By Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post

It’s hard to be green when you’re red-faced all the time. It’s easy to be red-faced when your cause is global warming doomsterism.

This week, the doomsters were embarrassed to learn, once again, that the planet was not in grave peril. Antarctica, their greatest candidate for catastrophe, was not melting at an ever-faster rate, according to a report in Geophysical Research Letters, but at the slowest rate in 30 years. To add to their frustration, they couldn’t even lash out at the lead author, Marco Tedesco of the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department of City College of New York - the doomsters had praised his previous reports showing high rates of Antarctic melt.

The latest news from the Arctic - delivered daily via satellite - is no better. Two years ago with the Arctic ice in rapid retreat, the doomsters, convinced of the coming of an ice-free Arctic, could scarcely contain themselves. Now, with the Arctic ice in rapid return, their anticipation of disaster seems more a cruel hoax of Nature. The doomsters now dread to track the satellite data beamed down to us courtesy of the International Arctic Research Center and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency - you can see why they cringe each day by going to the satellite website and following the red line.

The red faces aren’t all caused by Nature’s refusal to cooperate in Earth’s demise.  The clean carbon folks have recently discovered that they’ve been in bed with organized crime. Scotland Yard and Europol, among numerous other law enforcement agencies across Europe, are hot on the trail of scam artists believed to have made off with 1-billion pounds by illicitly trading carbon credits. In Australia, authorities are investigating claims that a supplier to Carbon Planet, a carbon trading business, has been using fake carbon trading certificates to persuade forest dwellers in Papua New Guinea to sign over the rights to their forests under a UN scheme called REDD, for “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.’’ Australia’s REDD-faced Climate Change Minister Penny Wong may now be unable to tout Carbon Planet - about to list on the Australian stock exchange on the promise of A$100-million in REDD assets - at the upcoming climate change meetings in Copenhagen. Other dodgy carbon dealings led to the suspension of the UK branch of SGS, one of the world’s largest clean energy auditors, and of the Norwegian certification company DNV.

If universities could blush, Stanford would be setting the skies ablaze with its latest embarrassment, an attempt to censor a global warming documentary about to be released that had filmed one of its professors, global warming catastrophist Stephen Schneider. “You are prohibited from using any of the Stanford footage you shot, including your interview of Professor Stephen Schneider,” Stanford demanded in a letter. “Professor Schneider likewise has requested that I inform you that he has withdrawn any permission for you to use his name, likeness or interview in connection with any film project you may undertake.”

What caused Stanford and Schneider to go ballistic over the release of the documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong, by independent Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer? He asked Schneider about his many predictions of global cooling catastrophe in the 1970s. 

Why did the filmmaker back down, even though he had obtained permission for the interview? In legal proceedings, a well-heeled bully has no difficulty beating up a poor guy with only right on his side. Not that the filmmaker lacked either spine or recourse. He then documented the bad behaviour of Stanford and Schneider by having an actor read Schneider`s words before a blank screen. After its release, on Oct. 18, the sky over Stanford will turn an even deeper hue of red.

This week of embarrassment for the global warmists does not look all that different from most weeks. Overzealous scientists and their enablers have a habit of selecting the data they like and setting the rest aside. Some - Schneider among them - have even justified exaggerating the dangers in the cause of making the public take note. When they get caught they often resort to obfuscations and cover-ups.

And red faces become the norm.

See how Phelim is blocked by the enviromentalists from asking questions at the premiere of the Age of Stupid in this video here. It is described here.

Read more here.

By Indur M. Goklany

The Economist’s print edition has published my letter taking it to task for a pretty uninformed piece it published on the impacts of climate change last month. Although the editors changed the title, dropped the references which I furnish reflexively, and is somewhat briefer, the printed version is for the most part quite faithful to the spirit of the original.  I am furnishing the original below for the benefit of your readers who may be interested in checking my statements and going beyond the “he said, she said” nature of most exchanges on the opinion pages of newspapers and magazines.

*********************

A badly developed climate backgrounder

SIR - The Economist’s article, A bad climate for development (September 17), which also serves as a backgrounder for an online debate on climate change, is not only selective in the information it presents, it is riddled with speculation and unsubstantiated claims.

For example, its chart 3 presents portions of two of three panels in figure 2.1 of the World Development Report 2010.  But the panel that it chooses not to display shows that deaths from all climate related disasters have actually declined at least since 1981-85 despite (a) an enormous increase in the population at risk, namely, the world’s population, and (b) the fact that older data has a greater tendency to underestimate the number and casualties of extreme weather events. The original source of the data (Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, CRED) states that the increase in the data until 1995 “is explained partly by better reporting of disasters in general, partly due to active data collection efforts by CRED and partly due to real increases in certain types of disasters."[1] They also state that they are unable to say whether the latter increases are due to climate change.

Secondly, the backgrounder cites estimates sponsored by the World Health Organisation and published in Comparative Quantification of Health Risks that attributed 150,000 deaths and a loss of 5.5m disability-adjusted life years - a measure of the global burden of disease - to climate change in the year 2000.  But these studies also show that at least twenty other risk factors contributed more to death and disease.[2] That is, there are many more important health problems facing the world than climate change.

Thirdly, the article goes on to claim that the indirect harm to public health from the impact of climate change on water supplies, crop yields and disease is “hugely greater.” But what’s the evidence for this? 

In fact, access to safe water, improved sanitation, crop yields, and life expectancy has never been higher in the history of mankind.[3] This is true for both the developing and developed worlds. Much of this has been enabled, directly or indirectly, by economic surpluses generated by the use of fossil fuels and other greenhouse gas generating activities such as fertilizer usage, pumping water for irrigation, and use of farm machinery. And crop yields, in particular, are also higher today than ever partly because of higher concentrations of CO2, without which yields would be zero.

Fourthly, the backgrounder claims that global warming is causing both droughts and floods. Regardless of whether this is the case, deaths from droughts have declined by 99.9% since the 1920s, and 99% from floods since the 1930s.[4] In fact, since the 1920s, average annual deaths from all extreme weather events have dropped by 95 percent while annual death rates, which factor in population growth, have been reduced by 99 percent.

One item, however, where I agree with the backgrounder is that projections of the future impacts of climate change are “no more than educated guesses” although, as Alexander Pope might have said, a little education is a dangerous thing.

Indur M. Goklany

Notes:

[1] Revkin AC. 2009. Gore Pulls Slide of Disaster Trends. Dot Earth Blog. February 23, 2009. Available here. Visited September 10, 2009.

[2] Goklany IM. Climate change is not the biggest health threat. Lancet 2009; 374: 973-74.

[3] Goklany IM. The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet (Cato Institute, Washington, DC, 2007).

[4] Goklany IM. Death and Death Rates Due to Extreme Weather Events:  Global and U.S. Trends, 1900-2006, in The Civil Society Report on Climate Change, November 2007, available here.

By David Lungren, EPW Policy Beat

Player Queen: Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife, If once I be a widow, ever I be a wife!

Shakespeare: Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2

As its authors are quick to note, the Kerry-Boxer bill is about jobs.  It’s about putting “millions of people back to work,” as one sponsor claimed. It will “create good-paying jobs in every region of the country.” And it will create, according to one study, 1.9 million new jobs.  Such elaborate claims, repeated at every turn, raise suspicion: why are the authors of a massive new energy tax obsessed with jobs?  Why are they, in a word, “protesting too much”?  One need only read Kerry-Boxer to find the answer.

In Section 311, titled “Climate Change Worker Adjustment Assistance,” the authors clearly admit the bill will put people out of work. The bill provides “adjustment assistance” to workers who have been “adversely affected” by the bill’s mandates, which will cause higher energy prices, fewer jobs, and slow the economy.  In other words, we’ll sack your job, and then put you on green welfare.  Not exactly the best recipe for putting “millions of people back to work.”

Under the bill, workers from the “energy-intensive manufacturing” sector, among many others, can get federal assistance if the Secretary of Labor determines that “a significant number or proportion of the workers in such workers’ employment site have become totally or partially separated, or are threatened to become totally or partially separated from employment” because of Kerry-Boxer.  Workers can also get handouts if “sales, production, or delivery of goods or services have decreased” as a result of “any requirement” of Kerry-Boxer. 

Kerry-Boxer’s victims can get up to 2 years of assistance, which includes 70 percent of a worker’s average weekly wage (which cannot “exceed the average weekly wage for all workers in the state where the adversely affected worker resides").  One would think it better to maintain industrial manufacturing jobs, and create more of them through affordable energy and strong economic growth-neither of which, incidentally, would happen under cap-and-trade.

A lot of workers will be eligible for Kerry-Boxer’s job killing largesse.  The National Black Chamber of Commerce found that Waxman-Markey, similar in many respects to Kerry-Boxer (in fact, it’s fair to say Kerry-Boxer is more stringent than Waxman-Markey), would destroy over 2 million jobs.

So all the jobs talk reveals what Kerry-Boxer supporters seem to know: their bill will destroy jobs, as the bill itself proves, yet they insist “green jobs” will make up the difference.  But the National Black Chamber of Commerce is clear on this point: cap-and-trade would lead to “green jobs” in energy efficiency and renewable energy, yet “any calculation of jobs created in these activities is incomplete if not supplemented with a calculation of the reduced employment in other industries and the decline in the average salary that would result from the associated higher energy costs and lower overall productivity in the economy.” Thus, “even after accounting for green jobs, there is a substantial and long-term net reduction in total labor earnings and employment. “

The Black Chamber finds that this is an “unintended but predictable consequence” of cap-and-trade.  Creating green jobs through the private sector is fine, indeed good, but we can create them without a massive new tax on the economy.  That’s what Kerry-Boxer is.  So the next time you hear Kerry-Boxer supporters talking about jobs, which you inevitably will, remember: they need to talk about jobs because their bill destroys them.

See blog post here.

See more here on John Kerry’s Green Depression by Greg Pollowitz on Planet Gore.

John Kerry, the former junior senator from Massachusetts who by the way served in Vietnam, is leading the effort in the Senate to pass Cap’n Trade, a measure to combat so-called global warming by imposing massive taxes on energy. Blogger Dan Calabrese notes a revealing Kerry quote from last week:

Let me emphasize something very strongly as we begin this discussion. The United States has already this year alone achieved a 6% reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need to go another 14%.

Wow. To accomplish Kerry’s environmental goals, all we need to do is shrink the economy even more and keep it shrunken - in other words, for the recession to turn into a permanent depression. If you think that’s a good idea, call your senator and urge him to vote “yes” on Cap’n Trade!