This is an excerpt of a speech at Cambridge by Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, “The Science and Economics of Climate Change Conference”, Howard Theatre at Downing College, University of Cambridge, 10 May 2011

See his talk at the ICCC here.

By Vaclav Klaus

I will talk about the Global Warming Doctrine (GWD) because this doctrine, not global warming itself, is the issue of the day and the real danger we face. This set of beliefs is an ideology, if not a religion, which lives more or less independently on the science of climatology. Climate and temperature are used or very often misused in an ideological conflict about human society. It is frustrating that the politicians, the media and the public, misled by the very aggressive propaganda organized by the GWD exponents and all their fellow travelers, do not see this. I hope today’s conference will be a help in this respect.

I have expressed my views about this issue in a number of speeches and articles presented or published in the last couple of years all over the world. My book “Blue Planet in Green Shackles” has been translated into 17 languages. I spoke about it several times also here in Great Britain, in Chatham House four years ago, and most recently in the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Some relevance had my speech at the UN Climate Change Conference in New York in September 2007.

The GWD has not yet presented its authoritative text, it has not yet found its Karl Marx who would write its “Manifesto”. This is partly because no one wants to be explicitly connected with it, and partly because it is not easy to formulate.

The GWD, this new incarnation of environmentalism, is not a monolithic concept that could be easily structured and summarized. It is a flexible, rather inconsistent, loosely connected cascade of arguments, which is why it has been so successfully escaping the scrutiny of science. It comfortably dwells in the easy and self-protecting world of false interdisciplinarity (which is nothing else than the absence of discipline). A similar approach was used by the exponents of one of the forerunners of GWD, of the Limits to Growth Doctrine. Some of its protagonists were the same.

What follows is my attempt to summarize my reading of this doctrine:

1. It starts with the claim that there is an undisputed and undisputable, empirically confirmed, statistically significant, global, not regional or local, warming;

2. It continues with the argument that the time series of global temperature exhibits a growing, non-linear, perhaps exponential trend which dominates over its cyclical and random components;

3. This development is considered dangerous for the people (in the eyes of soft environmentalists) or for the planet (among “deep” environmentalists);

4. The temperature growth is interpreted as a man-made phenomenon which is caused by the growing emissions of CO2. These are considered the consequence of industrial activity and of the use of fossil fuels. The sensitivity of global temperature to even small variations in CO2 concentration is supposed to be high and growing;

5. The GWD exponents promise us, however, that there is a hope: the ongoing temperature increase can be reversed by the reduction of CO2 emissions;

6. They also know how to do it. They want to organize the CO2 emissions reduction by means of directives (or commands) issued by the institutions of “global governance”. They forget to tell us that this is not possible without undermining democracy, independence of individual countries, human freedom, economic prosperity and a chance to eliminate poverty in the world. They pretend that the CO2 emissions reduction will bring benefits which will exceed its costs.

This simple scheme can be, undoubtedly, improved, extended, supplemented or perhaps corrected in many ways by the distinguished participants of this conference but I believe that its basic structure is correct. The missing “GWD manifesto” should be built along these lines.

There are many disagreements about this doctrine among the scientists in natural sciences, as was demonstrated here this morning, but I also know the stances of social scientists, especially economists, who do not buy into this doctrine either. These two camps usually do not seriously talk to each other. They only come into contact with the self-proclaimed interdisciplinarists from the other field. The social scientists are taken aback by the authoritative statements that “the science is settled”, the scientists in natural sciences a priori assume that there is nothing “hard” in social sciences.

The politicians - after having lost all other ideologies - welcomed the arrival of this new one. They hope that the global warming card is an easy game to play, at least in the short or medium run. The problem is that they do not take into consideration any long-term consequences of measures proposed by the GWD.

By Dr. Larry Bell, Forbes

As if deadly human CO2 emission climate endangerment of polar bears, logging displacement of spotted owls, and water diversion from delta smelt for California agriculture wasn’t bad enough, domestic oil and gas drilling now threatens yet another innocent creature.  Last December the Fish and Wildlife Service announced that a native three-inch Southwestern U.S. reptile “faces immediate and significant threats due to oil and gas activities and herbicide treatments,” and initiated the process to get it listed under the Endangered Species Act. Should this designation be granted, oil and gas production in the New Mexico and Texas Permian Basin containing an estimated 20% of our nation’s reserves and one-fourth of our active oil and gas wells may need to be shut down.

First filed by the Center for Biological Diversity in 2002, the Bush administration delayed consideration of the petition for six years. An issue of dispute is whether the dunes sagebrush lizard in question is truly a separate species, or rather, a common sagebrush lizard subspecies. The Obama administration has now put the matter back on a high priority track- along with the designation of vast areas in and off Alaska as protected areas for caribou and polar bears. (Source: “Will a Lizard Stop West Texas Oil?” Investor’s Business Daily.  April 28, 2011.)

This, of course, is the same administration whose Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has ignored a judge’s order to remove oil drilling restrictions in the Gulf of Mexico, and whose EPA recently withheld permits to block Shell Oil from drilling this summer in the Arctic Ocean off the northern coast of Alaska - after the company has already spent five years and nearly $4 billion on those plans. The Beaufort and Chukchi Sea leases alone cost $2.2 billion.  EPA’s appeals board ruled that Shell hadn’t included carbon emissions from an ice-breaking vessel in the project’s overall greenhouse gas calculations.

If it seems curious to some why the president would then travel to Brazil and lend $2 billion we borrowed from China to enable their state-owned company to drill in the Gulf of Mexico, the answer should be quite obvious. Almost everyone knows there aren’t any caribou or polar bears in Brazil. And forget about the carbon emissions from those Brazilian tankers that we will pay to deliver the oil to us. GE plans to convert them to wind power through purchases of U.N.-approved Chinese junk technology components.

Other whiners quibble about the high costs of protecting those threatened creatures. For example, selfishly worrying that an expected 20% drop in 2011 Gulf oil production will result in the loss of 375,000 more jobs, further damage our economy, and raise gasoline prices. (Source: Anthony Martin, “Obama’s War on Oil-Shell Stopped from Drilling,” April 26, 2011.)

Some unfairly point out that the spotted owl protection effort killed logging and created ghost towns throughout the Pacific Northwest, only to later discover that the kindness campaign made little difference. Government studies later revealed that those spotted owls weren’t logging casualties at all, but were being victimized by their cousins, the barred owls, who crowded them out of habitats and attacked them.

So the government then came up with a $200 million “barred owl removal plan” to literally shoot the interlopers, a subspecies of the same Mexican owl clan. This has come to be a very familiar solution...namely to choose losing favorites and kill strong competitors. Where is PETA when you really need them? Remember, those murdered barred owls had mothers too! (Sources: Tom DeWeese, “Stupid Human Tricks: The Sad Case of the Spotted Owl,” July 2, 2007. “Blasting Some Owls to Save Others?” Nancy Grace for CBS News, April 27, 2007. CBS.com Stories.)

Still other environmental policy critics object to the California Fish and Game Commission’s listing of delta smelt as an endangered species which led to 40% unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley, turning that major food basket into an empty dust bowl. They don’t seem to appreciate that these tiny little fish have an important purpose on this Earth also. It’s called “bait.”

And those overheated polar bears? On a Sept. 9, 2007, Good Morning America broadcast, Kate Snow called them “the newest victims of global warming.” That same segment featured Dr. Steven Amstrup, a U.S. Geological Survey scientist, who stated that the bears “could be absent from almost all their range by the middle of this century.” Strangely, only five years earlier a 2002 USGS study had reported that the “[polar bear] populations may now be near historic highs.” (Sources: Nathan Burchfiel, “Polar Bear Scene Could Maul Energy Production,” May 7, 2007.  “Polar Bear Proposal Shows EPA is Broken,” speech by Sen. James Inhofe, U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, press release, Jan. 4, 2007.)

Yes fortunately, and certainly no thanks to us, they now do seem to be in somewhat better shape than we have been led to believe after all. Dr. Mitchell Taylor, manager of wildlife research for the Government of the Canadian Territory of Nunavut, agreed with the USGS’s 1970 assessment, later reporting that his organization’s research showed that the Canadian polar bear population had increased about 25% during the past decade (from about twelve thousand to fifteen thousand). Even Polar Bears International, a nonprofit organization that works to protect the animals, rates only five groups as “declining,” another five as “stable,” one as “increasing,” and others as “data deficient” (impossible to measure) out of 19 total world populations. (Sources: “Biological Science Report USGS//BRD2002-0001: Section8: polar Bears,” USGS, 2002.)

Still, now that polar bears are officially listed as “threatened,” we can sleep much easier at night not having to worry about depreciating tundra habitat property values with unsightly oil and gas operations in ANWR.  And since spotted owls are being protected don’t you agree that it’s probably a good idea to add the barred owls we’re killing to save them to that endangered species list as well?

A big remaining question is what to do about those lizards. If experts on such matters determine they’re just a subspecies of the common sagebrush lizard, then to hell with them … let them just drag their scrawny tails out of the way…they’re expendable. But should they be ruled to be a separate species … then it’s imperative to halt that drilling right away!

Finally, there’s still another large question. What about our own endangerment if we won’t be able to drill for oil and gas in or near Alaska, in the Permian Basin, or anywhere else the Department of Interior and EPA disapprove?  Consider our future survival as fuel, energy and food costs continue to escalate as a result.

Shouldn’t we be eligible for listing as a threatened species too? Reprinted with author permission

By Robert Matthews, The National

As predictions go, it was truly disturbing - made all the more so by the authority of the source. In 1989, Dr Mustafa Tolba, the head of the UN Environment Programme (Unep), warned that over the coming years as many as 50 million refugees would be wandering the globe to escape the ravages of climate change.

By 2005, Unep felt confident enough to say the 50 million mark would be reached “by 2010”. Other experts agreed, among them the celebrated environmentalist Professor Norman Myers of Oxford University. So where are they? In a word, nowhere. A recent study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in England found no evidence of any mass migration caused by climate change.

On the contrary, it suggested that - unsurprisingly - people prefer to stay in their own country in the face of environmental upheaval. Unep has tried to disown the prediction, but has succeeded only in sparking a media furore after being caught removing graphics clearly stating “50 million climate refugees by 2010” from its website.

It looks like the agency is learning the truth of the ancient Chinese proverb that “prediction is very difficult - especially of the future”.

It’s unlikely to give up making predictions, though: after all, that’s what expert groups are supposed to do. But as a fascinating new survey of the prediction business shows, we should all be much more sceptical about forecasts - especially those made by experts.

As the journalist Dan Gardner points out in Futurebabble: Why Expert Predictions Fail And Why We Believe Them Anyway, experts have been getting predictions wrong for centuries, for all kinds of reasons.

In 1789, the English economist Thomas Malthus showed with almost mathematical certainty that the world was condemned to mass starvation by the obvious fact that populations increase exponentially, inevitably outstripping food supplies.

Two centuries on, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation figures show that even the least developed nations are enjoying rising food levels. Clearly, Malthus had not banked on the ingenuity of agriculturalists to feed the world.

Everyone makes mistakes, of course, but as Gardner shows, experts are quite often prone to making them.

He cites the results of a pioneering study begun in the 1980s by Professor Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California who brought together hundreds of experts in political science and economics, and asked them to predict what the future might hold.

The result was a collection of more than 27,000 forecasts whose veracity was then checked over the following years. The outcome, published in 2005, was salutary. It showed that the typical expert did not perform significantly better than random guessing.

But Prof Tetlock went further, trying to identify why some experts were so much worse than others. He found that political beliefs or levels of optimism made no difference: a cheery right-winger was just as likely to do badly as a miserable Marxist. Qualifications or access to confidential information did not matter, either.

Far more important, he found, was the mindset that the experts brought to making predictions.

Those who did badly did not like getting bogged down in complexities, or weighing up the evidence from a variety of sources. Instead, they had a habit of making predictions that complied with some grand, overarching thesis. And having made their predictions, they were - ironically enough - strikingly confident about them.

A grand thesis, simple views, confidence ... as Gardner points out, that’s pretty much a thumbnail sketch of the perfect media pundit.

Yet according to Prof Tetlock’s research, those are precisely the characteristics of experts whose predictions are worse than random guessing.

And that, in turn, suggests that the very fact a pundit makes regular media appearances means we can ignore his or her predictions.

Gardner reports how Prof Tetlock put this simple rule to the test using Google hits as a simple way of measuring the “celebrity” of each of the 284 experts who took part in his study. Sure enough, the more famous the expert, the worse his performance.

So if we can’t trust the pundits foisted on us by the media, whom can we trust?

According to Gardner, we should look for experts who do not start from the assumption that some Big Idea (often their Big Idea) is correct. The future has a habit of making a mockery of grand theses. Instead, the starting point should be information gleaned from a wide variety of sources.

Once some broad-brush conclusions have been made, the most reliable forecasters tend to analyse where their conclusions came from. Explaining them to others often helps to reveal assumptions and leaps of faith that just can’t be justified.

The final characteristic to look out for, says Gardner, is simple humility. Anyone with total confidence in their prediction of the future should be treated with suspicion.

Paradoxically, those who say merely that there is a “high chance” of some event happening are more likely to be right than pundits who simply declare “it will”.

And those who make precise, long-term predictions - like, say, 50 million environmental refugees by 2010 - are best ignored completely.

Yet the real problem with forecasting is not so much dodgy pundits, as those who demand to hear them.

Most of us are looking for some certainty in this uncertain world, and we crave the kind of certainty touted by “experts”. Until we wean ourselves off this irrational desire, the law of supply and demand means we will continue to get the pundits we deserve. And that’s a prediction you can totally rely on.

Robert Matthews is visiting reader in science at Aston University, Birmingham, England