Memories of panics past

By Andrew Bolt

NUCLEAR winter, mega-famines, global cooling, acid rain, bird flu, death by fluoride, Chernobyl. I've seen it all and nothing scares me now. I can't remember exactly what I wrote that was so evil. So much to choose from. Was it that I refused to be freaked by this latest panic attack that global warming was blasting in and . . . Oh, God, WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE! Or was it that I wouldn't listen to that frenzy of activists insisting the genetically modified canola oil I use to fry my chops would nuke us all into an explosion of pustulating tumours?

Anyway, one young reader was furious that I'd yet again stood snobbily apart, while his mob ululated warnings of some fresh horror. "You'd be on your own," he sneered in an angry email. True enough, my young critic, I do often feel lonely in this astonishing age when to panic is a sign of virtue and to reason a sign of a cold heart.

But you know my problem? It's not just that I hate mobs, knowing there's no wisdom in them. It's not even that I'm stubborn by nature, and like the answer Albert Einstein gave to One Hundred Authors Against Einstein - that all it took to defeat his Theory of Relativity was not 100 scientists but just one fact. My real problem is simply that in my 48 years I've lived through so many pack-panic attacks over nothing that I won't fall so easily for the next.

Your parents or grandparents may know what I mean. Go ask if they remember all those plagues we were told would surely smite us if we didn't sign some cheque, praise some god, or vote for some politician. Ask if they remember scares like the nuclear winter, DDT, mega-famines, global cooling, acid rain, Repetitive Strain Injury, bird flu, the millennium bug, SARS, toxic PVC, poisonous breast implants, the end of oil, death by fluoride, the Chernobyl doom, the BSE beef that would eat your brains, and other oldies and mouldies. It's amazing we're still alive after all that, let alone richer and healthier.

So, my furious friend, don't try to panic me now about global warming, GM food, peak oil or ADHD. I've seen too many. You want to know how they're tricked up? First, you get a possible problem - preferably with some skerrick of truth. You then get some expert, or maybe an Al Gore, to make wild assumptions or faulty extrapolations. You know the kind: that if a dodgy levee breaks in New Orleans, the whole world is gonna drown. And then you whistle for the carpetbaggers - journalists keen to sell a sensation, business keen to sell a cure, and politicians keen to sell themselves as the solution. And bang, you have a mass panic, with more people gaining from the scare than are game to expose it.

I guess you're shocked by my cynicism. Would it help if I gave some examples of the panics I was once fed? Here's the very first I remember. When I was a student, too, my earnest teachers used to tell me the world was running out of food, and show pictures of starving Indians, which made me worry a lot. They were repeating the hot theories of people like green guru Prof Paul Ehrlich, whose 1968 book The Population Explosion sold in the millions. "The battle to feed humanity is over," Ehrlich preached. "In the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of millions of people will starve to death."

He was wrong, of course. Better crops, better communications, better transport, better education - and see now. Famines are now virtually unknown outside of war zones. But such apocalyptic talk was everywhere then. Take the Club of Rome, a top think tank, which in 1972 warned the world's economy was about to hit a wall. We were running out of oil, gas, silver, tin, uranium, aluminium, copper, lead and zinc, it warned in Limits to Growth, which sold 30 million copies, becoming the best-selling environmental book in history. Panic spread. "We could use up all the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade," warned US president Jimmy Carter.

Except we didn't. Instead, we've now got bigger reserves of all the things the Club of Rome said would soon be used up, except for tin. But those panics about resources were nothing compared with the full-blown hysteria that was now being whipped up over the environment. These eco-scares really took off in 1962 after Rachel Carson published her Silent Spring, using now disputed or discredited evidence to claim DDT was such a menace in the food chain we had to ban it to save whole species. So DDT spraying was largely halted to save birds and fish, even though that meant killing tens of millions of Third World children, who were left with no good protection from the malarial mosquitoes against which the DDT had been used.

Never mind! We were too busy then panicking over a fall (sic) in global temperatures. In April 1975, for instance, Newsweek ran an article, The Cooling World, warning of "ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change", exposing us to floods, "catastrophic" famines, "the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded" and "drought and desolation".

The panic attacks were now coming in waves. There was "acid rain", which the United Nations in 1986 blamed for damaging a quarter of Europe's trees. Now, of course, we know "acid rain" is hardly harmful, and Europe's trees are blooming. There was then the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, also in 1986, that was said to threaten millions of people with death and so terrified women that the International Atomic Energy Agency said as many as 200,000 had abortions. Now we know that the true death toll so far is fewer than 60.

There was the warning by British officials in 1996 that more than 500,000 people faced death by BSE, a brain disease they could catch from infected beef. Now we know - after eight million cattle were slaughtered - that the threat was wildly exaggerated, and the 100 or so victims might not have even got the disease from eating beef. But don't stop panicking! So we panicked instead about bird flu, with newspapers running screaming headlines such as: "Pandemic Could Kill 150 Million, UN Warns". But now we know the UN was just plucking figures from the air, and there's still no proof this disease, caught from heavy exposure to sick birds, can leap from human to human.

How many more scares should I describe, each quickly buried in embarrassment, rather than held up as a warning to be slow to panic? Remember the fear that the world's computers would crash the second the clocks ticked over to the year 2000? Planes would fall from the sky thanks to this Y2K bug, which the world spent an estimated $300 billion "fixing". But what happened at midnight? Tick, tick, tick . . . er, tick.

It was in the 1980s that I first declared my personal war against panic, after thousands of Australians suddenly started to complain of what they called Repetitive Strain Injury. The theory was that typing for hours gave them a crippling wrist pain that would never go away. So firmly was this believed here that by 1985, RSI was blamed for a third of all claims for compensation for disease, and every federal public servant who put out a sore hand was simply paid off.

What struck me, though, was that all the sufferers I knew seemed to be moaners by nature, or already unhappy. Even odder was that this disease seemed to hit only Australians and only in some workplaces, such as Telecom and the Commonwealth Bank - often heavily unionised or soggy with complaint.

You see, as psychologist Prof Robert Spillane says now, RSI was actually not a medical problem but a social one, suffered largely by unhappy people "who chose to become patients" and who had there-theres murmured to them by compensation lawyers and the new breed of occupational health therapists. But who gets RSI now? It's like a magic wind blew it away, overnight.

So that, my young friend, is why I refuse to join your latest panic party. Sneer at my loneliness all you like, as your howling, screaming, gasping mob gibbers in unison with a fear you seem to catch from each other. I've learned that if I wait long enough, you'll come to your senses. Until you panic all over again, that is.

Source






So, next Catholics should stop lighting candles?

Post below lifted from The anchoress. See the original for links

I hope none of my Hannukah-observing friends will diminish their religious practices in order to augment, satisfy and give primacy to the religious philosophies of others. If the followers of the Church of Global Warming wish to observe all sorts of penances and deprivations in order to practice their religion, I have no problem with that. As long as someone's religious dogmas, dictates and traditions don't involve mass slaughter, the imprisonment of others or you know, the really fringy things, I'm a tolerant sort and believe all believers should be free to practice their faith and observe their traditions without being hasselled, bullied, coerced or made to feel bad for doing so.

And as I've said before, I expect the followers of the Church of Global Warming to be just as tolerant to those of other faiths, and their practices. We Catholics won't force you to go to mass, fast, do penance or fly commercial, and you don't force us to put out our candles, unlight our Christmas trees or worship Al Gore.

And in that hope, I'm going to go light a few candles at a local church that still uses real candles - although I guess pushing a few "electric candle" buttons will meet the case, as well - and I'm going to offer up an Advent prayer for religious tolerance and human forbearance throughout this vast, mysterious planet, which is greater than all the fuss, fury and conceits of humankind.

UPDATE: Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard does some calculating:

Here's a clue and an educational moment, Mr Wegner. Each of the completely burned candles emits 15 grams of carbon according to your own figures. One million such completely burned candles would produce 15 metric tons of carbon. If every one of those one million homes stopped burning that one candle completely - right now - and continued to do so for the next 6,666 years they would offset the carbon emitted by the [important environmentalists] going to Bali.

Emphasis mine. In case you don't understand the Bali reference, go here. Gaius adds:

So, while these functionaries plot out how to limit your lives, how to immensely increase the cost of your energy, how to redistribute your wealth on a global scale, they will not be doing so in anything less than plutocratic splendor that emperors of even a century ago could not have dreamed of.

But don't worry. They are doing it for all the best reasons. Trust them. They'll wave from the limousines.




The Science of Gore's Nobel

What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism?

The Nobel Committee might as well have called it Al Gore's Inner Peace Prize, given the way it seems designed to help him disown his lifelong ambition to become president in favor of a higher calling, as savior of a planet. The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn't for "science." In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the "greenhouse" effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.

How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind. Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascade" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he's playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: "The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona."

Here's exactly the problem that availability cascades pose: What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged "consensus" arrived at their positions by counting heads? It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn't. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof; many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses (especially well-funded hypotheses) they've chosen to believe.

Less surprising is the readiness of many prominent journalists to embrace the role of enforcer of an orthodoxy simply because it is the orthodoxy. For them, a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.

With politicians and lobbyists, of course, you are dealing with sophisticated people versed in the ways of public opinion whose very prosperity depends on positioning themselves via such cascades. Their reactions tend to be, for that reason, on a higher intellectual level. Take John Dingell. He told an environmental publication last year that the "world . . . is great at having consensuses that are in great error." Yet he turned around a few months later and introduced a sweeping carbon tax bill, which would confront Congress more frontally than Congress cares to be confronted with a rational approach to climate change if Congress really believes human activity is responsible. Mr. Dingell is no fool. Is he merely trying to embarrass those who offer fake cures for climate change at the expense of out-of-favor industries such as Mr. Dingell's beloved Detroit?

Take Vinod Khosla, a venture capitalist working with Kleiner Perkins, a firm Mr. Gore joined last month to promote alternative energy investments. Mr. Khosla told a recent Senate hearing: "One does not need to believe in climate change to support climate change legislation. . . . Many executives would prefer to deal with known legislation even if unwarranted." Mr. Khosla is no fool either. His argument is that the cascade itself is a reason that politicians can gain comfort by getting aboard his agenda.

Now let's suppose a most improbable, rhapsodic lobbying success for Mr. Gore, Mr. Khosla and folks on their side of the table--say, a government mandate to replace half the gasoline consumed in the U.S. with a carbon-neutral alternative. This would represent a monumental, $400 billion-a-year business opportunity for the green energy lobby. The impact on global carbon emissions? Four percent--less than China's predicted emissions growth over the next three or four years.

Don't doubt that this is precisely the chasm that keeps Mr. Gore from running for president. He could neither win the office nor govern on the basis of imposing the kinds of costs supposedly necessary to deal with an impending "climate crisis." Yet his credibility would become laughable if he failed to insist on such costs. How much more practical, then, to cash in on the crowd-pleasing role of angry prophet, without having to take responsibility for policies that the public will eventually discover to be fraudulent.

Public opinion cascades are powerful but also fragile--liable to be overturned in an instant when new information comes along. The current age of global warming politics will certainly end with a whimper once a few consecutive years of cooling are recorded. Why should we expect such cooling? Because the forces that caused warming and cooling in the past, before the advent of industrial civilization, are still at work.

No, this wouldn't prove or disprove a human role in warming, only that climate is variable and subject to complicated influences. But it would also eliminate the large incentive for politicians to traffic in doom-laden predictions--because such predictions would no longer command media assent and would cease to function as levers to redistribute resources. Mr. Gore would have to find a new job.

Source




Why "peak oil" is an empty scare, and why the price of oil will collapse

Post below lifted from Ace. See the original for links

A commenter at Tigerhawk put me onto this DOE document that is a Rand Corp report from the 2005 timeframe (its a PDF so you'll need Acrobat reader). Here's the beef:

The largest known oil shale deposits in the world are in the Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Estimates of the oil resource in place within the Green River Formation range from 1.5 to 1.8 trillion barrels. Not all resources in place are recoverable. For potentially recoverable oil shale resources, we roughly derive an upper bound of 1.1 trillion barrels of oil and a lower bound of about 500 billion barrels. For policy planning purposes, it is enough to know that any amount in this range is very high. For example, the midpoint in our estimate range, 800 billion barrels, is more than triple the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Present U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per day. If oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, 800 billion barrels of recoverable resources would last for more than 400 years.

...Shell anticipates that, in contrast to the cost estimates for mining and surface retorting, the petroleum products produced by their thermally conductive in-situ method will be competitive at crude oil prices in the mid-$20s per barrel. The company is still developing the process, however, and cost estimates could easily increase as more information is obtained and more detailed designs become available. [PA note: even if costs turned out to be 3X, its still economically viable at today's prices]

Development Timeline. Currently, no organization with the management, technical, and financial wherewithal to develop oil shale resources has announced its intent to build commercial-scale production facilities... [PA note: by 2007 Shell had already started ramping this in Canada]

If you take 1/4 of the US demand out of the world market, world oil prices would have to collapse to whatever OUR baseline production costs+profit are -- which would be fixed by petro engineering economics rather than the whim of dictators, Arabs, and various loons. Prices today are arbitrary and build in worry factors about supply. If we know we can produce and sell a barrel for say $50, and then do it, it compels the arbitrary pricers to meet our price or lose business. Worry factors for American/Canadian oil would be near zero - foreign wars, loony dictators, etc would have little effect on production and delivery capability from CONUS and Canadian facilities.

I'm sure this will generate all sorts of screeching from the Oil Drum crowd and the peak oil loons. The bottom line here is - the US and Canada have within our grasp the power to blow the crap out of the world oil prices, maintain fat profits for our oil companies for hundreds of years to come, and make our economies freaking juggernaughts all at the same time.

Do we have to stones to do it? Gotta tell the enviros to STFU first. Then make a righteous looking effort - which in itself might be enough to collapse world oil prices considerably. Another commenter at Tigerhawk suggested a clever method of long term recovery of development costs -- long term oil price option puts. If you know you're going to hammer the market, might as well pick the pockets of the "chicken little" crowd's in the process right? Hell yea.





RUDD U-TURN ON GLOBAL WARMING

Reality hits Australia's Leftists

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd last night did an about-face on deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, days after Australia's delegation backed the plan at the climate talks in Bali. A government representative at the talks this week said Australia backed a 25-40 per cent cut on 1990 emission levels by 2020. But after warnings it would lead to huge rises in electricity prices, Mr Rudd said the Government would not support the target.

The repudiation of the delegate's position represents the first stumble by the new Government's in its approach to climate change. Mr Rudd said he supported a longer-term greenhouse emissions cut of 60 per cent of 2000 levels by 2050. But the Government would not set medium-term targets until a report by economist Ross Garnaut was completed next year. "I think speculation on individual numbers prior to that is not productive and I would suggest it would be better for all concerned if we waited for the outcome of that properly-deliberated document," Mr Rudd said.

The electricity industry yesterday warned it may not be able to meet growing consumer demand and comply with the 2020 target. Energy Supply Association of Australia chief executive Brad Page said a 17 per cent power price rise in Victoria would seem "pretty modest" compared with the cost of complying with the target. An ESAA report released this year found cutting carbon emissions by 30 per cent of 2000 levels by 2030 wold push up power costs by 30 per cent. Mr Page said the cost of meeting the higher target by 2020 would be much more as low-cost, green-generation technology would not be available for more than 10 years. "You are dependent on yet-to-be delivered technology," he said. "The community needs to be aware cuts of this magnitude will come at considerable cost and it's difficult to know how exactly it will be delivered."

Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson said the suggested cuts would have "devastating impact" on Australia's economic development. "It will have serious consequences for electricity bills and many other burdens borne by working families in day-to-day life, and pensioners," Dr Nelson said.

Source

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