By Peter Foster, Financial Post

The fate of the Earth hangs in the balance in Bali, but the issue is not whether humanity will succumb to a “climate crisis,” or how the international community might craft a successor to the tattered Kyoto Accord (Let’s call it KyoTwo).  Bali is not about climate; it symbolizes the continued assault on freedom by those who seek—or pander to—political power under the guise of concern for humanity.

Just at the point where Marxism was being consigned to the dustbin of history, the more or less concealed power lust that had fed it found a new cause in the environment. The fact that the UN’s 1992 Rio conference followed hard on the collapse of the Soviet Union represented almost the passing of a poisoned baton. Capitalism had once been the enemy because it was alleged to make people poor. Now it was the enemy because of the alleged side effects of making them rich. The emissions of carbon-based industrial society would lead to a climate in turmoil:We would be beset by Biblical plagues of floods, droughts and monster hurricanes.

This simplistic narrative depended on carbon dioxide being the main driver of climate. Scientists who pointed that there were likely other more important factors, that climate science was in its infancy and that earth’s climate had varied dramatically long before the invention of the steam, internal combustion or jet engine, were not scientifically refuted; they were howled down as “deniers” or industry shills. Read more here.

By Ross McKitrick in the Christian Science Monitor

Climate change is one of the most complex topics in science. New insights arise every month. Key discoveries are anticipated in the next few years. Yet politicians seem to think we’ve learned everything there is to know about the climate. And they keep designing static policy plans based on that assumption.

We have seen the failure of this approach with the Kyoto Protocol. So as world leaders meet in Bali, Indonesia, this week to discuss a replacement treaty, they should keep this simple principle in mind: Good climate policy must be dynamic, not static, and this requires incorporating a learning process. Politicians like long-term commitments because they can push costs into the future. But long-term commitments are foolish when you are still awaiting key information about the nature of the problem.

Climate policy needs to shift from static to dynamic thinking. This requires tying policy to actual greenhouse warming. Anything else is like taking a shot in the dark. Read more of this sensible plan here.

By Holman W. Jenkins Jr. Wall Street Journal

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?
Read more here.