Do They Believe the Hype?

Post below lifted from Taranto. See the original for links

This column is highly skeptical of global warmism, and we wonder if those who claim to believe in it really do. An example of why is this BusinessWeek story titled "Clinton Sees Opportunity in Climate Woes." That's Hillary Clinton, of course:

Global warming hits particularly hard at the poor, she said. "One in four low-income families have already missed a mortgage or rent payment because of rising energy costs," Clinton said.

This is a complete non sequitur. Rising energy costs are supposed to be a solution to global warming, not a problem caused by it. What's more, if temperatures rise in winter, that ought to reduce the amount of money low-income families would have to spend heating their homes. Mrs. Clinton seems to be invoking "global warming" here just as a politically correct slogan, devoid of meaning.
Higher oil prices, by the way, don't necessarily mean less carbon dioxide emissions. Bloomberg reminds us that there are other fuels:

Now that the price of coal is at a historic low relative to oil, there's no stopping consumers and producers alike from embracing Al Gore's nightmare. A ton of U.S. coal is so cheap at about $47 that European utilities will pay $50 to ship it across the Atlantic, according to Galbraith's Ltd., a 263-year-old London shipbroker. While oil and coal cost the same as recently as 1998, West Texas Intermediate crude is five times more expensive after climbing to a record $96.24 on Nov. 1.

Peabody Energy Corp., Consol Energy Inc. and Arch Coal Inc., the three biggest U.S. coal companies, forecast the largest increase in exports in 20 years, degrading the call for a moratorium on coal plants by former U.S. Vice President and this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore. Coal use worldwide has grown 27 percent since 2002, three times faster than crude, said BP Plc. U.S. East Coast coal has risen 71 percent, while oil tripled on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Most sources of energy involve burning something and thereby generating CO2. The big exception is nuclear power, but by and large fear of global warming isn't enough to overcome environmentalists' fear of the atom--which leads us to think that they don't take global warming all that seriously.




Another crooked opinion poll

No. It's not the AP again. This time it's the BBC -- which is not much of a surprise, sadly. Post below lifted from Monkey Tennis

The BBC is trumpeting the results of a poll it commissioned, which, it claims, shows that "most people are ready to make personal sacrifices to address climate change". Its report on the poll says:

Four out of five people indicated they were prepared to change their lifestyle – even in the US and China, the world's two biggest emitters of carbon dioxide.

and…

BBC environment reporter Matt McGrath says the poll suggests that in many countries people are more willing than their governments to contemplate serious changes to their lifestyles to combat global warming.

22,000 people in 21 countries were interviewed for the poll, and the figures given for the UK respondents were fairly representative of those for all countries, with more than 80 per cent agreeing that lifestyle changes were 'probably' or 'definitely' necessary.

Strange, then, that a separate poll conducted in Britain and reported on by Reuters a couple of days earlier produced very different findings:

Warnings about the effects of climate change have made most Britons aware of the crisis, but few are willing to make major changes to the way they live, a survey showed on Friday.

[…]

The survey, the sixth since 1986, found that six out of 10 people said they knew a lot or a fair amount about climate change and many were willing to do something to help.

But nearly half declared they would not make changes that impinged on their lifestyles and less than three in 10 said they had switched to using a more fuel-efficient car, cut car usage or taken fewer flights.

This doesn't quite square with "most people are ready to make personal sacrifices" does it? And here's a third poll on the same subject, reported in the same Reuters story:

A separate consumer survey found people over 50 – among the most climate-aware and affluent group – were deeply suspicious of any government move to raise green taxes, viewing it as a money-making mechanism.

[…]

The survey by Millennium, an agency specialising in marketing to the mature, found 84 percent believed the government was capitalising on climate fears to raise funds and also found little willingness among respondents to change lifestyles much – if at all – to benefit the environment.

Not only does the BBC's poll contradict two others taken at around the same time with regard to attitudes to 'climate change' in the UK, it also suggests there's been a dramatic change in opinion since the BBC reported on another independent poll back in July:

The public believes the effects of global warming on the climate are not as bad as politicians and scientists claim, a poll has suggested.

[…]

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

But hang on a minute – here's yet another poll, which the BBC reported on in September, and which seems much more in tune with the findings of the BBC-commissioned poll we kicked off with – and funnily enough, it was also commissioned by the BBC:

Large majorities in many countries now believe human activity is causing global warming, a BBC World Service poll suggests.

[…]

An average of 79% of respondents to the BBC survey agreed that "human activity, including industry and transportation, is a significant cause of climate change".

Nine out of 10 people said action was necessary, with two-thirds of people going further, saying "it is necessary to take major steps starting very soon".

Again, while people in various countries were interviewed for this poll, the results for the British respondents were about par for the course.

In case you're becoming confused – I know I am – here's a quick recap: we have three independent polls suggesting that Britons are either ambivalent or skeptical about whether climate change is a real problem, and highly skeptical about the motives of those who demand action; and we have two polls commissioned by the BBC which suggest that Britons, along with the rest of the world, are not only fully on board with the threat of climate change, but are prepared to endure tough measures to tackle the problem.

Both BBC polls were conducted by GlobeScan and PIPA – The Program on International Policy Issues. And lest anyone be thinking that these must be independent organisations, with no axe to grind and no vested interest in the outcome of the polls they conduct, here's Globescan President Doug Miller commenting on the BBC's September poll:

…Miller said growing awareness of global warming had awoken people's self-interest.

"The impacts of erratic weather on their property, on their person, on their country is tangible and real to people across the world."

He said "the strength of the findings makes it difficult to imagine a more supportive public opinion environment for national leaders to commit to climate action".

Note that Miller isn't commenting on the findings of the poll, as a spokesman for Mori might, but is giving his personal opinion on the subject, making it clear that he regards global warming and its consequences as a given.

The 'Core Practice Areas' listed on GlobeScan's website include Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Community Affairs, and the site features a photo of the Earth taken from space. I think we get the message.

As for PIPA, the list of 'Recent Studies' displayed on its website tells you everything you need to know. When it's not producing anti-American, anti-war or pro-climate hysteria polls for the BBC, it's producing reports such as 'Less than Half of Pakistani Public Supports Attacking Al Qaeda, Cracking Down on Fundamentalists' (in collaboration with the US Institute of Peace), and 'Muslims Believe US Seeks to Undermine Islam'.

Far from employing politically neutral organisations to carry out its polls, the BBC is working with two groups which entirely share its soft-left, but potentially very dangerous, view of the world and its ills. Pollsters are, of course, masters in the art of manipulating both their subjects and their data to get the results they want – and in the unlikely event that the BBC doesn't get the results it wants, it's a master of twisting the facts to suit the narrative: witness the poll it commissioned which purported to show that most Iraqis thought the Surge had failed, the findings of which were released to coincide with the Petraeus/Crocker testimony to Congress.

It's possible that the findings of the BBC's polls are accurate, and that the independent polls mentioned above, along with others, are flawed, but it's a remarkable coincidence that the BBC is able to produce poll after poll which suggests that the whole world thinks exactly what its news reports tell them to.




Our Moderate Climate Crisis

Ours is a truly strange global warming crisis. The warming has been only about 0.7§ C, spread over 150 years. Our ancestors lived through much more dramatic climate changes. Just 10,000 years ago, insect fossils tell us, air temperatures dropped as much as 20§ C over a few centuries. Then temperatures zoomed back up to levels warmer than today in perhaps 50 years, according to Dr. Dorothy Peteet of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York. That period, at the end of the last major Ice Age, was also when humans killed off the last of the massive cave bears--because we wanted their caves. The caves were the best-insulated places for humans to live, so hunters risked their lives to attack the groups of massive bears with nothing more than stone-tipped spears.

We are told that the mild crisis of the Modern Warming is due to human-emitted carbon dioxide (CO2). However, about 70 percent of this warming occurred before 1940, before big industries and automobile sales. That pre-1940 warming was almost certainly due to the natural, solar-linked 1,500-year cycle researchers have found recently in ice cores, seabed sediments, and fossil pollen.

After 1940, global temperatures dropped for 35 years before resuming an upward trend from 1976 to 1998. The net warming since 1940 is a tiny 0.2§ C. We can blame humans for half of that, because the 1,500-year cycle is still affecting the picture. That makes Al Gore's inconvenient truth a human-driven warming of 0.1§ C over 65 years. That's less than 2/1000th of a degree per year.

Meanwhile, the climate-forcing impact of atmospheric CO2 has been declining rapidly. The laws of physics tell us the first 40 parts per million of human-added CO2, back in the 1940s, had more climate-forcing power than the next 360 ppm. Today's radically weakened CO2 effect cannot possibly drive Al Gore's predicted 20-foot sea-level rise and parboil the planet with auto exhaust.

None of the CO2 has been as potent as the greenhouse computer models claimed it would be. Climate modeler James Hansen of NASA told Congress in 1988 that by the year 2000 the Earth would have warmed another 0.3§ C and sea levels would have risen several feet. Reality has been much more moderate. The temperatures in 2000 were only 0.1§ warmer, and sea level has risen just one inch.

We've had no global warming at all over the past eight years, so the near-zero correlation between the Earth's temperatures and CO2 levels has been getting even weaker. The CO2 levels have continued to rise in linear fashion, but temperatures have remained stable. The strong correlation between our temperatures and sunspots, meanwhile, continues to get stronger. This points to the sun as the most significant driving force in our recent climate change.

There is simply no reason to believe the computerized climate models, as they already have demonstrated their capacity to be radically wrong. On the contrary, it is time to acknowledge the physical and historical evidence of a moderate, natural 1,500-year climate cycle linked to the sun. That cycle tells us we will continue to enjoy a slow, sunny, erratic warming through the next few centuries--which is far better than the alternative of another harsh, cloudy, unstable Little Ice Age. George Washington and his veterans, who suffered through that chilly time at Valley Forge, would have cast their votes for warming.

Source





WHERE COOLER HEADS PREVAIL

Is there really anything new to be said about climate change? Hasn't the issue become the public-policy equivalent of Groundhog Day, with the same arguments playing out in the same way every week?

Perhaps there is. The weary and repetitive character of the climate-change debate is masking a number of fundamental changes now taking place that, 20 or 30 years from now, are likely to be recognized as the turning point on the issue. Despite the relentless media and advocacy-group frenzy, the case for catastrophic global warming is fraying around the edges. The alarmists have found themselves suddenly hoisted by their own petard, as the latest massive report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noticeably reined in its predictions of future doom and gloom (less sea-level rise, lower temperature rise, admissions of serious problems in its climate models, and so forth). Having thumped skeptics about ignoring the IPCC-certified "consensus," the alarmists are now criticizing the IPCC for being "too conservative." Increasingly it appears that the problem of climate change is likely to be more modest and manageable than the heated rhetoric would have you imagine, just as the apocalyptic 1960s predictions of the "population bomb" turned out to be wrong.

It is increasingly apparent even to the Kyoto Protocol's European cheerleaders that the Kyoto approach is a dead end. Meanwhile, up on Capitol Hill, the new Democratic leadership talks a big game on climate change, but is considering only the most modest of measures, which, if eventually brought to a vote, will probably degenerate into another pork-fest and subsidy game. Seldom if ever has there been a larger gap between the rhetoric and the legislation being considered. It's as if Lincoln and the Republicans of the 1850s had said: "Slavery is evil; therefore let us adopt tax incentives, impose a few regulations on slave auctions, and subsidize the production of new farm equipment."

The alarmists say the lack of dramatic action (such as, for instance, a 50% to 70% cut in greenhouse emissions over the next 40 years) is due to the opposition of the "denial industry" and fossil-fuel interests, but this is a convenient fiction. The real problem is that no one is willing to enact measures with the gargantuan costs that would be involved. Eventually even environmentalists are going to come to see that global warming is the issue that ate them alive. And policymakers are going to begin looking at alternative perspectives on how to deal with the actual problems of climate change.

This is where Bjorn Lomborg comes in. Lomborg burst on the scene in 2001 with The Skeptical Environmentalist, pointing out that the data do not support the familiar green "litany" of planet-wide calamity. For this heresy, environmentalists have predictably compared him to Holocaust deniers and worse. He followed up this effort with the "Copenhagen Consensus," an ambitious convocation of top social scientists (including several Nobel laureates) that aimed at ranking global priorities such as AIDS, malnutrition, water supplies and climate change. No matter how the methodology was sliced up, climate change came in last on the list. For this, the head of the IPCC compared Lomborg to Hitler. "What is the difference between Lomborg's view on humans and Hitler's?" the IPCC's Rajendra Pachauri said to a Danish newspaper in 2004. "If you were to accept Lomborg's way of thinking, then maybe what Hitler did was the right thing."

Having already resorted to the exhausted reductio ad Hitlerum, environmentalists will be hard-pressed for new invective to use against Cool It, Lomborg's new book focusing exclusively on climate change. Notwithstanding Lomborg's major concession that "global warming is real and man-made" and is "beyond debate," environmentalists will not be happy. Lomborg questions "whether hysteria and headlong spending on extravagant CO2-cutting programs at an unprecedented price is the only possible response." Any competent economist can tell you that deep CO2 reductions fail every cost-benefit test; this is true even of economists, such as Yale's William Nordhaus, who accept the catastrophic-global-warming scenario.

Environmentalists, along with most liberals, snort at cost-benefit analysis -- an attitude best expressed by a full-page advertisement in The New York Times several years ago from environmental "archdruid" David Brower that bore the headline: "Economics Is a Form of Brain Damage." The virtue of Cool It is that Lomborg effectively translates the aseptic language of cost-benefit analysis into persuasive plain English (for wonks, a longer and more technical version of Cool It is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press).

Consider the case of a persistent cause of more than 1.2 million deaths, 50 million injuries and a half-trillion dollars in damages worldwide every year. Then ponder that a simple policy change could eliminate nearly all of this harm. The cause: automobile accidents. The remedy: Lower the speed limit to five miles per hour. But of course no nation would ever do this, because it would make us so much poorer. The benefits of auto use outweigh the risks, such that we don't even consider a modest reduction in speed limits, which studies show would significantly reduce auto-accident casualties. Instead, we invest in safer highways, air bags, seat belts and other means to reduce the human cost of driving.

The use of fossil fuels presents the same tradeoff. As Lomborg states, "the benefits from moderately using fossil fuels vastly outweigh the costs." If anything, Lomborg understates this point. The tradeoff for arguably increasing the average global temperature by 0.6 degrees in the 20th century has been nearly a doubling in life expectancy, a huge decline in infant mortality, and the steadily increasing spread of middle-class prosperity across the planet's population. Does anyone outside the tiny ranks of environmental extremists really wish we had not made this progress, which depended vitally on cheap energy? Acknowledging this calculus is environmentally incorrect, but it is the silent ground upon which practical policymakers will build policy. There simply is no near-term, large-scale alternative to fossil fuels. Deal with it.

Some climate skeptics will criticize Lomborg for conceding too much about the certainty of our knowledge of human-caused climate change. But he is doing an important service in changing the dynamics of the debate. And if it turns out that some or all of the warming we experience is the result of natural factors, then Lomborg's adaptation strategy will be all the more important. By the end of Cool It, Lomborg has neatly turned the tables on the emotional rhetoric of the alarmists: "I hope that in 40 years we will not have to tell our kids that we went for a long series of essentially unsuccessful command-and-control Kyotos that had little or no effect on the climate, but left them poorer and less able to deal with problems of the future."

Lomborg thinks we should aim at modest reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions, invest heavily in energy research, and devote resources to adapting to changing conditions. Eventually, policymakers throughout the world are going to come around to Lomborg's point of view (indeed they already are, if the tenor of the recent APEC meeting in Australia is any indication), though they will do so kicking and screaming and with multiple genuflections toward the alarmist totems. Al Gore and other true believers won't ever be persuaded, but one day, perhaps not long from now, they are going to wake up to discover that the world has passed them by.

Source






The all-purpose scapegoat again: NOW THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS BLAME CHINA'S WATER SHORTAGE ON GLOBAL WARMING

It wouldn't be their own mismanagement, of course

China suffers a water shortage of nearly 40 billion cubic metres a year which Water Resources Minister Chen Lei blamed largely on global warming, state media reported on Monday. "The changes have led to a combination of both frequent drought and flooding," the China Daily newspaper quoted Chen as saying. Although global warming has contributed to falling water tables in China, rising consumption both by farmers and booming cities, as well as severe pollution, have compounded shortages.

Decades of heavy industrialisation have made water from some lakes and rivers so polluted it is no longer useable, and tonnes of untreated waste are pumped directly into water sources.

Data also showed that rainfall in arid north China has been decreasing, the report said, adding that water resources in areas surrounding the Yellow, Huai, Hai and Liao rivers had dropped by about 12 percent. "Seasonal water shortages in some of those areas are getting worse, seriously restricting sustainable social and economic development," the newspaper quoted an unnamed official as saying.

Water shortages have also been taking their toll on rice cultivation in China, the world's top consumer and producer of the grain, leading to plans for it to expand acreage for a new kind of rice that can grow in dry soil.

Source.

NOTE: There has in fact been no significant change in total annual precipitation over China during the second half of the 20th century. See here

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