Even the L.A. Times does not like the California car-maker prosecutions

Editorial below:

The charitable spin on Bill Lockyer's lawsuit against major auto manufacturers is that it's a politically inspired, headline-grabbing stunt by a state attorney general running for state treasurer. The alternative - that he might actually believe this suit has legal merit - may be more frightening.

Lockyer's suit against the Big Six auto companies alleges that because vehicle exhaust contributes to global warming, the companies should be held financially liable for everything from wildfires to a bad ski season.

The suit is the latest salvo fired in the struggle between the state and the auto industry, which has separately sued the state over its attempts to curb global warming. But California shouldn't be in the business of filing meritless suits to gain leverage in other cases.

For Lockyer, this is hardly a first. He joined several other states two years ago to file an almost identical lawsuit over the emission of greenhouse gases by power companies. That suit was rejected by the courts; the states are appealing. The judge zeroed in neatly on the problem at hand: Fighting global warming is a complex regulatory job that belongs to the legislative and executive branches. Once laws are in place, companies that break those laws should be made to pay. But holding law-abiding companies liable for the government's past failures is another matter.

It's true that Congress and the Bush administration have irresponsibly shirked their responsibility on this matter, and a separate, legitimate lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court brought by California and several other states is seeking to force the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. The federal government's lack of action was also a major factor in the Legislature's recent passage of AB 32, which sets the stage for reducing greenhouse gases 25% by 2020. These responses to federal inaction are appropriate; frivolous, extortion-style lawsuits against car makers are not. Lockyer's new lawsuit against auto makers is akin to suing fishermen for depleting the ocean, even when they stick scrupulously to fishing quotas.

Lockyer contends that vehicle emissions - even legal emissions - are an illegal public nuisance partly responsible for a lower snowpack, wildfires and a host of other ills, current and potential. But liability here is a dicey thing to prove. Studies link warming to worsening Western drought, but that says little about any individual fire. If an arsonist sets a match to dry brush, who is at fault, the criminal or the Camry?

Global warming is, well, global. If the ocean level rises or trees die in the forest, how much of the responsibility belongs to a car sold in the U.S. and how much to the dirty Chinese coal plant or deforestation in South America? Presumably, the driver of a Hummer is more liable than the driver of an electric vehicle - as long as the battery isn't recharged using energy produced by a polluting power plant.

Lockyer is right about the threat posed by climate change and our society's responsibility to stem the trend. But in this case, he has mounted a silly legal battle that trivializes a serious problem.

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Global warming: time for a heated debate

Al Gore's dogmatic documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" embodies the worst possible response to climate change.

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore presents himself as prophet rather than politician. The former American vice-president uses the documentary to preach what he believes is the only legitimate view on climate change. He implies that anyone who deviates from The Truth According to Gore is – literally – corrupt, insane or possibly hates their children.

Gore’s gospel on global warming rests on two related key claims. On the science he says the debate about humanity’s impact on the climate is over: ‘The scientific consensus is that we are causing global warming.’ To the extent there are any heretics, he argues that they are either the oil industry’s paid lackeys or its stooges in the Bush administration.

His second claim is that climate change is a moral rather than a political issue. By this he means that there is no room for debate about solutions to the problem. The only appropriate measures involve curbing emissions of greenhouse gases and reducing the human impact on the planet. The credits at the end of the film are interspersed with suggestions for human action, including driving less, recycling more and using less hot water. Those who want to know more are referred to www.ClimateCrisis.net. The backing track to this peculiar ending is Melissa Etheridge’s ‘I need to wake up’.

The documentary is built around a slide show on climate change that Gore has given over a thousand times to audiences around the world. It includes images of lines on graphs rising precipitously, huge chunks of ice crashing off melting glaciers, drowning polar bears, and floods obliterating some of the world’s largest urban centres. There are also interludes on Gore’s life story, including his son being seriously injured in a car crash, his sister dying of lung cancer, and the failed presidential bid in 2000. The purpose of these biographical elements seems to be to show how The Truth was gradually revealed to Gore.

He certainly has no doubts about his own importance. The trailer for the documentary states: ‘If you love the planet, if you love your children, you have to see this film.’ Presumably those who fail to watch the movie are, at the very least, guilty of not loving their children. It does not specify what should be done to those who watch the film and disagree with it, but, given Gore’s intolerance to criticism, they must be risking eternal damnation.

Unfortunately for Gore there are good reasons to question the fundamental tenets of his faith. His account of the scientific consensus on climate change is willfully misleading. There is much about the science that is still debated and much that is simply not yet known. To the extent that there are problems caused by climate change there are other strategies to deal with it besides his favoured approach of mitigation.

Gore presents his arguments as thoroughly grounded in science. He quotes an extensive study of peer-reviewed journal articles on climate changes, which concluded that global warming is happening and humanity has played a role in creating it. In the film Gore refers to those who disagree with this view as ‘so-called sceptics’ – although if they are not genuine sceptics it is unclear what he is suggesting. In an interview in Metro, a free London newspaper, he went even further, actually questioning the sanity of those who take a different view: ‘Fifteen per cent of the population believe the Moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona and somewhat fewer still believe the Earth is flat. I think they all get together with the global warming deniers on a Saturday night and party.’

Yet the apparent scientific consensus behind Gore’s approach is based on a sneaky statistical sleight of hand. Although scientists generally agree that the Earth is warming, and humans have had an influence, there is a lot more to climate science than this insight.

Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that some arguments have never been widely contested: the Earth’s average temperature has risen by about 0.6 degrees Celsius over the past century, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen substantially, and such carbon dioxide can act as a greenhouse gas. But many of the more specific points on climate change are still the subjects of debate, and many others are simply not yet understood. As Lindzen argues, we do not yet understand the natural variability of climate change so it is hard to properly assess the human contribution to warming. The Earth’s climate is an immensely complex system.

Gore takes a worst-case scenario on climate change – to support his argument that if we do not curb emissions immediately we will suffer a catastrophic crisis – and presents it as the scientific consensus. For example, Lindzen points out, in contradiction to Gore, that ‘the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940, that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average’. Many other of Gore’s specific claims on climate change are also contested.

But even if climate change is a serious threat to humanity, it does not follow that Gore’s approach is the only possible solution, let alone the best. On the negative side, curbing carbon emissions, sometimes referred to as mitigation, has substantial disadvantages. Since fossil fuels are still by far the cheapest and most widely available form of energy, cutting back on emissions is likely to have severe economic consequences. Over time it is likely this technology will improve and others will play a larger role, but until this happens curbing emissions could damage existing economic capacity. It is even more of a problem for developing countries, since it makes it harder for them to industrialise.

Gore caricatures such concerns in An Inconvenient Truth as a love of money. He shows a picture of gold bars and says there should be no choice between them and ‘the entire planet’. Members of the privileged elite such as Gore often seem to find it easy to decry affluence – he is the son of a senator, attended an elite private school and went on to Harvard. But for literally billions of people, economic growth is essential if they are to achieve a decent standard of living.

Fortunately, mitigation is not the only possible way of responding to climate change. Another possible response is adaptation. This can involve such measures as building modern flood defences, constructing new buildings away from areas at or below sea level, and developing new types of crops. Given that climate change is a relatively long-term process there are all sorts of measures that could be taken to adapt to its effects.

More ambitiously there is the possibility of geo-engineering. As Joe Kaplinsky has argued previously on spiked, weather modification was considered a possibility by many scientists in the years after the Second World War: ‘There have been a number of proposals put forward for climate engineering. The simplest idea is to inject dust into the upper atmosphere using artillery shells or aircraft. The dust would then scatter some of the sun’s rays back into space, cooling off the Earth. Another proposal is to add iron to the oceans, which would suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere by encouraging algae to grow.’ Sadly, such proposals, let alone even more high technology ones, have generally not been pursued as a result of hostility by environmentalists. It is ironic that environmentalists, who claim to be concerned about the impact of climate change on humanity, stand in the way of such solutions.

Gore, unfortunately, is not a prophet in the wilderness. Many of the few remaining politicians and media outlets that once expressed scepticism about curbing carbon emissions – mainly conservatives – are joining the consensus. For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s Republican governor, has come round to Gore’s way of thinking. California has become the first American state to legislate for cuts in greenhouse gas emission. In France, President Jacques Chirac is supporting a ‘solidarity tax’ to be levied on air travellers. And in Germany the conservatives and Greens have joined forces to run Frankfurt’s local government. In Britain, the new Conservative leader, David Cameron, has adopted the slogan ‘Vote Blue, Go Green’ and has visited the Arctic to see the impact of climate change. Even The Economist, which for a long time took a sceptical line on climate change, has modified its stance.

Now more than ever there is a need for a genuine debate on climate change. Climate scientists should be free to do research without interference or misrepresentation by politicians. It is an immensely complicated field which should conform to the highest possible scientific standards. Meanwhile, the role for politicians should be to debate the best possible policy responses to climate change. Such initiatives need to take into account the costs of mitigation and the possibilities of other approaches to dealing with global warming. The dogmatic attitude embodied in An Inconvenient Truth is the biggest obstacle to finding a solution to the problem.

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Hey! How come global warming does not get a mention below?

When major catastrophes strike, like the recent Asian earthquake and tsunami, the mass deaths can lead one to think that natural disasters are the most likely way people can die. Not by a long shot. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, the leading causes of death in the United States are, in this order, heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, and "accidental injury," a broad category that includes a lot of stuff that just happens. You are more likely to commit suicide or fall to your death than be killed by a tsunami or any natural disaster, the odds say.

In less advanced countries, where residents often live in poverty and huddle near the sea or in poorly constructed houses, tsunamis, floods and earthquakes are a more looming threat. But even in such locales, there are far greater risks over the course of a lifetime.

There are no formal estimates on the risk of death by tsunami, because they occur so infrequently. About 2,200 died in a Papua New Guinea tsunami in 1998; roughly 8,000 in the Philippines in 1976, about 120 in Hawaii and California in 1964. You have to go back to 1896 -- 27,000 deaths in Japan -- to find one that even approached the 150,000-plus scale of the Asian disaster on Dec. 26, 2004.

Michael Paine, of the Planetary Society Australian Volunteers, monitors and calculates risks of low-frequency events like asteroid impacts and tsunamis. He estimates the odds of a tsunami being the average coastal dweller's cause of death, globally speaking, are around 1-in-50,000. For the average citizen in the United States, given that many don't live near the coast, the chances are 1-in-500,000 or even perhaps less likely. Paine stressed this is a very rough estimate. The real odds drop to zero, of course, if you live in the mountains and never visit the shore.

In fact, that sort of risk management -- intentional or not -- goes for many things. Frequent flyers are more likely to die in a plane crash than someone who never flies. A Californian is at greater risk from earthquakes than someone in Minnesota.

Overall, global deaths from sudden natural disasters -- things Nature dishes out over moments, hours or days -- have been on the decline in recent years, with the exception of 2003 and 2004. Officials credit better warnings and swifter response to help victims.

In 2003, the last year for which worldwide deaths have been tabulated by the Red Cross, natural disasters killed 76,000 people. The figure was skewed by two events: a heat wave in Europe that overcame more than 22,000 and an earthquake in Iran that killed upwards of 30,000. (Earthquakes kill roughly 10,000 people every year, on average.)

The previous ten years saw an average of 62,000 global deaths per year from natural disasters. That's far less than the tolls taken by famine, disease and war.

Communicable diseases kill millions of people every year (13.3 million 1998, according to the World Health Organization). In sub-Saharan Africa last year, AIDS killed about two million people, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. Even more died because of bad water or sanitation systems. In Kenya, AIDS deaths are "equivalent to two 747 jets crashing every day," stated a recent Red Cross report. Another study estimated that 3.3 million people died due to war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo from 1998 to 2002. More than three-quarters of the deaths owed to diseases and malnutrition resulting from the fighting.

Globally, violence is a leading killer. It accounts for 14 percent of all deaths among males and 7 percent among females, according to a 2003 analysis by the World Heath Organization. On an average day, 1,424 people are murdered. Somebody commits suicide every 40 seconds.

Perceptions of risk factors can change over time simply because more is learned. The chances of an Earth-impacting asteroid killing you have dropped dramatically, for example, from about 1-in-20,000 in 1994 to something like 1-in-200,000 or 1-in-500,000 today. The new numbers -- their range reflecting the need for further research -- were offered up last week by Clark Chapman of the Southwest Research Institute and David Morrison at NASA's Ames Research Center. Why such a dramatic downgrade? Active intervention. "A significant part of it is that we have now discovered, in the last dozen years, a good fraction of the largest, most deadly asteroids and found that they won't hit the Earth," Chapman told LiveScience.

Also, projections of the destruction a large space rock would cause have been revised downward a bit. Finally, since Earth is two-thirds water, asteroid risks include the possibility of an impact-induced tsunami. And Chapman says asteroid-generated tsunamis may not be as deadly as once presumed....

More here




Australian PM defends the Brethren against the Greens

The Brethren have rightly identified and publicized the Australian Green Party as anti-Christian far-Leftists and the Greens hate them for it

The beliefs of the Exclusive Brethren Christian sect, which includes a refusal to vote, should be respected, Prime Minister John Howard said today. The sect has been criticised, particularly by the Greens, in recent times for its alleged activities in elections but Mr Howard says he has seen more fanatical groups in his time.

"The Exclusive Brethren as an organisation within the law, a Christian sect, is entitled to put its view," Mr Howard told ABC Radio. "I did make the observation that I've met a lot more fanatical people in my life than the Exclusive Brethren. "They have a different, a more disciplined, perhaps some would say a more narrow interpretation of the Christian religion than others, but I respect their right to have (this interpretation)."

Mr Howard, who yesterday said he had met with the group, said the more unorthodox views of the sect, such as not voting, did not means its members should be vilified. "I have to say that strikes me as what you might call an unorthodox Christian ... it strikes me as a little unusual, but that is their right and it should be respected," he said. "It shouldn't be the subject of some vilification campaign against them."

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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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