It’s a rare occasion when you find a global warming alarmist willing to debate a skeptic in public, as happened last month in North Carolina when atmospheric scientist John Christy went up against William Schlesinger, president of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies. It’s probably because alarmists don’t like when their clocks get cleaned. So what do the skeptics do when their cowardly opponents run away? They throw a party for themselves!

That’s what happened this week in New York, when the Heartland Institute hosted its second International Conference on Climate Change. As opposed to staging a sad affair in which an imaginary consensus of scientists discharge doom-and-gloom scenarios due to excessive engine combustions and mammalian exhalations, my fellow challengers to anthropogenic global warming theory conducted an uplifting, thought-stirring summit. The goal: good science, and how to stop the alarmists from driving energy prices and business regulations upward in the name of averting a contrived climate emergency.

But if there’s one flaw with these lovable libertarians, it’s that they still crave attention from those who practice journalism-formerly-known-as-mainstream. The bass-playing Heartlanders got the enviro-groupie treatment from the New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, who favors the established rock stars of environmentalism. Not surprisingly he dashed their hopes of groovin’ around and around, and instead applied the usual Society of Environmental Journalists’ marginalization template:

More than 600 self-professed climate skeptics are meeting in a Times Square hotel this week to challenge what has become a broad scientific and political consensus: that without big changes in energy choices, humans will dangerously heat up the planet.

As is common with sycophants who ingratiate themselves to the objects of their literary affection, Revkin defended their honor by ignoring two options that Encarta, for one, offers as the definition of “consensus:”

1.  general or widespread agreement among all the members of a group

2.  a concept of society in which the absence of conflict is seen as the equilibrium state of society

Neither entry would appropriately apply to Revkin’s alleged scientific or political consensus. He cannot, without contortioned countenance, credibly claim there is widespread agreement – either scientific or political. Nor can he assert there’s an absence of conflict over the issue, unless he only spends time in his SEJ/big government science echo chamber. Read more here.

As Senator Inhofe testified yesterday, the more information a person has about global warming, the less responsible he or she feels for it; and indirectly, the more information a person has about global warming, the less concerned he or she is for it” See proof here. Unfortunately Revkin and the just as clueless fellow New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who called for the government to promote the green revolution and called climate realists, “not conservatives, crazy radicals” this has not been able to move them off their political driven agenda biases. 

Setting targets to cut emissions is easy, achieving them is not, says Martin Livermore. In this week’s Green Room, he questions the current wisdom of placing so much faith in systems that have failed to deliver.  The impression is that governments want to say the right things, but hope that the whole issue will go away before they have to do anything. To some, any suggestion that the world is not on course to make drastic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions smacks of heresy and should be given no credence.

In their view, fossil fuel use simply must be reduced if we are to avoid disaster later in the century. But, although most politicians subscribe to the view (informed by the scientific mainstream) that urgent action is needed to avoid possibly catastrophic global warming, policy actions do not yet match their words. Setting targets is easy, achieving them is not.

The much-vaunted European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) has turned out to be an ineffective and costly piece of market fixing, which will not achieve its stated aims. Carbon offsetting is even worse: transferring money to developing countries to fund projects that probably would have been implemented anyway, and with little real impact on emissions. The carbon emissions market risks being the next bubble to burst.

A dose of cold realism is needed if any significant, affordable reductions in carbon intensity are to be made. Believing strongly that drastic reductions in fossil fuel use are essential does not make them happen; it just ignores the reality that effective action is not taking place. It is in everyone’s interest, whether you fully believe or are sceptical of the received wisdom, to accept this rather than allow policymakers to repeat the mantra of emissions reduction without taking realistic and effective action.

The impression is that governments want to say the right things, but hope that the whole issue will go away before they have to do anything. Why would so many powerful people say that global warming is the single biggest threat facing humanity and yet fail to take action?  There are probably three main reasons for this. The first is timescale. Put simply, weather patterns are just not following the sort of steady trend which would instil confidence in IPCC pronouncements. No amount of “it’s even worse than we thought” headlines will convince a sceptical public if the words don’t fit with the evidence of their own eyes. 1998 remains the warmest year on record, and since then there has been no discernable upward trend.  Last year saw a miserable summer in much of western Europe, and the same countries are in the middle of a winter which has been colder than for many years. For the average layman, global warming remains a distant prospect.

Politicians are naturally reluctant to impose apparently unwarranted costs on their citizens if those same people can vote them out of office at the next election. Which leads to the second point: whoever bears the initial cost, ultimately taxpayers (and therefore voters) will have to pay. Businesses may have to buy emission permits, but (unless the cost is so small as to be meaningless as an incentive to reduce energy consumption) they will pass on the additional amount to their customers. Whether we care to admit it or not, it is wealth created in the private sector which is taxed and enables the public sector to operate. The two cannot be divorced. If businesses have higher costs, they either try to absorb them, become uncompetitive and fail (leading to both lower tax revenues and higher welfare costs for the state) or they put their prices up and consumers pay. 

After you… The third reason follows naturally: neither companies nor countries want to go out on a limb. For almost all countries, it is a case of “we will if you will”. If everyone moves in concert, then co-ordinated action is possible. If some countries are perceived to be benefiting unfairly, then the whole system can fall apart. This is the reason why agreement on a post-Kyoto deal in Copenhagen in December is going to be so difficult. This is only the first stage of a long process, a setting of targets and commitments.

The world recession will cut energy consumption and help reduce emissions (every cloud has a silver lining), but will make no structural changes to how we generate and use energy. What chance, then, for the far more demanding post-Kyoto targets? Faced with a less than enthusiastic electorate, suspicious of the motives of other countries and having learnt some hard lessons from the example of Kyoto, it is hardly surprising that politicians try to play a waiting game. They go with the flow in setting targets for carbon dioxide emissions reductions, but do not take radical action to achieve this because they want neither to alienate voters nor harm the economy. This is not to say that drastic reduction of fossil fuel use without upsetting most members of the public is impossible. The answer is to use the best available and most cost effective low carbon technology for base load generation (nuclear power), increase the focus on energy efficiency in all sectors of the economy, and encourage R&D on new transport and power generation technologies. But to start to move in this direction needs policymakers to acknowledge the hard fact that the present unwarranted faith in power from renewables and emphasis on punishing emitters is going nowhere. Read more here.

In the political arena, bait-and-switch is often rewarded, not punished - especially in the case of global warming alarmism. Instead of fines or jail time, politicos get committee chairs, presidencies, speaking fees and Nobel Prizes. Scientists and bureaucrats receive paychecks, research grants and travel stipends for Bali. Activists get secretive government payments for “public education” campaigns. Companies get government contracts, subsidies and seats at the bargaining table. And all are lionized or canonized for supporting Climageddon theories and policies.

The perpetrators of these B/S schemes may never be chastened or prosecuted. However, as in the case of consumer fraud, an informed public is less likely to get fleeced. President Obama and congressional Democrats support a $650 billion carbon cap-and-trade tax on every household, business and factory in America. If they introduce legislation amid this recession, voters, energy consumers and more responsible legislators should keep important facts in mind.

Global warming (aka climate change) has been “real” since time began. Witness the Ice Ages, interglacial periods, Medieval Warm Period (950-1350), Little Ice Age (1400-1850), Anesazi drought, Dust Bowl, and conversion of verdant river valleys into the Sahara Desert some 4,000 years ago. No one yet knows what solar energy fluctuations, planetary orbit shifts, recurrent oscillations in ocean currents, cloud cover variation and other natural forces combined to cause these potent climatic changes. But there is no evidence that they have suddenly been displaced by human CO2 emissions.

Growing numbers of scientists say the climate change debate is far from over, and global warming was never a crisis. Over 650 certified meteorologists and climate scientists are on a US Senate compilation of climate cataclysm skeptics - and 32,000 scientists have signed the Oregon Petition, saying they dispute claims that humans are causing climate change, and the changes will be disastrous.

Many of them are meeting in New York March 8-10, at the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change. They may not drive the final nails into the coffin of climate hysteria, but their findings and analyses underscore the lack of evidence for scary “forecasts” that are routinely generated by woefully inadequate computer models and self-interested researchers, activists and politicians. They will point out that planetary temperatures are no longer rising, hurricanes are not increasing in number or intensity, ice caps are not disappearing, and moderate temperature and CO2 increases benefit plant growth.

The UN’s Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change claims to be the world’s “most authoritative body” on the subject. However, only “something on the order of 20%” of the panel’s scientists “have some dealing with climate,” admits a senior member. Even the IPCC chairman is an economist, not a scientist. Worse, says atmospheric scientist Dr. Roy Spencer, the IPCC insists that human carbon dioxide emissions drive global warming. It has “never seriously investigated” the possibility that climate change might be natural. The IPCC sees only what it is looking for; it sees nothing it is not looking for.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels may have “soared” from 280 ppm to 385 ppm over the last century. But this represents an almost trivial rise from 0.03% of the atmosphere to 0.04% - the equivalent of an increase from 3 cents to 4 out of $100, or from 1.08 inches to 1.44 inches on a football field. The dominant greenhouse gas is water vapor, which nature controls via evaporation and precipitation.

Planetary temperatures may have increased during the last century, as CO2 levels increased. But not in a straight line. They rose 1900-1940 (1934 was the century’s warmest year), fell 1940-1975, rose again 1975-1998, then stabilized and even declined slightly from 1998 to 2008. New York, Holland and Bangladesh might be inundated by a 49-foot rise in sea level, if the entire West Antarctic ice sheet melted. But that would require a global temperature spike far greater than even Al Gore has prophesied. The average temperature for the peninsula’s two-month summer is barely 36 F; in the winter, temperatures are below minus 50.

Unplugging unused appliances and switching to CFL bulbs may help jet-setting Hollywood celebrities feel better. But they will not stabilize Earth’s climate. Even grounding Al Gore and John Travolta’s private jets, scrapping every US automobile, mothballing America’s coal-fired power plants, and slashing US CO2 emissions by 80% (back to 1905 levels), as President Obama wants to do, will have little effect.  Even the IPCC recognizes that perfect compliance with the Kyoto Protocol by every country would reduce global temperature increases by only 0.2 degrees by 2050 (assuming CO2 does drive global warming). But Europe has put its greenhouse gas reduction programs on hold. Australia is poised to reject cap-and-trade plans. China and India are building new coal-fired power plants every week.

Nearly 85% of US energy is hydrocarbon based, whereas wind turbines currently provide 0.5% and generate electricity only 25% of the time. Even absent the deepening recession, taxing and penalizing hydrocarbon use and CO2 emissions will drive up energy costs and extinguish far more jobs than can possibly be created via government-subsidized renewable energy and green-collar job initiatives. The impacts on poor families, economic civil rights, living standards and civil liberties would be severe. Not surprisingly, the more people understand these facts, the worse the hysteria gets. Al Gore: Soaring global temperatures will “bring human civilization to a screeching halt.” Energy Secretary Stephen Chu: “We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California.” NOAA scientist Susan Solomon: “In ten years the oceans will be toxic, and all life in them will die.” NASA astronomer James Hansen: “Death trains” are carrying poisonous fuel to “coal-fired factories of death.” Hollywood horror movie writers couldn’t possibly top this stuff.

So when Congress and the President call for more economic pain through energy restrictions and cap-and-trade bills, demand solid evidence for catastrophic warming and human causation. Don’t accept worthless computer models and worst-case scenarios. And don’t be conned by bait-and-switch tactics.