENTARY
May 9, 2007
Whimpers & bangs
I read speeches by politicians, of all stripes. I have found this to be the antidote to much media misreporting.An example would be the victory speech of Nicolas Sarkozy, President-elect of France. I like him better than the rival he defeated. He has a reputation for courage that is interesting. He faces an impossible situation in France, where a dysfunctional state continues to offer social services the electorate cannot afford, for fear of violent resistance from the state’s established beneficiaries. Mr Sarkozy has been demonized in advance by the Leftists and Islamists. Good luck to him. Will he prove a Thatcher or a Reagan? The following excerpt from his victory speech convinces me that he will not: “I want to issue an appeal to our American friends, to tell them that they can count on our friendship, which has been forged in the tragedies of history which we have faced together. I want to tell them that France will always be by their side when they need it, but I also want to tell them that friendship means accepting that your friends may think differently and that a great nation such as the United States has a duty not to put obstacles in the way of the fight against global warming, but on the contrary to take the lead in this fight, because what is at stake is the fate of humanity as a whole. France will make this battle its primary battle.” I have written before in these pages that “global warming” is a great imposture and fraud, that will, a generation from now, look like the Club of Rome forecasts for a generation ago. That aside, it is tremendously consequential: not because the predictions are plausible (they are based on computer modelling, which cannot even tell you reliably what the weather will be next week), but because it offers a “window of impunity” to vastly increase the scope of government. That is why, all over the world, politicians have scrambled aboard the climate-change bandwagon even more enthusiastically than the media. We live at a time when there are frightful realities to confront -- principally the Islamist threat, itself in several dimensions (international terrorism, a nuclear Iran, a Near Eastern combustion, threats to the oil supply, etc). But also, a time when geostrategic opportunities are presented to dangerous operators such as China and Russia, as the United States becomes over-extended, and her allies begin to desert her. Against this background, the environmentalist hysteria -- the “War on CO2” that is offered as an alternative to the “War on Terror” -- is a ridiculous distraction. Quite frankly, the vast expenditures it is being used to justify, and the potentially ruinous economic dislocations, would be better invested in building the military power of America and the West. For we have real enemies. Under these circumstances, perhaps the most constructive thing to do, is to invent another environmental scare to distract from global warming. To which end, I gather the star that is now called “SN 2006gy,” with a mass considerably greater than our sun, but some 240,000,000 light years away in the galaxy NGC 1260, went supernova last September (i.e. blew up spectacularly). It was, in absolute terms, 100 times brighter than any previously recorded supernova. (A trend?) But given its distance from earth, not an attention-getter. Whereas, Eta Carinae, a star with more than four million times our sun’s luminosity, and less than 8,000 light years off, in our own Milky Way, seems ripe to go supernova. It approaches or exceeds the Eddington limit, which is to say, the size (approximately 120 times the mass of our sun) at which the outward pressure of radiation exceeds the inward pressure of gravity. Now, that would be a show: bright enough to see in the daytime, and to read by at night, over many weeks or months. But we’d have to wait another thousand centuries for the debris. Betelgeuse, the red supergiant in the constellation of Orion, is the nearest known supernova candidate, at 427 light years. Still, probably, too far away to hurt us. But I wonder if David Suzuki is on to the dangers of some undetected “white dwarf” supernova that might suddenly occur in our immediate vicinity (say, within one light century). The gamma ray burst from one of those could blow off our entire ozone layer, and expose us to solar and stellar radiation of the sort believed by some to account for the great extinction at the end of the Ordovician period, about 445 million years ago -- that was, among other things, death on trilobites. On the plus side: it would mop up all our excess CO2, in perhaps ten seconds. Or consider my personal favourite: a "vacuum metastability event," in which one of the physical constants suddenly changes, making the entire universe untenable. Surely the United Nations should be talking about that. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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