Five biggest myths about global warming

With Al Gore getting so much mileage from his fame as both a former vice president and now Oscar winner to advance his ideological (if not personal) agenda of getting people to use less energy, it’s worth reviewing the global warming debate to clarify a few misconceptions.

First, we are not in imminent danger of massive sea-level rises. In his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore warns of seas rising by 20 feet, and shows a dramatic image of lower Manhattan flooded by the swollen Hudson River. But this will only happen if the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets disappear overnight—a highly unlikely event. The collected scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose word climate alarmists preach as gospel when convenient, estimates only 17 inches of sea-level rise this century. Melting sufficient to flood New York would take millennia, never mind centuries. We should have plenty of time to build flood defenses.

Second, if global warming is as big a threat as claimed, it will not be averted by minor steps like changing a few light bulbs, buying carbon offsets or driving hybrid cars. Gore himself has talked of a “wrenching transformation” in our lifestyles (I won’t mention his heated pool). That’s because everyone acknowledges that the Kyoto Protocol, even when fully and successfully implemented by all its parties, will avert a barely measurable 0.07°C of warming by 2050. To stop the more extreme estimates of warming, we would need something like 30 Kyotos. President Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto process because of its likely cost of $100 billion to $400 billion annually to the U.S. economy.

Third, some national security hawks argue that we must reduce American use of petroleum because it funds Middle Eastern terrorists. This argument is overblown. America actually imports more oil from Africa than it does from the Middle East, which supplies only about 20 percent of our oil imports. Yet the Middle East produces oil more cheaply than anywhere else. That means that, if we were to use less gasoline, it would be the more expensive producers, like Canada and those African states, that would be the first to be hit by falling demand. If that made production in those countries uneconomic, there’s actually a chance that our supply of gas from the Middle East would rise.

Fourth, polar bears are not becoming extinct as a result of decreasing Arctic ice. We know that polar bears have survived warmer periods in the past, so there is no reason to suspect they will suffer a threat of extinction now. The chief polar bear biologist for the Canadian province of Nunavut recently wrote: “Of the 13 populations of polar bears in Canada, 11 are stable or increasing in number. They are not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present.” Yet if the polar bear is listed as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act because of global warming, environmentalists will be able to block the new power stations and refineries the nation desperately needs.

Finally, the rest of the world is not waiting for America’s lead on climate change. Europe has attempted to put a price on carbon and has failed to reduce emissions because of its internal tensions. Measures attempted in Canada, Japan and New Zealand have also failed. China, India, and the G-77 group of developing nations have outright refused to accept any restriction on their emissions (China could overtake the U.S. as the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter later this year).

The rest of the world has two reasons for demanding American action: First, blaming America absolves them of responsibility and, second, emissions restrictions will hobble America’s economy, allowing the rest of the world to play catch-up.

For climate alarmists, these are harsh realities, inconvenient truths if you will. The global warming debate is rife with confusion and misunderstanding. As a thorough review of the implications of the science, economics and geopolitics of the debate shows, the supposed cure is worse than the disease.

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It's not pretty being green

THE LATEST CRAZE in architecture, after fizzled experiments in Modernism, Post Modernism, Brutalism, Deconstructionism, and Post-Brutal-Deconstructed-Neo-Modernism, is a genuflection to environmentalism called "Green Building" or "Sustainable Architecture." For the most part, building "Green" means cloaking an intrinsically inefficient high rise building in an ecological hair shirt that makes owners feel good and tenants feel miserable.

The latest example of Green Building has risen in San Francisco, where the city by the Bay has ripped apart one of the grittier parts of its foggy utopia to construct what is surely the most ridiculous building of our still young century: the poetically-named Federal Building. A unique combination of crackpot environmentalism and elaborate ugliness, the Federal Building will finally opens its doors (or flaps, or airlocks, or orifices, or something) later this month and it will boast a number of odd design "features." For instance, the Federal Building is an office tower tall enough to disrupt the city's skyline, yet its elevators only stop on every third floor--the better to conserve energy. And after trudging up and down the stairs on a blazing summer afternoon the unfortunate tenants soak in their own sweat because the building has no air conditioning . . . again to save energy.

Who could have conceived of such a thing? Imagine a hip West Coast architect who surrounds himself with turtle necked young designers and calls his firm Morphosis and you have Thom Mayne. A profile of Mayne in the San Francisco Chronicle included this telling insight: "Mayne doesn't see his work as ugly, for starters. He also seems honestly baffled by the Bay Area notion that new buildings should mimic the architectural character of their surroundings--or, as Mayne puts it, indulge in 'the anachronistic illusion of some other time.'"

With any luck, the Mayne event in San Francisco will be so notoriously bad that it will do for enviro-fundamentalism what the Tweed Courthouse did for corrupt government . . . that is, give it unmistakable form that provokes corrective action. Until then, federal employees by the Bay will have plenty of time to contemplate the consequences of global climate change while working in their very own greenhouse

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Why skepticism is sound

In the global warming debate the big issues is whether what human beings do contributes significantly to global warming. That global warming is occurring is not much in dispute, although some scientists do make a good deal of the point that there have been warming periods in the past, some of them far greater than those being recorded in our time. There has of course been steady global warming, on average, since as the earth evolved it was at certain early times covered with ice and quite uninhabitable by anything alive. Warming was a precondition to the emergence of life. But the warming never increased steadily and there have been periods of both, warming and cooling all along. Even after serious warming had commenced, there were long periods during which cold spells reemerged.

At this time, however, there is discernible warming, although the actual records-as distinct from computer projections-show only very small increases in the temperature of the earth. And in some places no warming is occurring at all. However, the history of temperature rise is not what concerns many of the skeptics about climate change. Nearly everyone agrees that there has been a rise recently. What is in dispute is (a) how much of an increase is likely to occur in the future and (b) whether human activities have had, are having, and will have a significant impact on global warming.

As to (a), the evidence is mixed and the more dire predictions are all based on several computer models combined with other computer models. And as the saying goes, "garbage in, garbage out." Here is the first place where skepticism occurs. Are those doing the modeling doing it right and can they actually be trusted to do it right? Is the science and technology on which modeling is based itself-and the scientists themselves-reliable?

Given that global warming research now consists of a mostly government subsidized industry across the globe, including the United Nations, with millions of dollars in grants going to those doing work in the field, there is understandable concern about whether those involved are stacking the deck in favor of a Doomsday scenario. It is often noted by private industry research critics that profit can corrupt research but the same is hardly ever noted in mainstream circles about government subsidized research. Furthermore, skeptics well understand that without a scare, there are fewer funds forthcoming. Government funding requires, ultimately, political support and such support relies heavily on a concerned, even frightened constituency. No Doomsday scenario, no concerned citizenry, and no allocation of funds obtained via taxation.

But there is more. In my own community the rangers put warnings out each day about fire hazards, ranging from "moderate" to "extremely high." Interestingly, the "moderate" sign is displayed even if it is pouring rain. In the ten years I have lived here, there hasn't been a fire. Yet the "extremely high" has been displayed (by my assessment) routinely roughly 70% of the year. It is a tendency of those assigned to be on the lookout to exaggerate hazards. Vigilance calls for it, as they see their jobs.

As to the human factor, here the skeptics are often concerned about what may be dubbed (following a book by that title by Jonathan R. T. Hughes) the governmental habit-if global warming were unrelated to human activity, there isn't a lot that politicians and bureaucrats could promise to do about it. Or, alternatively, if the best approach to encouraging responsible human conduct would be to leave politicians out of the picture and simply deploy various measures banning or containing what economists call negative externalities-bad side effects from normal productive processes-that, too, would leave the politicians out of the picture. And then what would they do, how would they gain the power most of them hunger for? There is, then, a strong probability that Doomsday scenarios will be projected by government officials and all those who work for them-get financial support, appointments to prestigious committees, invited to plush conferences, etc., etc.

So when one puts together the lack of solid science and technology behind the claim that global warming is imminent and that human conduct significantly contributes to the probable global warming, the attitude of skepticism is most reasonable. Or, to put it differently, how reasonable is it to trust politicians about their need for increased powers over the rest of us?

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A Milestone of a Mistake: Inconvenient CAFE Truths

Demands for tighter auto fuel-economy standards are a major part of the global-warming bandwagon, and the newly unveiled Markey-Platts bill on auto fuel economy is being touted by environmentalists as a "bipartisan milestone" on the issue. Unfortunately, it's a milestone of a mistake. It continues a central tradition of proponents of this program, known as CAFE (for corporate average fuel economy)-namely, never admit that CAFE has any impact on auto safety.

In fact, CAFE is a well-established killer of a regulation, because it restricts the production of larger, more crashworthy vehicles. According to the National Academy of Sciences 2002 study of CAFE, this downsizing effect contributes to about 2,000 deaths per year-a huge toll for a program that's been in effect for three decades.

But according to the Markey-Platts bill, the NAS study "clearly states that fuel economy can be increased without negatively impacting the safety of America's cars and trucks". Actually, the study doesn't say that at all. It does suggest that new technology can allow CAFE to be increased without further downsizing, but that's quite a bit different from say CAFE will stop killing people. The NAS study does not conclude that new technology will allow a reversal of the downsizing that's already occurred under CAFE. Second, the study never addresses the more fundamental point that more stringent standards would very likely restrict the upsizing of the new-vehicle fleet. That upsizing-an increase in average vehicle size and weight-is something that many consumers will want if (or, more likely, when) gas prices stabilize or fall in the future. The more stringent the CAFE standards are, the less the auto industry will be able to respond to that demand.

In short, more stringent CAFE standards will be even more deadly than the current ones, and the NAS report is no basis for pretending otherwise.

The Markey-Platts bill is also notable for citing the work of an Oak Ridge researcher, David Greene, for the proposition that "fuel economy is not linked with increased fatalities." That may sound impressive, since David Greene was a member of the NAS committee that produced the 2002 report. But Greene, it turns out, dissented from the committee's finding that CAFE kills people.

The most notable finding of the NAS CAFE report was that CAFE was one very deadly program. It's strange that Reps. Markey and Platt try to wrap their bill in the prestige of that report, while at the same time ducking its finding that CAFE kills.

Strange, but to be expected. In all the years that CEI has been involved in this issue, we've never found a single proponent of CAFE who would admit that it kills anyone. That tradition, it appears, is still going strong. You can bet that as the push for tighter CAFE standards accelerates under the global warming debate, this dubious tradition will get even stronger.

Demands for tighter auto fuel-economy standards are a major part of the global-warming bandwagon, and the newly unveiled Markey-Platts bill on auto fuel economy is being touted by environmentalists as a "bipartisan milestone" on the issue. Unfortunately, it's a milestone of a mistake. It continues a central tradition of proponents of this program, known as CAFE (for corporate average fuel economy)-namely, never admit that CAFE has any impact on auto safety.

In fact, CAFE is a well-established killer of a regulation, because it restricts the production of larger, more crashworthy vehicles. According to the National Academy of Sciences 2002 study of CAFE, this downsizing effect contributes to about 2,000 deaths per year-a huge toll for a program that's been in effect for three decades.

But according to the Markey-Platts bill, the NAS study "clearly states that fuel economy can be increased without negatively impacting the safety of America's cars and trucks". Actually, the study doesn't say that at all. It does suggest that new technology can allow CAFE to be increased without further downsizing, but that's quite a bit different from say CAFE will stop killing people. The NAS study does not conclude that new technology will allow a reversal of the downsizing that's already occurred under CAFE. Second, the study never addresses the more fundamental point that more stringent standards would very likely restrict the upsizing of the new-vehicle fleet. That upsizing-an increase in average vehicle size and weight-is something that many consumers will want if (or, more likely, when) gas prices stabilize or fall in the future. The more stringent the CAFE standards are, the less the auto industry will be able to respond to that demand.

In short, more stringent CAFE standards will be even more deadly than the current ones, and the NAS report is no basis for pretending otherwise.

The Markey-Platts bill is also notable for citing the work of an Oak Ridge researcher, David Greene, for the proposition that "fuel economy is not linked with increased fatalities." That may sound impressive, since David Greene was a member of the NAS committee that produced the 2002 report. But Greene, it turns out, dissented from the committee's finding that CAFE kills people.

The most notable finding of the NAS CAFE report was that CAFE was one very deadly program. It's strange that Reps. Markey and Platt try to wrap their bill in the prestige of that report, while at the same time ducking its finding that CAFE kills.

Strange, but to be expected. In all the years that CEI has been involved in this issue, we've never found a single proponent of CAFE who would admit that it kills anyone. That tradition, it appears, is still going strong. You can bet that as the push for tighter CAFE standards accelerates under the global warming debate, this dubious tradition will get even stronger.

Source




Global cooling "Light snow dusted parts of the upper Midwest yesterday, a day after a storm grounded hundreds of flights and coated roads with ice, leaving six people dead. Some areas of northern Illinois reported up to 6in (15cm) of snow on Wednesday. Another inch to 1.5in (3.8cm) of snow was expected yesterday morning. The snowfall recorded at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago was 3in (7.6cm), which surpassed the April 11, 1957 record of 2.3in (5.8cm). Milwaukee also broke a snowfall record for the date with 7in (18cm). North Dakota and South Dakota had snowfalls of a similar depth. More than 550 flights were cancelled at O’Hare airport because of poor visibility. Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport also suffered delays and cancellations"

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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 generally 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

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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