I got to thinking about the Sudan over the weekend; why Thabo Mbeki is there, and why anyone might care. My column for the Daily Maverick this week was the inevitable result: Tintin Mbeki in the Sudan

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.

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”.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

It would appear that jetting off to a far-flung tropical island for a 12-day gabfest on climate change is restricted to people who believe that jetting off to far-flung tropical islands risks drowning said islands. Skeptics and terrorists need not apply.

Scientists and journalists who are known to disagree with the supposed consensus on climate change were refused credentials to speak at, or cover, the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, according to a post by Andrew Bolt, a commentator for the Herald Sun in Australia.

(Consensus, as anyone with a grounding in philosophy of science knows, is the highest form of proof. It is to science what the Creed of Nicea is to Christianity.)

Perhaps the people denied access really do not merit accreditation. But this sort of thing has happened before, and it’s all just a little too convenient. Fifteen thousand delegates escaped the cold to head for Bali, not counting the thousands of spoilt rich party kids who tag along as protest groupies. You’d think they could spare the seats.

Rav Casley Gera, over at an admirable quest for knowledge he calls African Development for the Completely Bloody Ignorant, is currently working on Jeffrey Sachs and his much-publicised plans to end poverty. By 2025. It’s high-minded stuff indeed, and interesting, but after reading Gera’s summary I’m left with more questions than answers.

Sachs raves about anti-globalisation, saying “Before Seattle…. there was little said about the world’s poor.” I’m sure Bob Geldof would have something to say about that; not to mention the rich-country taxpayers who’ve been spending billions on foreign aid for the last half-century and have very little, if anything, to show for their generosity. Before long, however, he’s on the other side of the argument, saying, “By now the antiglobalisation movement should see that globalisation, more than anything else, has reduced the numbers of extreme poor in India by two hundred million and in China by three hundred million since 1990.”

So, which is it, Mr Sachs? Globalisation, or anti-globalisation? Or anti-globalisation-inspired globalisation?

He invokes Adam Smith, but in the same breath calls for making good on promises to spend 0.7% of rich-country GDP on foreign aid in an effort to meet the UN Millennium Development Goals.

Which is it, Mr Sachs? Free-market capitalism, or tax-funded bureaucratic socialism? Or tax-funded bureaucratic market capitalism?

I guess that’s the problem when high-minded do-goodery meets the facts on the ground. Your head can’t argue with the facts, yet your heart can’t let go of the altruism that motivates you. So you come up with a confused mish-mash of ideas. My concern is not only that Sach’s self-contradictions cannot be resolved on an intellectual level, but that by insisting on having it both ways, government-run foreign-aid bureaucracies will only end up undermining the success Sachs notes can be (and has already been) achieved by global free trade and economic liberty.

Sachs and his friends in the foreign aid movement, noted economists like Angelina Jolie and U2’s Bono, are nice guys, no question about it. They mean well. But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, they say, and nice guys finish last.

“Taser” is a trade name for any of a range of stun guns used by law enforcement officers and soldiers to inflict non-lethal force. Now, a CBS report says the United Nations has described Tasers as a form of torture, after several deaths have been attributed to their use.

The UN has completely lost the plot, here, both on the facts and on PR.

First, torture is an interrogation technique in which pain or suffering is inflicted on a subject to persuade them to disclose information. It doesn’t extract very convincing confessions, but can force subjects to disclose other information, which may prove useful and may save lives. Either way, torture isn’t very useful at all if the subject dies. Killing is not the point of torture.

Second, Tasers are intended to subdue suspects, not kill them, nor to extract information. They are intended to incapacitate a subject. This is not torture, either in intent or effect. It does, however, make Tasers a useful alternative to guns, which deliver lethal force and imperil innocent bystanders. It also makes them useful as a weapon in situations where force is required, but lethal force is not justifiable. Of course, that Tasers sometimes turn out to be lethal is rather problematic. Of course, this problem must be addressed sooner rather than later, either by limiting their use to situations in which lethal force would normally be authorised, or by fixing them so the risk of killing a subject is much lower.

However, a simplistic label of “torture”, and a simplistic call for a ban on Tasers will leave law enforcement little choice but to revert to billy-clubs and guns as their only options. Is a beating with a billy-club really more palatable than a disabling electric shock, when administered to a suspect who resists arrest? Isn’t that “torture” too? And as for guns, some reports suggest that they’re even more lethal than Tasers.

Most importantly, however, rashly throwing about the word “torture”, without any apparent thought, dangerously devalues the term. With such shrill activism, fit only for the tabloid press, the UN is crying wolf. If it gets so hysterical on this issue, why would it attract serious attention when one day it raises the alarm over real torture? Is it any wonder so few people take the UN seriously these days?

In 2005, according to this news report, “8.8 million people became infected with tuberculosis and 1.6 million died of it. It takes months of careful antibiotic treatment to clear the infection.”

This sort of death toll is why projects like the Copenhagen Consensus, which is due for an update in 2008, cite disease control as a better way to spend a given amount of public money than many others (such as fighting global warming). It cites HIV/AIDS and malaria, though not TB, in particular.

The problem many countries — in particular developing countries like my own — face is that TB treatment is hard to enforce. Although South Africa has had some success with a buddy system to monitor drug treatment, the fact is that among poor communities, rigorous adherence to long-term drug treatments is a problem (and not only in the case of TB). Non-completion of courses of antibiotic medication leads to mutations that create drug-resistant super-strains. These affect not only the country of origin, but the rest of the world.

So, having sketched the bad news, the article cited at the top contains the good news:

Researchers have decoded the gene map of a strain of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis and said on Tuesday their work has identified mutations that may help develop better treatments.

They also sequenced the genome of another dangerous strain called multidrug-resistant TB, as well as run-of-the-mill tuberculosis bugs, and found a few mutations may explain how the mutant strains evade antibiotics.

“By looking at the genomes of different strains, we can learn how the tuberculosis microbe outwits current drugs and how new drugs might be designed,” said Megan Murray of the Broad Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.

Of course, one needs to be careful with statistics such as the number of infections and deaths cited above. It turns out, for example, that statistics on HIV/AIDS have been grossly overestimated. As the Washington Post reports from Johannesburg, South Africa:

The United Nations’ top AIDS scientists plan to acknowledge this week that they have long overestimated both the size and the course of the epidemic, which they now believe has been slowing for nearly a decade, according to U.N. documents prepared for the announcement.

AIDS remains a devastating public health crisis in the most heavily affected areas of sub-Saharan Africa. But the far-reaching revisions amount to at least a partial acknowledgment of criticisms long leveled by outside researchers who disputed the U.N. portrayal of an ever-expanding global epidemic.

The latest estimates, due to be released publicly Tuesday, put the number of annual new HIV infections at 2.5 million, a cut of more than 40 percent from last year’s estimate, documents show. The worldwide total of people infected with HIV — estimated a year ago at nearly 40 million and rising — now will be reported as 33 million.

The main reason isn’t an actual decline in the underlying numbers: “U.N. officials say the revisions stemmed mainly from better measurements rather than fundamental shifts in the epidemic.”

Why is this a problem? Well, as James Taranto trenchantly notes in his Best of the Web Today column, the Washington Post piece is quite explicit about it:

Having millions fewer people with a lethal contagious disease is good news. Some researchers, however, contend that persistent overestimates in the widely quoted U.N. reports have long skewed funding decisions and obscured potential lessons about how to slow the spread of HIV. Critics have also said that U.N. officials overstated the extent of the epidemic to help gather political and financial support for combating AIDS.

“There was a tendency toward alarmism, and that fit perhaps a certain fundraising agenda,” said Helen Epstein, author of “The Invisible Cure: Africa, the West, and the Fight Against AIDS.” “I hope these new numbers will help refocus the response in a more pragmatic way.”

… Among the reasons for the overestimate is methodology; U.N. officials traditionally based their national HIV estimates on infection rates among pregnant women receiving prenatal care. As a group, such women were younger, more urban, wealthier and likely to be more sexually active than populations as a whole, according to recent studies.

The United Nations’ AIDS agency, known as UNAIDS and led by Belgian scientist Peter Piot since its founding in 1995, has been a major advocate for increasing spending to combat the epidemic. Over the past decade, global spending on AIDS has grown by a factor of 30, reaching as much as $10 billion a year.

But in its role in tracking the spread of the epidemic and recommending strategies to combat it, UNAIDS has drawn criticism in recent years from Epstein and others who have accused it of being politicized and not scientifically rigorous.

… Piot often wrote personal prefaces to those reports warning of the dangers of inaction, saying in 2006 that “the pandemic and its toll are outstripping the worst predictions.”

All of this lends support to the arguments by Taranto, Don Surber, Noel Sheppard and others, that UN claims about future dangers and funding priorities are flawed, corrupt, or both.

Large government or inter-governmental spending sprees are no match for scientific and technical progress that tackles real problems, rather than hyping up politically-correct bogeymen. Scientists outwit high powered mutants¹, whereas the bureaucrats create them.

But guess who’s going to get stick when a pharmaceutical company uses the excellent work of the scientists whom Eli and Edith Broad so generously fund, to make life-saving drugs for sale in Africa?

1. with apologies to Hunter S. Thompson [↩]

“Oh Christ.” That was 88-year-old Doris Lessing’s exasperated, charming response to CNN, when she disembarked from a black cab in London to be informed by the news cameraman that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Why she’s so surprised is beyond me. She’s a pretty good author, has been both prolific and influential, and has sure waited long enough for the ultimate accolade. And at least she’s a writer.

What mystifies me is the Nobel Peace Prize, which according to Alfred Nobel’s will is to be awarded “to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”

So who gets it? A failed candidate for US president and a bevy of bureaucrats. The former has recently been going around the world using dodgy numbers and emotive images to whip up mortal fear in the hearts of millions, calling for states to impose, by force, restrictive and oppressive measures on free, industrious people. For good measure, the politico-bureaucrats have been living off taxes collected by force while they base fearful prophecies of apocalypse on statistics of dubious provenance in their efforts to scare people into expanding the power of national governments and supranational institutions. For all their entertainment value, how either Al Gore or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change created fraternity between the nations, abolished or reduced standing armies, or held and promoted peace congresses, is beyond me.

Mind you, I guess Al Gore did invent the internet. Peace, bro.

It’s a funny affair, the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s been inconsistent at best. Last year, the choice was inspired, selecting Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, which has done Bangladesh in particular and the Indian subcontinent in general a great service by proving that wealth can be created among the world’s poor through peaceful trade, without pouring billions down bureaucratic black holes. Today’s award exactly contradicts the philosophical basis and spirit of last year’s prize.

That earthquake warning, incidentally, has its epicentre in Norra Begravningsplatsen, pictured above.