Fiat Lux

Light may not have mass, momentum, charge or a chemical formula, but it now shares an important distinction with many elements found on The Periodic Table. In France, light is being regulated as a pollutant. The Guardian UK shares details below.

Shops and offices throughout France will be forced to turn off their lights overnight in a bid to fight light pollution, the country’s environment ministry has announced. Under the new law, which comes into effect on 1 July, lights in shop window displays will be turned off at 1am. Interior lights in offices and other non-residential buildings will have to be switched off an hour after the last employee leaves.

The goal of the law is actually to prevent CO2 emissions which French Ecology Minister Delphine Batho seems to believe are harming the planet. The proponents of this tactical retreat to ages before Edison claim it will save enough energy to power 750,000 French households every year. It once again amazes me what depredations of liberty are possible when they are sold as environment-friendly policy.

The entire farcical idea brings to mind a scene towards the end of Atlas Shrugged. The infamous Directive 10-289 orders all skyscrapers not to use any space above the 10th floor to save resources. It’s a different methodology than that being followed by the current passel of Socialist morons in France, but it does the same thing. For all intents and purposes, it subjects the rights of a property holder to curtail, while claiming to have a different, beneficial purpose.

Meanwhile the “science” claimed as a gravamen by charlatans such as Delphine Batho is under headlong assault from the unforgiving skeptic known as reality. A recent study from Norway eviscerates much of the current non-sense being peddled by the Climate-Fascists in support of their expansion of governmental power over the lives of the people.

In the Norwegian study, much to the alarmists’ dismay, researchers have arrived at an estimate of 1.9°C as the most likely level of future warming. The report also recognizes that temperatures have stabilized at 2000 levels for the past decade even though CO2 levels have continued to rise. Meanwhile, a reconstruction of the Eemian interglacial from the new NEEM ice core, published in the journal Nature, shows that in spite of a climate 8°C warmer than that of the past millennium, the ice in Northern Greenland was only a few hundred meters lower than its present level. This finding casts doubt on the projected melting of ice sheets and resulting sea-level rise.

So the “known facts” were dubious conjectures and the intent of the regulators here is to confiscate rather than preserve the riches of the Earth. This would suggest that the 1979 Charney Report significantly overestimated the radiative forcing from CO2*. They stipulated that a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would raise the mean temperature on Earth by 3 degrees Centigrade with an error of plus or minus 1.5 degrees. Thus, the current warming hiatus that spawned spurious “scientific” efforts aimed at hiding the decline, would lead rational observers to peg the climate effects of CO2 towards the bottom of Charney’s possible range of likely outcomes or lower.

So let’s be honest here, Delphine Batho. Every estimate of how catastrophic AGW would be has been overhyped and overblown. Charney and his co-authors cautioned climate scientists at the time that they were uncertain how cloud interactions would impact long-term radiative forcing from Greenhouse Gasses. This caution was thrown to the wind by the late 1990’s and the Cult of AGW dominated the field of climate science for many years. But their predictions are not coming to pass, so you owe it to your people to stop making policy as if these Jeremiads actually came freighted with prophetic accuracy. In France the battle cry against this pseudo-scientific nonsense should be “Fiat Lux!”

* – Charney actually called CO2-induced effects “Climate Change” before James Hanson rebranded it “Global Warming” during a 1988 Congressional Hearing. Of course another source claims Wallace Smith Broecker used the term “Global Warming” in scientific literature back in 1975, so who knows?