By Lawrence Solomon, National Post
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”
Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia - the university of Climategate fame - is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.
Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.
See post here.
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Rudd’s “4000” scientists turn to just “dozens”
By Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
Kevin Rudd tells yet another lie to justify his global warming policies:
“And the most recent IPCC scientific conclusion in 2007 was that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and the ‘increase in global average temperatures since the mid 20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” This is the conclusion of 4,000 scientists appointed by governments from virtually every country in the world...”
Mick Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia and an IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author, corrects the record:
“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields.”
Just a few dozen scientists, not Rudd’s “4000”. The man is utterly shameless.
But this raises the question: how easy is it for such a small group to become slaves of group think - or, indeed, to become intoxicated with their enormous and flattering influence on geo-politics?
In 2006, Professor Edward Wegman raised this very fear in his report, commissioned by the United States House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee to examine the IPCC’s discredited “hockey stick”, devised by Michael Mann, which purported to show unprecedented warming last century:
One of the interesting questions associated with the “hockey stick controversy” are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process. In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published…
However, it is immediately clear that the Mann, Rutherford, Jones, Osborn, Briffa, Bradley and Hughes form a clique, each interacting with all of the others. A clique is a fully connected subgraph, meaning everyone in the clique interacts with every one else in the clique....
Michael Mann is a co-author with every one of the other 42 [in his clique]. The black squares on the diagonal [fig. 5.2] indicate that the investigators work closely within their group, but not so extensively outside of their group.
Note those names again: Michael Mann, Scott Rutherford, Phil Jones, Tim Osborn, Keith Briffa, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes are all climate scientists implicates in the Climategate scandal.
And Rudd not only fell for it, but lied for it. See post here.
By Myron Ebell
The Senate on Thursday defeated the Murkowski Resolution by a vote of 47 to 53. Six Democrats joined all 41 Republicans in voting for S. J. Res. 26 to block the EPA’s finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare and therefore must be regulated by the Clean Air Act. The six Democrats were Blanche Lincoln (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.), Ben Nelson (Neb.), Jay Rockefeller (WV), Evan Bayh (Ind.), and David Pryor (Ark.).
Opponents had to work overtime to defeat Senator Lisa Murkowski’s (R-Alaska) Resolution. Environmental pressure groups spent millions of dollars in the last few weeks on radio and television advertising and on grassroots mobilization. The White House issued a sternly-worded veto threat on Tuesday. I even heard that an appeal for phone calls to the Senate was sent to President Obama’s Organizing for America e-mail list of 13 million names.
Reid’s Last Second Machinations
But by Wednesday, it was clear that all of their efforts were not going to be enough to defeat the Resolution. So Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) promised to hold a vote later in the year on a bill introduced by Senator Rockefeller that would delay the implementation of Clean Air Act regulations for two years. That was enough to peel away the votes of Senator Jim Webb (D-Va.) and several others.
Although I doubt that anyone in the Senate is counting on Reid to keep his promise, it was a remarkable concession to have to make. It reveals that the Democratic leadership and the White House realized that they were in deep trouble if the Senate passed the Murkowski Resolution. My guess is that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told the White House and Reid that she would have a hard time preventing a House vote if the Senate voted yes. That’s because 170 House members, including 25 Democrats, have already co-sponsored identical resolutions and there are a number of Democrats who voted for the Waxman-Markey energy-rationing bill who think that a vote against energy rationing now might help them save their seats in the November elections.
What’s Next?
This was therefore not just a symbolic vote, as opponents have claimed for months. It was a very important vote that will reverberate through the election campaign. Nor is it the end of efforts to block EPA from implementing regulations that will suffocate the economy. There is clearly majority support in the Senate and House at least to delay EPA implementation of emissions regulations. A vote on the Rockefeller bill, S. 3072, may or may not occur, but there are a number of other avenues still open: the lawsuits filed against the Endangerment Finding; a House discharge petition to bring the Resolution of Disapproval to the floor; a rider to the EPA appropriations bill could be offered this fall to remove funding for implementing any greenhouse gas regulations; and next year the new Congress may be much more hostile to the Endangerment Finding and to energy-rationing policies in general.
High-lights and Low-lights
I listened to much of the six hours of Senate floor debate on C-Span. Anyone who missed it who would like to hear some of the speeches can find them archived here. Senator Murkowski did an excellent job explaining the issues and what was at stake and why even supporters of energy-rationing legislation (as she is herself) should vote to block EPA. The speeches of the Chairman and Ranking Republican of the Environment and Public Works Committee provided a sharp contrast in intellectual seriousness. Ranking Republican James Inhofe (R-Okla.) gave a cogent and factually accurate speech that summarized the whole issue. Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), on the other hand, let loose with howler after ridiculous howler. I shouldn’t be unfair to Senator Boxer, however. Many of the other Senators opposed to the Resolution spoke just as much foolish nonsense. I should single out Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) as one of them. Kerry is the chief sponsor of the two Senate cap-and-trade bills, but is as clueless as Boxer.
Three other floor speeches should be mentioned. Senator John McCain’s (R-Az.) speech was made possible by his Republican primary opponent, J. D. Hayworth. I expect we will hear many other good conservative speeches from McCain between now and 24th August. Senator Webb gave an excellent analysis of what was at stake: “I do not believe that Congress should cede its authority over an issue as important as climate change to unelected officials of the Executive Branch. Without proper boundaries, this finding could be the first step in a long and expensive regulatory process that could lead to overly stringent and very costly controls on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions. Congress - and not the EPA - should make important policies, and be accountable to the American people for them.” Then, of course, Webb voted No. I guess there wasn’t time to re-write his speech after he switched his vote.
Senator Rockefeller summed up his reasons for voting Yes: “I don’t want EPA turning out the lights on America.” Fifty-three of his Democratic colleagues disagreed. They now bear full responsibility for the dire economic consequences of EPA’s regulatory onslaught.
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Senate surrenders to the EPA
Examiner Editorial June 11, 2010
Fifty three of the Senate’s 59 Democrats gave unelected, overpaid bureaucrats at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency a green light yesterday to do pretty much whatever they choose in their quixotic crusade against global warming. All 41 Republicans and six brave Democrats voted for Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s resolution nullifying the EPA’s recent usurpation of authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the U.S. economy to combat greenhouse gases. Thankfully, this craven surrender of congressional authority isn’t the last word on the issue, assuming that the November elections produce a Senate with enough backbone to reassert the legislature’s rightful power.
In the meantime, it’s vital to understand how bureaucracies function. Whatever else they may do, leading bureaucrats always do two things, regardless of which party controls the White House or Congress: They limit choices available to the rest of us by imposing regulations that increase government power and thus justify expanding their budgets and staffs; and they protect themselves and their turf by suppressing internal dissent, often at any costs.
As an example of the latter, consider career EPA scientist Alan Carlin. Last year, Carlin went through all the proper channels in submitting a study to the EPA’s top leadership in which he raised serious questions about the credibility of scientific reports used to justify the agency’s decision to regulate greenhouse gases. Carlin’s study became public thanks to the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Carlin’s reward was to be publicly pilloried by President Obama’s EPA administrator, Lisa Jackson. His work was suppressed within the agency, and he was threatened with additional retaliation if he continued voicing his views. Rather than endure this bureaucratic muzzling, Carlin retired.
Similarly, EPA lawyers Allan Zabel and Laurie Williams—a married couple living in San Francisco who between them have four decades of experience at the agency—became so concerned last year about the EPA’s support of cap-and-trade legislation that they created a YouTube video titled “The Huge Mistake” to explain their case. They made it clear that the video represented only their personal opinions, but the EPA still ordered them to change the video’s content or face severe punishment.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., predicts that a suffocating new round of EPA regulations will soon descend upon the “one-fifth of our restaurants, one-fourth of our schools, two-thirds of our hospitals and doctor’s offices, 10 percent of our churches, thousands of farms and millions of small businesses” that emit greenhouse gases. Considering how the EPA grandees mistreat their underlings, we wonder how the agency will respond to the soon-to-be-swelling ranks of critics on the outside. Read more at the Washington Examiner here.
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.