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.

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. [↩]

One often hears that opponents of climate change alarmism are “deniers” (a slur intended to recall Holocaust denial), are oil-company-funded (as if energy companies don’t need those dollars to polish their green image), are limited to a lunatic fringe (as if lunatic fringes host international conferences and write appeals to the United Nations) and most importantly, claim that they get their facts wrong (ironic, considering the many inconsistencies in alarmism “science”).

Now one alarmist expresses his surprise at the debate on a green website he started. He thought he’d have to cast the net wide to find skeptics, but in reality, is having to actively recruit people willing and able to defend the climate catastrophe orthodoxy. And it’s the “able” part that appears to present the most serious problems. Skeptics are better prepared, better informed and better read than alarmists. They quote better science and argue their cases more effectively, he laments.

I seldom quote entire posts, but this makes for pretty amazing reading:

When I launched the TalkClimateChange forums last year, I was initially worried as to where I would find people who didn’t believe in global warming. I had planned to create a furious debate, but in my experience global warming was such a universally accepted issue that I expected to have to dredge the slums of the internet in order to find a couple of deniers who could keep the argument thriving.

The first few days were slow going, but following a brief write-up of my site by Junk Science I was swamped by climate skeptics who did a good job of frightening off the few brave Greens who slogged out the debate with. Whilst there was a lot of rubbish written, the truth was that they didn’t so much frighten the Greens away — they comprehensively demolished them with a more in depth understanding of the science, cleverly thought out arguments, and some very smart answers. If you want to learn about the physics of convection currents, gas chromatography, or any number of climate science topics then read some of the early debates on TalkClimateChange. I didn’t believe a word of it, but I had to admit that these guys were good.

In the following months the situation hardly changed. As the forum continued to grow, as the blog began to catch traffic, and as I continued to try and recruit green members I continued to be disappointed with the debate. In short, and I am sorry to say it, anti-greens (Reds, as we call them) appear to be more willing to comment, more structured, more able to quote peer reviewed research, more apparently rational and apparently wider read and better informed.

And it’s not just TalkClimateChange. Since we re-launched the forums on Green Options and promoted the “Live Debate” on Nuclear Power, the pro-nuclear crowd have outclassed the few brave souls that have attempted to take them on (with the exception of our own Matt from TalkClimateChange). So how can this be? Where are all these bright Green champions, and why have I failed to recruit them into the debate? Either it’s down to poor online marketing skills, or there is something else missing. I’ve considered a range of theories as to the problem, none of which seem to fit — such as:

Greens are less educated? Nope.
Greens have less time? Nope.
Greens are a little reticent? Nope.
Greens are less intelligent? Definitely nope.
Greens are less passionate? Absolutely nope.
Greens have less at stake? Clearly not.

The only feasible explanation that I can come up with so far is that perhaps Greens are less invested in the status quo, and therefore less motivated to protect it? The other possibility is that we are all completely wrong and we’re deluded — please tell me this isn’t so. So I am hoping that La Marguerite [where this piece was posted — Ivo], with its insightful host and enlightened readership may be able to help shed some light on this peculiar phenomenon?

The post was written by a fellow named Mark, and he promises a follow-up next week right about now. I picked it up via Tom Nelson via Climate Skeptic.

It raises a lot of interesting points, not least about the sheltered cocoon of comfort in which the green left lives, and in which their PC fashions and prejudices appear to be “universally accepted”.

In one way, he’s right. Those who don’t believe we’re headed for certain apocalypse unless we act now are indeed “invested in the status quo, and therefore … motivated to protect it”. That’s the status quo in which humans are free from costly government bureaucracy, free to own their property and improve it, free to pursue health, prosperity and progress as they subjectively define it, and free to invest their capital to ensure sustainable resource use in the future. This is the status quo which has created a large middle class, has built prosperity that only a century ago would have been undreamed of, has supported substantial population growth despite the alarmist predictions of scientists and the media, has reduced poverty rates and improved the quality of life of rich and poor alike, has doubled life expectancy in 100 years. The status quo which has enjoyed the prosperity to invest in improving the quality of the environment, in contrast, for example, to the state-controlled economies of the Soviet Union, or the poor economies of the developing world, in both of which pollution has been far, far worse than in the capitalist West. And this is the status quo where people are free to continue building on these trends without sacrificing their productivity and future prosperity to a global climate change industry that has more vested interest than any oil company has ever had.

In the final analysis, I’ll stick my neck out and say, yup, “we are all completely wrong and we’re deluded” is pretty much spot-on. Sorry, my good man.

If only to prove that there’s no such thing as “scientific consensus” on climate change, the group of scientists, economists and other prominent consensus-busters that convened in New York issued a declaration summarising its findings last week.

I noted a few days ago that this group, which styles itself the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC, in pointed contrast to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, convened by the United Nations and patronised by green lobbyists and political pressure groups) had rudely been dismissed by a credulous, editorialising media, which promptly got its facts wrong on the Flat Earth Society.

The Manhattan Declaration that emerged from the conference merited hardly any coverage. The exceptions on major media sites that I could find are a column in the Wall Street Journal that mostly makes the valid point that Al Gore makes an easy target, a disputatious item in a column in the New York Times, a couple of blog posts by Melanie Phillips on the Spectator’s website, and a report in The Register that calls the NIPCC the “IPCC’s ‘evil twin’”.

The summary for policymakers — another reference to its politicised counterpart at the UN — is available in PDF format.

Of course, even if there were consensus, it would have no scientific value in and of itself. Science is about observation, hypothesis, experiment, and proof, not about how many people believe this or that incomplete hypothesis. Basing public policy that binds billions and costs trillions on such incomplete hypotheses incurs far more risk than the political pressure groups would claim accompany no action or voluntary action.

The full text of the Manhattan Declaration follows (original link):

Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change
“Global warming” is not a global crisis

We, the scientists and researchers in climate and related fields, economists, policymakers, and business leaders, assembled at Times Square, New York City, participating in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change,

Resolving that scientific questions should be evaluated solely by the scientific method;

Affirming that global climate has always changed and always will, independent of the actions of humans, and that carbon dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant but rather a necessity for all life;

Recognising that the causes and extent of recently observed climatic change are the subject of intense debates in the climate science community and that oft-repeated assertions of a supposed ‘consensus’ among climate experts are false;

Affirming that attempts by governments to legislate costly regulations on industry and individual citizens to encourage CO2 emission reduction will slow development while having no appreciable impact on the future trajectory of global climate change. Such policies will markedly diminish future prosperity and so reduce the ability of societies to adapt to inevitable climate change, thereby increasing, not decreasing, human suffering;

Noting that warmer weather is generally less harmful to life on Earth than colder:

Hereby declare:

That current plans to restrict anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a dangerous misallocation of intellectual capital and resources that should be dedicated to solving humanity’s real and serious problems.

That there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change.

That attempts by governments to inflict taxes and costly regulations on industry and individual citizens with the aim of reducing emissions of CO2 will pointlessly curtail the prosperity of the West and progress of developing nations without affecting climate.

That adaptation as needed is massively more cost-effective than any attempted mitigation and that a focus on such mitigation will divert the attention and resources of governments away from addressing the real problems of their peoples.

That human-caused climate change is not a global crisis.

Now, therefore, we recommend –

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth.”

That all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

Agreed at New York, 4 March 2008

Are these points worthy of debate? I think so. No matter what you think about the “scientific consensus”.

Yesterday, either CNN or Sky News reported on the Heartland Institute’s conference on climate change. (It was CNN — see update.) The three-day conference, held in New York earlier this week, was designed to answer some of the questions that would be relevant to my “10 reasons to reject” and “10 more reasons to disbelieve“. Questions such as:

• how reliable are the data used to document the recent warming trend?
• how much of the modern warming is natural, and how much is likely the result of human activities?
• how reliable are the computer models used to forecast future climate conditions? and
• is reducing emissions the best or only response to possible climate change?

The conference was addressed by leading sceptics of the political orthodoxy emanating from the UN’s IPCC, including many sporting doctorate degrees or other distinctions. The lengthy speaker list included Fred Singer, Ross McKitrick, Anthony Watts, Barun Mitra, Václav Klaus, Craig Loehle, Willie Soon, Roy Spencer, Lord Monckton, Marc Morano, and South Africa’s very own Free Market Foundation man, Leon Louw.

The report ended with a snide comment: “The Flat-Earth Society didn’t shut up shop in 1492.”

Not only does this flippant insult illustrate the media’s clear bias on the subject of climate change, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny itself.

For a start, the Flat Earth Society either originated with Samuel Rowbotham’s book, Earth Not A Globe, in the 19th century, or was founded in 1547, depending on whom you believe. I’d bet on the former, which is corroborated by a a Flat Earth Society FAQ and by Wikipedia. The latter date comes from a tagline on a Flat Earth Society page.

Moreover, the notion that Columbus sailed west against the prevailing wisdom of the Flat Earth Society is a fiction that first appeared in a historical novel by Washington Irving, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, in 1828. Never happened. He probably wasn’t widely mocked for his notion of reaching India by sailing west, and even if he was, by failing to reach India he did not prove the earth was round. That the earth was circumnavigable was proven in practice not by an American icon, but by Ferdinand Magellan, who reached the Phillipines on two voyages, one heading east and the other west from Spain, in the early 16th century. This was also well before the Flat Earth Society claims it was founded. Thing is, the notion that medieval scholars believed the Earth was flat is a myth.

If the media’s snide dismissal of any debate around climate change is itself a fiction, why would anyone believe the editorial opinion about climate change they can’t resist injecting into their news reporting?

Update: It was CNN, which was still running the “news report” today, 13 March. The exact insult by “reporter” Miles O’Brien was: “Even the Flat Earth Society didn’t fold its tents in 1493.” Earlier in the story, he interviewed one of the participants and without blushing asked what planet he was on. No biased editorialising there, either.

By “global warming”, I mean the wider orthodoxy not only that warming is happening, but that it is caused by human activity, that it will lead to catastrophic consequences, that action to change the climate is urgent, that said action consists largely of limiting CO2 emissions and reducing energy use, that such action will be effective, that such action is required of developed and developing countries alike, and that it can only be achieved by using taxation, legislation or other forcible, government-imposed means to make people comply.

A while ago, I listed ten reasons to reject global warming. I’d have to be wrong on all of them before I could rationally consider measures such as cap-and-trade, carbon-tax or other elaborate, invasive and expensive government measures to combat climate change.

A comment by a retired geology Ph.D. on this well-considered piece on the irrationality of the climate change debate (from the felicitously named Rightwing Nuthouse) lists ten more reasons to be skeptical of anthropogenic global warming:

1. It has all the marks of a religion; skeptics are treated like heretics and the spokesman is a Baptist lay preacher.
2. Global warming is now called climate change so it can embrace global cooling, also.
3. It is anti-American since America is biggest producer of CO2.
4. I’ve been through this before in the 1970’s with Global Cooling.
5. As I geologist I know that climate changes take a long time since the earth has a very large thermal mass.
6. Humans have adapted to colder and warmer conditions. Manhattan’s average temperature has increased 7°F in the last 50 years but New Yorkers are not wilting.
7. The data for the earth’s temperature for more than 100 years in the past are very sparse and unreliable.
8. The data for the earth’s temperature for the last 100 years is not much better and practically all of it has to be compensated for the urban heat island effect, vide Manhattan.
9. Other measurements of the earth’s thermal condition, for example, shrinking growing season lengths, are not consistent with global warming.
10. Concomitance is not causation.

I don’t agree with all of them. Point three, for example, should in my opinion read, “It’s anti-development, since development, poverty reduction and prosperity growth are big producers of CO2,” but it makes some good points, especially about the quality of the climate record, the selectivity of factors considered in the overall models, the assumption that correlation implies causation, and the failure to adjust correctly for urban heat islands.

Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit site has been documenting many of these data and statistical problems, prompting in some cases corrections to the official records. See this post on urban heat island adjustments, and see these posts on temperature record errors and corrections, for example. (I covered some of his work inter alia here and here.)

So while Rick Moran makes some good points about our ability to evaluate the scientific basis for climate change theory, even the notion that we just don’t know enough suggests that expensive programmes of enforced action are imprudent, at best. Not to mention that they’re philosophically repulsive to anyone who values individual freedom and bases their views of how best to minimise poverty and maximise prosperity on the vitality of free markets and innovation.

A couple of weeks ago, prompted by a listing of my most popular posts, Nick van der Leek assailed the then most popular (scroll down to the blue text), 10 reasons to reject global warming, which was itself a response to a comment of his on a Maverick magazine column I re-published here.

He did this not very well, I might add, and I’ve been idly mulling a mild fisking. This Day of Goodwill Boxing Day seems as good a day as any for it.

He wrote:

NVDL: I recently read a blog which listed the blogger’s top stories. I recall this person’s top blog was something like 10 Reasons Not to worry about Global Warming, or 10 reasons Climate Change is a Hoax. That strikes as [sic] the sort of delusional drivel smoking companies came up with just before their advertising was phased out: 10 Myths About Smoking, Why Doctors Smoke, Smoking Is Sexy and Other Benefits.

Except that I didn’t write anything about smoking. Nor do I have a pecuniary interest in writing marketing material either for or against the global warming hypothesis. If you want to claim that I’m wrong by all means do so, but then respond to what I actually wrote rather than railing against red herrings.

I can imagine that these sorts of bogus and brain dead stories are popular.

You haven’t yet shown that my story is either bogus or brain dead. And to do so, you’d have to convince me that all 10 reasons I cited are wrong. As I pointed out in the original post, failure to do so for any one of them would mean my key argument stands. (The key argument being that there is insufficient reason to accept the necessity for governments to enforce, by law, tax or otherwise, standards of behaviour consistent with the theory of global warming.)

I can also write popular popcorn crap for example:

1) Why AIDS isn’t worth worrying about
2) How to succeed without a matric
3) Slag off your boss and win
4) How to cheat on your partner and get them to love you more than they do now
5) How to lose weight by eating more ice cream
6) Make more money by working less
7) How to succeed without really trying
8) How to lie to people without giving yourself away
9) 10 Reasons Not To Save
10) Why Fast Food Is Healthier Than Home cooked Meals

But I didn’t write any of that, now did I? I wrote 10 reasons to reject global warming.

There’s a reason people would want to read the above garbage, and it’s a simple one: they want it to be true, they want a lazy, easy approach to getting what they want. In the same way, we want to NOT worry about Climate Change, because that allows us to do squat all.

You’ve ignored the possibility that worrying about climate change and doing something about it might not have any benefits at all; it might be ineffective. Or it might have benefits, but impose costs that exceed those benefits. Or, worst of all, it might cause harm instead of reducing it.

A cost-benefit evaluation is a lot more complicated than “we don’t want to incur costs”. In order to justify incurring costs, one should first be convinced that some benefit will accrue, and second, that the benefit is likely to exceed the costs. Uninformed speculation about my motives might constitute an attack on my character, but it does not attack my arguments.

You telling them [sic] it’s true, and the fact that your drivel is popular doesn’t make it any less drivel, it just shows the extent of our delusion, the desperate buy in, and how the stupid infect one another.

I never made any claim about what the post’s popularity means. In fact, I agree with you: the popularity of drivel doesn’t make it any less drivel, just like the popularity of global warming alarmism doesn’t make it any more true. And, to quote Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, don’t call me stupid.

Today I did a statistical scan of the Top Stories on [a particular] website for the year 2007. It wasn’t a story on Lucky, or Gift Leremi, or a newsy political story. No, it was this:

Women now ‘raping’ men

I’m still waiting for a single actual argument against a single point I made. Your point is?

My point is, although the populace may be entertained and moved and interested by tabloid junk, the information we disseminate (whether through talking, emailing or blogging) ought to be sensible, rational and constructive (as least to the extent that we are), and certainly not intentionally the opposite. When we do this, we do so to our collective cost. We spread mediocrity and deaden our sensitivities, our value for life and the living depreciates in favor of laziness.

And this does not apply to you? Is global warming alarmism “sensible, rational and constructive” just because you say it is? Well, I say it is “intentionally the opposite”. Shall we flip a coin to see who’s right, or shall we rationally weigh my ten arguments against your extended non-argument?

Are we prostitutes for popularity, like Peter Keating (living only for cheap fame and sucking up to the approval of the mob) as opposed to a deeper, more personal, more integral and integrated vision - such as Howard Roark’s (in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead).

You chose a very curious example here. Did someone hack your blog and plant a mine? I seem to recall that Howard Roark was not given to toeing the “consensus” line, opposed the forcible imposition by governments upon individuals of rules and restrictions demanded by a majority, and resented being told how he “ought to” behave. Yet this is exactly what you’re telling me to do. I never cited popularity in support of my arguments. By contrast, you’re appealing to a “consensus” view, and have done so on several previous occasions to support the assertion that we must radically change the way we live to conform to your ideas of decency (including, memorably, accepting not that we might need alternatives to oil, but that “the happy motoring era must end”).

Otherwise we get lost in a cycle that is neither intelligent or useful, and it says a lot about the human animal and our lot, or what our lot can conceivably be.

Wow, flew away on that thought tangent….

And in all that tangential wordage, you presented not a single argument disputing any of the 10 reasons I cited for rejecting global warming. That’d be nil down, 10 to go, then.

I’ve long said I’d prefer a nuclear reactor in my back yard to a coal-fired power plant next door, since the former is safe and clean, while the latter emits lots of smog and radiation. Looks like I could soon have one!

Noted on Slashdot is a remarkable story in Next Energy News about a tiny nuclear power plant, developed by Toshiba. Tiny, but developing 200kW nonetheless — enough to drive a workshop full of power tools, several computers, a pool pump, as many home appliances as I can afford, all the 100W incandescent lightbulbs my heart desires, and have enough left over to sell to the neighbours to cover the hire-purchase agreement.

The device measures two by six (by something, presumably) metres, which is roughly the size of a car. It will produce enough power for a cluster complex, a block of flats, or a city block. Says the news report:

The 200 kilowatt Toshiba designed reactor is engineered to be fail-safe and totally automatic and will not overheat. Unlike traditional nuclear reactors the new micro reactor uses no control rods to initiate the reaction. The new revolutionary technology uses reservoirs of liquid lithium-6, an isotope that is effective at absorbing neutrons. The Lithium-6 reservoirs are connected to a vertical tube that fits into the reactor core. The whole process is self sustaining and can last for up to 40 years, producing electricity for only 5 cents per kilowatt hour, about half the cost of grid energy.

And it’s not pie in the sky, either. Toshiba claims it will install the first units in 2008, and begin marketing the idea worldwide by 2009. If the price per kWh is to be relied on, a unit will cost about $3 million, or R21 million. That’s not cheap, but it’s not unreasonable either. And taking everyone who can afford a BMW off the national grid will be music to The Bolt’s ears.

This could put Gore Inc. (and the Gorebusters) out of business for good. It’s party time!

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.

An open letter to the secretary-general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, signed by 100 scientists, claims the UN climate conference in Bali is “taking the world in the wrong direction”.

Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems.

Among the 100 signatories, famous, infamous and otherwise, are the frequently link-worthy Luboš Motl, Ross McKitrick whom I’ve mentioned as having helped to break Michael Mann’s hockey stick temperature chart, John Maunder, who I presume is somehow related to Edward Maunder, discoverer of the correlation between sun spot cycles and in particular the Little Ice Age, Lord Lawson of Blaby, Thatcher’s Chancellor of the Exchequer who featured prominently in the film The Great Global Warming Swindle, Vincent Gray and David Evans, whom I mentioned the other day along with William Alexander, professor emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at our very own University of Pretoria.

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Pope Benedict XVI has sent a stern message to “climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.”

Just this last September, His Holiness led a sort of new-age hippie festival, which struck me as not a little odd. It suggested that he had bought into the whole eco-cultist thing, which seemed to confirm that environmentalism is, to borrow Michael Crichton’s memorable notion, nothing more than a religion for the secular age.

It looks like he may have changed his mind. Maybe it’s the hot air rising from the tropical splendour of Bali, where tax-guzzling party-goers are manufacturing consensus, or perhaps the efforts of a few rational skeptics to talk sense into the faithful (remember when skepticism was a good thing in science?), but apparently the cardinals are upset: “…senior cardinals close to the Vatican have since [the eco-festival] expressed doubts about a movement which has been likened by critics to be just as dogmatic in its assumptions as any religion.”

That the Pope is calling for some balance in the approach to environmental issues — favouring sensible care for the environment without succumbing to dogmatic fervour, melodramatic alarmism or grandiose notions of saving the planet no matter what the cost — is welcome indeed. Perhaps the Pope knows blind faith when he sees it, after all.

The same can’t be said for the Daily Mail, which ran the story. Beneath a saturated snapshot of a stern Pope, guess what picture they ran?

The caption? “Adrift: Polar bears on melting iceberg” Hey, guys, icebergs melt. All the time. That’s what they do. Polar bears are common around ice caps, ice floes, ice shelves, ice rivers, and, indeed, icebergs. That’s where they live. That’s where their food lives. This is normal. That’s nature. It’s not a catastrophe. It’s not a picture of impending doom. This is exactly the sort of unthinking, dogmatic alarmism the Pope is warning against.

Guess who did, after all, manage to speak in Bali?

Ladies, gentlemen, I give you Lord Monckton. Or, to be more precise, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. A Scottish member of the House of Lords, Monckton was born Christopher Walter. He is a descendant of a member of Churchill’s cabinet who founded the law firm Monckton Chambers, a licenced day-skipper with the Royal Yacht Association, a puzzle-setter of considerable renown, a member of the Worshipful Company of Broderers (one of London’s great Livery Companies), and a Knight of the Order of Malta. As a Catholic Tory, he has startlingly mediaeval views on handling deadly epidemics, which suggests that when he does see a crisis, he’s all for acting in dramatic fashion. On the upside, he is opposed to European political union and thinks it’s a good idea that people own their own homes. Oh, and he’s a gadfly around Al Gore.

He describes the former US vice president’s jeremiad An Inconvenient Truth as “a foofaraw of pseudo-science, exaggerations, and errors”, and for the use of that word alone, he deserves our respect.

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