By E. Calvin Beisner, Washington Times

Al Gore, call your office. Elite environmentalists and globalists appear to be preparing to dump global warming as their cause celebre.

For at least the past 18 years (since Mr. Gore published “Earth in the Balance"), greens have touted saving the Earth from catastrophic, man-made global warming as the “central organizing principle of human civilization.” One would think that was because it was perceived as the greatest threat facing us - which indeed it has been called, over and over.

But last month, the United Nations celebratedits annual International Day for Biodiversity by releasing a report that says the case for saving species is “more powerful than climate change.”

Oops. Wait a minute. The report’s not out yet. The U.N. just announced that it will release it this summer. Just as with all the hoopla before releasing the U.N.’s 2007 global-warming assessment, this allows for lots of public buildup before the report actually appears and is subject to critical examination. The familiar green tactic is known as “science by press release.”

The announcement compares the forthcoming report with the 2006 Stern Review on the economics of climate change, which claimed that the benefits of drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions to reduce global warming would be five to 20 times the costs. Global-warming alarmists celebrate the Stern Review because it seems to justify the deindustrialization and permanent impoverishment of the world that they promote.

Yet the Stern Review has been shown to be economic nonsense, reaching its wild conclusions only by means of vastly exaggerated potential global-warming damages and adoption of a near-zero-time discount rate that is the stuff of fantasy, not serious economic analysis.

Although true believers won’t have their faith shaken, the U.N.’s forthcoming report is likely to be debunked as quickly and compellingly as the Stern Review.

According to an article in the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper, the U.N. document will say that “if the goods and services provided by the natural world are not valued and factored into the global economic system, the environment will become more fragile and less resilient to shocks, risking human lives, livelihoods and the global economy.”

But, of course, natural resources already are valued and factored into the global economic system - by the pricing mechanism of the market, which spontaneously reflects supply and demand all around the world in a near-miraculous way that the self-appointed economy managers neither understand nor appreciate. They want authority to set the value of all things - i.e., to replace the market’s valuing mechanism with their own choices.

In other words, they want the price-setting power of the various committees that brought collapse to all the countries in the world in which they operated precisely because, by determining prices by fiat, they made economic calculation impossible.

Pavan Sukhdev, an Indian economist with Deutsche Bank India and the forthcoming report’s author, told the Guardian the changes called for in the report “will involve a wholesale revolution in the way humans do business, consume and think about their lives.” When you hear that language, hang onto your hat - and everything else you own. It’s all targeted.

The Guardian says the report will claim “the potential economic benefits” of the major overhaul of the world’s economy “are huge. Setting up and running a comprehensive network of protected areas would cost $45 billion a year globally ... but the benefits of preserving the species richness within these zones would be worth $4-5 trillion a year.” If you can believe there’s an investment opportunity that will return $100 on every dollar invested, and that the only way to get anyone to invest in it is by government mandate, please come and talk to me about a bridge.

Apparently relying on statements from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the U.N. report assumes hyperrapid rates of species extinction - 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the natural background rate. But the claim is devoid of empirical foundation. Like warmists’ predictions of future climate catastrophe, it depends not on empirical observation but on computer models. It’s not evidence. It’s not data. It’s hypothesis.

When in the 1980s, the IUCN, pressed to rebut a 1984 critique by the late Julian L. Simon and Aaron Wildavsky that pointed out there were no empirical data to back such claims, commissioned a field study in rain forests (thought to have the highest rates of species extinction) around the world, the rather embarrassing result was the IUCN’s book, “Tropical Deforestation and Species Extinction” (1992). Every chapter in the book reported extinction rates from empirical observation only a tiny fraction of the claimed rates. As V.H. Heywood and S.N. Stuart put it in their chapter, the “data indicate that the number of recorded extinctions for both plants and animals is very small” and, “Known extinction rates are very low.”

Nonetheless, as global warming fears collapse in the face of Climategate, the green socialist machine is scrambling to be ready to switch gears. Perhaps the new rationale for global wealth redistribution and deindustrialization will be preserving biodiversity. It’s a good candidate: It has all the flaws of global warming - bad science, bad economics and totalitarian politics. See more here.

E. Calvin Beisner is with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

The European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) based in Germany has sent a Letter of Protest to the Intendant of German public broadcaster Deutsche Welle demanding that it refrains from the illegal use of public funds and cancel its one-sided conference for journalists called: The Heat Is On - Climate Change and the Media.

The international conference, scheduled to take place in Bonn from June 21 till June 23, excludes all views that disagree with the extreme AGW gloom and doom, world downfall view.  However, because Deutsche Welle is a publicly funded institution, it is required by German Law to remain neutral and honest.

Instead, Deutsche Welle has decided on its own to abandon journalism and to resort to promoting one single extreme view on the topic of climate change, and to shut out the rest. It’s activism run amok.

One workshop is How to professionally deal with climate scepticism. The workshop’s objective:

This workshop aims to point out what journalists must know about climate change policy, whom to trust and when to question their own professional procedures.

This conference has infuriated a number of scientists and citizens. As a result EIKE has drafted and dispatched a letter of protest to Deutsche Welle. The letter states:

It certainly cannot be in the interest of a publicly financed broadcaster to put its own existence into question with a debate over its objectivity.

and

Enlightened thinking has always been at the centre of our culture, along with sceptical, critical and scrutinising thought. It is intolerable that, here in Germany, public funds are being illegally used under your supervision and under your responsibility to marginalise a large number persons (the majority!) who share a different opinion.

More information about Deutsche Welle and its conference is here and here.

77 German Scientists sign a petition

To show that there is a wide range of opinions on the AGW topic in Germany, EIKE has a Petition refuting catastrophic AGW signed by 77 German scientists.

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Lindsey Graham Said What About Climate Change?
By Kate Sheppard

On Tuesday, South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham told reporters that he would vote against the climate bill he helped author. Now he’s going one
step further. Graham, one of the few Republicans who claimed to care about climate change, now says global warming is no big deal.

Graham appeared on Wednesday at a press conference with Dick Lugar (R-Ind.), who was rolling out his own energy bill, a measure that relies heavily on expanding nuclear power and raising fuel economy standards without putting a cap on carbon dioxide emissions. Yesterday, Graham said he didn’t think any energy bill could get 60 votes this year because oil drilling has become too controversial. Today he decided, at the last minute, to back Lugar’s bill.

Reporters asked Graham several times about why he was supporting Lugar’s bill, when just a few months ago he had argued that the Senate shouldn’t pass a “half-assed” bill that lacked hard restrictions on carbon emissions. Graham replied that he now doesn’t think pricing carbon is that important. “The science about global warming has changed,” he noted, offhandedly. “I think they’ve oversold this stuff, quite frankly. I think they’ve been alarmist and the science is in question,” Graham told reporters. “The whole movement has taken a giant step backward.”

I followed up with him. “Can you clarify that statement that the science on global warming has changed?” I asked.

“The public acceptance about global warming has changed,” he said.

“Well, what do you think?” I replied.

I’ll print his response in full, because it’s a humdinger:

It makes sense to me that the planet is heating up because you can measure heat. It’s not a stretch to say that what goes into the air is contributing to global warming, but I don’t want to be in the camp that says I know people in Northern Virginia will never see snow. At the end of the day, I think carbon pollution is worthy of being controlled, whether you believe in global warming or not. I do believe that all the CO2 gases, greenhouse gases from cars, trucks, and utility plants is not making us a healthier place, is not making our society better, and it’s coming at the expense of our national security and our economic prosperity. So put me in the camp that it’s worthy to clean up the air and make money doing so. This idea that carbon’s good for you. I want that debate. There’s a wing of our party who thinks carbon pollution is okay. I’m not in that wing.

I asked him, if carbon emissions aren’t warming the planet, why are they bad? Here’s his reply:

I just think it’s bad...the reason I don’t hang out in traffic jams and get out and suck up the wind is I think this crap is bad for you. We’ve had an increase in asthma cases. If you’ve ever been to Thailand stuck behind 400 motorcycles, it’s a lousy place to be. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist in my view to understand that the stuff floating in the Gulf, if you burn it doesn’t make it better for you. If you wouldn’t go swimming in this stuff, why would you burn it and want to breath it?

Graham ended his commentary on the subject on this note: “I do believe the environmental benefit of a low carbon economy is worth the Republican party’s time and attention. Does climate change have to be your religion? No, it is not my religion, it is my concern.”

This is quite different from what Graham has been saying for the past eight months. Last October, he co-authored an op-ed with John Kerry (D-Mass.) arguing that that “climate change is real and threatens our economy and national security.” Now he’s fumbling to figure out how to make it seem like he still cares - but not too much. Read more on Mother Jones news here.

By Dennis Ambler for SPPI

This is really very, very good, but politicians will not read it through, it is 79 pages long. It is a lawyer’s examination of the IPCC evidence as in a courtroom. He takes apart the IPCC conclusions and presents other evidence that disproves their insistence on incontrovertible evidence of AGW.

An example of his approach:

The Ability of Climate Models to Explain Past Climate
The IPCC and the climate establishment have vastly oversold climate models by declaring that such models are able to quite accurately reproduce past climates, including most importantly the warming climate of the late twentieth century. Mainstream climate modelers have themselves explained that climate models disagree tremendously in their predicted climate sensitivity - response of temperature to a CO2 increase - and are able to reproduce twentieth century climate only by assuming whatever (negative) aerosol forcing effect is necessary to get agreement with observations.

These kind of explanations, by leading climate modelers, suggest that climate models do not in fact reflect understanding of the key physical climate processes well enough to generate projections of future climate that one could rely upon. It seems unlikely that climate model projections would be accorded much policy significance if the way in which they were able to “reproduce” past climate was generally understood. It seems more than plausible that policymakers (let alone the general public), take a model’s purported ability reproduce past temperatures as an indication that the model’s assumption about climate sensitivity is correct.

If policymakers were told that this is not so, that ability to reproduce past temperatures indicates only that a particular pairing of assumptions about climate sensitivity and aerosol forcing allowed the reproduction of past temperatures, then the logical question would be: which model gets the correct pairing of sensitivity and aerosol forcing? In answer to this, climate modelers would have to say that they do not know, and the best that could be done would be to use all the models (this is called the ensemble approach). But of course it is possible that all the models were very badly wrong in what they assumed about sensitivity.

A policymaker aware of this would then have to ask whether it would be better to base policy on climate models, or a more naive climate forecasting method, and whether further public funding of efforts to improve climate models was worthwhile.

The Existence of Significant Alternative Explanations for Twentieth Century Warming
The IPCC and the climate establishment story expresses great certainty in arguing that late twentieth century global warming was caused by the atmospheric buildup of human ghg emissions (this is the anthropogenic global warming or AGW story).

The IPCC reports confidently assert that solar activity could not have accounted for warming during this period, because this was a period of weakening and not strengthening solar 76 irradiance, and that there was no natural forcing during this period that could have accounted for the warming.

Yet a closer look at the literature shows that there is ongoing dispute about the possible role of the sun, with the debate coming down to conflicting views about the reliability of alternative datasets on solar activity. Perhaps even more importantly, a growing body of sophisticated theoretical work confirms that the nonlinear global climate is subject to inherent warm and cool cycles of about 20 to 30 years in duration, with substantial evidence that a warm cycle was likely to have begun in 1976.

The existence of alternative explanations for twentieth century warming obviously has enormous implications for policy, for in order to determine how much to spend to reduce human GHG emissions, one must know first have some idea how harmful those emissions will be if they continue unabated.

Questionable methodology underlying highly publicized projected impacts of global warming

One of the most widely publicized numbers in the establishment climate story is the projection that 20-30 per cent of plant and animal species now existing may become extinct due to global warming. This number is also one of the most troubling, because it comes from a single study whose methodological validity has been severely questioned by a large number of biologists. These biologists agree that the methodology neglects many key processes that determine how the number of species will respond to changing climate, and will always lead to an overestimate of species loss due to climatic change.

Among the most surprising and yet standard practices is a tendency in establishment climate science to simply ignore published studies that develop and/or present evidence tending to disconfirm various predictions or assumptions of the establishment view that increases in CO2 explain virtually all recent climate change.

Perhaps even more troubling, when establishment climate scientists do respond to studies supporting alternative hypotheses to the CO2 primacy view, they more often than not rely upon completely different observational datasets which they say confirm (or at least don’t disconfirm) climate model predictions.

We should not be using public money to pay for faster and faster computers so that increasingly fine-grained climate models can be subjected to ever larger numbers of simulations until we have got the data to test whether the predictions of existing models are confirmed (or not disconfirmed) by the evidence.

Policy carrying potential costs in the trillions of dollars ought not to be based on stories and photos confirming faith in models, but rather on precise and replicable testing of the models’ predictions against solid observational data. See post here.