By Ric Moran, American Thinker
The only reason I am highlighting this piece in the Guardian is because it is a textbook example of everything that’s wrong with climate change advocates.
Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.
The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius - which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” - is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.
Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel - a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.
“I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” Birol told the Guardian. “It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.”
Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. “These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s] projections, such a path ... would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100,” he said.
1. Absolutely no quoting of skeptics.
2. Warnings of absolute catastrophe with not a shred of evidence to support it.
3. Hiding the fact that the increase in CO2 comes from “developing countries” (China, India) and not from the industrialized world. (one passing reference)
4. A 50-50 chance of a 4c rise in temps by 2100? Talk about hedging your bets!
5. Ascribing reliable authority to people and organizations that have no track record of accuracy whatsoever.
6. The usual picture of smoking industrial smokestacks when CO2 is invisible and is not a pollutant.
I’m sure you could add more to the list. But since most of the increase comes from non-signatories to Kyoto and Copenhagen, it is unclear exactly why western industrialized countries should reduce their emissions even further, damaging their economies in the process, while China and India get a free ride.
Scare tactics don’t work anymore. Quoting biased scientists and organizations who parrot echo chamber pronouncements of doom and gloom is just not good enough anymore. What models predict a 4c rise in temps before 2100? How accurate have they been to this point? Why the arbitrary number of 22GT’s of emissions to prevent a rise in temps? Where does it come from? Who figured it out? Why not 23GT’s of emissions? Or 24?
A good scientist - and a discerning reader of science articles in the mainstream press - demand answers to those and other questions before getting on the sky is falling bandwagon. Before we mangle the economies of the western world to satisfy the Luddites and control freaks in the UN, the NGO’s and the radical green movement, we should require more proof than these ridiculous attempts at scaremongering by the media and their allies in the Global Warming movement.
We are told CO2 at 390 ppm is dangerous to our health and our future. What is the reality? Certainly not as warmists project. We breathe out air with 40,000 ppm CO2 - one hundred times the ambient concentration. Since the post World War II Industrial Revolution began in 1947, CO2 has risen but temperatures fell from 1947 to 1978 then rose until 1998 before levelling off and falling since 1998. That means 4 decades of cooling versus two decades of warming. Not a strong endorsement for the so called consensus view.
Also as this instrument to measure CO2 notes, CO2 levels are not uniform. In cities they can range to 600 ppm, inside homes to 800 ppm, inside classrooms and hearing rooms where our government plots to take your money through carbon regulation, 1500 ppm and inside factories perhaps 5000 ppm. Inside submarines, levels of 6000 to as high as 11,000 are reported without any ill effects. Plants have been shown to thrive at CO2 levels 3 to 4 times the ambient. Many nurseries pump in CO2 into greenhouses.
Studies that claim climate change is impacting crop yields negatively are based on models and not reality. It shows you how far the warmists are willing to go to keep the gravy train of money (now over $106 billion and counting) on the track.
Junk Science responds to WAPO editorial
In a bizarre Memorial Day editorial, the Washington Post criticized climate skeptics for using the Freedom of Information Act to pry documents concerning Climategater Michael Mann from the University of Virginia.
The Post labeled the skeptics’ FOIA efforts as “harrassing” and “nuisance tactics.”
The Post, however, has been entirely silent on Greenpeace’s efforts to FOIA documents from the University of Virginia concerning Pat Michaels, University of Delaware concerning David Legates and from Harvard University concerning Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas - efforts that are truly “harrassing” and “nuisance” in nature as Greenpeace acted entirely in retaliation to the FOIA request concerning Mann.
The editorial is especially gross coming on the day when America commemorates those who died to preserve everyone’s freedoms - not just those of the politically correct.
See post and be sure to read the comments.
By Chris Horner, The Spectator
The Global Warming Polcy Foundation, run by a native German if from London, links to and translates an article in Die Welt reporting on, and sounding something of an alarm over, a major recommendation from an influential commission advising Chancellor Angela Merkel, “World in Transition - Social Contract for a Great Transformation”, by Germany’s Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environmental Change (WBGU). That group os led by of all people the top dog at a major scientific institute (but, please, yes, let’s bow to science not as a provider of knowledge but policy advisor).
A telling pull quote from the story is “Germany’s green government advisors admit frankly that decarbonization can only be achieved by the limitation of democracy - both nationally and internationally.”
You can put the piece through e.g., Google translate if you wish. Otherwise, here are some choice excerpts (all emphases in original):
All nations would have to relinquish their national interests and find a new form of collective responsibility for the sake of the climate: “The world citizenry agree to innovation policy that is tied to the normative postulate of sustainability and in return surrender spontaneous and persistence desires. Guarantor of this virtual agreement is a formative state [...].”
This strong state provides, therefore, for the “social problematization” of unsustainable lifestyles. It overcomes “stakeholders” and “veto players” who “impede the transition to a sustainable society.” In Germany, climate protection should therefore become a fundamental goal of the state for which the legal actions of the legislative, executive and judicial branches will be aligned.
“In order to anchor future interests institutionally, the Council recommends expanding the parliamentary legislative process with a deliberative “future chamber”. To avoid interference by interest group and political parties, the composition of this chamber could be determined, for example, by drawing lots.
..."[T] the WBGU admits frankly, that the decarbonization of the society can only be achieved by the limitation of democracy - both nationally and internationally.
Internationally, the WBGU calls for a “World Security Council” for sustainability. The members of the proposed “future chamber” for Germany would explicitly not be chosen democratically and would limit the powers of Parliament.
The WBGU requests “civic participation” - but only for the implementation of the national objective of climate protection. The required “problematization of unsustainable lifestyles” would therefore quickly amount to their stigmatization. Those who do not share the ideas of sustainability would be outside of the new state eco-order - thus all the supporters of the modern industrial society.
Assumed general will to climate policy
The strong eco-state would follow a new social contract, which the WBGU derives from the natural law of enlightenment that also forms the basis of parliamentary democracy. This attribution is incorrect because the WBGU assumes a general will to climate protection and decarbonization.
The council justifies this general primarily from the higher moral insight of its expert knowledge. The WBGU is consequently more in the tradition of the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His concept of “volotonté générale” was the starting point of authoritarian and utopian Jacobinism in the Western state history.
The WBGU compares the decarbonization of the global economy to the Neolithic and the Industrial Revolution. It is wrong to claim that such a deliberately planned and radical transformation of economic and social systems is without precedent.
At least partial models of such transformations are the industrialization of the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, or the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution” in Mao’s China.
Deprivation for generations
Whether planned or not - revolutionary transformations of economic systems always involve large sacrifices for the generation that experiences them. Existing productive economic structures are demolished and new one will have to be built.
This is clearly demonstrated by history - for example by the “social question” in the Industrial Revolution, the temporary deprivation of the workers. The price of utopian climate Jacobinism of the WBGU is too high.
What could possibly go wrong?
Of course, such arguments are not unusual in this issue area, but in fact the norm. It’s simply distrubing to see it so publicly voiced, particularly now, after all that we have learned. Does this represent confidence returning to the movement, or desperation?
By coincidence, a day or so ago I was on a call with conference organizers and an activist mathematician whom I will be debat—wait, he insisted it not be that—presenting with next month. In it he voiced similar thoughts at a much smaller scale. For purposes of our discussion, he will not entertain challenge to his scientific beliefs. They are fact. The only legitimate discourse may be found over the details of doing what it is he and those he and his associates demands.
Because that’s how the world works. Or, at least, how it’s supposed to. According to some people.