By Margaret Munro
VANCOUVER - Canadians may abhor the rising price of gasoline, but Thomas Stocker suggests the planet might be better off if it soared to “three to four” times its current level.
“This is scandalous, I know,” said Stocker, adding sky-high gasoline could help slow the climate change which world leaders have declared one of the greatest challenges of our time. Much higher pump prices would help people realize there are “much smarter ways to go from point A to point B” than climbing into “three tonnes of steel and rubber” that spew greenhouse gases, said Stocker, who is in British Columbia this week to discuss the insidious effect humans are having on the global atmosphere.
The Swiss climatologist is a key player with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He and the IPCC say there is no question the climate is changing because of the huge amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases wafting into the atmosphere through the burning of oil, gas and other fossil fuels.
The atmosphere’s carbon dioxide level is the highest it has been in 800,000 years, Stocker said - temperatures are climbing, sea levels are rising and heat waves are becoming more common and more dire in many countries.
Note Temperatures according to Hadley the last decade have been falling. Sea level rise acceleration is a total fraud (Morner).
Stocker stressed that decisions made today - how much and what type of energy is used in transportation, homes, buildings and factories - will help shape what the future brings since emissions released today will contribute to changes felt decades from now.
“It’s not like we wait to 2049 and say ‘Oh, we’d like to have less climate change in 2050’,” he said in an interview before a public talk in Vancouver.
He compared the situation to slamming on the brakes to avoid a car crash. “You don’t wait until you’re half a metre from the wall.”
And if society won’t cut emissions, he asks “are we ready to pay the cost of adaption?” he asks, citing the prospect of seeing some Pacific island states sink beneath rising oceans.
To avoid the worst impacts scientists say warming must be kept to a 2 C increase in the average global temperature by 2100, which would mean about 6 degree C warming in the Canada’s north. That, they say, can only be achieved by slashing emissions over the next 10 to 20 years.
Stocker said there are still unknowns in our understanding of how climate works, but the ominous projections are “not crystal ball readings” but are based on facts and well-established scientific laws. The details are spelled out in data, studies and computerized climate models that are under review by more than 1,000 researchers from around the world for the next round of IPCC reports due out in 2013 and 2014.
Stocker co-chairs the IPCC working group of 250 scientists exploring the scientific aspects of climate change. Other groups are looking at the impacts of climate change and ways of mitigating the damage. The IPCC’s last report in 2007 stated “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” - a “fact” that Stocker said has not been challenged despite the IPCC recent troubles.
The panel, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, became embroiled in a furor over a glaring mistake - its last report incorrectly stated that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035.
There was also controversy in 2009 over leaked e-mails from the University of East Anglia in the U.K. that indicated leading climate scientists, who work on the IPCC, had tried to stifle critics. The IPCC has since committed to being more transparent and improving communications and has new protocols for addressing errors in its reports.
Stocker said the next round of reports will elaborate on everything from the role aerosols play in the climate system to the fate of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which could drown low-lying regions around the world if they melt. There is speculation that climate change is already causing more extreme weather, but Stocker said there is still no proof that the number of tornadoes - like the ones which have been tearing across the U.S. this spring - is increasing. “But we can say with confidence that it fits the picture,” he said.
Scientists have been calling for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions for 20 years, but global emissions continue to rise along with use of fossil fuels like the bitumen product rendered from Alberta’s oilsands. Stocker said he sees little chance of success in “quick-fix” geoengineering schemes, like putting solar reflectors in space or pumping sulphur into the atmosphere to “play volcano” and cool the planet.
He said the only real solution is to cut emissions, and it makes much more sense to start now than wait to 2020. He said Canadians, like Americans, could make a significant dent in their emissions by reducing per capita energy use, which is among the highest on the planet. There is great potential for reducing energy use in homes through the use of better insulation, more efficient windows and appliances, he said.
And a big price hike at the gas pump, said Stocker, would make people and governments get much more serious about switching to more efficient ways of getting around. Read more.
D Weston Allen
Tim Flannery’s best seller under the spotlight of climate change realism
Flannery’s book ‘The Weather Makers” is shown to contain 23 misinterpretations, 28 contradictory statements, 31 untraceable or suspect sources, 45’failures to reflect uncertainty, 66 over-simplifications or factual errors, 78 exaggerations and over a hundred unsupported dogmatic statements, many of them quite outlandish.
* 400 pages *100 plus illustrations *300 plus peer-reviewed references * well indexed
The Weather Makers Re-examined is the first comprehensive review and critique of The Weather Makers - the 2005 best seller that propelled Tim Flannery to become the Australian of the Year (2007) and now the Climate Change Commissioner for the Gillard Government.
Leading IPCC reviewer, Vincent Gay PhD., calls Dr. Allen’s Re-examined “the most knowledgeable and comprehensive indictment of the global warming bandwagon.” The former Director of the US Department of Energy and the Environment, William Happer PhD., tells the author, “The people of the world should collectively thank you, and maybe they will some day.”
Dr. Allen puts every chapter of Tim Flannery’s thesis on global warming alarmism under the spotlight of the most up-to-date scientific realism - in climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide, the reliability of the temperature records, sea levels, glaciers, the true state of the Arctic, Antarctic, Greenland, the Great Barrier Reef, extreme weather events, acidification of the oceans, oscillating Atlantic and Pacific currents and much more.
The Weather Makers is shown to contain 23 misinterpretations, 28 contradictory statements, 31 untraceable or suspect sources, 45 failures to reflect uncertainty, 66 over-simplications or factual errors, 78 exaggerations and over a hundred unsupported dogmatic statements, many of them quite outlandish.
Always a scholar and a gentleman, Wes Allen never uses ad hominem arguments, but treats Tim Flannery with courtesy and respect. His predilection for cautious understatement, however, makes for some humorous one-liners. For example, he says that after Flannery has diagnosed his beloved Gaia as suffering from a raging fever, he has nothing more to offer her than some feeble “homeopathic remedies.”
With CC Commissioner Flannery now leading the charge for a government carbon tax to mitigate Gaia’s raging fever, the timing for the publication of The Weather Makers Re-examined could not be better. There are few things more powerful than a quality book whose time has come. The Weather Makers Re-examined is such a book.
$39.60 posted free anywhere in Australia. Irenic Publications, 57 Duranbah Road, Duranbah NSW 2487.
Excerpts from The Weather Makers Re-examined
On the real Flat Earthers of today
From cover to cover, Tim Flannery’s message is that ‘we are now the weather makers’. Move over sun, moon, stars, planets, Earth’s mighty oceans, mountains and volcanoes - almighty man now rules the weather! In the context of known geological and cosmic climatic forces, such an anthropocentric focus is almost pre-Copernican.
And as in the days of heliocentric Copernicus, scientists suggesting solar or other causes for climate change now find themselves denied grants and tenure, accused of links to ‘big oil’, ridiculed and rejected, or denounced as ‘deniers’ by a geocentric and anthropocentric orthodoxy.
On the patronage of depressing stories
Scientists have been falling over each other to break the most depressing story; and journals like Nature and Science have been eager to publish them.
On the dominant greenhouse gas
“Flannery says in The Weather Makers, “Earth’s thermostat is a complex and delicate mechanism, at the heart of which lies carbon dioxide.” If Earth does indeed have a thermostat, the heart of it has to be water - vast quantities of it. It takes more energy to raise the temperature of one gram of water by 1 degree than of any other common substance. The massive oceans, glaciers and lakes, comprising over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, stabilise Earth’s temperature. Water vapour, the dominant greenhouse gas, forms reflective clouds, precipitates as rain and transfers enormous quantities of heat vertically and horizontally around the planet. Compared to water in all its forms, carbon dioxide is a small peripheral player.
On being alarmed about prosperity and development?
Flying over Eurasia, Tim Flannery [says he] looked down on the large network of city lights burning “so bright - with so much energy - as to alarm me.” Would he find the darkness over densely populated North Korea more comforting?
On poverty and the deprivation of cheap energy
Poverty is a major cause of environmental degradation and destruction of habitat in Third World countries. And without cheap energy sources, combating poverty is nigh impossible. Think about the implications of that.
While the impact of climate change on malaria transmission is trivial, the impact of depriving susceptible nations of cheap energy could be enormous. Tackling climate change by a quixotic war on carbon, instead of a war on poverty and malaria itself, may well prove costly and counterproductive…How many children could we save from malnutrition, malaria, gastroenteritis and AIDS if the money wasted on Kyoto was spent on proven preventive measures?
On the benefits of cheap energy
There is no recognition whatsoever [in Flannery’s book] of the enormous benefits to humanity from such [cheap] energy use. What would be truly shocking would be a return to the short and brutal existence before 1800. Even with his thousands of servants, France’s King Louis XIV could not be as well-informed, entertained, transported, engaged in as many recreational activities or enjoy as great a variety of food and beverage as the average Australian of today, thanks to our main servant - coal.
Our standard of living and quality of life is very dependent on cheap energy. That is largely why we are three times as affluent as our parents. If we greatly increase the cost of that energy, we will pay the cost with longer working hours for lower wages, and enjoy a lower standard of living, as many in Europe are now discovering.
Our ability to adapt to future climate change, warming or cooling, drier or wetter conditions will be dependent on a buoyant economy and thoughtful planning. If we stifle the economy with misguided mitigation measures instead of implementing effective adaptation measures, we are planning to fail.
The most immediate threat to civilisation as we know it might well be the sudden deprivation of cheap energy.
On a cooling planet being a greater danger than global warming
It is global cooling that threatens civilisation. The Little Ice Age was a dreadful time for humanity. Famine and disease plagued Europe and expanding Arctic ice froze the Danes out of Greenland. Global rewarming since 1850 has greatly benefitted humanity - and even the polar bear.
Deaths from typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis declined dramatically during pre-antibiotic 20th century warming.
Despite warming in the UK from 1976 to 2005, there remained at least 120 times more deaths due to cold than to heat each year, largely due to adaptation measures. Without adaptation, this ratio would still have been around 30.
On the manipulation of temperature data
When you torture temperature data enough, it will confess to anything.
On the control of all aspects of human behaviour
There is no more powerful way to control all aspects of human behaviour than to control carbon. Everything we do or buy and everywhere we go involves carbon. No element is more fundamental to organic chemistry and to life itself.
The only way people can ‘rid atmospheric carbon emissions from their lives’ is to stop breathing!
On GHG not causing extreme weather events
We find no solid evidence for GHG emissions causing extreme weather events.
On predicting the future
Who really knows what this century will bring? Who could have dreamt in 1900 what that century would bring – refrigeration, antibiotics, effective birth control, the Green Revolution[in agriculture], high speed global transport, space travel, worldwide live TV, mobile phones, GPS, phenomenal computing power and the internet to mention just a few. The safest prediction is for ongoing technological innovation with as yet unheard of marvels and energy sources.
On Flannery’s global warming remedies
After diagnosing Gaia with a raging life-threatening fever, The Weather Makers prescribes the equivalent of a homeopathic remedy.
By Mark Steyn
With respect to our friend Hugh Hewitt, I think Michael Walsh’s column gets to the big problem with Mitt. It’s not that he’s a glib, finger-in-the-windy opportunist of no fixed principles; it’s worse than that: He has a weird knack for reaching into the icebox to pull out the conventional wisdom when it’s five years past its sell-by date.
He bragged about “protecting a woman’s right to choose,” which might have made sense for a pandering RINO squish in the late Eighties but not by the time he did it in 2002.
He embraced the governmentalization of health care not in the 1970s but at exactly the moment when, at home and abroad, the reality of the impact of Third Party universalism was plain to everybody who thought seriously about this issue.
Now he’s come out in favor of global warming not when it was actually happening (over a decade ago) but two years after the peer-review hit the fan in East Anglia, Copenhagen, and at the IPCC.
This is like watching your parents do the Macarena: It’s embarrassing and it’s dated.
Mitt had a lot going for him last time round, but he seems determined not to learn from experience. And the least that voters are entitled to in a time of crisis is a presidential candidate who’s one step ahead of the conventional pieties, not someone so out of it that he orders his political positions from the remainder bin. Post.