Published yesterday on The Daily Maverick, my latest column: Pray Copenhagen fails. I really do hope the UN’s climate shindig fails. It will save millions of lives and trillions of dollars. If we’re serious about solving global problems like hunger, disease and poverty, we should not give corrupt politicians the power to loot taxpayers and line the pockets of special interests on the basis of a dubious premise.

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.

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.)

If you really care about global warming, there are a whole bunch of things you probably think you shouldn’t be doing that you should, and vice versa. The environmental religion of the modern age, in which an angry Gaia will punish us for our sinful ways, but we can redeem ourselves by sacrifice and self-denial, has spawned a mythology of classical proportions. The problem is that many of those myths, spouted as accepted wisdom by an uncritical media and special-interest activists, appear to be just plain wrong.

Wired magazine goes to the actual science — remember science? — and makes some proposals for those who really care about climate change, and think not only that reducing carbon emissions will actually help, but delude themselves that it is possible to reduce them enough to make even a little dent in anticipated warming.

Here is its list, each of which is explored further in a separate article:

• Live in Cities: Urban Living Is Kinder to the Planet Than the Suburban Lifestyle
• A/C Is OK: Air-Conditioning Actually Emits Less C02 Than Heating
• Organics Are Not the Answer: Surprise! Conventional Agriculture Can Be Easier on the Planet
• Farm the Forests: Old-Growth Forests Can Actually Contribute to Global Warming
• China Is the Solution: The People’s Republic Leads the Way in Alternative-Energy Hardware
• Accept Genetic Engineering: Superefficient Frankencrops Could Put a Real Dent in Greenhouse Gas Emissions
• Carbon Trading Doesn’t Work: Carbon Credits Were a Great Idea, But the Benefits Are Illusory
• Embrace Nuclear Power: Face It. Nukes Are the Most Climate-Friendly Industrial-Scale Form of Energy
• Used Cars — Not Hybrids: Don’t Buy That New Prius! Test-Drive a Used Car Instead
• Prepare for the Worst: Climate Change Is Inevitable. Get Used to It

It doesn’t say all of these are good ideas, of course. There are excellent reasons to slash-and-burn overgrown, bug-infested jungles, to plant more productive crops, sure. But there are also plenty excellent reasons not to cut down old-growth forests. However, if your policy goal is to reduce carbon emissions, which seems to be the sole fetish of environmentalists and policy makers, then all of these points, including razing the rainforests, are valid.

Meanwhile, the US Congress is about to debate a cap-and-trade scheme that will vastly expand government powers and revenue, cost consumers trillions in bureaucratic red tape, tax and lost economic growth, and achieve very little indeed. In welcoming an open floor debate on these mushy measures, the Wall Street Journal writes:

The vehicle is a bill that principal sponsors Joe Lieberman and John Warner are calling “landmark legislation.” They’re too modest. Warner-Lieberman would impose the most extensive government reorganization of the American economy since the 1930s.

Ouch. Nothing like a fat bureaucracy to infringe on the liberty and prosperity of the people. Nothing like a first-country moral crusade to give developing-country leaders ideas to foist upon their long-suffering people. Nothing like an overbearing state to hold down the development of the poor.

As if $130 oil isn’t reason enough to consider more fuel-efficient cars, reduce energy usage in industry and invest in alternative energy sources.

While we wait for this legislative disaster, however, would the disciples of St Al please report to the consistory, so they can get cracking on Wired’s measures?

(Hat tip: Climate Skeptic.)

Well, that’s it then. The Al Gore Inc special interest lobby has won another victory. The US has declared the polar bear to be an endangered a threatened species. So from today, global waffling alarmists can cite the doomed polar bear in support of their doctrinaire opposition to energy production, industrial projects and economic development.

Care to make further strides in reducing poverty, increasing life expectancy, growing prosperity and improving quality of life? Sorry, poor pretty polar bear cubs with small plaintive voices will stand astride history yelling, “Stop!” This is what, these days, they call “progressive”.

Yesterday’s press release was to the point:

Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne today announced that he is accepting the recommendation of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall to list the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). The listing is based on the best available science, which shows that loss of sea ice threatens and will likely continue to threaten polar bear habitat. This loss of habitat puts polar bears at risk of becoming endangered in the foreseeable future, the standard established by the ESA for designating a threatened species.

I’ve pointed out in considerable detail before, polar bears should not be listed by any reasonable interpretation of the various criteria that apply. The motives for listing them as endangered threatened — opposition to oil exploration and pathological fear of climate change — are also quite explicitly stated by the green lobby. The only possible scientific reason for listing them (the reason cited by Kempthorne) is wild speculation about future changes in their habitat, combined with the assumption that polar bears won’t bother to adapt to their environment, if it did indeed change.

But here’s what’s really happening to the population:

(Studies, in chronological order, are by: IUCN, Schuhmacher, DeMaster & Stirling, Nowak & Paradiso, Watson, Garner, Truett & Johnson, Schliebe, Lunn et al, IUCN, IUCN. Background photograph is by Steve Amstrup of the US Geological Service.)

Alarmists have a nasty habit of citing the high estimate in 1996, and the low estimate in 2006, to make their case for being alarmed. This technique, of carefully selecting time intervals to “prove” a dubious point by noting changes from an outlier, is a very common and simple means of lying with statistics. Given these studies, the more honest interpreter would use the longest available data series along with the most conservative estimates, to guess at a doubling in the population in the last 40 years. Or, if you prefer, you can assume the early research for technical reasons to be incomplete and inaccurate, and argue that the population appears stable at worst. However, that would appear to be unnecessarily pessimistic, as this article from last year points out:

“There aren’t just a few more bears. There are a … lot more bears,” biologist Mitchell Taylor told the Nunatsiaq News of Iqaluit in the Arctic territory of Nunavut. Earlier, in a long telephone conversation, Dr. Taylor explained his conviction that threats to polar bears from global warming are exaggerated and that their numbers are increasing. He has studied the animals for the Nunavut government for two decades.

Native wisdom, usually treated with great reverence by the environmentalist left, is undoubtedly a crock of self-serving lies in this case:

Inuit hunters make their own estimates of the polar bear population based on the number of animals they encounter on their travels. Taylor says scientists have ignored the anecdotal evidence of the Inuit, who say bear numbers were rising. Inuits also report more polar bears wandering into their towns and villages, where they are a threat to children.

“I’m pretty sure the numbers [of polar bears] are climbing,” says Pitselak Pudlat, an Inuit hunter and manager of the Aiviq Hunters and Trappers Organization at Cape Dorset, Baffin Island. “During the winter there were polar bears coming into town.”

(To be fair, note the chart in my earlier post, which shows growing, stable and declining populations.)

I reckon if the environmentalists are really so concerned about tiny areas of industrial activity in the vast wildernesses of the Arctic, they should just ship the fluffy little maneaters to the Antarctic. It’s uninhabited by people, full of nutritious food, and the ice is getting thicker, over there.

This suggestion is, admittedly, not as funny as the pathetic caveat Kempthorne, having caved to the pressure groups, adds to his press release:

In making the announcement, Kempthorne said, “I am also announcing that this listing decision will be accompanied by administrative guidance and a rule that defines the scope of impact my decision will have, in order to protect the polar bear while limiting the unintended harm to the society and economy of the United States.”

Good luck, Mr Kempthorne. You have a polar bear’s chance in hell. Perhaps you can get a job with Al Gore’s investment company, though. The self-serving capitalists of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers certainly owe you one. Maybe he’ll let you be a roadie on his next great rock star tour.

Update: The term “endangered” is a catch-all term (as in “Endangered Species Act”), but also indicates a particular classification, different from “threatened”. I have read the US Endangered Species Act (and its IUCN counterpart), and should have known to be less careless with these terms. Corrected where necessary.

The Australian, a newspaper in, well, Oz, reports that global warming appears to have stopped in 1998, that 2007 saw a 0.7°C drop in temperature, and that sunspot activity suggests we may be entering a period of global cooling again. Despite the mass hysteria at Al Gore’s hot air concerts.

Sorry to ruin the fun, but the ice age cometh

[…] Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously. […]

Then a regular reader (hat tip: Hard Rain) sent me a post by Tim Blair, an Australian blogger, which saved me half the trouble. He covers the subject more than just well, and includes a reference to my favourite¹ Czech physicist, Luboš Motl. Lumo, as he signs his posts, noted that despite what the media believes sells well on climate change (panic! doom!), the Amazon.com bestseller list begs to differ.

Lumo also has an interesting titbit on Al Gore’s film. Remember those ice cliffs that he waxed so lyrical about? When he almost got tears in his eyes over their spectacular beauty, and the thought that one day, they might be gone? The producers of the alarmist blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow must be proud. After all, they made the computer-generated images.

I have often said (though I’m not sure whether I’ve written) that by 2030 or so we’ll all be worried about the next ice age. Warming appears to have reached a peak in 1998, and solar activity appears to be heading for a new low. As the Australian (article, not blogger) suggests, solar output is more closely correlated to temperatures measured on earth than atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, which anyway seem to be an effect of global warming, not a cause. Solar activity also accounts for the strange up-down-up temperature trend (despite steadily rising carbon dioxide) of the 20th century, as well as for the 1000-year temperature maxima and minima that Michael Mann tried to erase for the benefit of the UN IPCC.

This point about the influence of the sun on climate (well duh!) is made in several books on the subject, and is summarised well in The Great Global Warming Swindle, an excellent polemic made for Channel 4 in Britain last year. (You can buy it on DVD, or if you’re lucky download it from Google Video. It’s well worth watching, if you haven’t yet seen it.)

It would seem that the ice age alarmism is starting already, just as global warming alarmism started just about when Newsweek published its infamous cooling panic story in 1975. Pity Newsweek recanted in 2006. Upon publishing a story by Sharon Begley on the global warming “denial machine”, for “Newsweek Project Green”, the editor wrote:

Our story is not a piece of lefty cant. […] In 2040, will the editor of NEWSWEEK hold up this week’s issue as an alarmist and discredited report in the tradition of 1975’s “global cooling” story? One can hope, for that would mean America and the rest of the world had reversed the effects of warming so quickly that climate change will seem as rare and remote as polio. But I fear our successors will find that our concerns were the right ones, and that we were on the safest of scientific ground this week. Denying reality does not make it go away. Facts, as John Adams said, are stubborn things.

No, it didn’t take until 2040. It took just a couple of weeks, before this story itself was shredded by an editorial which described it as a “moral crusade”, “self-righteous indignation”, a “vast oversimplification” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading”. And that was just Newsweek’s self-criticism. Guess they should have stuck to their global cooling guns in the first place.

Good thing they call it “climate change” now, so the media can sensationalise, we can panic, and bureaucrats and activists can claim our money, no matter what happens.

Update: After all that, I forgot to add the link right at the top of the post, to The Australian. Fixed now.

1. True, I don’t think I know more than one. [↩]

Three guesses where this quote comes from:

To many scientists and students of scientific history, there really is no such thing as a consensus.

Nope, it’s not the Wall Street Journal. It’s not TCS Daily. It’s not from the Climate Denialist and UFO Nutters Digest either. This is from a columnist/blogger at the New York Times, Andrew Revkin. He’s been among the more informative media voices, doggedly reporting both sides — and the middle — of the climate debate.

His piece notes a typically detailed and well-referenced minority report (intro here, full document here) released by Senator James Inhofe, ranking member of the US Environment and Public Works Committee. It documents the views of over 400 scientists who disagree with the “consensus” claimed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (and its patron saint, Al Gore), and links to much peer-reviewed research work that undermines the orthodox views of “settled science”.

An excerpt from the introduction:

Even some in the establishment media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists. In October, the Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that climate skeptics “appear to be expanding rather than shrinking.” Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears “bite the dust.” In addition, many scientists who are also progressive environmentalists believe climate fear promotion has “co-opted” the green movement.

This blockbuster Senate report lists the scientists by name, country of residence, and academic/institutional affiliation. It also features their own words, biographies, and weblinks to their peer reviewed studies and original source materials as gathered from public statements, various news outlets, and websites in 2007. This new “consensus busters” report is poised to redefine the debate.

If 400 sounds like a consensus-busting number, but still paltry in comparison with the UN’s exagerated claim of 2 500 scientists that back the IPCC view, consider this:

Many of the scientists featured in this report consistently stated that numerous colleagues shared their views, but they will not speak out publicly for fear of retribution. Atmospheric scientist Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of almost 70 peer-reviewed studies, explains how many of his fellow scientists have been intimidated.

“Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media,” Paldor wrote.

Whichever side is right, in debunking the notion that the science is — barring a few extremist nutters and oil company shills — settled, Inhofe’s report is timely indeed. If they’re going to draft Gore, perhaps they could draft Inhofe to run against him. The campaign would be most entertaining.

Since Al Gore is now a partner at venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, which in turn partners with his own investment company, Generation Investment Management, his climate change crusade can no longer be mistaken for a selfless act of political leadership.

As Generation Investment Management says: “Our preference for performance-based fees aligns our interests with that of our clients and is typically based on long-term performance.”

I’m all for private investment into alternative energy and green technology research. There’s a lot of great innovation going on there, and the field is full of promise and opportunity. In fact, private investment and free markets are how one discovers where the real cost-benefit of green technology lies. Competing marketing messages is how consumers discover new products, and get the opportunity to satisfy unmet needs or wants. If this includes the need for a cleaner environment, good on them, and good on the companies that profit from supplying that need.

Provided, of course, that governments don’t introduce market-distorting protectionist or interventionist policies.

Green activists love to paint skeptics as “oil-company funded”. As if the generalisation is true, and even when it is, as if oil companies don’t have a contribution to make to the debate, or have no right to lobby against laws and restrictions that are inimical to their interests.

Gore’s venture into capital merely underscores the point that environmentalism is a big business. Thousands of “climate scientists” depend for their income on global warming being a scary crisis that needs research funding. Thousands of green technology and alternative energy companies rely on the climate change scam for their marketing.

Every time Gore calls for a biofuel subsidy, a green tax rebate, a legal restriction, an environmental mandate, or a carbon offset, know that it is simply a marketing message for Al Gore Inc and his partners at KPCB. Know that he is simply lobbying for protectionism in favour of his own vested interests. All protectionism distorts markets, prejudices one group in favour of another, and ultimately destroys wealth. And so does every law or government policy on Al Gore’s action agenda.

In a new paper, published in the journal Energy & Environment, Craig Loehle reconstructs the 2000-year temperature record without using tree rings as a proxy. He gets the following trend. Note the prominence of the medieval warm period and the little ice age, both of which are conspicuously absent from Mann’s hockey stick and various other reconstructions favoured by alarmists such as Al Gore.

He discusses in detail the reasons for omitting the abundant tree ring proxies. Here’s the abstract:

Historical data provide a baseline for judging how anomalous recent temperature changes are and for assessing the degree to which organisms are likely to be adversely affected by current or future warming. Climate histories are commonly reconstructed from a variety of sources, including ice cores, tree rings, and sediment. Tree-ring data, being the most abundant for recent centuries, tend to dominate reconstructions. There are reasons to believe that tree ring data may not properly capture long-term climate changes. In this study, eighteen 2000-year-long series were obtained that were not based on tree ring data. Data in each series were smoothed with a 30-year running mean. All data were then converted to anomalies by subtracting the mean of each series from that series. The overall mean series was then computed by simple averaging. The mean time series shows quite coherent structure. The mean series shows the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) quite clearly, with the MWP being approximately 0.3°C warmer than 20th century values at these eighteen sites.

A lengthy and forthright discussion by people considerably more qualified than I am, and with participation from Loehle himself, can be found at Steve McIntyre’s ClimateAudit site. It’s worth reading before picking holes in the paper.

Update: Something just occurred to me. The pronounced warm period prior to the year 1000 is missing from most reconstructions I’ve seen, because they all cover only the last 1000 years. Those charts, when they haven’t been piped through Michael Mann’s hockey stick maker, include the medieval warm period around 1200-1300 and little ice age around 1700-1800. Turns out if you go back just a little bit more, you get an even higher temperature peak than the medieval warm period. One wonders if the data endpoint selection for the “usual” charts is deliberate.

• This column was first published on 8 October 2007 in Maverick, a South African business magazine. The rest of the magazine is much better, so if you’d like to subscribe, simply contact them via e-mail.

Why does Al Gore bang the climate change drum? Because he’s a scientist, certain that his theory is true? Or because he’s a politician, and scary predictions have always persuaded people to put their faith in the ability of the prophets to save them from doom?

You don’t bet on uncertainty if you’re a politician. So if climate change and its causes are uncertain, what exactly is it that Al Gore betting on?

When Paul Ehrlich warned about the coming population explosion in 1968, he said it would lead to mass starvation by the mid-1970s. “Nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate,” he wrote. But death rates had already been in decline in both the rich and poor world, for 100 years, and have continued declining since.

Moreover, fertility rates had long been going down in the rich world, and a similar decline had already begun in the developing world too. It is now estimated that global population, far from rising uncontrollably as Ehrlich predicted, will never exceed 10 billion. He warned about a crisis that was already being addressed, naturally.

In 1998, the UN compared the Y2K problem to the impact of an earth-asteroid collision, which “demands worldwide strategic mobilisation…similar to the effort required by World War II.”

So Y2K required food rationing, confiscatory taxes, central planning and martial law? It’s unsurprising that this is what an organisation of governments would promote. When the new millennium arrived, the UN said: “The governments…can congratulate themselves for passing the Y2K challenge.”

The only problem is that the governments did nothing. Well, not much. Of the total US spend on Y2K, the US government’s contribution amounted to about five percent. The problem was already in hand when the dire warnings of a “meltdown of civilisation” (I kid you not) were rife. People aren’t stupid.

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There’s a lot of good news on the consensus front in Europe, noted by Hans Labohm, a Dutch economist and IPCC reviewer. It shows that skepticism on climate change is gaining a foothold throughout the countries of the EU. Far from buying the alarmist orthodoxy, opinion in Europe are divided about the truth and extent of global warming. It probably benefited more than any other continent from the medieaval warming period that permitted the expansion of agriculture and, some historians hypothesise, helped fuel the Renaissance. Russian scientists are even pointing to solar activity, which seems headed for another “Maunder Minimum”, and predicting a Little Ice Age, such as Europe experienced in the 18th century. Imagine what today’s efforts to prevent warming will look like if that happens. Our children will think we were insane. Imagine a world in which they ban hybrids and subsidise large, heavy gas guzzlers on safety and environmental grounds.

On the Nobel Peace Prize, Labohm notes the political composition of the Norwegian panel that awards it, and adds a telling quote:

Little wonder Francis Sejersted, past chairman of the committee, admits: ‘Awarding a peace prize is, to put it bluntly, a political act.’

Speaking of children, he answers the concerns of at least one commenter on my blog, who is convinced that we must all act immediately to help her children survive; to wit:

And what about our kids? Well, they have survived the story of Santa Claus without any visible scars. Wouldn’t they survive the nonsense of man-made global warming as well?

Labohm has written a useful and heartening roundup of which people and organisations aren’t meekly swallowing the politically-correct Gorthodoxy that dominates the media today.

Update: Link to comment pointed in the wrong direction. Fixed.

Though the possible set of inconvenient puns has been utterly exhausted in the last few days, if you haven’t seen it yet, Bjørn Lomborg’s commentary on the subject of Al Gore’s Peace Prize is worth reading. Notably:

The number of hungry people depends much less on climate than on demographics and income. Extremely expensive cuts in carbon emissions could mean more malnourished people. If our goal is to fight malnutrition, policies like getting nutrients to those who need them are 5,000 times more effective at saving lives than spending billions of dollars cutting carbon emissions.

Likewise, global warming will probably slightly increase malaria, but CO2 reductions will be far less effective at fighting this disease than mosquito nets and medication, which can cheaply save 850,000 lives every year. By contrast, the expensive Kyoto Protocol will prevent just 1,400 deaths from malaria each year.

While we worry about the far-off effects of climate change, we do nothing to deal with issues facing the planet today. This year, malnutrition will kill almost 4 million people. About 3 million lives will be lost to HIV/AIDS, and 2 ½ million people will die because of indoor and outdoor air pollution. A lack of micronutrients and clean drinking water will claim 2 million lives each.

With attention and money in scarce supply, we should first tackle the problems with the best solutions, doing the most good throughout the century. If we focus on solving today’s problems, we will leave communities strengthened, economies more vibrant, and infrastructures more robust. This will enable these societies to deal much better with future problems - including global warming. Committing to massive cuts in carbon emissions will leave future generations poorer and less able to adapt to challenges.

In Michael Crichton’s memorable metaphor of environmentalism as religion, Gore is the high priest, preaching fire and brimstone unless we repent our sins. We are the chanting supplicants, and in our fear and panic we are regressing to human sacrifice to appease an angry Gaia.