By Michael Barone
Religious faith is a source of strength in many people’s lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous—or disastrous.
On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered “the great disappointment” when it didn’t happen.
In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children’s Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn’t, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery.
In 1898, the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords, believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren’t, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.
A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists.
They have an unshakeable faith that manmade carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate, causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science—which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity—but on something very much like religious faith.
All the trappings of religion are there. Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.
The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.
Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.
Indulgences, like those Martin Luther railed against: private jet-fliers like Al Gore and sitcom heiress Laurie David can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.
Corporate elitists, like General Electric’s Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not to. And if you’re clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.
Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.
But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom—and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.
If carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate, the global-warming alarmists would be right. But it’s obvious that climate is affected by many things, many not yet fully understood, and implausible that SUVs will affect it more than variations in the enormous energy produced by the sun.
Skepticism has been increased by the actions of believers. Passage of the House cap-and-trade bill in June 2009 focused politicians and voters on the costs of global-warming religion. And disclosure of the Climategate emails in November 2009 showed how the clerisy was willing to distort evidence and suppress dissenting views in the interest of propagation of the faith.
We have seen how the United Nations agency whose authority we are supposed to respect took an item from an environmental activist group predicting that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 2350 and predicted that the melting would take place in 2035. No sensible society would stake its economic future on the word of folks capable of such an error.
In recent years, we have seen how negative to 2 percent growth hurts many, many people, as compared to what happens with 3 to 7 percent growth. So we’re much less willing to adopt policies that will slow down growth not just for a few years but for the indefinite future.
Media, university and corporate elites still profess belief in global warming alarmism, but moves toward policies limiting carbon emissions have fizzled out, here and abroad. It looks like we’ll dodge the fate of the Millerites, the children’s crusaders and the Mahdi’s cavalrymen.
Michael Barone, senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner (www.washingtonexaminer.com), is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.
Mark Duchamp
Opposition to wind farms has been growing in Denmark. Because of this, the Danish energy company DONG had taken the decision to no longer erect wind turbines in the countryside, and to put them offshore instead. But wind farms at sea cost twice as much to build and to maintain, and the price of electricity for households is already, in Denmark, 100% more expensive than in most of Europe. So the new government elected in September wants to build more wind farms onshore, in spite of their adverse impacts on the health of neighbours.
To help placate angry country dwellers, noise limits are being reviewed by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and a public consultation is underway. But there is much controversy. Dr Mauri Johansson, a Danish physician specialised in community health and occupational medicine (now retired), accuses the EPA of manipulations to the detriment of the health of neighbours. He is not alone: a team of researchers from Aalborg University led by Professor Henrik Moeller, an internationally-renowned acoustics specialist, are also putting in doubt the work of the Danish government. They are themselves supported by Kerstin Persson Waye, professor of occupational and environmental medicine at Gothenburg University, Sweden.
In a nutshell, under the proposed EPA regulations, for 33% of neighbours it will feel “as if a truck is idling just outside their homes”. Dr Johansson and Professor Moeller are at odds with their government, which claims against all evidence that “Denmark is leading the fight against low frequency noise from wind turbines.”
Canadian physician Dr Robert McMurtry, formerly Dean of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario, and formerly Assistant Deputy Minister of Population & Public Health, at Health Canada, wrote a letter supporting Professor Moeller:
“Truth has become a casualty. Sadly there are many ill-consequences to the policies for the installation of industrial wind turbines (IWT), not the least of which are adverse effects on human health. I have met more than 40 people whose lives have been devastated when IWT became their bad neighbor. It is also clear that this is a global phenomenon and yet the denial by many of those in authority continues.”
Support for the Danish and Swedish academic opposition to the new, lax legislation on wind turbine noise being concocted in Copenhagen has been coming from a number of noise engineers, acousticians, doctors, psychologists and nurses in the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, etc. who have expressed in conferences and in the media their concern about the failure of governments to address properly the wind farm health problem. To name a few: Dr Nina Pierpont, USA, author of “The Wind Farm Syndrome”; Dr Sarah Laurie, Australia, Medical Director of the Waubra Foundation; Dr Bob Thorne, Australia, Psychoacoustician; and Dr Carl Phillips, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist specializing in public health policy, formerly tenured professor in the School of Public Health, University of Alberta, who wrote about governments denying the health problem: “The attempts to deny the evidence cannot be seen as honest scientific disagreement and represent either gross incompetence or intentional bias.”
Per Clausen, chair of the Unity Lists Energy Committee in the Danish Parliament, is concerned by the preferential (lax) treatment being applied to noise from wind farms. He understands that his government wants to speed up the deployment of wind turbines, but is opposed to applying double standards in favour of any industry, to the detriment of its neighbours’ health. (1)
European and North American wind farm health victims, represented by EPAW and NA-PAW, are concerned that the improperly-conducted, double-standard studies of the Danish EPA will be used as a model by governments world-wide. They remind the health authorities that the Australian Senate, after hearing evidence in a special public enquiry on wind farms, recommended that infrasound & low frequency noise issues be properly investigated. The above shows that this is not being done. A parallel may be drawn with the bogus tobacco studies conducted years back, which resulted in class action lawsuits.
Amos Aikman, The Australian
DRAMATIC forecasts of global warming resulting from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide have been exaggerated, according to a peer-reviewed study by a team of international researchers.
In the study, published today in the leading journal Science, the researchers found that while rising levels of CO2 would cause climate change, the most severe predictions - some of which were adopted by the UN’s peak climate body in its seminal 2007 report - had been significantly overstated.
The authors used a novel approach based on modelling the effects of reduced CO2 levels on climate, which they compared with proxy-records of conditions during the last glaciation, to infer the effects of doubling CO2 levels.
They concluded that current worst-case scenarios for global warming were exaggerated.
“Now these very large changes (predicted for the coming decades) can be ruled out, and we have some room to breathe and time to figure out solutions to the problem,” the study’s lead author, Andreas Schmittner, an associate professor at Oregon State University, said.
Scientists have struggled for many years to understand how to quantify “climate sensitivity” - how Earth will respond to projected increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
In 2007, the UN’s peak climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, warned that a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial levels would warm the Earth’s surface by an average of 2C to 4.5C, although some studies have claimed the impact could be 10C or higher.
Professor Schmittner said it had been very difficult to rule out these extreme “high-sensitivity” scenarios, which were very important for understanding risks associated with climate change.
The study found high-sensitivity models led to a “runaway effect” under which the Earth would have been covered in ice during the last glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago, when CO2 levels were much lower.
“Clearly that didn’t happen, and that’s why we are pretty confident that these high climate sensitivities can be ruled out,” he said.
Professor Schmittner said taking his results literally, the IPCC’s average or “expected” value of a 3C average temperature increase for a doubling of CO2 ought to be regarded as an upper limit.
“Many previous climate-sensitivity studies have looked at the past only from 1850 through to today, and not fully integrated paleoclimate data, especially on a global scale,” he said. “If these paleoclimatic constraints apply to the future, as predicted by our model, the results imply less probability of extreme climatic change than previously thought.”
However, he cautioned that extreme climate change could still occur in some areas.
By Steve Goddard, Real Science
Curly – Permanent Drought In Australia
Speaking to a packed house at the University of Western Australia last night, Professor Ross Garnaut said the drying of the South-West has been predicted by climate change scientists, and climate changes in the region are directly attributable to carbon levels in the atmosphere
http://www.perthnow.com.au/
Moe – Too Much Rain In Australia Causing Sea Level To Fall (John Cook)
Larry - 75 Metres Of Sea Level Rise
“If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice - that’s a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster - a guaranteed disaster,” Hansen told the Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
In summary, the permanent drought in Australia is producing too much rain, which is causing sea level to rapidly fall to catastrophically high levels.
By Steve Goddard
Contrary to the mindless nonsense being spewed by Jeff Masters and Joe Romm (and Heidi Cullen and her former brood at the Weather Channel), snow is associated with cold. The graph above plots Rutgers North American winter snow extent vs. NCDC US temperatures. There is a strong correlation between between cold winters and snow. During winters when a lot of cold air moves into the US, there is (of course) more snow in North America. Only a moron would suggest otherwise.
Chicago, February 2011.
The last four winters have been the snowiest four year period on record in North America - because it has been cold.
http://climate.rutgers.edu/
See more on the snow cover on WeatherBell.com.
By Marlo Lewis, Global Warming.Org
For President Obama, approving the Keystone XL Pipeline should have been a no-brainer. All the State Department had to do was conclude the obvious - the pipeline is in the U.S. national interest.
What other reasonable conclusion is possible? Building the 1,700-mile, shovel-ready project would create thousands of construction jobs, stimulate tens of billions of dollars in business spending, and generate billions of dollars in tax revenues. Once operational, the pipeline would enhance U.S. energy security, displacing oil imported from unsavory regimes with up to 830,000 barrels a day of tar sands oil from friendly, stable, environmentally fastidious, democratic Canada. Canada already ships us more oil than all Persian Gulf states combined, and Keystone would significantly expand our self-reliance on North American energy.
Obama had only two policy choices. He could either disapprove the pipeline on the grounds that environmental concerns over incremental greenhouse gas emissions and oil spill risk outweigh the substantial economic, fiscal, and energy security benefits of the pipeline. Or he could approve the pipeline on the grounds that its benefits outweigh potential environmental impacts.
He did neither. Instead, he punted a final decision until after the November 2012 elections. The timing of Obama’s decision not to decide - just days after 10,000 anti-Keystone activists formed a protest circle around the White House - strongly suggests that Obama’s waffle was politically-motivated.
If Obama approves the pipeline, he risks alienating the green wing of his political base. “Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune told reporters recently that Obama’s decision on the pipeline would ‘have a very big impact’ on how the nation’s largest environmental group funnels resources toward congressional races rather than the race for the White House,” Politico reported last week. A constant theme of protest rallies since August is that Keystone is a “litmus test” for Obama. As one green blogger put it, “if the president cannot stand with the environmental community against the pipeline, some say, why should they stand with him at all?”
If, on the other hand, Obama disapproves the pipeline, he risks alienating union labor, such as the AFL-CIO-affiliated United Association of Plumbers and Pipe Fitters. In addition, disapproval would make candidate Obama more vulnerable to GOP criticism that he cares more about green ideology than about job creation and energy security.
Former Shell Oil exec John Hofmeister nailed it: “It’s much easier to avoid a decision than to make a decision,” and delay allows Obama to dangle the hope before each group that he’ll eventually decide in their favor.
This accountability-avoidance strategy might even induce environmentalists and labor to work harder for Obama’s re-election, the implicit deal on offer being that Obama will approve or disapprove the pipeline in 2013 depending on which group delivers more campaign contributions and votes in 2012.
All the more reason, then, for friends of affordable energy to lampoon Obama’s indecision as playing politics with the nation’s economic and energy future.
----------
The right response to Obama’s Keystone XL killing
November 11, 2011 by Steve Milloy
We suggest tit-for-tat.
In response to president Obama’s decision to effectively kill the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline - as well the rest of his war against fossil fuels - House Republicans should:
Zero-out federal funding for all so-called “clean energy” projects;
Put the wind and solar guys on notice that when their production tax credit - i.e., the only reason their industries exist - expires in 2012, there won’t be any more subsidies until the war on fossil fuels stops.
Between yesterday’s Keystone XL killing and the demagogued-to-death Senate effort to roll back the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution rule, it should be clear that an energy war has been declared by Democrats.
Republicans need to respond in kind - that goes for the GOP presidential candidates, too.
Obama admin funds $200K poll to psych-out Republicans on climate
By Steve Milloy
A Stanford social psychologist claims his poll of 1,001 adults conducted in November 2010 shows that Republican candidates who take a “green” position on climate change gain far more votes from Democrat and Independent voters than they lose from Republican voters.
The “non-green” position included the statement that “climate science is junk science” and that “cap-and-trade is a job killer and damages our economy.”
The poll was funded by a September 2010 grant from the Obama administration’s National Science Foundation in the amount of $200,000.
Isn’t it nice that the Obama administration is trying to help Republicans get elected? Very post-partisan.
Source: CO2 Science
Global Warming: The View from China
“Global climate change,” in the words of Fang et al. (2011), “is one of the biggest challenges to human society in the 21st century.” And noting that “carbon emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change are considered the main factors causing global warming,” plus the fact that “carbon emissions affect social and economic development,” they correctly state that “climate change has been shifted from an academic topic to an international political, economic, and diplomatic issue.”
The five Chinese researchers - all of whom are associated with the Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education at Peking University in Beijing, and two of whom are also associated with the Climate Change Research Center of the Academic Divisions of the Chinese Academy of Sciences - introduce their review of the climate change issue by noting that the Intergovenmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been the primary voice of those who support the thesis that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have been responsible for a worrisome increase in global temperature that is claimed to produce “a series of negative effects on natural systems, including snow and ice melt, sea-level rising, and disturbances in the hydrological cycle,” as well as “the acidification of sea water,” all of which phenomena are claimed by the IPCC to directly or indirectly threaten terrestrial and marine ecosystems and social systems.
More recently, however, Fang et al. state that the claims of the last IPCC report “have been largely questioned,” noting that “the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), established in 2007, has introduced a number of controversial and divisive debates,” citing Singer et al. (2008) and Idso et al. (2009). They also write that “the ‘Climate-gate’ and ‘Glacier-gate’ scandals have especially questioned the public credibility of the report,” citing Hefferman (2009) and Schiemeier (2010). And as a result, they state that “the IPCC report is no longer the most authoritative document on climate changes, as it is restricted by its political tendencies and some errors and flaws.”
In their own review of the subject, Fang et al. come to the following conclusions.
First, “global warming is an objective fact,” but there is “great uncertainty in the magnitude of the temperature increase.”
Second, “both human activities and natural factors contribute to climate change, but it is difficult to quantify their relative contributions.”
Third, with regard to the IPCC claim that “the increase in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (including CO2) is the driving force for climate warming,” they note the following four problems: (1) “it remains unclear how the human and natural factors, especially the aerosols, affect the global temperature change,” (2) “over the past century, the temperature change has not always been consistent with the change of CO2 concentration,” since “for several periods, global temperatures decreased or were stable while the atmospheric CO2 concentration continuously increased,” (3) “there is no significant correlation between the annual increment of the atmospheric CO2 concentration and the annual anomaly of annual mean temperature,” and (4) “the observed significant increase of the atmospheric CO2 concentration may not be totally attributable to anthropogenic emissions because there are great uncertainties in the sources of CO2 concentration in [the] atmosphere.”
This is but one view of the subject, albeit an important one, simply because it comes from China, the world’s most populous country. Many different groups have many different ideas about the topic; and that is the nature of the long-running controversy: there is no agreement on these and other core issues. Consequently, and contrary to what the IPCC crowd continually contends, the science of global climate change is definitely not “settled.”
Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso
References
Fang, J.Y., Zhu, J.L., Wang, S.P., Yue, C. and Shen, H.H. 2011. Global warming, human-induced carbon emissions, and their uncertainties. Science China Earth Sciences 54: 1458-1468.
Heffernan, O. 2009. Climate data spat intensifies. Nature 460: 787.
Idso, C.D. and Singer, S.F. 2009. Climate Change Reconsidered; 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The Heartland Institute, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Schiermeier, Q. 2010. IPCC flooded by criticism. Nature 463: 596-597.
Singer, S.F. 2008. Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate: Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The Heartland Institute, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
By Christopher C. Horner
The headline in today’s ClimateWire (subscription required) blares “U.N. says turning lights on for world’s poor need not boost CO2.” That is, we can provide electricity to 1.5 billion people who have never flipped a light switch and not see an increase in emissions of carbon dioxide (until the global warming fad/excuse for doing things statists like to do, this was called plant food, the driver of photosynthesis).
CO2 is released not just by oceans when they warm (absorbed when they cool) or decaying plants, or people exhaling, but combusting “fossil fuels” like the coal, gas, and, in some places, oil used to create electricity. CO2 emissions generally correlate with economic prosperity-more on that, momentarily.
But there is even less to this absurdity than meets the eye. Here’s how the ClimateWire story opens:
UNITED NATIONS - Generating enough electricity to supply the 1.5 billion people on this planet who live without it does not necessarily have to add much carbon dioxide to the global mix, U.N. experts argued in their annual Human Development Index.
The report, released yesterday, takes on the nettlesome subject of how the world can help bring these billions, most of them impoverished and living in Africa, into the light. It argues that “providing basic energy services” could happen with a CO2 increase of only 0.8 percent.
The fear that adding this level of energy supply to world accounts would mean much higher carbon output is unfounded, said William Orme, of the U.N. Development Programme, during a press briefing here on the report.
“That’s false,” he said. “You can actually do all that without creating a 1 percent rise in carbon emissions.”
Think about that. According to a UN report - coincidentally timed in the run-up to talks next month on replacing the energy-rationing Kyoto Protocol - you can create electricity for just under a quarter of the world’s population without, per the UN, even a 1% increase in man’s marginal contribution to CO2! That’s called UN Math.
The first thing that jumps out to those of us trying to find a way to make this statement be true is this interpretation: “Basic energy services” is in the eye of the beholder, a beholder who has his, viewing the dramatically lesser basic needs of others. He who seeks what others have surely has a different perspective. So far, the Kyoto disaster has affirmed this.
And then there’s this interpretation, which actually is necessary in any reading of this claim. Once the lights go on, at some level, then no growth for you! You’ve got what we think you need, now shut up.
As stated, CO2 equates with economic activity, with the statistical hiccup of certain wealthy countries depending heavily on nuclear power for much of their prosperity, like France and, until very recently, Japan and Germany.
So here again we see the newly fashionable effort to redefine prosperity, writing out economic GDP in favor of a mishmash of statist ideals leaving despotic hellholes as supposedly happy little nirvanas compared to those of us who thought reducing drudgery, disease and premature death from brutish, nasty living was somehow a good thing.
As AEI’s Steve Hayward notes, one “typical example of popular wisdom is the Happy Planet Index, which ranks the ostensible ‘happiness’ of the United States at 150th out of 178 countries, chiefly on account of America’s carbon footprint.” Mmm.
Ignore for the moment the internal confusion of this ClimateWire paragraph (surely a typo, which seems to be the principal way they get things right), and catch the argument. “Still, the U.N. report says high living standards ‘need to be carbon-fueled and follow the examples of the richest countries.’ A high degree of fossil fuel consumption was not seen as improving a nation’s life expectancy or education level, for example.”
So guess what the UN has in store for them, while also working to rope us into agreeing to Kyoto-style rationing? The UN report suggests “off-grid renewable options.” Ah, yes, the old reliable - er, wait, unreliable, “intermittent” - wind and solar power. Remember, we didn’t say often or how long the lights would be on, did we?
Just behold those happy poor...er, representatives of noble cultures. So wise, educated in ways we wealthy people will never comprehend (such are the wages of carbon sin). They’ve got a light bulb now, and they can turn them on during the day when the sun shines to power it!
So, yes, UN, you can “provide electricity” to 1.5 billion people without even slightly increasing CO2 emissions.
That is, if you don’t mind turning down, and sometimes out, the lights of many others.
And possibly squirrels running on wheels in their cages. Lots of them. And pedal-power. Hey, you need to get in shape anyway.
I mean, there are many ways this could be true. Yet, under any reading, why would we place this responsibility in the hands of, or even anywhere near, a group of people who believe in energy scarcity, not abundance? We’ve already got such a crew in charge, here, and look at the swell direction things are headed.