By Bjørn Lomborg in the Daily Times
When we look at the evidence, we discover again and again that the best solutions to the world’s biggest challenges aren’t the ones we hear about the most. We could save many more lives during extreme weather events, for example, by insisting on hurricane-resistant building standards than we would by committing to Live Earth’s target of a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2050. Read full story here.
The organisers of next Saturday’s Live Earth concerts hope that the entire world will hear a crystal clear message: climate change is the most critical threat facing the planet. Planned by former US Vice President Al Gore, Live Earth will be the biggest, most mass-marketed show of celebrity activism in history.
But making global warming the world’s top priority means that we shuffle other major challenges down our “to do” list. Some climate change activists actually acknowledge this: Australian author Tim Flannery recently told an interviewer that climate change is “the only issue we should worry about for the next decade”.
The Copenhagen Consensus project brought together top-class thinkers, including four Nobel Laureate economists, to examine what we could achieve with a $50 billion investment designed to “do good” for the planet.
They examined the best research available and concluded that projects requiring a relatively small investment — getting micro-nutrients to those suffering from malnutrition, providing more resources for HIV/AIDS prevention, making a proper effort to get drinking water to those who lack it — would do far more good than the billions of dollars we could spend reducing carbon emissions to combat climate change.
Robert E. Murray Testimony Before the Senate EPW
The climate change, or so-called “global warming”, issue is a human one for American citizens, as the present courses of action being proposed by the United States House and Senate Majority Members and some Republicans will result in little or no environmental benefit, but will definitely destroy the lives or quality of life of millions of working American families and citizens on fixed incomes who depend on low cost electricity for the maintenance of their jobs and living standards. We feel very threatened, and frankly afraid, for these people, who only want to work in honor and dignity and have an acceptable quality of life, from what is going on in the Congress.
Raising energy costs, as this Congress seems intent on accomplishing, will kill American people. A Johns Hopkins University study revealed that replacing three-fourths (3/4) of United States coal-based energy with higher priced energy will lead to one hundred fifty thousand (150,000) extra premature deaths annually, and with no benefit to the global environment.
Reducing carbon dioxide emissions will impact our poorest families the hardest, according to a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office. A fifteen percent (15%) reduction in carbon dioxide emissions under a so-called cap and trade emissions system, a euphemism for politicians and many others who do not understand the subject and that it cannot work, will cost the poorest of our citizens three percent (3%) of their annual household income. The fifteen percent (15%) reduction will cost the poorest twenty percent (20%) of Americans twice as much as the cost to the richest twenty percent (20%), as a percentage of total income. Usually, you Congressional leaders in the Majority would condemn this as heartless and unconscionable.
Rising energy costs will also cost American jobs. The hysterical and out of control climate change or global warming issue, and the legislation that you have proposed, will lead to the deterioration of the American standard of living and the accelerated exportation of more of our jobs to China and other developing countries, which have repeatedly advised, as recent as last week, that they will not limit their carbon dioxide emissions. According to a Pennsylvania State University study, replacing two-thirds (2/3) of United States coal-based energy with higher priced energy will cost America three million (3,000,000) jobs, with an upward estimate of possibly four million (4,000,000) American livelihoods.
Read more here .
By Prof David Bellamy
The most reliable global, regional and local temperature records from around the world display no distinguishable trend up or down over the past century.
The last peak temperatures were around 1940 and 1998, with troughs of low temperature around 1910 and 1970. The second dip caused pop science and the media to cry wolf about a catastrophic ice age just around the corner. Our end was nigh! As soon as the temperatures took an upward turn in the 1980’s the scaremongers changed their tune switching their dogma to imminent catastrophic scenarios of global warming all based on computer models some that were proved to be as bent as the hockey stick which no longer features in IPCC’s armoury. How can a sixty-year cycle of changing temperature give any credibility to claims that carbon dioxide is causing an inexorable march towards a climate Armageddon.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen throughout this time frame, yet the temperature has gone up and down in a cyclical manner. How can this be explained unless there are other factors in control overriding the effect of this greenhouse gas? There are of course many to be found in peer reviewed literature, solar cycles, cosmic ray cloud control and those little rascals El Ninos and La Ninas all of which are played down or even ignored by the global warming brigade. As are the positive aspects of carbon dioxide in the growth of plants. See full story here.