Lord Black: A teeming rain forest of irrelevant climate claims
o n z o b
November 28, 2009, 06:00:00 | NP Editor
Till now, I have avoided more than very limited comment on the whole
global-warming-carbon
emissions controversy. But now that colossal spending and regulating
programs impend on these
issues, I must say that the Al Gore-David Suzuki conventional-wisdom
hysteria is an insane scam.
The basic relevant facts are that carbon emissions are not the principal
factor in global warming,
and despite dire contrary forecasts and ever-increasing carbon-emissions in
the world - especially
as the economies of China and India, representing 40% of the world's
population, expand by six to
10 percent each year - the world has not grown a millidegree warmer since
the start of this
millennium. And its mean temperature rose by only one centigrade degree in
the 25 years before
that. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide emissions does have a gentle
warming effect if it is
not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but cannot be measured
directly against the
volume of such emissions.
The chief source of apparently informed hysteria on this subject, the
Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), has estimated that the mean world temperature will
increase by between 1.8
degrees C and 4 degrees C in this century, although a tenth of that warming
has already failed to
occur in the last decade. But even this prediction does not remotely justify
all the cant and hype
that the end of the world is nigh.
Even the IPCC admits that the upper end of its forecast would, in fact,
substantially increase
world food production. There is no chance of achieving stated - or even (by
some countries)
committed - emission-reduction targets, nor any reason to believe that the
attainment of these
targets would accomplish anything useful. Yet the president of the United
States has been promising
radical progress toward an international covenant in Copenhagen next month
to spend trillions of
dollars in pursuit of this unattainable, undesirable target.
It would be infinitely more sensible to intensify research, and invest where
necessary or advisable
in mitigation, adaptation and geostrategy, such as the infusion of sulphates
into the stratosphere,
as happens naturally with volcanic eruptions, to reduce the intensity of the
sun and provide
countervailing cooling influences without thinning the ozone layer. We
should keep in mind that the
IPCC's worst case in its preferred (very negative) scenario is that in the
next hundred years,
living standards in what is now the developing or under-developed world will
improve by only 750%,
instead of the 850% improvement that would allegedly occur if the world's
temperature remained
constant, as it has in the last decade.
All responsible people want to assist the disadvantaged parts of the world
and do what we
reasonably can for our own descendants, but not to the point of
self-impoverishment now for the
sake of a marginal gain against a wildly unproved prognosis a century from
now. This is the
flimsiest justification imaginable for the mad slogan parroted endlessly by
the eco-Zouaves, from
Hollywood to the UN to Ducks Unlimited: "Save the Planet!," as they try to
force-march the world
into bio-degradeable pastoralism.
Nor is this the grim tipping point Al Gore has made scores of millions of
dollars and won a Nobel
Peace Prize for decrying as the imminent apocalypse. Gore's scurrilous film,
An Inconvenient Truth,
is based on no original research and is a teeming rain forest of false and
irrelevant claims, such
as that the Pacific island country of Tuvalu is losing population because
the sea level around it
is rising under the relentless pressures of global warming on the Polar ice
caps; and the claim
that, for the same reason, mosquitoes have afflicted Nairobi, Kenya, with a
constant epidemic of
malaria.
The inconvenience of the truth falls on Gore, not his credulous viewers, as
water levels have in
fact declined slightly at Tuvalu, and the country's modest population
shrinkage is due to economic
migrants; and malaria was much more prevalent in Nairobi a century ago, and
has risen only slightly
in recent years because of the ecologists' attack on the use of insecticide.
The Polar ice caps
aren't melting at all; the ice sheets over the oceans are, but that over
land is actually
thickening, so water levels are not being affected.
The much-vaunted British Stern Review is in fact, largely rubbish, devised
to give the
environmental baton to Tony Blair, so he could wave it like a magic wand to
placate the left of the
British Labour Party for whom he delivered nothing else but an
indiscriminate increase in public
spending. It warns of a 70% decline in world food production this century if
its temperature
forecast increases are met, relying exclusively on a study that predicts
such a decline will occur
to the harvest of Northern Indian groundnuts only, not the world's food
supply. Stern purported to
forecast 200, 300, or a thousand years ahead, which is nonsense, and warns
of the "deaths of
hundreds of millions, social upheaval, large-scale conflicts," if
$25-trillion is not spent in the
next 15 years to reduce carbon emissions by 70%, (and disemploy scores of
millions of people).
This leads directly to the farce of the Kyoto agreement, which was supposed
to be escalated at the
Copenhagen discussions next month. Bill Clinton pledged to support this mad
enterprise, as well as
the monstrous racket of international trafficking in unused permissible
emission balances. The U.S.
Senate long ago repudiated any such adherence, 95-0, in one of its few
unanimous acts on a serious
subject since Pearl Harbor.
Barack Obama is trying to replicate this poker game domestically in the
trade part of
cap-and-trade, which, as passed by the House of Representatives, will
neither reduce carbon
emissions nor raise government revenues, but will impose a heavy burden of
heating and
air-conditioning cost increases on the families and employers of America.
(In all of the
circumstances, for the unfeasible former Canadian Liberal leader, St�phane
Dion, to have named his
dog "Kyoto" could be considered cruelty to animals.)
Two of Canada's greatest and most undersung recent heroes are environmental
economist Ross
McKitrick and statistical minerologist Steven McIntyre, who by their
tireless research in the teeth
of the entire ecological establishment, proved the former IPCC claim of
drastically accelerated
global warming was a fraud. These men have been prominently mentioned in the
hacked emails that
have just revealed the outrageous lengths the scientific propagators of the
Great Green Fraud have
gone to to suppress the facts.
The immensely respected former British chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel
Lawson, had great
difficulty finding a publisher for his expos� of these matters, An Appeal To
Reason, A Cool Look at
Global Warming, such is the pressure the eco-lobby can assert. He believes
Green is the new Red,
the anti-capitalists taking over the relatively inoffensive tandem bicycle
of naturalists, and
turning it into a nihilistic juggernaut, the treads having been blown off
their great Red Marxist
tank that careened through the world for most of the last century. The
eco-extremists allow the
conservationists and butterfly collectors and Sierra Clubs to front their
activities, just as the
pacifist na�fs were often the witless dupes and "useful idiots" (in Lenin's
words), of the
Communists.
As Lord Lawson wrote in his book, those worried about imminent environmental
catastrophe, as
compared, for examples, to nuclear terrorism or even large meteoric
collisions, "need not worry
about saving this planet. They are already living on another one . We appear
to have entered a new
age of unreason . It is from this, above all, that we really need to save
the planet."
National Post
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