When Alice went through the looking glass, she found a world where things were completely the reverse of what they are in the real world. Of course, Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece was intended as a parody of the mendacious politicians of the day.
Today we have something beyond parody, and that is the U.N. climate bureaucracy and its acolytes. Because the U.N. agencies are bureaucracies, it is perhaps understandable that they should seek at all times to increase their own power and control over the world’s people. But what is not understandable is when that quest turns into a campaign to keep the poor people of the world in poverty. Yet that is exactly where the U.N. now finds itself with the campaign for what it calls “climate justice.” That campaign is based on completely false premises, and could not have been better designed to keep the poor poor than if that had been the principal and only purpose. The advocates of so-called “climate justice” seem to be totally unaware of the reprehensible morality of their campaign. Instead, they flaunt their own high levels of consumption, and look to as leaders those at the very most extreme levels of high consumption.
Poverty, in the sense of deprivation of basic goods and services, in very large part is a result of insufficient access to energy. Access to energy means electricity for our homes, businesses and computers; it means transportation, in the form of automobiles, trains and planes; it means heating in cold weather and cooling in hot weather; it means functioning hospitals and health care facilities; it means mechanized agricultural methods that ameliorate the effects of bad weather and pests; it means access to information; and many other things equally important. Without access to energy, people are trapped in local areas to lead a life of basic subsistence if not periodic hunger and starvation.
Current data from the World Bank with respect to access to energy show that even today over 1.2 billion people, 20% of the world’s population, lack access to electricity. This includes about 550 million people in Africa and over 400 million in India. Here is the World Bank’s description of what it means to lack access to electricity:
Without access to energy service, the poor will be deprived of the most basic of human rights and of economic opportunities to improve their standard of living. People cannot access modern hospital services without electricity, or feel relief from sweltering heat. Food cannot be refrigerated and businesses cannot function. Children cannot go to school in rainforests where lighting is required during the day. The list of deprivation goes on.
The World Bank actually projects that the number of people in Africa without access to electricity will increase, not decrease, between now and 2030!
And electricity is just one piece of the energy access puzzle. The 1.2 billion figure who lack electricity is far exceeded by the numbers who lack access to modern transportation (automobiles, trains, airplanes), to air conditioning, to heat, to hospitals, to mechanized agricultural equipment, and to the internet. For example, according to 2013 data from the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva, only about 2.4 billion people out of the 7.0 billion in the world (34.3%) had internet access; that leaves some 5.6 billion without access. In Africa, only 16.3% of people had access to the internet, and only 6.7% had access to the internet at home.
Given the serious hardship faced by the world’s poor in the absence of energy access, one would think that a top priority of the U.N. would be finding ways to achieve that access as quickly, as cheaply, and as reliably as possible. But in fact, under the banner of so-called “climate justice” the U.N. is doing exactly the opposite. It is doing its best to hobble, hinder and obstruct development of the cheapest and most reliable sources of energy in the third world, while instead advocating for massive transfers of wealth from rich countries, not to the poor people themselves, but instead to the governing cliques and wealthy elites in the poor countries when Alice went through the looking glass, she found a world where things were completely the reverse of what they are in the real world. Of course, Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece was intended as a parody of the mendacious politicians of the day.
Today we have something beyond parody, and that is the U.N. climate bureaucracy and its acolytes. Because the U.N. agencies are bureaucracies, it is perhaps understandable that they should seek at all times to increase their own power and control over the world’s people. But what is not understandable is when that quest turns into a campaign to keep the poor people of the world in poverty. Yet that is exactly where the U.N. now finds itself with the campaign for what it calls “climate justice.” That campaign is based on completely false premises, and could not have been better designed to keep the poor poor than if that had been the principal and only purpose. The advocates of so-called “climate justice” seem to be totally unaware of the reprehensible morality of their campaign. Instead, they flaunt their own high levels of consumption, and look to as leaders those at the very most extreme levels of high consumption.
Poverty, in the sense of deprivation of basic goods and services, in very large part is a result of insufficient access to energy. Access to energy means electricity for our homes, businesses and computers; it means transportation, in the form of automobiles, trains and planes; it means heating in cold weather and cooling in hot weather; it means functioning hospitals and health care facilities; it means mechanized agricultural methods that ameliorate the effects of bad weather and pests; it means access to information; and many other things equally important. Without access to energy, people are trapped in local areas to lead a life of basic subsistence if not periodic hunger and starvation.
Current data published by the World Bank with respect to access to energy show that even today over 1.2 billion people, 20% of the world’s population, lack access to electricity. l This includes about 550 million people in Africa and over 400 million in India. Here is the World Bank’s description of what it means to lack access to electricity:
Without access to energy service, the poor will be deprived of the most basic of human rights and of economic opportunities to improve their standard of living. People cannot access modern hospital services without electricity, or feel relief from sweltering heat. Food cannot be refrigerated and businesses cannot function. Children cannot go to school in rainforests where lighting is required during the day. The list of deprivation goes on.
The World Bank actually projects that the number of people in Africa without access to electricity will increase, not decrease, between now and 2030!
And electricity is just one piece of the energy access puzzle. The 1.2 billion figure who lack electricity is far exceeded by the numbers who lack access to modern transportation (automobiles, trains, airplanes), to air conditioning, to heat, to hospitals, to mechanized agricultural equipment, and to the internet. For example, according to 2013 data from the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva, only about 2.4 billion people out of the 7.0 billion in the world (34.3%) had internet access; that leaves some 5.6 billion without access. In Africa, only 16.3% of people had access to the internet, and only 6.7% had access to the internet at home.
Given the serious hardship faced by the world’s poor in the absence of energy access, one would think that a top priority of the U.N. would be finding ways to achieve that access as quickly, as cheaply, and as reliably as possible. But in fact, under the banner of so-called “climate justice,” the U.N. is doing exactly the opposite. It is doing its best to hobble, hinder and obstruct development of the cheapest and most reliable sources of energy in the third world, while instead advocating for massive transfers of wealth from rich countries, not to the poor people themselves, but instead to the governing cliques and wealthy elites in the poor countries.
So what is this U.N. “climate justice” campaign? On its public face, it is a campaign to have rich countries pay money to governments of poor countries to compensate the poor countries for alleged harm resulting from “climate change.} A U.N. agency called UN-NGLS (UN Non-Governmental Liaison Service) is leading the charge. Their home page for “Climate Justice for a Changing Planet” can be found at http://www.un-ngls.org/spip.php?page=climatejustice. The basic idea of the campaign is that the big problem facing poor countries is not poverty or lack of energy access, but rather climate change, and that the solution to climate change is to have taxpayers in rich countries transfer money to governments of poor countries so they can supposedly spend the money to ameliorate the climate change. Here is an excerpt from the Climate Justice home page of UN-NGLS:
There is little doubt that climate change will lead to unprecedented changes in the natural environment, which will in turn affect the way we live, with potentially dramatic consequences on our health, energy sources and food production systems. There is also increasing recognition that these impacts are being felt disproportionately by poor people who already live under precarious conditions. Climate change, with its many facets, further exacerbates existing inequalities faced by these vulnerable groups.
Also involved is the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose Fifth Assessment Report (available at http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/) was issued in late March 2014. The IPCC’s Report predicts a list of horrible natural disasters that supposedly will be associated with climate change, but have not yet occurred, including increased droughts, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes. With that ammunition, worldwide campaigners for “climate justice” go forth to make their case for wealth transfers to the poor country governments. For example, the large organization known as CARE put out a release (https://www.careinternational.org.uk/news-and-press/latest-press-releases/2610-ipcc-impacts-report-global-injustice-of-climate-change-is-unfolding-before-our-eyes-says-care) promptly following the IPCC’s report. Here are some excerpts:
From more extreme and intense weather-related disasters, to reduced food security, to rising sea-levels, climate change is fast becoming a scandal of epic proportions for the world’s poorest people - and it’s unfolding right before our eyes. But overcoming climate poverty is not a task of charity, it is an act of justice,
The latest IPCC report, compiled by hundreds of the world’s leading climate experts on behalf of the UN, describes how climate change constitutes an additional burden for the rural and urban poor and has the potential to push people into chronic poverty, undermining and reversing development gains made over many years. It also shows that, as global temperatures rise, there is increasing risk of passing critical ‘tipping points’ which may lead to abrupt and irreversible large-scale changes to major ecosystems on which millions of people rely.
Describing the IPCC’s latest report as “another clarion call to action,” CARE wants to see:
1. Governments working harder than ever to keep global warming to as close to 1.5 degrees C as possible to avert extreme climate change.
2. Developed countries providing far greater financial support to help poor countries address climate impacts, with actions focussing on helping the most vulnerable people and communities to build their resilience to increasing climate disruption, and greater support to help people deal with the loss and damage already occurring.
Other voices for “climate justice” spoke out at a U.N. conference on climate change held in Warsaw, Poland in November 2013. The New York Times reported on that conference in a November 18, 2013 article titled “Growing Clamor About Inequities of Climate Crisis.” (http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/world/growing-clamor-about-inequities-of-climate-crisis.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20131117) For example, the Times quoted John Kioli of Kenya as follows:
John Kioli, the chairman of the Kenya Climate Change Working Group, a consortium of nongovernmental organizations, called climate change his country’s “biggest enemy.” Kenya, which straddles the Equator, faces some of the biggest challenges from rising temperatures. Arable land is disappearing and diseases like malaria are appearing in highland areas where they had never been seen before. Developed countries, Mr. Kioli said, have a moral obligation to shoulder the cost, considering the amount of pollution they have emitted since the Industrial Revolution. “If developed countries are reasonable enough, they are able to understand that they have some responsibility,” he said.
But is there any actual evidence of a connection between rich country industrial activity and natural disasters or even bad weather in poor countries? The answer is, simply, no. Indeed, for those willing to slog through the IPCC full Fifth Assessment Report, the admission of lack of connection is actually there, although buried deep in the multi-hundred-page Report and couched in bureaucratic gobbledegook. A scientist named Roger Pielke, Jr. compiled many of the statements from the section of the Report known as Working Group I, Chapter 2, for purposes of testimony given before the Senate; he also posted many of them in a blog post (http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2013/10/coverage-of-extreme-events-in-ipcc-ar5.html):
* “There is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century”
* “Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century, No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”
* “In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale”
* “In summary, there is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms because of historical data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems”
* “In summary, the current assessment concludes that there is not enough evidence at present to suggest more than low confidence in a global-scale observed trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall) since the middle of the 20th century due to lack of direct observations, geographical inconsistencies in the trends, and dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice. Based on updated studies, AR4 conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated. However, it is likely that the frequency and intensity of drought has increased in the Mediterranean and West Africa and decreased in central North America and north-west Australia since 1950:
* “In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones since 1900 is low.”
Pielke goes on to call the attempt to associate things like floods, droughts, hurricanes and tornadoes with climate change “Zombie science,” and says that “Climate campaigners would do their movement a favor by getting themselves on the right side of the evidence.”
But the “climate justice” campaign continues and even accelerates, based entirely on Zombie science. And equally because of the Zombie science, the corollary idea that use of fossil fuel energy harms poor people is seriously impeding efforts to bring them access to energy. Thus, for example, the United States has severely restricted the ability of its international aid agencies to participate in financing of fossil fuel developments, and instead has limited them strictly to so-called “renewables” that are more expensive and less reliable. Here is an excerpt from testimony of Todd Moss of the Center for Global Development given before the House energy and Commerce Committee on February 27, 2014:
Just as the U.S. is seeking to expand energy access, other policies are increasing restrictions on financing for natural gas and hydropower. This comes at the exact moment when many African countries are discovering natural gas and want to use part of their reserves to produce electricity at home. Indeed, all six of the Power Africa focus countries are either producing, developing, or exploring for oil and gas.
Ghana is a good example. The country is a close U.S. ally which recently discovered natural gas and would like to use this resource to expand access and grow its industry. Yet current U.S. policy restricts our ability to assist them in building any new gas plants and many advocacy groups want to prevent Ghana from generating additional power via natural gas out of concern over potential greenhouse gas emissions. As we consider the U.S. position on this, it is worth keeping in mind that we currently have more than 3,400 power plants running on fossil fuels in the United States. Ghana has two.
Separately on the website of the Center for Global Development, Moss calculates a small piece of the effect on the poor of restricting new power development in poor countries to only renewables in lieu of environmentally-incorrect alternatives like natural gas and hydropower. Based on commitments from the U.S. OPIC (Overseas Private Investment Corporation) of $10 billion, Moss calculated that access to electricity could be provided to 60 million more people if investment in natural gas and hydro were allowed, as opposed to just renewables. (http://www.cgdev.org/blog/natural-gas-vs-renewables-opic-whats-tradeoff)
Meanwhile, the advocates of “climate justice” look to as their leaders the likes of Al Gore, who preach abstinence for others while living in multiple massive high-carbon-footprint mansions (http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/gorehome.asp ) (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/17/photos-al-goree-new-8875_n_579286.html ) and flying around the world on private jets.
It is time for the advocates of “climate justice” to recognize the immorality of their campaign to keep the poor poor.
Barbara Hollingsworth
CNSNews.com) Seven months after being subpoenaed by Congress, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy conceded that her agency does not have, and cannot produce, all of the scientific data used for decades to justify numerous rules and regulations under the Clean Air Act.
In a March 7th letter to House Science, Space and Technology Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), McCarthy admitted that EPA cannot produce all of the original data from the 1993 Harvard Six Cities Study (HSC) and the American Cancer Society’s (ACS) 1995 Cancer Prevention Study II, which is currently housed at New York University.
Both studies concluded that fine airborne particles measuring 2.5 micrograms or less (PM2.5), 1/30th the diameter of a human hair, are killing thousands of Americans every year.
Both 2.5 and 10 microgram particulates are well below EPA current standards. But they want to lower the standards, cost the US taxpayers $90B using secret, flawed science
These epidemiological studies are cited by EPA as the scientific foundation for clean air regulations that restrict particulate emissions from vehicles, power plants and factories.
The agency has recently come under fire for exposing volunteers to concentrated levels of particulate matter without informing them of the risks, a practice Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight, called “despicable.”
The full committee, which issued its first subpoena in 21 years last August after being stonewalled by the EPA for two years, wanted the raw data from the studies so that their results could be replicated by independent researchers. (See EPA subpoena.pdf)
However, despite “multiple interactions with the third party owners of the research data in an effort to obtain that data,” McCathy wrote, some of the data subpoenaed by the committee “are not (and were not) in the possession, custody or control of the EPA, nor are they within the authority to obtain data that the agency identified.”
“EPA has not withheld any data in our possession that is responsive to the subpoena,” McCarthy stated. “The EPA acknowledges, however, that the data provided are not sufficient in themselves to replicate the analyses in the epidemiological studies, nor would they allow for the one to one mapping of each pollutant and ecological variable to each subject.” (See EPA letter to Smith March 7 2014 (1).pdf)
CNSNews.com asked EPA whether the agency had turned over any data from the Harvard Six Cities and American Cancer Society studies in response to the subpoena.
“EPA provided to the Committee all the data that was in the possession of the agency or within the agency’s authority to obtain under the Shelby Amendment,” which requires that results of federally-funded studies be made available to the public, an agency spokeswoman responded. “As such, the agency has now in good faith obtained and provided to the Committee all the requested research data subject to the Shelby Amendment and covered by the subpoena.”
A committee staff member confirmed to CNSNews.com that “EPA gave us what they have of both studies, which is a significant amount of data, but not sufficient” to allow independent reproduction or verification of results.
“We’re at a point where EPA has conceded that they don’t have in their possession the data necessary to fully comply, and in some cases, never did possess the data,” he added.
The subpoena was issued as the EPA moves to finalize strict new regulations that could place 90 percent of the U.S. population in non-attainment areas and impose an additional $90 billion annual burden on the U.S. economy.
However, two newer studies cast doubts on the original research.
Stanley Young and Jessie Xia of the National Institute of Statistical Sciences published a paper last year questioning the EPA’s reliance on the Harvard and Cancer Society studies, both of which found that breathing fine particulate matter (PM2.5) resulted in increased mortality.
“There is no significant association of PM2.5 with longevity in the west of the United States,” Young and Xia noted, adding that “our findings call into question the claim made by the original researchers.” (See young080113.pdf)
Another recent study by Johns Hopkins-trained biostatistician Steve Milloy that attempted to duplicate EPA’s findings also found “no correlation between changes in ambient PM2.5 mortality” and any cause of death in California between 2007 and 2010.
“Virtually every regulation proposed by the Obama administration has been justified by nontransparent data and unverifiable claims,” committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said in February, denouncing what he called EPA’s “secret science.”
“The American people foot the bill for EPA’s costly regulations, and they have a right to see the underlying science. Costly environmental regulations should be based on publicly available data so that independent scientists can verify the EPA’s claims.”
Smith and Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) have introduced the Secret Science Reform Act of 2014, which would prohibit EPA from “proposing, finalizing or disseminating regulations based upon scientific information that is not publically available in a manner sufficient for independent scientific analysis.”
HR 4012, which would amend the Environmental Research, Development and Demonstration Authorization Act of 1978, states that “the Administrator shall not propose, finalize, or disseminate a covered action unless all scientific and technical information relied on to support such covered action is (A) specifically identified; and (B) publicly available in a manner that is sufficient for independent analysis and substantial reproduction of research results.”
At a February 11th hearing before the Subcommittee on Environment, Raymond Keating, chief economist at the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, testified in favor of the bill. (HHRG-113-SY18-WState-RKeating-20140211.pdf)
“The U.S. has made enormous progress in cleaning the air over the last 40 years, so much so that we now are talking about reducing very small increments of pollution. Achieving those tiny reductions will no doubt be very costly as EPA itself admitted when it released its cost analysis for ozone in 2010. The question is: will they be worth it?” Keating asked.
“We won’t know that unless we have the scientific data in front of us, unless scientists from all over the country can attempt to replicate it and determine its validity. Without that, EPA is hiding the ball, and imposing costs without truly knowing what the benefits are.”
Congress is expected to consider the bill sometime this summer.
An expensive superstitious program on drought and CO2
By most quantitative criteria, James Cameron is the world’s most successful film director and film producer. He has earned almost $1 billion just for himself and some of his works are blockbusters - like Titanic and The Terminator; let me not include AAvatar here. He’s also a deep-sea explorer. You can have some unusual hobbies if your worth approaches a billion.
However, when it comes to issues like the climate, he is just batshit crazy. He’s much more religious about this nonsense than Osama bin Laden was religious when it came to the Allah doctrine. So he also decided to shoot a completely unoriginal, redundant, 9-part TV documentary (9 hours in total), Years of Living Dangerously.
The first episode, included in the video above, will be aired tomorrow. I have actually watched it - partly in the background because I had othher work. It is a collection of unnecessary repetitions of footnotes from An Inconvenient Truth. What seemed incredible to me was how boring the “documentary” was. I can’t understand why the creator of Titanic just can’t make a more persuasive documentary.
It’s supposed to be filled with stars so you get Harrison Ford (famous actor), Katharine Hayhoe (a Christian who is a climate alarmist in Texas), and Thomas Friedman (of the New York Times). But in this documentary, they’re dull, uninteresting, not acting well, so at the end, the documentary looks much less “celebrity-laden” than An Inconvenient Truth, for example: Al Gore was enough to beat this documentary in this respect.
Harrison and Friedman are trying to convince random people at those places to offer dramatic stories about drought. What a surprise that they get virtually nothing dramatic out of them. Deserts have been around for billions of years, sometimes they are added, sometimes they are greening (and Sahara is close to the latter; that’s why the world’s greatest desert is never discussed in similar documentaries). The life at deserts (and even semi-deserts) is, by definition, less green and less rosy. 
These three hosts visit various boring places, especially places with some drought in the Midwest, Turkey, Syria, and so on, and they try to link the drought, unemployment, and all other evils in the world to carbon dioxide. Needless to say, there doesn’t exist any research or scientific or rational justification – not even in the alarmist crackpot literature - that wt would indicate that the increase of global temperatures, let alone carbon dioxide, would imply increased drought.
Cameron seems to look at everything through the lenses of the climate change doctrine: wars, unemployment, bad weather, just everything. It’s hard to figure out how someone with such a severe brain defect could have created a movie, let alone Titanic. You may call me a string theory believer. String theory is clearly a theory of everything. But even though some string theory processes actually operate inside all the events around us, I am not thinking of string theory when I look at drought, unemployment, wars, simply because the relevant theories for the low-energy macroscopic phenomena are effective theories whose dependence on the specific features of string theory is extremely weak.
Even if you believed that carbon dioxide adds some measurable positive contribution to the global mean temperature, it’s very clear that its relationship to someone’s unemployment or conflict is much weaker than the influence of the excited string harmonics. It’s just an insanity to think about temperature unrelated phenomena in the world around us and especially social phenomena in terms of the 5th or 10th most important contribution to the variability of the global mean temperature at the centennial timescale. But this program is all about these irrational links. You listen to some stories about oil-palm companies poisoning elephants etc. and you sympathize with the elephants and start to feel that the documentary has deviated from the main theme, AGW. But you’re quickly shown that it hasn’t. The poisoned elephants are due to CO2-driven climate change, too! This guy is a complete loon.
The documentary also criticizes deforestation. Deforestation looks sad to me. But you may see that these people are inhuman Luddites when they single out palm oil as a villain. Palm oil is indeed being grown at vast areas but it’s needed almost everywhere in the products you find in the supermarkets chocolate bars, cosmetics,, and so on, and so on. Incidentally, the price of palm oil seems to be almost the same (currently around $700 per ton) as the price of coconut oil (I am buying coconut oil for prices that are at least 20 times higher!). Given the remarkably healthy character of coconut oil relatively to the palm oil (which is still an unhealthy cholesterol builder, among other things), I am amazed that the palm oil is not being replaced by coconut oil in many applications. At any rate, palm oil should be celebrated, it’s one of the things that the happy modern civilization really needs. More forest-friendly alternatives may be found but check the products you bought in the supermarket how many of them would be in trouble without some kind of a replacement.
Cameron is a climatic religious bigot and the documentary shows that he is totally incapable of learning some science or shooting a program that popularizes science. In this respect, the documentary is even worse than An Inconvenient Truth. It doesn’t even try to make the viewers learn some science or think scientifically about some of these issues. Cameron has probably never tried to do so himself. So it’s just a constant stream of brainwashing, random sad events automatically attributed to “global warming” by the filmmaker himself and by random people who clearly know about as little as he does. The idea of the scientific method formulating competing hypotheses and eliminating the inadequate ones by comparisons with the quantitative evidence is something completely unknown to Cameron.
Katharine Hayhoe offers problematic comments that science and faith are perfectly compatible. She is trying to communicate her climatic apocalyptic beliefs to the Christians and she is apparently surprised that she is failing, much like Cameron must be surprised that his “blockbuster” only has 150,000 views now, although it’s the only copy of the first episode on the Internet. I would be willing to bet that the number of viewers will be low tomorrow.
There is no way to advise Cameron to produce a more rational documentary about an issue that is intrinsically scientific. There is no way simply because making viewers (and himself) think irrationally, using the mindless witch-hunt mentality, is the very reason why he is shooting similar worthless documentaries. It is no coincidence that Katharine Hayhoe is a star in the first episode. Cameron wants religion and superstitions more generally, a mindless faith in what spiritual authorities say, to retake the topics that science has once stolen from them. He wants to convert people and make them as mindless as he is; one thing he surely doesn’t want the viewers to do is to think.