Lord Nigel Lawson recently testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works -- testifying on the Kyoto Protocol and assessing the status of efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. Lord Lawson is a former Chancellor of the Exchequer [i.e. Treasurer, Finance minister] in the British government. A seat in the House of Lords is permanent so members can speak their minds without fear or favour. And Tony Blair's reforms have greatly enhanced the authority and expertise of the House. How annoying for Leftists that the world's most "anachronistic" parliamentary body should also arguably be the wisest -- not that Leftists would admit it, of course. The text of Lord Lawson's very comprehensive statement is below:
"I am grateful for your invitation to testify before you today. I am aware that you have been provided with the Report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs on The Economics of Climate Change in advance of these proceedings, so I intend simply to summarise our key findings and to provide some commentary of my own. By way of background, the Economic Affairs Committee is one of the four permanent investigative committees of the House of Lords, and fulfils one of the major roles of our second chamber as a forum of independent expertise and review of all UK government activity. It is composed of members of all three main political parties. Its climate change report, which was agreed unanimously, was published on 6 July 2005, just ahead of the G8 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland. In summary, the Committee concluded that:
* The Government should give the UK Treasury a more extensive role, both in examining the costs and benefits of climate change policy and presenting them to the public, and also in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC);
* There are concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, and the influence of political considerations in its findings;
* There are significant doubts about the IPCC's scenarios, in particular the high emissions scenarios, and the Government should press it to change its approach;
* Positive aspects of global warming have been played down in the IPCC reports: the IPCC needs to reflect in a more balanced way the costs and benefits of climate change;
* The Government should press the IPCC for better estimates of the monetary costs of global warming damage and for explicit monetary comparisons between the costs of measures to control warming and their benefits;
* A more balanced approach to the relative merits of adaptation and mitigation is needed, with far more attention paid to adaptation measures;
* UK energy and climate change policy appears to be based on dubious assumptions about the roles of renewable energy and energy efficiency, and the costs to the UK of achieving its objectives have been poorly documented, and the Government, with much stronger Treasury involvement, should review and substantiate the cost estimates involved and convey them in transparent form to the public;
* Current UK nuclear power capacity should be retained;
* International negotiations on climate change reduction will prove ineffective because of the preoccupation with setting emissions targets. The Kyoto Protocol makes little difference to rates of warming, and has a na‹ve compliance mechanism which can only deter countries from signing up to subsequent tighter emissions targets. Any future Protocols might be more fruitfully based on agreements on technology and its diffusion.
I cannot of course speak for the Committee as a whole, but my own understanding of the issue is clear:
* The IPCC's consistent refusal to entertain any dissent, however well researched, which challenges its assumptions, is profoundly unscientific;
* Although its now famous "hockey stick" chart of temperatures over the last millennium, which inter alia featured prominently in the UK Government's 2003 Energy White Paper, is almost certainly a myth, the IPCC refuses to entertain any challenge to it;
* The IPCC's scenarios exercise, which incidentally incorporates a a demonstrably fallacious method of inter-country economic comparisons, manifests a persistent upward bias in the likely amount of carbon dioxide emissions over the next hundred years. For example, a combination of steadily increasing energy efficiency and the growth of the less energy-intensive service economy has led to a steadily declining rate of growth of carbon dioxide emissions over the past 40 years: all the IPCC's scenarios unaccountably assume an abrupt reversal of this established trend.
So why is the IPCC so adamant that it will not revisit its conclusions? It may be that they are so profoundly concerned about the perils of global warming that the darkest possible picture is painted in order to secure urgent action. There may also be the inevitable institutional characteristic of making the problem more serious than it is in order to command greater attention. This too may be a consequence of the way research funding is administered - it is a cold, isolated world for the climate change contrarian in the modern scientific community.
Whichever reason - and I suspect it may be both - the IPCC's absolutist position is unhelpful. The world faces a number of other, and arguably more imminent, challenges and competing claims on resources: the threats from nuclear proliferation and international terrorism, and the need for humanitarian aid for the world's poorest, are obvious examples. Choices always have to be made, and they need to be based on rational assessment.
So far as climate change is concerned, I am not qualified to pronounce on the science. While it seems clear to me, as a layman, that - other things being equal - increasing carbon dioxide emissions will, in time, warm the planet, I note that the science of climate change is uncertain and that reputable scientists hold greatly differing views about the rate at which such warming is likely to occur - which in any case is not simply a matter of the science: it depends just as much on the likely rate of future economic growth and the pattern and nature of that growth. The key question, which is not a matter for scientists at all, is what should be done about such global warming as may occur.
* There are two possible approaches, which are not of course mutually exclusive: mitigation, that is, seeking to stabilize and if possible reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and adaptation, that is to accept that the climate may well be warming, and to take action to counter any harmful consequences that may flow from this.
* The IPCC and its acolytes make only the most perfunctory acknowledgment of adaptation. Their estimates of the damage from global warming are based on the assumption that very little adaptation occurs, and focus almost exclusively on the need for mitigation. In my view, however, the most important conclusion of the House of Lords report is that adaptation needs to take centre stage. . * Numerous studies have shown that adaptation is the more cost-effective option, which is hardly surprising. Not only is that the way in which we normally come to terms with climatic vagaries, but there are benefits as well as costs from global warming. There are, of course, regional variations: in northern Europe, for example, including Britain, for the rest of this century the benefits are likely to exceed the costs, whereas for the tropics the reverse is the case. But adaptation, which implies pocketing the benefits while acting to diminish the costs, has obvious attractions.
* The four principal costs potentially involved in global warming are damage to agriculture and food production, water shortage, coastal flooding (as sea levels rise), and - allegedly - malaria:
o In the case of agriculture, adaptation, much of which will occur autonomously, that is, without the need for government action, would consist of cultivating areas which have hitherto been too cold to be economic and, in other cases, switching to crops better suited to warmer climates.
o In the case of water shortage, there is massive wastage of water at the present time, and ample scope for water conservation measures - which incidentally would also help on the farming front.
o The most serious likely cost is that caused by coastal flooding of low-lying areas, where government action is clearly required, in the form of the construction of effective sea defences - as the Dutch, incidentally, put in place more than 500 years ago. With modern technology this becomes an admittedly expensive but nonetheless highly cost-effective option.
o Finally, as to malaria - which leading malaria experts, whom the IPCC was careful to exclude from its deliberations, argue is in any event unrelated to temperature, noting that the disease was endemic in Europe until the 17th century - the means of combating if not eradicating this scourge are well established.
* By contrast, the Kyoto and emissions caps and targets approach seems a most unattractive option:
o Even if the existing Kyoto targets were attained they would make little if any difference to the predicted rate of global warming. Kyoto's importance is presented as a first step to other, stiffer future agreements. But this is pie in the sky.
o The developing countries, including major contributors to future carbon dioxide emissions such as China and India are - and are determined to remain - outside the process.
o Since the only sanction against non-compliance with Kyoto (which is likely to be widespread) is even stricter targets in any successor agreement, the realism of this approach is even harder to detect.
o In addition, even if targets were achievable, the cost of reaching them would be horrendous. Essentially, it would work by raising the cost of carbon-based energy to the point where carbon-free energy sources, and other carbon saving measures, become economic. For Kyoto-style mitigation to be seriously effective, it would involve a substantially greater rise in energy prices than anything we have yet seen despite recent spikes.
o The real cost of this approach is not so much dearer energy as the reduced rate of world economic growth which this would imply. It is far from self evident, not least for the developing countries, that over the next hundred years a poorer but cooler world is to be preferred to a richer but warmer one. Nor should it be overlooked that the Kyoto strategy requires the present and next generation to sacrifice their living standards in order to benefit more distant generations who are projected in any event to be considerably better off.
* Mitigation can however, be a desirable complement to adaptation. Far better than the Kyoto approach is additional support for research into reduced carbon technologies of all kinds, thus bringing forward the time when at least some of these technologies may become economic. A nation which performs relatively well in terms of cutting back emissions is bound to lose out competitively whereas a nation which achieves a technological breakthrough is likely to benefit competitively.
In conclusion, I believe that the IPCC process is so flawed, and the institution, it has to be said, so closed to reason, that it would be far better to thank it for the work it has done, close it down, and transfer all future international collaboration on the issue of climate change, where the economic dimension is clearly of the first importance, to the established Bretton Woods institutions.
It is profoundly important that all governments, most importantly their Treasury departments, make their own independent and rigorous economic analysis of the issue. At the time the Lords committee was taking evidence this, for whatever reason, had not happened in the UK. I very much hope that, following our report, it will. We appear to have entered a new age of unreason, which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is profoundly disquieting. It must not be allowed to prevail."
Source
More scientific wisdom bites the dust
It used to be gospel among astrophysicists that comets were made of ice with a bit of dust in them. The Tempel 1 mission is now however accepted as having shown the opposite -- that comets are dust with a bit of ice in them. No doubt that theory will be abandoned in due course too. And there is probably no such thing as a typical comet anyway -- if the Jovian and Saturnian moons are any criterion.
The new conclusion is of course something of a boost for those "wacky" old astrobiologists -- as is this finding:
"Organic chemicals that play a crucial role in the chemistry of life are common in space, a study by NASA researchers has found. These chemicals are "prevalent throughout the universe," said Douglas Hudgins of NASA Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, chief author of a study detailing the findings in the Oct. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal. "NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has shown complex organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. are found in every nook and cranny of our galaxy."
Science just is not the right place for dogma -- though you would never guess it from reading what some scientists say. I wonder how that other astrophysical maverick, Andrew Prentice, fared with predictions about Tempel 1? I cannot find anything online.
HISTORY'S FIRST MAJOR "GREEN" POLITICAL PARTY
When we note in Greenies their Leftism, their romanticism about a mythical natural past, their misanthropy, their disregard for facts and reason and their willingness to lie and deceive in their quest for power, it should be noted that all those things were characteristic of a "Green" 1930s political party too -- the National Socialist German Worker's party -- generally abbreviated as the "Nazi" party. The Nazis were as Green as they were socialist and they reveal the sort of tyranny we could expect if the Green/Left of today rose to unrestricted power. Below is just one excerpt from a comprehensive and fully referenced article on the prewar German "Greens":
"It is frequently pointed out that the agrarian and romantic moments in Nazi ideology and policy were in constant tension with, if not in flat contradiction to, the technocratic-industrialist thrust of the Third Reich's rapid modernization. What is not often remarked is that even these modernizing tendencies had a significant ecological component. The two men principally responsible for sustaining this environmentalist commitment in the midst of intensive industrialization were Reichsminister Fritz Todt and his aide, the high-level planner and engineer Alwin Seifert.
Todt was "one of the most influential National Socialists," directly responsible for questions of technological and industrial policy. At his death in 1942 he headed three different cabinet-level ministries in addition to the enormous quasi-official Organisation Todt, and had "gathered the major technical tasks of the Reich into his own hands." According to his successor, Albert Speer, Todt "loved nature" and "repeatedly had serious run-ins with Bormann, protesting against his despoiling the landscape around Obersalzberg." Another source calls him simply "an ecologist." This reputation is based chiefly on Todt's efforts to make Autobahn construction—one of the largest building enterprises undertaken in this century—as environmentally sensitive as possible.
The pre-eminent historian of German engineering describes this commitment thus: "Todt demanded of the completed work of technology a harmony with nature and with the landscape, thereby fulfilling modern ecological principles of engineering as well as the 'organological' principles of his own era along with their roots in voelkisch ideology." The ecological aspects of this approach to construction went well beyond an emphasis on harmonious adaptation to the natural surroundings for aesthetic reasons; Todt also established strict criteria for respecting wetlands, forests and ecologically sensitive areas. But just as with Arndt, Riehl and Darre, these environmentalist concerns were inseparably bound to a voelkisch-nationalist outlook. Todt himself expressed this connection succinctly: "The fulfillment of mere transportation purposes is not the final aim of German highway construction. The German highway must be an expression of its surrounding landscape and an expression of the German essence."
Todt's chief advisor and collaborator on environmental issues was his lieutenant Alwin Seifert, whom Todt reportedly once called a "fanatical ecologist." Seifert bore the official title of Reich Advocate for the Landscape, but his nickname within the party was "Mr. Mother Earth." The appellation was deserved; Seifert dreamed of a "total conversion from technology to nature," and would often wax lyrical about the wonders of German nature and the tragedy of "humankind's" carelessness. As early as 1934 he wrote to Hess demanding attention to water issues and invoking "work methods that are more attuned to nature." In discharging his official duties Seifert stressed the importance of wilderness and energetically opposed monoculture, wetlands drainage and chemicalized agriculture. He criticized Darre as too moderate, and "called for an agricultural revolution towards 'a more peasant-like, natural, simple' method of farming, 'independent of capital'."
With the Third Reich's technological policy entrusted to figures such as these, even the Nazis' massive industrial build-up took on a distinctively green hue. The prominence of nature in the party's philosophical background helped ensure that more radical initiatives often received a sympathetic hearing in the highest offices of the Nazi state. In the mid-thirties Todt and Seifert vigorously pushed for an all-encompassing Reich Law for the Protection of Mother Earth "in order to stem the steady loss of this irreplaceable basis of all life." Seifert reports that all of the ministries were prepared to co-operate save one; only the minister of the economy opposed the bill because of its impact on mining.
But even near-misses such as these would have been unthinkable without the support of Reich Chancellor Rudolf Hess, who provided the "green wing" of the NSDAP a secure anchor at the very top of the party hierarchy. It would be difficult to overestimate Hess's power and centrality in the complex governmental machinery of the National Socialist regime. He joined the party in 1920 as member #16, and for two decades was Hitler's devoted personal deputy. He has been described as "Hitler's closest confidant," and the Fuehrer himself referred to Hess as his "closest advisor." Hess was not only the highest party leader and second in line (after Goering) to succeed Hitler; in addition, all legislation and every decree had to pass through his office before becoming law.
An inveterate nature lover as well as a devout Steinerite, Hess insisted on a strictly biodynamic diet—not even Hitler's rigorous vegetarian standards were good enough for him—and accepted only homeopathic medicines. It was Hess who introduced Darre to Hitler, thus securing the "green wing" its first power base. He was an even more tenacious proponent of organic farming than Darre, and pushed the latter to take more demonstrative steps in support of the lebensgesetzliche Landbauweise. His office was also directly responsible for land use planning across the Reich, employing a number of specialists who shared Seifert's ecological approach.
With Hess's enthusiastic backing, the "green wing" was able to achieve its most notable successes. As early as March 1933, a wide array of environmentalist legislation was approved and implemented at national, regional and local levels. These measures, which included reforestation programs, bills protecting animal and plant species, and preservationist decrees blocking industrial development, undoubtedly "ranked among the most progressive in the world at that time." Planning ordinances were designed for the protection of wildlife habitat and at the same time demanded respect for the sacred German forest. The Nazi state also created the first nature preserves in Europe.
Along with Darre's efforts toward re-agrarianization and support for organic agriculture, as well as Todt and Seifert's attempts to institutionalize an environmentally sensitive land use planning and industrial policy, the major accomplishment of the Nazi ecologists was the Reichsnaturschutzgesetz of 1935. This completely unprecedented "nature protection law" not only established guidelines for safeguarding flora, fauna, and "natural monuments" across the Reich; it also restricted commercial access to remaining tracts of wilderness. In addition, the comprehensive ordinance "required all national, state and local officials to consult with Naturschutz authorities in a timely manner before undertaking any measures that would produce fundamental alterations in the countryside."
Although the legislation's effectiveness was questionable, traditional German environmentalists were overjoyed at its passage. Walter Schoenichen declared it the "definitive fulfillment of the voelkisch-romantic longings," and Hans Klose, Schoenichen's successor as head of the Reich Agency for Nature Protection, described Nazi environmental policy as the "high point of nature protection" in Germany. Perhaps the greatest success of these measures was in facilitating the "intellectual realignment of German Naturschutz" and the integration of mainstream environmentalism into the Nazi enterprise."
Much more here
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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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Jim Hansen and his twin
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