By Dr. Tim Ball in The Canada Free Press
By the time of the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR), the politics and hysteria about climate change had risen to a level that demanded clear evidence of a human signal. An entire industry had developed round massive funding from government. A large number of academic, political, and bureaucratic careers had evolved and depended on expansion of the evidence. Environmentalists were increasing pressure on the public and thereby politicians. In addition, the bar of proof was raised by claiming the 20th century and especially the last decade had 9 of the 10 warmest years in history; warming beyond anything previous and therefore unnatural. These claims were to become their downfall because, as some climate experts knew, there were much warmer periods in the historic record. There were hundreds of research papers from a wide variety of sources confirming the existence of a period warmer than today just a thousand years ago known as the Medieval Warm Period (MWP).
This period was clearly warmer than present temperatures and warmer than some computer model predictions for the future. Its existence was a serious problem because it negated the claims that the 20th century temperatures were unprecedented. What to do? This was effectively done by what became known as the “hockey stick”. The name came from the shape of a graph which showed no temperature increase for 1000 years (the handle) with a sudden rise in the 20th century (the blade). It was ideal, two strikes with one event. The MWP was gone and the sudden rise in the 20th century was clearly unnatural. It had to be due to human activity.
Research that produced the hockey stick came from dendroclimatology, the reconstruction of past climates from tree ring data--but they tacked on modern temperature data for the blade. They incorrectly assumed tree rings are only a function of temperature and cherry-picked those trees that gave the desired result. When challenged on this, one dendroclimatologist justified this practice by telling a US Congressional committee, “You have to pick cherries if your are going to make cherry pie.”
Read more of this disgraceful part of the history of our great science here. A great place to start for newbies on this issue.
Boston Herald Editorial Staff
Thursday is the deadline set by a federal judge in Alaska for the Fish and Wildlife Service to decide whether the polar bear is a threatened or endangered species. All the evidence shows the polar bear doesn’t need his help. Environmental groups petitioned for such a listing and sued when a decision was not forthcoming by the deadline. They claimed that global warming had already diminished polar ice, would continue to do so and doom the estimated 23,000 or so bears to extinction by perhaps 2050. If the bears were listed, the service would be obliged to designate “critical habitat.”
The Endangered Species Act provides that each federal agency would have to ‘insure that any action authorized, funded or carried out by such agency is not likely to jeopardize any endangered species or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of (critical) habitat of such species.’ The environmentalists, if not the service, could claim that any activity that emitted carbon dioxide, the chief gas causing the supposed warming, could not be authorized, financed or done by a federal agency. The agencies would have to bring the modern world to a crash as no fossil fuels could be burned in power plants, no highways built and so forth throughout the economy.
The plaintiffs’ claims are highly dubious. Polar bears have been around for 100,000 years, surviving much warmer temperatures before the last ice age. Population estimates are subject to huge and unknowable uncertainties. Native groups say there are more than there were several decades ago. Canada, on whose territory about two-thirds of the bears live, has refused to classify them as threatened or endangered. The United States should follow suit. Read more here.
By Christopher Monckton
European and American statists, including activist NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), assert that the moderate climate warming that is occurring today is a man-made catastrophe, and have embraced the dystopian fantasy that coercive policies for the elimination of fossil fuel production and usage can prevent or turn back the current warming cycle. They have, thus, made the “global warming planetary emergency” into the central plank of their ongoing campaigns for more centralized government.
Leftist commentator, Alexander Cockburn, put it this way: This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice [liberal fascism].
For decades environmental activists have insisted that capitalism is not a “sustainable” (sufficient to “save the planet") economic system. We now hear brazen declarations that democracy is no longer a “sustainable” political process. Al Gore lends a popular, philosophical/theological underpinning to collectivist impulses by casting the root of all environmental evils - real and imagined - in the scientific and industrial/technological revolutions. Put differently, for Gore and the EDF, the planetary environment, not human life, appears the supreme standard of value. Therefore, everything, most importantly Science and Economics, must be pried away from the benefit of man and pressed into total service of the State.
Given just a decade or two of such “sustainable” policies, bolstered by Gore’s religion, the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages, and the human misery it breeds. The American people who owe their long, comfortable and healthy lives to the accomplishments of modern industry, technology, medicine and affordable fossil energy ought to be outraged by activists’ claims and policies. They should come to grasp the terrible costs and futility of the left’s policies; they must understand that life lived as the left envision it for them and their children is baneful; life lived in submission to the hard natural forces of climate and disease, increasingly lived without labor-saving technology, without the fruits of sophisticated agricultural techniques, and without modern medicine, sanitation, electrification and transportation systems is, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Economic growth requires energy growth, and restricting energy growth through self-interested international agreements such as Kyoto or domestic policies such as carbon taxes or cap-and-trade schemes is a recipe for global poverty and human deaths. Read more here.