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Commentary
Last month's United Nations climate conference in Egypt was a dreary affair. Dubbed "COP27"—the 27th of these increasingly tiresome extravaganzas—the 2022 gathering was the same old same old with a few new wrinkles.
There was the customary ideological fanaticism—the insistence that we radically retool our societies on the basis of computer models that don't come close to matching climate realities (and daring to call those who question the validity of faulty models "ideologues"). There was the stubborn refusal to conduct a balanced cost-benefit analysis of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, literally ignoring CO2's manifold benefits (e.g. a vast greening of the planet, longer growing seasons and increased agricultural productivity, reduced deaths due to cold, and a 99 percent reduction in the death rate from weather events due to economic and technological advances powered by fossil fuels) as well as ignoring other known influencers of climate such as solar and volcanic activity, fluctuations in Earth's orbit, albedo (cloud cover), ocean currents, etc....