It is to laugh!

As we speak, friends and neighbors, the shite is hitting the fan in a big way about 1000 miles to my right, at the World Climate Conference in Russia. In an astonishing turn of furriner politickin’, my newest bestest buddy, Vlad “the Impaler” Putin, is nixing the Kyoto Protocol as an (gasp!) alarmist, opportunist, economically disastrous bit of power-politics out of the goofier corners of Europe. Et Tu, Vladimir?

Basically, the Russkis are going to tell us that global warming is a myth, unsupported by any competent scientific studies, and is being used as a hammer by the also-rans of the world (read “France, Germany, Canada, etc.”) to clobber people who actually produce stuff and still have an economic future to worry about.

Now, it may very well be that the meeting between Bush and Putin last week had something to do with this. Although you may not know it from reading the papers, Bush isn’t the only Tree-Hating Nazi who didn’t sign the Kyoto Protocol. Australia and Japan both waffled, and Russia was still holding back on signing it. Things are bad enough there, economically speaking, without having to retrofit the entire infrastructure to satisfy *spit* Greenpeace *spit*. So big bad Vlad decides against it, and has Russian scientists galore to debunk the entire global warming hysteria to boot.

But all is not to be taken at face value, to put it mildly. Putin was also quoted as saying “In Russia, you often hear, either as a joke or seriously, that Russia is a northern country and it would not be scary for it to be two or three degrees warmer. Maybe it would be good and we could spend less on fur coats and other warm things”.

Having been in Europe for about 4 years now, and twice having seen snow on April 19th, I couldn’t agree more.

(links via Instapundit)