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Steve Hayward of Power Line provides graphic illustrations of how climate data are manipulated to cause concern and even panic. But, honestly presented facts provide a calm competent contextual understanding.
… A little hard to get worked up about this, isn’t it? In fact you can barely spot the warming. No wonder you need a college education to believe in the alarmist version of climate change. No wonder the data (click here for original NASA data if you want to replicate it yourself) is never displayed this way in any of the official climate reports.
If this chart were published on the front page of newspapers the climate change crusaders would be out of business instantly.
Attached to a picture of a small boy in a Mozambique slum, an essay by Bjørn Lomborg suggests the child has little need for solar panels. Lomberg is a serious environmentalist who despairs at the prescriptions of the light-weight trend-surfing greens.
In the run-up to the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, rich countries and development organizations are scrambling to join the fashionable ranks of “climate aid” donors. This effectively means telling the world’s worst-off people, suffering from tuberculosis, malaria or malnutrition, that what they really need isn’t medicine, mosquito nets or micronutrients, but a solar panel. It is terrible news. …
… Providing the world’s most deprived countries with solar panels instead of better health care or education is inexcusable self-indulgence. Green energy sources may be good to keep on a single light or to charge a cellphone. But they are largely useless for tackling the main power challenges for the world’s poor.
According to the World Health Organization, three billion people suffer from the effects of indoor air pollution because they burn wood, coal or dung to cook. These people need access to affordable, reliable electricity today. Yet too often clean alternatives, because they aren’t considered “renewable,” aren’t receiving the funding they deserve.
A 2014 study by the Center for Global Development found that “more than 60 million additional people in poor nations could gain access to electricity if the Overseas Private Investment Corporation”—the U.S. government’s development finance institution—“were allowed to invest in natural gas projects, not just renewables.” …
Ed Rogers understands why the upcoming Paris climate change conference is perfect for this president.
After failing at almost every foreign policy challenge he has been confronted with, perhaps there is now something on the horizon that actually sets up nicely for President Obama. The Paris Conference on Climate Change, which will be held from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11, could be an event that perfectly matches his skills and interests.
The U.N.-sponsored Paris festival lends itself to unrealistic giveaways and meaningless rhetoric — the more self-righteous and pretentious, the better. The meeting won’t produce any particular result, and the day of reckoning where we find out it was all for naught won’t be scientifically determined until many years in the future. It seems well-suited for this president.
All Obama has to do is go to Paris, give a vapid speech about saving the planet, capitulate to those who would like to see the United States weakened, pretend that others will fulfill their pledges to reduce carbon emissions and then return home to a round of self-congratulations from his own staff and sycophant appointees. To follow up on his brave proposals, all he has to do is sign a couple of executive orders that slap American businesses with some gratuitous, onerous regulations and declare that a noble deed has been done. And, by the way, the White House will have to do whatever it takes to keep any agreement reached in Paris from being voted on in Congress. …
The ugly underside of the green movement is examined by Joel Kotkin.
What is the endgame of the contemporary green movement? It’s a critical question since environmentalism arguably has become the leading ideological influence in both California government and within the Obama administration. In their public pronouncements, environmental activists have been adept at portraying the green movement as reasonable, science-based and even welcoming of economic growth, often citing the much-exaggerated promise of green jobs.
The green movement’s real agenda, however, is far more radical than generally presumed, and one that former Sierra Club President Adam Werbach said is defined by a form of “misanthropic nostalgia.” This notion extends to an essential dislike for mankind and its creations. …Robert Malthus (1766-1834), a Protestant cleric and scholar, believed that rapid population growth would lead to mass impoverishment and starvation.
Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book “The Population Bomb” helped revive the Malthusian ethos, in decline during much of the 20th century, with his hoary predictions of imminent mass starvation in the Third World. Not that he had much hope for richer countries.
“By the year 2000,” he predicted, “the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people. … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Good thing Ehrlich is not a professional gambler – and that he didn’t control policy apparatus. Among the policies embraced by Ehrlich was the possible feasibility of placing “sterilants” in the water supply, and he advocated tax policies that discouraged childbearing.
Overall, Ehrlich’s dire predictions proved widely off the mark – food production has soared, population growth slowed and starvation declined – but his influence lives on. One of his closest acolytes, John Holdren, is President Obama’s top science adviser. (As once pointed out in Pickings, Holdren is perfect for this administration – an academic who’s usually wrong.)
… Progressive pundits increasingly envision the presidential election in 13 months as a “last chance,” as one put it, to stop “climate change catastrophe.” Even Gov. Jerry Brown, formerly more pragmatic, now uses extreme language about “extinction” – once again peddled by the irrepressible Ehrlich – in connection with climate change. If you believe that Gaia’s reckoning is imminent, after all, you can only accept the most extreme, draconian steps, whatever the effect on living standards and economies. And while you’re at it, bring on those sterilants!
Hillary Clinton’s shift from favoring to opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, despite strong union support for the project, makes clear that climate change policy will be at the center of the campaign, pitting the energy and manufacturing states of the U.S. interior against those controlled by the coastal gentry, among whom climate change has acquired something of a religious aspect.
The only way to break the grip of the Ecotopian fantasy will be for others – including what’s left of traditional Democrats – to join with Breakthrough and other pragmatic thinkers to come up with sensible alternatives to address the climate issue. Rather than accept the intimidating treatment of the greens and their media enablers, mainstream businesses and middle-class voters need to insist on practical ways to preserve the planet without destroying humanity.
American Interest spots this in Great Britain;
Green activists have found a new way to villainize hydraulic fracturing in Britain: claiming that sand, one essential component of the sluice pumped at high pressure into horizontal wells to “frack” shale, will give people cancer. The Times (of London) reports:
‘[Activist group Friends of the Earth] distributed thousands of leaflets asking for donations to help stop fracking. The leaflets said fracking would expose communities to chemicals that could cause cancer because it involved “pumping millions of litres of water containing a toxic cocktail of chemicals deep underground . . . [which] could end up in your drinking water”.
The leaflet said that the group had already helped people in Lancashire prevent fracking by Cuadrilla, the company which had two applications rejected by the county council this summer. When Cuadrilla complained to Friends of the Earth that it did not use toxic chemicals, the group replied listing the evidence on which it based its claims. It wrote: “We understand that Cuadrilla used a significant amount of sand to frack the well at Preese Hall [in Lancashire in 2011]. Frack sand tends to contain significant amounts of silica which is a known carcinogen.” ‘
By this logic, greens ought to be calling for the quarantining of beaches—to hear these activists tell it, the sand you’d be tanning on there would be as big a cancer risk as the UV rays you might be soaking up.
Mark Steyn spots some in the scientific community coming to their senses about climate.
Nine years ago self-proclaimed “climate hawk” David Roberts was contemplating Nuremberg trials for deniers:
“When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg.”
But in his latest piece, at Vox.com, he’s singing a rather different tune:
“Basically, it’s difficult to predict anything, especially regarding sprawling systems like the global economy and atmosphere, because everything depends on everything else. There’s no fixed point of reference.”
Now he tells us.
“Grappling with this kind of uncertainty turns out to be absolutely core to climate policymaking. Climate nerds have attempted to create models that include, at least in rudimentary form, all of these interacting economic and atmospheric systems. They call these integrated assessment models, or IAMs, and they are the primary tool used by governments and international bodies to gauge the threat of climate change. IAMs are how policies are compared and costs are estimated.
So it’s worth asking: Do IAMs adequately account for uncertainty? Do they clearly communicate uncertainty to policymakers?
The answer to those questions is almost certainly “no.” ”
Mr Roberts is almost certainly right. But he’s unlikely to find any takers for that line among the warm-mongers at next month’s Paris climate jamboree.As I explain in my new book, the IPCC used Michael E Mann’s ridiculous hockey stick to sell certainty: 1998 is the hottest year of the hottest decade of the hottest century in, like forever.
Given the zillion-dollar alarmism industry it fueled, it would be asking a lot for its beneficiaries to back away from that to something more qualified. And thanks to the cartoon climatology of Mann’s stick, there are millions of starry-eyed activists who now think the very concept of “uncertainty” is a denialist plot. …