On The First Day Of Christmas . . .

The Copenhagen farce is glad tidings for all

After two weeks of increasingly ill-tempered negotiations, one of the European delegates at the Copenhagen summit “to save the planet” had clearly reached breaking point; or perhaps it was the ingratitude of the people he was trying to save that caused this negotiator to tell the BBC’s science correspondent, Susan Watts, that millions of Africans now “deserve” to be incinerated.

Watts was reporting a conversation she had had with an unnamed “European negotiator” after South Africa decided to join the quartet of America, India, China and Brazil in putting its name to a statement rejecting any binding emissions targets, and thus comprehensively sabotaging the entire conference. “South Africa has signed up to this!” the delegate told Watts. “They’re going to fry — and they’ll deserve it.”

One’s heart does not warm to anyone expressing such sentiments, but it’s easy to understand the fury that must have overcome this delegate. Here was Europe offering to impose vast costs on its own industries and peoples to save Africa from the alleged perils of runaway CO2 emissions — and that continent’s most powerful international voice says, thanks very much for the offer, but we think we can best provide health and prosperity to our people by being free to expand our economy exactly as you did in the industrial revolution, by using the wonderfully cheap forms of energy that nature affords: fossil fuels. After all, why is it that in the US many fewer people die as a result of very high temperatures than used to be the case a hundred years ago? Air-conditioning.

I know that for those thousands of “climate activists” who descended on Copenhagen, the idea of air-conditioning in African homes is something almost too revolting to contemplate; but then they have never understood that, for the real inhabitants of the developing world, the American example of achieving health and comfort through technology and subverting harsh nature for human ends is something to be emulated, not shunned.

The climate catastrophists naturally insist that if the developing countries — notably China and India — follow the American path, the planet will become uninhabitable. The most quoted expression of this came in 2004 from Britain’s chief government scientist then, Sir David King, when he said that if we did not act to reduce our carbon emissions, by the end of the century Antarctica would be the world’s only habitable continent.

Even if you share King’s view of what some of the climate models project in terms of anthropogenic CO2’s effect on global temperatures, his apparent belief that man is completely unable to adapt to a changing environment suggests that, whatever his claims as a scientist, he knows next to nothing about either human nature or history.

Ouch.

Unfortunately for those in the same camp as King, the leak of lethally embarrassing emails from the world’s foremost academic climate research unit, at the University of East Anglia, confirmed the suspicions of roughly half the British population, that too much political faith had been placed in the omniscience of a small group of scientists.

The most interesting of those leaked emails came from Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. After observing — this was an email dated October 12, 2009 — that in freezing Boulder, “We have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record ... it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F”, Trenberth turned to the fact that the planet’s average temperature over the past 10 years seemed to have been static and wrote: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of global warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Two days later he reiterated: “We cannot account for what is happening in the climate system.”

Asked last week by the BBC about these emails, King would say only that their leak and publication in the run-up to the Copenhagen summit had to be the work of some malign national agency (the CIA? The Russians?). Since we know that a Briton with Asperger’s syndrome, working on a domestic dial-up internet connection, managed to hack into the Pentagon’s most secret codes, King’s insistence that only a national agency could have hacked into a non-secure academic research unit’s emails seems as sensible as the assertion that we must all plan to settle in Antarctica. Even if he is right that UEA’s emails were put in the public domain as a result of theft, he deserves as much respect for his reaction as any MP whose only response to the leak of Commons expenses claims had been that the newspaper that bought the disc with all the information had broken the law. As a matter of fact, no MP was quite so arrogant.

King’s old boss, Tony Blair, turned up in Copenhagen to give his take on the leaked emails. The former prime minister declared that they did not lessen by one jot what he called “the need for action” and added: “It is said that the science around climate change is not as certain as its proponents allege. It doesn’t need to be.” Blair is clearly not troubled by irony, since this approach is exactly the one that got us into such a mess over Saddam Hussein’s suppositious biological threat. The actual evidence was tenuous at the time — but to persuade the public of the need for action, Blair was prepared to say that it was watertight. For weapons of mass destruction, read weather of mass destruction.

Blair now argues that even if the science is less clear than is claimed by the climate catastrophists, we have to act because of the risks to humanity if their worst fears turn out to be well founded. This would make perfect sense if there were no risks attached to what he calls “action”, just as it would if there had been no lives put at risk by attacking Iraq. In fact, there are vast costs involved in the war against weather, which could actually cost lives. The highly respected climate economist Professor Richard Tol, a senior member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has said that the CO2 tax required to bring emissions down to the levels demanded by the IPCC would reduce global GDP by an amount that would equate — in 2100 — to $40 trillion (£25 trillion) a year. It’s pretty obvious, really: just as cheap energy has transformed the lives of millions for the better, it follows that reversing the process would have an opposite effect.

Carbon cap and trade, recommended by the EU as an alternative to tax, has its own malign effect. Just ask the 1,700 employees being made redundant at Corus’s steel plant in Redcar. The owners of Corus could receive up to $375m (£230m) in carbon credits for laying off those British workers. Then, if they switch production to a so-called clean Indian steel plant, Corus could also receive millions of dollars annually from the United Nations’ Clean Development Mechanism fund. The net effect of all that on the environment could be safely estimated as zero.

Gordon Brown, who seems to be embarking on a scorched earth economic policy in his final months in power, evidently regards this as worth it — he wants to go down in history as the man who saved the climate. Yet this government — or the next one — has been given a golden opportunity by the farce in Copenhagen: to abandon the carbon witch hunt altogether. If India, China, America, Brazil (and Uncle Tom Cobley and all) carry on with “business as usual”, then anything Europe does to cut its emissions is irrelevant, at best: it will cause pain and hardship for its own citizens to no purpose whatever.

So let’s toast the negotiators of Copenhagen. By failing so spectacularly, they have presented us with a wonderful Christmas present. All we have to do is open it.

DOMINIC LAWSON

Via TimesOnline

Gimme Dem Global Warming Blues

Christopher Booker is the global warming climate change reporter for The Daily Mail And, yes, this about his book. However, Booker's column also focuses on recent events, as well as the not-so-recent.

The devastating book which debunks climate change
Just imagine if we learned we were about to be landed with the biggest bill in the history of the world - simply on the say-so of a group of scientists. Would we not want to be absolutely sure that those scientists were 100 per cent dependable in what they were saying?

Should we not then be extremely worried - and even very angry - if it emerged that those scientists had been conspiring among themselves to fiddle the evidence for what they were telling us?

This is the extraordinary position in which we find ourselves thanks to news reported in Saturday's Daily Mail which has raised huge question marks over the reliability of the science behind the theory of global warming.

Hundreds of emails leaked from the internal computer system of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia show how a small group of highly influential senior British and U.S. scientists have for years been secretly discussing ways in which their evidence could be manipulated to make the threat posed by global warming sound much worse than it is.

To place the significance of these revelations into context, let us recall how exactly a year ago, Parliament passed, virtually unopposed, what was far and away the most expensive new law ever put before it. On the Government's own figures, the Climate Change Act is going to cost Britain £18 billion [US$29 billion ed.] a year - that's £720 [US$1198.13 ed.] for every household in the country - every year from now until 2050.

We shall be paying this through soaring 'green taxes' on everything from air travel to the £3,300 [US$5,490.58 ed.]tax being proposed on each new car; through rocketing fuel bills to subsidise thousands more wind turbines and to pay for removing carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations.

In fact, the true cost of the act, if complied with to the letter, would certainly be far higher, because what it lays down is that, over the next 40 years, we must cut our emissions of carbon dioxide by over 80 per cent.

Pretty well every aspect of our lives in today's industrialised society involves emitting carbon dioxide - and short of some technological revolution as yet undreamed of, the only way we could meet that target would be to close almost every part of our economy. Yet, astonishingly, scarcely a single MP even questioned the need for such a law; only three voted against it.
...

We all know the basic thesis: that thanks to mankind burning fossil fuels, the world's temperatures are hurtling upwards, and that unless the most drastic action is taken, we can look forward to an unprecedented global catastrophe - droughts, hurricanes, killer heatwaves, melting icecaps, sea levels rising to the point where many of the world's major cities are submerged.

All this is what has been predicted by the expensive computer models relied on by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC), which the politicians tell us we must trust as the ultimate source of authority on the future of the world's climate.

On every side we are told that 'the science is settled', that '2,500 of the world's top climate scientists' agree that these terrifying predictions will all come true unless we take the most drastic action. So carried away have they all been by this belief that scarcely a single politician dares question it.

Yet the oddest thing which has become increasingly evident in the past year or two is the fact that almost none of these things is happening, certainly not in the way those computer models have been predicting. Although carbon dioxide levels have continued to increase, temperatures have not been rising in the way the computer models all agree they should have done.

In the past decade, the overall trend of temperatures has been not upwards, but down.

The hard evidence tells us that there have actually been fewer major droughts, hurricanes and heatwaves in recent years than there were in earlier decades.

There is no less ice at the Earth's poles today than there was 30 years ago. Sea levels may have been rising very slowly, but no faster than they have been for 200 years.

In other words, as a growing army of genuine experts across the world has been trying to tell us, there is not a single item on the list of apocalyptic predictions we have been fed for so long by the IPCC and the likes of Al Gore which is not being called into question by what is actually happening to the world's climate.

The scientists who have been challenging almost every aspect of the official theory on global warming have ranged from world-ranking physicists such as Professor Richard Lindzen, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Professors Will Happer and Freeman Dyson of Princeton University, to 700 scientists of many disciplines.

These include Nobel Prize-winners and former contributors to the IPCC, who signed a 'minority report' of the U.S. Senate's environment committee.

It is beginning to look as though the panic over global warming, which has our politicians so in its grip, may have been no more than a colossal scare story - to line up alongside all those other scares which have raced in and out of the headlines in recent decades, such as the 'Millennium Bug', which at midnight on December 31, 1999, was going to crash the world's computers.

So the real question which arises from this most terrifying of all scare scenarios is: why did the world's politicians get swept along by it?

One of the more suspicious features of the man-made global warming theory is precisely this extraordinary pressure, which has been built up to insist the evidence for it is so overwhelming that it is a moral crime to question it.

For several years, anyone daring to doubt the theory - not least some of the world's most eminent climate scientists - has been vilified as a 'denier', to be compared with those who try to deny the historical reality of Hitler's Holocaust.

Al Gore was one of the first to condemn as 'flat earthers' anyone who was sceptical of his reckless scaremongering, likening such people to the cranks who believe the Moon landings were all somehow 'faked on a movie lot in Arizona' (delightfully, among the scientists who have come out as 'climate sceptics' are two of the U.S. astronauts who did land on the Moon, Dr Buzz Aldrin and Dr Jack Schmitt).

In the scientific world, notably in the U.S. and Europe, it has long been a major scandal that those daring to doubt the official orthodoxy on global warming face ostracism from their academic colleagues, have had research funding withdrawn and have not been allowed to publish their papers in the leading scientific journals.
....

It gets better. Read the rest at The Daily Mail

"I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: 'future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age'”. ― Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic

al-Gore's scientists were too busy spinning to comment.

Global Road Apples Update

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