In a remarkable editorial over the weekend, Australian scientist David Evans renews his argument against government-mandated restrictions on carbon emissions, noting that there is little evidence to show they have anything to do with climate change.

If you’ve followed my sporadic coverage of climate change alarmism, you may recall him as a scientist who worked on carbon accounting for the Australian government, and changed his mind once he saw the evidence on which global warming alarmism was (or rather, was not) based.

Evans was one of the signatories of the open letter to UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon, on the occasion of the climate change junket in Bali, late last year. He was among several people who weren’t welcome. He has written a paper (link in PDF) in support of his position that CO₂ does not cause global warming, has written a more accessible alternative, and has also penned a remarkable confession: I Was On the Global Warming Gravy Train.

His editorial is worth reading in full, but here are some key points:

When I started that job [of writing Australia’s carbon accounting model] in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it. […]

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). […]

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

None of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.

[…]

Until now the global warming debate has merely been an academic matter of little interest. Now that it matters, we should debate the causes of global warming.

So far that debate has just consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions.

In the minds of the audience, the evidence that global warming has occurred becomes conflated with the alleged cause, and the audience hasn’t noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved.

[…]

The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990, and we have not found any actual evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. Evidence consists of observations made by someone at some time that supports the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. Computer models and theoretical calculations are not evidence, they are just theory.

[…]

The onus should be on those who want to change things to provide evidence for why the changes are necessary. The Australian public is eventually going to have to be told the evidence anyway, so it might as well be told before wrecking the economy.

Don’t expect any of this to make an ounce of difference. To turn a typical alarmist point against them, too many people are invested in the climate alarmism lobby. Some merely for its value in obtaining public money for research, but others, like Al Gore, quite literally. Politicians love the idea of climate change, because it gives them at once an opportunity to appear saintly and selfless, and an excuse to impose measures that increase their power and reward their political benefactors. Many companies buy into it because it gives them marketing collateral, and allows them to gain a slice of a “green” products pie that is expect to top $688 billion by 2010 (link in PDF), not to mention all the spinoffs from trade in an entirely new class of assets — carbon credits — simply conjured out of thin air by governments. The media loves it because, well, scary stories sell magazines.

Expect David Evans to be attacked over everything except the substance of his arguments, by all these people with undeniable vested interests of their own.

But he is right: if climate alarmists demand that the world drastically limit its use of fossil energy, and significantly increase the cost of production — which is the stuff that provide people with food, housing and healthcare, and lift the poor out of poverty — the onus is on them to prove why he is wrong and their solution is unavoidably necessary. And even if he is wrong, they should show why there is no alternative solution to large-scale, invasive government regulation, such as relying on technological innovation and free markets to solve whatever problems people might encounter as a result of global warming.

Their plan is a staggering price to pay for mere precaution, especially when it appears that their fears are based on little more than elaborate speculation. In fact, the precautionary principle — that self-contradictory rule to which environmentalists so often appeal — itself cautions against their grand, megalomaniacal, but ultimately vain schemes to change the climate. But it won’t stop them trying to run your life, scare your children and rob you blind.

Update: Fixed a missing close quote that cut half the paragraph starting with, “Don’t expect any of this to make an ounce of difference.” Proof-reading is under-rated and sadly neglected, on occasion. My apologies.

It’s almost time for the 2008 Olympics, and the Chinese authorities are making sure their coming out party is as green as possible. And what does environmentalism entail? Draconian restrictions, of course. The Communist Party of China no doubt can relate to the greens’ penchant for fascist measures to save the rest of us from ourselves.

In a bid to pacify the environmental tyrants of the occident, the communist tyrants of the orient have instituted a ban on cars. Beijing residents will be limited to driving only every other day, with the aim of halving the usual 3.3 million cars on the road. Additional restrictions will shut down (and even move out of the city) many major factories.

BEIJING (Reuters) — Beijing will introduce “odd-even” traffic restrictions for two months from July 20 to help ease congestion and reduce pollution during the Olympics and Paralympics, officials said on Friday.

Authorities hope the regulations will take 45 percent of the city’s 3.29 million cars off the road and reduce emissions from vehicles by 63 percent, officials told a news conference.

[…] Those affected by the ban will be compensated by not having to pay road or vehicle taxes for three month, costing the city about 1.3 billion yuan ($189 million).

Violators would be punished “according to relevant national and local regulations” and lose the compensation.

Only 70 percent of government-owned cars will be included in the scheme.

And if you’re sufficiently poor to have an older, high-emissions car (of the kind Britain’s PM, Gordon Brown, unapologetically wants to use as an excuse to super-tax the working class), you don’t get to drive it at all.

Over at the Huffington Post, this measure is considered a mere band-aid. One dreads to think what a real cure would look like.

And while you park your car, and close your factories, and stop smoking, and renounce your right to protest or get drunk, here’s what you shall cheer, the “spiritual civilisation bureau” decrees: “Aoyun! Jia You! Zhongguo! Jia You!”

The offically-approved cheer, complete with “civilised” gestures, is being taugh through official media and school training programmes. Note the faceless face of “civilisation”. Reports the BBC: “Li Ning, president of the Beijing Etiquette Institute, told the Beijing News that the cheer was in line with general international principles for cheering, while at the same time possessing characteristics of Chinese culture.”

Good to know we have international principles for cheering. I’ll confess I’ve been very disturbed by the uncivilised cheering I’ve come across. Granted, this involved anti-social people who even had the temerity to wear individual faces in public. Shameful. Glad they’re cracking down on that sort of thing.

Just when you thought this couldn’t get any funnier, you discover that with beautiful irony, the cheer means, “Olympics! Add oil! China! Add oil!”

Not if you have the misfortune of being a Chinese citizen in Beijing, you don’t.

Our own politicians and 2010 World Cup organisers undoubtedly have luxury box seats at the Beijing Olympics, where they’ll be learning from the masters how to please the world’s eco-fascists.

This struck a chord, in general, but especially in light of this post:

I think the Vimrod cartoons, now conveniently available on Flickr, are very funny. It took me a while to warm to them, during which time I suffered considerable scorn and condescension because I poured scorn and condescension on those who did think them funny, but now I too am superior. Still, I don’t expect everyone to agree. If you don’t get them, or you just don’t like them, or you don’t see why they’re both clever and funny, I won’t look down on your stunted sense of humour (if humour is what you call it).

On the advice of a regular reader, and because I’ve been delinquent in posting recently, I thought I’d post a snippet I sent to a mailing list in response to someone who declared: “We’ve caused thousands of species to go exctint!” or “We’re facing a mass extinction!” or some such hysterical catastrophist trope.

They asked, “Do scientists just make this stuff up, you think?”

The answer, of course, is: “Yes, they do.”

To illustrate, I put together this summary, extracted from Bjørn Lomborg’s classic 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, about whether species are going extinct hand-over-fist, and if not, why some people might think so.

First, the data (sources given at the end):

             #species  #ext*  % ext  #p/a    % p/a*

Vertebrates     47000   321   0.683   0.8  0.00171
Mollusks       100000   235   0.235   0.6  0.00059
Crustaceans      4000     9   0.225   0.0  0.00056
Insects      >1000000    98   0.010   0.2  0.00002
Vasc. plants   250000   396   0.158   1.0  0.00040

Total        ~1600000  1033   0.065   2.6  0.00016
Excl. insects  401000   961   0.240   2.4  0.00060

* Total documented extinctions since 1600AD

These are known species, and documented extinctions. The latter certainly under-report reality, though it isn’t possible to say by how much. That most obviously appears to be the case with insects, an outlier in the data above, so I built a second totals line excluding insects. To give some idea of scale, the 0.24% of all non-insect species to have gone extinct in the last 400 years doesn’t even compare with previous extinctions. The famous dinosaur extinction claimed over 40% of all species. In some 50 separately identified extinction periods, more than 10% of species were wiped out. So losing 1 in 400 is pretty mild, as extinctions go.

One might expect that with mammals, whose extinction rate is the highest by a large margin, the documented extinction rate is much closer to reality. Not many mammals escape our attention.

For mammals (a subcategory of vertebrates in the table above) we have 4500 species, 110 extinctions, which is 2.444% of the total, and 0.00611% per annum.

The total number of species, as well as the actual extinction rates among them, are pure speculation. Now it’s not exactly reasonable to extrapolate from mammals, but let’s do so, to develop a worst-case scenario for all species. Then we get an extinction rate of 0.006% per annum for all species. It is possible that some non-mammal species go extinct at a higher rate, but I don’t have any data either to confirm or deny this, so let’s work with 0.006% per annum.

This is high, but certainly not catastrophic. (Whether it is too high, getting worse, or what, if anything, we should do about it, is beyond the scope of this post.)

Al Gore, in his 1993 book Earth in the Balance, says “40,000 species go extinct per year”. Problem is, he is exaggerating by at least a factor of four. Even if he weren’t exaggerating, he performs a trick well known to those who lie with statistics: he fails to mention the denominator of that fraction. 40,000 of 100,000 is a lot. 40,000 of a million is not a lot. 40,000 of 10 million is negligible. So if our estimate of 1.6 million total known species is correct, even Al Gore’s exaggeration is somewhere between not a lot and negligible.

But if that number is wrong, where did he get it? The answer is that he got it from a British ecologist, Norman Myers. And where did Norman Myers get it? He made it up.

No, really, he made it up! Pulled it out of thin air.

Here’s how. As long ago as 1979, he wrote that until 1900, one species went extinct every four years; since 1900, one species per year went extinct. So far so good.

He then referenced a conference from five years earlier, which had “hazarded a guess” of an extinction rate of 100 per year at present, as the “overall extinction rate among all species, whether known to science or not”.

That hazardous guess seems way out of proportion to the rate Myers accepted for the period 1900-1974, being suddenly 100 times higher with only global cooling and the oil crisis to blame. Even if it includes species not known to science, that’s a rather dramatic jump.

But not to Myers. He is underwhelmed and undaunted, and goes on: “Yet even this figure seems low. Let us suppose that, as a consequence of this man-handling of natural environments, the final one-quarter of this century witnesses the elimination of 1 million species — a far from unlikely prospect. This would work out, during the course of 25 years, at an average extinction rate of 40,000 species per year, or rather over 100 species per day.”

That’s it. That’s the totality of his argument. The lot. There’s no data, no citations, no research, no extrapolation from known facts, nothing. Just an assumption, pulled out of thin air, of a million extinctions in 25 years, which he then in wonderful circular fashion divides up to get an extinction rate 40,000 times higher than he himself says occurred in the first three-quarters of our century.

See the problem? That 40,000 number, which almost thirty years later seems to be “common knowledge”, because scientists and activists have stated it as fact, is an invention. Complete fiction. No bearing on reality whatsoever. But it’s scary! Woooo!

If we know about 1.6 million species, don’t you think we’d have noticed a million extinctions by now? I’ll bet most people can’t even cite, off the top of their heads, just a few examples of actual extinctions; let alone dig up a list of the tens or hundreds of thousands that would be indisputably on record if Al Gore and Norman Myers hadn’t been dead wrong. The irony of the newspaper headline above, 25 years after Norman Myers made up his million-in-25-years number, is the stuff a sub-editor lives for.

So when someone raises extinctions as this major catastrophe, I say, “people make this stuff up”. Not because I’m being argumentative, or because I’m being controversial, but because they really do make this stuff up.

(Source: Lomborg 2001, p250ff, citing among others Bailie and Groombridge, 1997, Walter and Gillett 1998, May et al, 1995:11, Reid 1992:56 and, of course, Myers 1979:5.)

You can’t help but laugh at the hypocritical fathead. The prime minister of the UK, Gordon Brown, blames the people for wasting too much food, and says this is what causes high food prices. The solution? Buy less food, and throw less away.

Britons will today be urged to make saving food as important as saving energy, with the publication of a government report which reveals that more than 4m tonnes of food are wasted each year at a cost of hundreds of pounds per household.

Note that Brown didn’t bother to place his claim of food waste in context. Each year, he says, 4 million tonnes of food go to waste. In a well-worn classic of prevarication — using statistics to lie — there’s no denominator. Four million tonnes of how much food goes to waste? Is it a lot, or a little? One percent? Five percent? Ten percent? If it really is a lot, I fail to see why people won’t notice rising food prices and discover: “Hey, neat, I can buy just legs of lamb, instead of buying the whole thing and throwing the rest away!”

How does the UK government know all this anyway? Do the English fill out annual food returns? Are waste dumps carefully analysed for suspicious substances that may once have been food? Do Britons pay taxes to employ people to audit the garbage? And what does Brown propose doing about it? Get people to buy food in smaller quantities, so packaging and distribution costs — not to mention plastic waste — go up instead?

Typical of a government official to blame the citizens for things that are none of the government’s business, are out of their control, are the errors of government, or all of the above.

After all, Britain’s government offers tax incentives for users of biofuel, which is here.) The bureaucrats admit this, but by yesterday had only agreed to “amend, not abandon”, its misguided state intervention to give biofuel an advantage over cheaper alternative energy.

Nevermind that most of the rest of the rise in food prices is a function of higher oil prices, since producers rely heavily on fuel in both the production and transport of food, and that the higher oil price is largely a function of the weak dollar, inflationary monetary policy worldwide, and high demand from large emerging markets.

No, it’s because you don’t eat your greens, young man! Does big brother have to make you finish your food? It sure sounds like it, with all that talk of “global plans” to find “global solutions” to “global problems”.

But wait, it gets better. On his first day at the summit in Japan, Gordon Brown and his wife enjoyed course after course after course of the most lavish food imaginable. To wit:

The dinner consisted of 18 dishes in eight courses including caviar, smoked salmon, Kyoto beef and a “G8 fantasy dessert”.

The banquet was accompanied by five different wines from around the world including champagne, a French Bourgogne and sake.

To complete the irony, heads of state from Ethiopia, Tanzania and Senegal weren’t invited. “I say, old chap, nice caviar. Be a waste to feed it to the darkies. They might get used to it and drive the price up, what what?”

No wonder nobody likes him.

Over on the M&G’s ThoughtLeader, Bert Olivier, an academic of the philosophical persuasion, rails against those who defend “the unforgiveable practices of capitalism”. He leans heavily on a polemic known as “The Corporation”, a documentary (and book) by Joel Bakan on which I’ve written before.

There’s so much to dispute in his post and the comments, I hardly know where to start. As one of the people who frequently offers a defence for the practices of capitalism (most recently here), I’ll make a few general points in rebuttal, though. I’ll refrain from cheap shots about the left-wing utopia from which most of us graduate (or drop out), thus to grow up and discover the real world. There is neat irony, however, in how our academic friend’s comrade in anti-capitalism, above, portrays himself. But enough ad humorem attacks.

Let’s begin by drawing some clear distinctions. Communism and capitalism aren’t just two systems among many. They are logical opposites, and are the only ways we know of organising production and consumption. One can either presume production and consumption are determined individually, or collectively. Collectivism presumes society (as expressed by the state) owns and organises both the production and consumption of its members. Capitalism supposes instead that individuals have the right to use and dispose of the fruits of their own labour as they see fit, without being constrained by any law other than those against infringing the same rights of others.

There are bastardisations of the concept, which is why “free-market capitalism” often needs to be spelt out. State-capitalism, for example, is merely a form of collective organisation. Socialism and communism are both collectivist in nature. The difference between them is a matter of degree, not nature. Any degree of socialism detracts from the general prosperity and must be enforced against the will of citizens. Any control of some parts of the economy, in order to be effective, eventually requires the control of more parts. In extremis, this means the logical conclusion of socialism is communist totalitarianism. Stalin wasn’t a perversion of communism. He was its logical culmination.

Limited socialist principles can appear to work, for a while, in rich countries, just like a rich individual can use his savings for a while without appearing to work for his lifestyle. It is no surprise that the well-intentioned New Deal culminated in the confiscatory taxes and economic malaise of the 1970s, and that a return to free market principles cured this malaise. Western Europe, too, became wealthy thanks to free enterprise and free trade. Poverty declined dramatically, and a large middle class was established. Once wealthy, it appeared to be able to afford a measure of socialism, but a few decades later, it is discovering that its savings are depleted, that not enough new wealth is being created. There is a price to pay for this well-intentioned idealism, and even rich countries find they cannot afford it forever. Unlike European economies, truly free markets need not fear immigration. Socialist markets, however, cannot afford to support even their own people, let alone people whose past production has not been decocted into the common pot. In poor countries, socialism has not offered a remedy for poverty either. It merely keeps the people mired in poverty — and that’s before accounting for the deleterious effects of tyranny or corruption.

The corporation doesn’t rule anyone. They can only profit if they offer things people are prepared to buy, and go to extreme lengths to do so. Do you really believe they determine what we eat, what we watch, what we wear, where we work, and what we do? Would you have more or less choice if you were limited to your own production and barter trade with your neighbours? Thanks to the corporation, we now have a vast array of food, mundane and exotic, on offer, at real prices (relative to our income) that our parents and grandparents would think fantastical. The picture alongside is one of hundreds of stores from which I can choose within five minutes of my home. Thanks to the corporation, we have a huge array of clothing available to us to suit every taste, from ordinary and practical to uber-cool and fashionable. If your needs or interests are more specialised, you probably know a store like the one below. There’s a lot you can say about golfers and golf equipment stores, but you can’t accuse them of not offering choice. And yet, not being controlled by corporations, I have never felt obliged to buy as much as a golf ball.

Corporations determine what we watch and where we work? Whether you sit in front of the TV all day is your problem, but don’t blame the people who create the thousands of different shows for different tastes broadcast on hundreds of different channels. If none of that extraordinary choice satisfies you, you can still read a book, you know. Unlike our parents and grandparents, who were employed for life on the same boring corporate ladder, or our great-grandparents who were stuck on the same farm or village all their lives and did the work their fathers did, the modern professional workforce job-hops every few years. Many work for themselves, from home, doing things that companies don’t think worth doing. You’re saying people do this because they have less choice where to work and what to do than they used to have?

Even if companies are monopolies, people have choices, to buy or not to buy, to spend or save, to buy here or buy there. Only by serving the needs of customers can corporations profit. Therefore, corporations profit only to the degree in which they serve the public good. When talking about monopolies, however, it is important to distinguish between those that are established or protected by law, and those that arise naturally. The latter simply reap the fruits of being better than competitors at providing a particular product or service, and are always vulnerable, should they abuse their position, to the emergence of new competitors with new ideas and better ways of doing things. Their power is restricted by the choice consumers have of buying their products or doing without them, as well as by the possibility for competition to arise — i.e. their power is restricted by the market, just as it would be if they were less powerful competitors. A monopoly’s power becomes unrestricted when it is protected by law. For example, in South Africa, new cellular operators cannot emerge, rendering the three current “competitors” a cartel. To use an example that isn’t likely to be clouded by “essential service” emotion, the same goes for casinos. They are governed not only by licence conditions, but by a limit on the actual number of licences in issue. Hence the lack of choice, the lack of variety, and the uncompetitive house rules.

It is true that rich countries maintain some subsidies or trade barriers. This is not free-market capitalism. This is just as evil as the subsidies or trade barriers maintained by developing countries. The latter are, in fact, much higher, so focusing on farm protectionism in Japan or Europe, for example, is largely a red herring. In any case, no matter whether the rich countries do the right thing — from which their own consumers would benefit — the developing world could gain a great deal of the potential benefits by dropping trade barriers unilaterally. In fact, if they do so, but the rich world doesn’t, the developing world will become more prosperous more rapidly, and there is every chance that they will eventually overtake rich countries — especially those like Europe, where the socialist streak runs deep and trade barriers are relatively high.

On corporate abuses: how many people bought GM’s pickups after the media reported on the fact that they exploded? Its failure to care about the welfare of its customers had a massive impact on the company and its profitability, and on the industry in general. The same goes for other corporate abuses. First, they are covered by laws against theft and fraud — laws which apply to all of us. Second, they open a company to potentially crippling civil liabilities. Third, they can harm the reputation of a company gravely; many have gone bankrupt after the public’s trust was destroyed by a major disaster or consumer safety scandal. Yes, corporate social responsibility is cynical, in some way. It is designed to convince customers that the company is serving them well and deserves their patronage more than a competitor does. I can’t see how this dynamic is a bad thing. Or did you want to start legislating the moral motives for people’s actions?

On subjecting corporations to the state, doesn’t the state serve its citizens, and exist at the pleasure of the people? And isn’t a corporation merely a voluntary association of citizens designed to pool resources and better divide labour, so the whole becomes more productive than the parts? Why, then, if the state is to be subject to the will of the people, advocate that certain groups of people should be subject to the control and regulation of the state (beyond ordinary laws against murder, theft and fraud)? This is philosophically inconsistent with a belief in the freedom of individuals, and a democratically elected state with constitutionally limited power, established by citizens to uphold laws that protect common rights and liberties.

Undoubtedly, some people do not act legally, or charitably, or morally. But this doesn’t change when you place them in a state bureaucracy with power over citizens. As long as such actions fall outside the boundaries of limited and justly applied law under which everyone’s rights are protected from infringement by another, individual self-interest pursued through free association and voluntary choice remains the best way to organise production in society. If you demand to see why, to quote Christpher Wren’s epitaph, look around you.

Beyond the ties that bind us all — to respect the person and property rights of others — what justification is there for wishing to tie down the capitalist Gulliver? What will be the consequences, unintended or otherwise? Fewer choices? Lost wealth creation? Fewer jobs? Less innovation? Forfeit poverty alleviation? I contend that there is no justification, except that Gulliver is big and free and independent. This makes the Lilliputians afraid of him. That such an instinctive, emotional response is natural makes it no less irrational.