AT LAST PEOPLE ARE BEGINNING TO LOOK AT THE COSTS OF GLOBAL WARMING POLICIES

"Bringing global warming to an end would cost almost half global GDP - EUR13,000bn - at least, one London analyst has calculated. Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research says this is many times the cost of dealing with the damaging effects of global warming.

Scientists say the world will continue to heat up for the next 50 years, based on the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere.

Mr Dumas says that actually halting global warming would mean going well beyond even the provisions of the Kyoto Treaty. Global oil consumption would have to be cut by large amounts, and quickly. On the "extremely conservative" assumption that such cuts in oil usage knock 0.5pc off global growth, the cumulative loss over five years would be $16.5 trillion, even if growth resumed its previous trend after the five years.

"It follows from any cost-benefit analysis that nobody is going to do anything serious about global warming," he says. "The cost of any serious measures would be orders of magnitude greater than whatever is needed by way of defences against a 15-foot rise in sea levels and freak weather insurance. "In reality, no-one seriously proposes a cure for global warming, because adequate measures would cause economic catastrophe and probably world war. We are going to have to live with it," Mr Dumas says.

His views will be contested by environmentalists who say continued global warming will be equally catastrophic. But it will add to the heated debate about how much should be done through reducing energy usage, and how much by replacing carbon with nuclear, renewable and new technology sources of energy".

Source. See also here for full report.





PROPAGANDA MASQUERADING AS NEWS

The atmospheric data STILL contradict the global warmers' "models". Article by Steven Milloy on August 19, 2005, FoxNews

Is the debate now over for skeptics of global warming hysteria? Readers of USA Today may certainly have that impression. "Satellite and weather-balloon research released today removes a last bastion of scientific doubt about global warming, researchers say," reported USA Today on Aug.12.

Certainly the USA Today report was partially correct - the researchers did, in fact, "say" [read "claim"] that "the last bastion of scientific doubt" had been removed. But claims and reality often don't match up. Three papers published in the journal Science last week purport to debunk an important argument advanced by skeptics of the notion of catastrophic, manmade global warming. The skeptics' argument is that while temperatures measured on the Earth's surface seem to indicate that global temperatures have increased at a rate of about 0.20 degrees Centigrade per decade (deg. C/decade) since the 1970s, temperatures measured in the atmosphere by satellite and weather balloons have shown only a relatively insignificant amount of warming for the same time period (about 0.09 deg. C/decade).

The implication of the skeptics' argument is that whatever warming seems to be happening on the Earth's surface, similar warming isn't happening in the atmosphere. This might mean that any observed surface warming is more likely due to the urban heat island effect -- where the heat-retaining properties of concrete and asphalt in urban areas artificially increase local temperatures -- rather than increasing atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.

One of the new Science studies reported that the satellites had drifted in orbit, causing errors in temperature measurement. Corrections to the satellite data, according to the researchers, would increase the atmospheric warming estimate to 0.19 deg. C/decade -- more in line with the 0.20 deg. C/decade warming of the Earth's surface. Another study reported that heating from tropical sunlight had skewed the balloon temperature measurements. Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, one of the studies' authors, told USA Today that, "Once corrected, the satellite and balloon temperatures align with other surface and upper atmosphere measures, as well as climate change models."

So is it really game-set-match in favor of the global warming alarmists? Not so fast, say the skeptics. When University of Alabama-Huntsville researcher Roy Spencer, a prominent climatologist, factored the newly reported corrections into his calculations, his estimate of atmospheric warming was only 0.12 deg. C/decade -- higher than the prior estimate of 0.09 deg. C/decade, but well below the Science study estimate of 0.19 deg C/decade and the surface temperature estimate of 0.20 deg. C/decade.

As to the claimed errors in the weather balloon measurements, Spencer says that no other effort to adjust the balloon data has produced warming estimates as high as those reported in the new study and that it will take time for the research community to form opinions about whether the new adjustments advocated are justified.

Climate expert Dr. Fred Singer of the Science and Environmental Policy Project says the temperature adjustments are "not a big deal." "Greenhouse theory says (and the models calculate) that the atmospheric trend should be 30 percent greater than the surface trend -- and it isn't," says Singer. "Furthermore, the models predict that polar [temperature] trends should greatly exceed the tropical values -- and they clearly don't ... In fact, the Antarctic has been cooling," adds Singer.

Singer also had some related thoughts concerning the gloom-and-doom forecasts concerning future temperatures. Last January, a study in the journal Nature estimated that a doubling of atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide would increase global temperatures anywhere from 1.9 degrees Centigrade to 11.5 degrees Centigrade by mid-century. But Singer says the researchers "varied only six out of many more parameters necessary to model clouds... Their result confirms... that clouds are still too difficult to model and that climate models underlying the Kyoto Protocol have never been validated."

So it's far from "case-closed" on global warming skepticism. Moreover, aside from the controversy over the satellite and weather balloon data, many key climate questions remain unanswered including: whether humans are causing significant warming; whether warming is undesirable; and whether anything be done to avert any undesirable warming.

Because of its prohibitive costs, alarm over global warming has been rejected numerous times by President Bush and the U.S. Senate. European nations are already discovering that their economies can't live with the Kyoto Protocol that was just implemented in February.

Despite alarmist media reports, global warming-mania is melting. It's no wonder the alarmists are in such a hurry to close the book on the science.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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