By Marc Morano, Climate Depot

The important work of Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg’s ”Copenhagen Consensus” panel is being marred by the inclusion of Nobel Winning Economist Thomas Schelling. Schelling, in a moment of sheer lunacy or candor, depending on your viewpoint, wished for “tornadoes” and “a lot of horrid things” to convince Americans of global warming threat in a July 14, 2009 interview with The Atlantic. Schelling also advocated “exaggerating” man-made climate fears in order to scare the public. “You have to find ways to exaggerate the threat,” Schelling said.

Relevant Excerpt: An Interview With Nobel Prize-winning economist Thomas Schelling, Part Two - The Atlantic - July 14, 2009
“...And what I don’t know is whether Americans are really willing to understand that and do anything for the benefit of the unborn Chinese. It’s a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. And you can in fact find ways to make the threat serious. [...]

But I tend to be rather pessimistic. I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening—you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth—that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

Schelling’s climate views echo those on the extreme fringe of the climate debate. Many questions need to be asked:

Why is Lomborg holding Schelling up as some kind of sage on climate and policy when he is espousing such anti-science views?

Why hasn’t Lomborg publicly repudiated Schelling’s comments?

Why has not Schelling apologized or at least attempted to “clarify” his anti-science comments?

Is the science of man-made global warming so weak and the arguments so unmoving, that Nobel Laureates are now reduced to “wishing” for death and destructions on Americans to “convince” them there is a threat?

By Willie Soon and David Legates

What does the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation think about carbon dioxide (CO2)-induced global warming? “We don’t think about it,” Bill Gates said during last year’s Engineers Without Borders International Conference. On another occasion, he told Newsweek magazine: “The angle I’ll look at most is “What about the 4 billion poorest people? What about energy and environmental issues for them?”

The question, however, is not simply a matter of re-prioritising limited resources. More fundamentally, the scientific case for catastrophic global climate change from increased atmospheric CO2 is substantially flawed. The Indian government also recognises the need to put real, immediate, life-and-death problems ahead of speculative risks 50-100 years from now---and base the country’s health and prosperity on energy, economic and infrastructure development, full employment, and diseases and poverty eradication.

“It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per-capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of wellbeing to its people, the Indian government’s National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAP) declared. Moreover, a stronger economy and increased living standards will reduce the vulnerability of poor families to extreme weather events and climate change, natural or man-made.

Over 400 million Indians remain energy deprived, impoverished, and reliant on wood, grass and animal dung for heating and cooking. When the sun goes down, their lives shut down. India’s per-capita CO2 emissions are roughly one-twentieth of the United States, one-tenth of the EU, Japan and Russia, and a quarter of the world average. Even under rosy economic growth scenarios, India’s future per-capita CO2 emissions will remain far below those in most developed countries.

Without electricity, people must live at subsistence levels. What little they can manufacture must be done by day, by kerosene lamp and by hand. Women and children spend hours every day collecting firewood, squatting in filth to make dung patties, and carrying infected water from distant rivers and lakes. The lack of refrigeration and safe drinking water means millions suffer from severe diarrhea, and countless thousands die annually. Open heating and cooking fires cause lung infections that kill thousands of infants, children and mothers, year after year. Poverty is rampant, education minimal.

Given these realities, can you explain why certain rich and famous people and media outlets are fixated on “preventing” CO2-induced global warming? Why they obsess over computer generated scenarios of climate disasters a century from now? Why they blame every weather incident and disease outbreak today on global warming, when the Earth has been cooling for at least five years?

Can you understand why, in the next breath, they oppose the construction of natural gas and coal-fired power plants that could generate enough electricity to reduce the poverty and disease? And then oppose nuclear and hydroelectric facilities, as well? As to climate science, there are no clear indications that rising CO2 levels are changing the weather in ways or degrees that haven’t been observed in past centuries and cycles. There has been no change in trends for large-scale droughts, floods, or rain, the NAP concluded.

The report also noted that average Indian temperatures have increased only 0.4C over the past century, while cooling trends can be found in northwestern India and parts of south India. Himalayan glaciers grew to their maximum ice accumulation about 260 years ago, according to the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, and their well-known retreats began as Earth warmed following the 500-year-long Little Ice Age---not because of human CO2 emissions. Even the computer-generated “threat” of sea level rise does not match reality. Researchers from the National Institute of Oceanography at Goa
observed that sea levels in the north Indian Ocean rose an average 1.1 to 1.8 millimetres per year (4.3-7.1 inches per century). That is slightly lower than the 7 inches per century global average---and way below Al Gore’s scary “prediction” of 20 feet by 2100.

Ironically, many of the same environmentalists who worry about global warming, and oppose large-scale electricity generation, are also against
biotechnology---which could create more nutritious crops that grow better under hotter, cooler, wetter or drier conditions. That would enable India’s farmers to improve productivity and feed more people, no matter what the climate does. That’s why Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug, father of India’s first “green revolution” in agriculture, is such a strong supporter of biotechnology.

So here is our answer to Bill Gates’ question, ‘What about India’s poorest people?” India should focus on feeding the poor, improving their health, and enhancing their economic conditions---rather than worrying about hypothetical anthropogenic global warming. Only then will India’s economic and population growth be sustainable. Only then will its people be comfortable, and able to adapt to and weather or climate changes that Mother Nature might send them---just as they do in the West. That would only be fair. Read full story here.

Wall Street Journal Editorial

Cap and trade may be flopping around like a dying fish in Congress, but the Obama Administration isn’t about to let the annoyance of democratic consent interfere with its climate ambitions. Almost as bad is the new evidence that it understands how damaging its carbon regulations and taxes will be and is pressing ahead anyway.

The White House is currently reviewing the Environmental Protection Agency’s April “endangerment finding” that as a matter of law CO2 is a pollutant that threatens the public’s health and must therefore be subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act. Such a rulemaking would let the EPA impose the ossified command-and-control regulatory approach of the 1970s across the entire economy, even if Democrats never get around to passing a cap-and-tax bill.

Yet a curious twist is buried in the EPA’s draft rule. The trade press is reporting that the agency thinks it enjoys the discretion to target the new rules only to major industrial sources of carbon emissions, such as power plants, refineries, factories and the like. This so-called “tailoring rule” essentially rewrites clear statutory language of the Clean Air Act by bureaucratic decree.

Because the act was never written to apply to today’s climate neuroses, clean-air regulation is based on an extremely low threshold for CO2 emissions that will automatically transfer hundreds of thousands of businesses into the EPA’s ambit. The agency is required to regulate sources that emit more than 250 tons of a given air pollutant annually, which may be reasonable for conventional pollutants like NOX or SOX.

But this is a very low limit for ubiquitous CO2, and so would capture schools, hospitals, farms, malls, restaurants, large office buildings and many others. To exempt these sources, the tailoring rule unilaterally boosts the rule for greenhouse gases from 250 tons to 25,000 tons, an increase of two orders of magnitude.

Well, well. In a speech in February, Obama EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson ridiculed those of us who warned about these consequences, saying that it was “a myth” that “EPA will regulate cows, Dunkin’ Donuts, Pizza Hut, your lawnmower and baby bottles. . . . Somebody said to me today, ‘kittens,’ I like that one.” Her routine got a big laugh from the like-minded Georgetown audience, but the new draft rule is a flat-out admission that the critics are right.

The endangerment finding was prompted by the 5-4 2006 Supreme Court Mass. v. EPA decision, which relied on an extremely literal interpretation of the Clean Air Act to crowbar CO2 into the law. That decision has been a political windfall for cap-and-tax advocates because it has driven utilities and other businesses to the bargaining table as they’ve concluded that some carbon limits are inevitable.

Yet the Supreme Court said nothing that would let the EPA simply decide on its own to apply the law to some unfavored business while giving others a pass. And the Clean Air Act is explicit about the 250-ton threshold. Team Obama’s real motive in “tailoring” this rule is to limit the immediate economic impact of carbon limits to head off a political backlash.

But even businesses that do get a pass shouldn’t rest too easily. The green lobby will quickly sue to force the EPA to enforce fully its own rules and go after all carbon sources. And why not? The Obama Administration is deliberately flouting its own legal claims for political reasons. Its cynical political hope is that if Congress won’t impose cap and tax, the courts will do it anyway.

President Obama claims that his “new energy economy” will jump start growth and jobs. The EPA endangerment rule repudiates that claim once and for all. If the green future is going to be so bright, why does the White House want to exempt so many businesses from its glories?

Read full editorial here.