Climate change forecasts have for years predicted that carbon dioxide would trap heat on Earth, and increases in the gas would lead to a planetwide rise in temperatures, with devastating consequences for the environment.

But long-term data from NASA satellites seems to contradict the predictions dramatically, according to a new study.

“There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans,” said Dr. Roy Spencer, a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. science team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer — basically a big thermometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.

“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” he said. The planet isn’t heating up, in other words.

James Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at conservative think-tank The Heartland Institute, wrote at Forbes that the meaning of the new research is clear — and it compromises what he called a “central premise of alarmist global warming theory.”

“Real-world measurements … show far less heat is being trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict,” Taylor wrote.

But with any story on the science of climate change, scientific truths are never so simple.

Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, called Spencer a “controversial figure” within the climate research community. He argued that Spencer’s paper is neither new nor correct.

“He’s taken an incorrect model, he’s tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,” Dessler told LiveScience.com.

Many scientists believe that as the planet warms, more water vapor moves into the atmosphere. This water vapor exists as clouds, which trap more heat, creating a vicious loop.

Spencer sees it differently. He thinks that the whole cycle starts with the clouds. In other words, random increases in cloud cover cause climate warming. The cloud changes are caused by “chaos in the climate system,” Spencer told LiveScience.

The truth of climate change remains murky, as always — something even Spencer notes in his new paper.

“Atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the climate system remains an unsolved problem,” he noted.

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>>Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995 (WorldNetDaily, 100214)

The academic at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ affair, whose raw data is crucial to the theory of climate change, has admitted that he has trouble ‘keeping track’ of the information.

Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.

Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.

The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.

Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

The admissions will be seized on by sceptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely man-made.

Professor Jones has been in the spotlight since he stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit after the leaking of emails that sceptics claim show scientists were manipulating data.

The raw data, collected from hundreds of weather stations around the world and analysed by his unit, has been used for years to bolster efforts by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to press governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Following the leak of the emails, Professor Jones has been accused of ‘scientific fraud’ for allegedly deliberately suppressing information and refusing to share vital data with critics.

Discussing the interview, the BBC’s environmental analyst Roger Harrabin said he had spoken to colleagues of Professor Jones who had told him that his strengths included integrity and doggedness but not record-keeping and office tidying.

Mr Harrabin, who conducted the interview for the BBC’s website, said the professor had been collating tens of thousands of pieces of data from around the world to produce a coherent record of temperature change.

That material has been used to produce the ‘hockey stick graph’ which is relatively flat for centuries before rising steeply in recent decades.

According to Mr Harrabin, colleagues of Professor Jones said ‘his office is piled high with paper, fragments from over the years, tens of thousands of pieces of paper, and they suspect what happened was he took in the raw data to a central database and then let the pieces of paper go because he never realised that 20 years later he would be held to account over them’.

Asked by Mr Harrabin about these issues, Professor Jones admitted the lack of organisation in the system had contributed to his reluctance to share data with critics, which he regretted.

Enlarge Chart

But he denied he had cheated over the data or unfairly influenced the scientific process, and said he still believed recent temperature rises were predominantly man-made.

Asked about whether he lost track of data, Professor Jones said: ‘There is some truth in that. We do have a trail of where the weather stations have come from but it’s probably not as good as it should be.

‘There’s a continual updating of the dataset. Keeping track of everything is difficult. Some countries will do lots of checking on their data then issue improved data, so it can be very difficult. We have improved but we have to improve more.’

He also agreed that there had been two periods which experienced similar warming, from 1910 to 1940 and from 1975 to 1998, but said these could be explained by natural phenomena whereas more recent warming could not.

He further admitted that in the last 15 years there had been no ‘statistically significant’ warming, although he argued this was a blip rather than the long-term trend.

And he said that the debate over whether the world could have been even warmer than now during the medieval period, when there is evidence of high temperatures in northern countries, was far from settled.

Sceptics believe there is strong evidence that the world was warmer between about 800 and 1300 AD than now because of evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

But climate change advocates have dismissed this as false or only applying to the northern part of the world.

Professor Jones departed from this consensus when he said: ‘There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not. The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia.

‘For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

‘Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th Century warmth would not be unprecedented. On the other hand, if the MWP was global, but was less warm than today, then the current warmth would be unprecedented.’

Sceptics said this was the first time a senior scientist working with the IPCC had admitted to the possibility that the Medieval Warming Period could have been global, and therefore the world could have been hotter then than now.

Professor Jones criticised those who complained he had not shared his data with them, saying they could always collate their own from publicly available material in the US. And he said the climate had not cooled ‘until recently – and then barely at all. The trend is a warming trend’.

Mr Harrabin told Radio 4’s Today programme that, despite the controversies, there still appeared to be no fundamental flaws in the majority scientific view that climate change was largely man-made.

But Dr Benny Pieser, director of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said Professor Jones’s ‘excuses’ for his failure to share data were hollow as he had shared it with colleagues and ‘mates’.

He said that until all the data was released, sceptics could not test it to see if it supported the conclusions claimed by climate change advocates.

He added that the professor’s concessions over medieval warming were ‘significant’ because they were his first public admission that the science was not settled.

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>>Global Warming Scientist Admits Doubts (newsmax, 100221)

Proponents of man-made global warming have suffered a serious blow as leading climate change scientist Phil Jones now acknowledges that the earth may have been warmer in medieval times than now.

Jones also conceded in an interview with the BBC that during the past 15 years there has been no “statistically significant” warming.

“The admissions will be seized on by skeptics as fresh evidence that there are serious flaws at the heart of the science of climate change and the orthodoxy that recent rises in temperature are largely made-made,” Britain’s Daily Mail observed.

Jones recently stepped down as director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in Britain after leaked e-mails indicated that scientists there were manipulating data to strengthen the argument for man-made global warming.

The data have been used to support efforts by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to urge governments to cut carbon dioxide emissions and to produce the “hockey stick graph” that shows temperatures relatively stable for centuries before rising sharply in recent decades.

Critics of global warming crusaders believe there is evidence that the world was warmer than today between about 800 and 1300 A.D., during the so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP), due to evidence of high temperatures in northern countries.

“There is much debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period was global in extent or not,” Jones said in the interview.

“The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic, and Europe and parts of Asia.

“For it to be global in extent, the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.

“Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent and as warm or warmer than today, then obviously the late 20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.”

Marc Sheppard, environment editor of American Thinker, declares: “As the entire anthropogenic global warming theory is predicated on correlation with rising CO2 levels, this first-such confession from an IPCC senior scientist is nothing short of earth-shattering.”

He also writes: “Indeed, we know that, during the MWP, ice-free seas allowed the Vikings to settle a then comfortably warm Greenland, where colonies flourished for many centuries. Modern archaeologists digging through [Greenland’s] permafrost have uncovered bones and artifacts attesting to the villages established there.”

Despite his concession that there has been no “statistically significant” warming over the past 15 years, Jones still maintains that he is “100% confident” the climate has warmed and said “there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.”

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>>Global Warming as Religion (Christian Post, 091204)

Religious freedom is one of the most difficult and vexing issues of our day-whether the subject is Muslim schoolgirls in France or Christian photographers in New Mexico.

And that’s before government starts calling just about any sincerely held belief a “religion.”

That is essentially what has happened in Britain. In July 2008, Tim Nicholson was let go from his job at a property management firm. According to Nicholson, his dismissal was due to his beliefs about man-made global warming.

Nicholson calls man-made global warming “the most important issue of our time” and believes that “nothing should stand in the way of diverting this catastrophe.” This led to “frequent clashes” with his co-workers over his concerns.

For instance, Nicholson, out of concern about excess CO2 emissions, refuses to fly. He objected when the firm’s CEO flew someone from London to Ireland to retrieve his Blackberry.

When he was dismissed, Nicholson sued under Britain’s Employment Equality act, specifically the part that prohibits discrimination on account of “religion and belief.”

According to Nicholson, “Belief in man-made climate change is...a philosophical belief that reflects my moral and ethical values.”

For its part, his former employer countered that “green views were political and based on science, as opposed to religious or philosophical in nature.”

In what’s being called a “landmark ruling,” a British judge ruled for Nicholson, saying that “a belief in man-made climate change...is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose” of laws covering discrimination in employment.

The judge’s ruling opens the door to the possibility of employees suing their employers “for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.”

Theoretically, an employer could say “I need you in Helsinki by tomorrow,” to which the employee could reply, “Too much carbon, we’ll have to aim for next week, since I’ll be going by bicycle, train, and boat.”

The possibilities are, as advertisers say, endless. And the upcoming Copenhagen conference will, no doubt, add more “converts” to the faith.

And what of the faith that actually created and nurtured Britain? (That’s Christianity.) Let’s just say that British officials aren’t as solicitous of its practitioners as they are of those belonging to newer arrivals.

For those of us who say that could never happen here, let me remind you of a Supreme Court case defining religion decades ago as “a sincere and meaningful belief which occupies, in the life of its possessor, a place parallel to that filled by God.”

And remember that, last year, Al Gore argued that you could have civil disobedience morally justified in order to stop the construction of a coal-fired electric generating plant.

Listen, folks, in today’s climate, the earth could soon enough take the place of that archaic idea of an ancient God of the Bible. Please go to ColsonCenter.org for my “Two-Minute Warning.”

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>>The Warmers Strike Back (townhall.com, 100317)

by Walter E. Williams

Stephen Dinan’s Washington Times article “Climate Scientist to Fight Back at Skeptics,” (March 5, 2010) tells of a forthcoming campaign that one global warmer said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics. “Climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of ‘being treated like political pawns’ and need to fight back…” Part of their strategy is to form a nonprofit organization and use donations to run newspaper ads to criticize critics. Stanford professor and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich, in one of the e-mails obtained by the Washington Times said, “Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules.”

Professor Thomas Sowell’s most recent book, “Intellectuals and Society,” has a quote from Eric Hoffer, “One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.” Environmentalist Professor Paul Ehrlich, who’s giving advice to the warmers, is an excellent example of Hoffer’s observation. Ehrlich in his widely read 1968 book, “The Population Bomb,” predicted, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer.” Ehrlich also predicted the earth’s then-5 billion population would starve back to 2 billion people by 2025. In 1969, Dr. Ehrlich warned Britain’s Institute of Biology, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Despite these asinine predictions, Ehrlich has won no less than 16 awards, including the 1980 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

Stanford University professor and environmentalist activist Stephen H. Schneider is another scientist involved in the warmer retaliation. In a 1989 Discover Magazine interview, Professor Schneider said, “We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Former Colorado Sen. Tim Wirth, now president of the United Nations Foundation, in 1990 said, “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we’ll be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Environmental activist predictions have been dead wrong. In National Wildlife (July 1975), Nigel Calder warned, “... the threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” In the same issue, C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization warned, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”

George Woodwell’s, founder of the Woods Hole Research Center, comments suggest that the warmers are gearing up for a big propaganda push. In one of his e-mails, Woodwell said that researchers have been ceding too much ground. He criticized Pennsylvania State University for their academic investigation of Professor Michael Mann, who wrote many of the e-mails leaked from the Britain’s now disgraced Climate Research Unit. Stephen Dinan’s Washington Times article reports, “In his e-mail, Mr. Woodwell acknowledged that he is advocating taking ‘an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach’ but said scientists have had their ‘classical reasonableness’ turned against them,” adding, “‘We are dealing with an opposition that is not going to yield to facts or appeals from people who hold themselves in high regard and think their assertions and data are obvious truths.’”

Fortunately, for the American people, Sen. James M. Inhofe, R- Okla., is considering asking the Justice Department to investigate whether climate scientists who receive taxpayer-funded grants have falsified data. He has identified 17 taxpayer-supported scientists who have been major players in the global warming conspiracy.

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>>Hacked E-Mail Is New Fodder for Climate Dispute (Paris International Herald, 091120)

E-mail messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.

The e-mail messages, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.

In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as “idiots.”

Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

Some of the correspondence portrays the scientists as feeling under siege by the skeptics’ camp and worried that any stray comment or data glitch could be turned against them.

The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument. However, the documents will undoubtedly raise questions about the quality of research on some specific questions and the actions of some scientists.

In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discuss gaps in understanding of recent variations in temperature. Skeptic Web sites pointed out one line in particular: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t,” Dr. Trenberth wrote.

The cache of e-mail messages also includes references to journalists, including this reporter, and queries from journalists related to articles they were reporting.

Officials at the University of East Anglia confirmed in a statement on Friday that files had been stolen from a university server and that the police had been brought in to investigate the breach. They added, however, that they could not confirm that all the material circulating on the Internet was authentic.

But several scientists and others contacted by The New York Times confirmed that they were the authors or recipients of specific e-mail messages included in the file. The revelations are bound to inflame the public debate as hundreds of negotiators prepare to negotiate an international climate accord at meetings in Copenhagen next month, and at least one scientist speculated that the timing was not coincidental.

Dr. Trenberth said Friday that he was appalled at the release of the e-mail messages.

But he added that he thought the revelations might backfire against climate skeptics. He said that he thought that the messages showed “the integrity of scientists.” Still, some of the comments might lend themselves to being interpreted as sinister.

In a 1999 e-mail exchange about charts showing climate patterns over the last two millenniums, Phil Jones, a longtime climate researcher at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, said he had used a “trick” employed by another scientist, Michael Mann, to “hide the decline” in temperatures.

Dr. Mann, a professor at Pennsylvania State University, confirmed in an interview that the e-mail message was real. He said the choice of words by his colleague was poor but noted that scientists often used the word “trick” to refer to a good way to solve a problem, “and not something secret.”

At issue were sets of data, both employed in two studies. One data set showed long-term temperature effects on tree rings; the other, thermometer readings for the past 100 years.

Through the last century, tree rings and thermometers show a consistent rise in temperature until 1960, when some tree rings, for unknown reasons, no longer show that rise, while the thermometers continue to do so until the present.

Dr. Mann explained that the reliability of the tree-ring data was called into question, so they were no longer used to track temperature fluctuations. But he said dropping the use of the tree rings was never something that was hidden, and had been in the scientific literature for more than a decade. “It sounds incriminating, but when you look at what you’re talking about, there’s nothing there,” Dr. Mann said.

In addition, other independent but indirect measurements of temperature fluctuations in the studies broadly agreed with the thermometer data showing rising temperatures.

Dr. Jones, writing in an e-mail message, declined to be interviewed.

Stephen McIntyre, a blogger who on his Web site, climateaudit.org, has for years been challenging data used to chart climate patterns, and who came in for heated criticism in some e-mail messages, called the revelations “quite breathtaking.”

But several scientists whose names appear in the e-mail messages said they merely revealed that scientists were human, and did nothing to undercut the body of research on global warming. “Science doesn’t work because we’re all nice,” said Gavin A. Schmidt, a climatologist at NASA whose e-mail exchanges with colleagues over a variety of climate studies were in the cache. “Newton may have been an ass, but the theory of gravity still works.”

He said the breach at the University of East Anglia was discovered after hackers who had gained access to the correspondence sought Tuesday to hack into a different server supporting realclimate.org, a blog unrelated to NASA that he runs with several other scientists pressing the case that global warming is true.

The intruders sought to create a mock blog post there and to upload the full batch of files from Britain. That effort was thwarted, Dr. Schmidt said, and scientists immediately notified colleagues at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. The first posts that revealed details from the files appeared Thursday at The Air Vent, a Web site devoted to skeptics’ arguments.

At first, said Dr. Michaels, the climatologist who has faulted some of the science of the global warming consensus, his instinct was to ignore the correspondence as “just the way scientists talk.”

But on Friday, he said that after reading more deeply, he felt that some exchanges reflected an effort to block the release of data for independent review.

He said some messages mused about discrediting him by challenging the veracity of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin by claiming he knew his research was wrong. “This shows these are people willing to bend rules and go after other people’s reputations in very serious ways,” he said.

Spencer R. Weart, a physicist and historian who is charting the course of research on global warming, said the hacked material would serve as “great material for historians.”

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>>Facing Scandal, Head of Climate Research Lab to Temporarily Step Down (Foxnews, 091201)

The director of the prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation

The director of the embattled Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in the United Kingdom is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

In a statement posted to its Web site, the University of East Anglia says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.

Professor Jones said, “What is most important is that CRU continues its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible. After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the Director’s role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this. The Review process will have my full support.”

Details of the independent review will be releasd in the next few days, according to the statement.

Matt Dempsey, spokesman for Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., thinks more is still to come from the scandal coming to be known as Climategate. “It certainly shows that there’s more to the investigation and there’s more to come, and we’re only at the beginning stages of learning about climate-gate,” he told FoxNews.com.

Dempsey added that Inhofe plans to request a hearing on the topic formally from Enivornment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer in a letter later today.

Jones’s biography page, published on the CRU’s servers, notes his research interest “in instrumental climate change, palæoclimatology, detection of climate change and the extension of riverflow records in the UK using long rainfall records. I am principally known for the time series of hemispheric and global surface temperatures, which I update on a monthly basis. I have numerous research papers over the last 20 years and these are available in the CRU Publications List.”

The controversy spun from a collection of e-mails stolen from the CRU and leaked onto the Internet. The e-mails were seized upon by some skeptics of man-made climate change as proof that scientists are manipulating the data about its extent. And the trustworthiness of the scientific community’s global warming data pool is being called into question as the scandal over doctored data continues to unfold.

The loss of the data prevents other scientists from checking it to determine whether, in fact, there has been a long-term rise in global temperatures during the past century and a half.

“They are making scientific progress more difficult now,” says Willie Soon, a physicist, astronomer and climate researcher at the solar and stellar physics division of the Harvard University-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “This is a shameful, dark day for science,” he said in an interview with FoxNews.com.

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>>Global Warming Scandal Makes Scientific Progress More Difficult, Experts Say (Foxnews, 091201)

The trustworthiness of the scientific community’s global warming data pool is being called into question as the scandal over climate data continues to unfold.

The latest revelation came on Sunday with the publication of a report by The Sunday Times of London that scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom confessed to throwing out most of the raw temperature data on which the theory of global warming is founded.

The loss of the data prevents other scientists from checking it to determine whether, in fact, there has been a long-term rise in global temperatures during the past century and a half.

Soon also suggested that there has been systemic suppression of dissenting opinion among scientists in the climate change community, ranging from social snubs to e-mail stalking and even threats of harm.

Many in the environmental policy community are outraged about the disclosure that the data has been lost. “The scientific process has become so appallingly corrupted,” James M. Taylor, senior fellow in environment policy at The Heartland Institute, told FoxNews.com.

Heartland is a libertarian think tank in Chicago that recently produced a conference featuring scientists and policymakers, like Jose Maria Aznar, the former prime minister of Spain, and Vaclev Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, who dispute the theory of global warming.

The report in the Times quoted Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, who requested the original records from CRU.

“The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us.’ So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” Pielke told the Times. He did not return repeated phone calls seeking additional comment. The university’s publicist also was unable to answer additional questions about the story.

“This closed-door conspiracy is harming everyone,” says Soon. “I thought I had seen it all. Now I have.”

A back story is also starting to emerge, depicting a rough world of suppression of dissenting opinion. Soon, who has been involved in climate change research for 15 years and has published in the field, said there was a general consensus that global warming was possible in the late 1990s. But at the time, the research community wanted to look back not just 150 years but 1,000 years, to see what the long-term trends had been.

Soon says some scientists became staunch advocates for their position that global warming was occurring, and that they they dug in and started refusing to publish papers with contradictory viewpoints.

“I read a paper on increasing heat in the ocean and asked the scientist in France for the backup data,” Soon says. “She told me she did not distribute data to people who didn’t agree with her conclusions.”

Soon says he has been victimized by other “ugly” personal attacks from leading scientists in the global warming world when he has simply raised questions, as any scientific colleague would, about the veracity of the data.

“Seeing all of this controversy in the news is no different than dealing with them in person,” he said. “There’s a lot of personal ugliness.”

Taylor, who is also outspoken in his questioning of climate change theory, says he too has encountered ugliness from global warming enthusiasts, including “e-mail stalking” and “people making thinly veiled threats to physically harm me and my family.” He said his opponents at public forums have refused to shake his hand or even acknowledge his presence.

Much scientific research corroborates what the CRU has been reporting, despite the missing data. “It’s true that GISS (NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies) and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) ground-based temperature reports show temperature increases similar to CRU,” Taylor said.

But then the CRU scandal erupted.

Hackers uncovered e-mails between leading global warming advocates, which expressed concerns that the temperature figures from the last decade simply did not demonstrate that global warming was continuing, as theorized.

Now, some critics are questioning even the seemingly reliable data from the U.S. government.

“The GISS and NOAA reports suffer from the same reliability concerns as the CRU ground-based temperature reports,” Taylor says. “And, more importantly, are similarly staffed by outspoken global warming activists who are likely engaging in the same data rigging and data hiding as CRU.”

But global warming backers aren’t so sure.

“I don’t think this is a big deal,” Nick Berning, director of public advocacy and media relations for Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, based in Washington D.C., said. “These are people who want to get their panties in a bunch, so they’ve gotten their panties in a bunch.”

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>>Climate Change Scientists Admit Dumping Data (Foxnews, 091130)

Scientists have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which predictions of global warming were based

Scientists at the University of East Anglia have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit CRU was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenized) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading center for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

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>>Climate Skeptics See ‘Smoking Gun’ in Researchers’ Leaked E-Mails (Foxnews, 091121)

Hackers broke into the servers at a prominent British climate research center and leaked years worth of e-mail messages onto the Web, including one with a reference to a plan to “hide the decline” in temperatures.

The Internet is abuzz about the leaked data from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (commonly called Hadley CRU), which has acknowledged the theft of 61MB of confidential data.

Climate change skeptics describe the leaked data as a “smoking gun,” evidence of collusion among climatologists and manipulation of data to support the widely held view that climate change is caused by the actions of mankind. The authors of some of the e-mails, however, accuse the skeptics of taking the messages out of context, adding that the evidence still clearly shows a warming trend.

The files were reportedly released on a Russian file-serve by an anonymous poster calling himself “FOIA.”

In an exclusive interview in Investigate magazine’s TGIF Edition, Phil Jones, the head of the Hadley CRU, confirmed that the leaked data is real.

“It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago,” he told the magazine, noting that the center has yet to contact the police about the data breach.

TGIF Edition asked Jones about the controversial “hide the decline” comment from an e-mail he wrote in 1999: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd [sic] from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

He told the magazine that there was no intention to mislead, but he had “no idea” what he meant by those words.

“That was an e-mail from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?” he said.

“Mike” refers to Jones’ colleague Michael Mann, who told the New York Times that the “trick” was simply a way of solving a data problem. In this case, the warming trend of the last century was detected in tree-ring samples only until 1960, but it continued in thermometer readings.

Jones’ word choice was poor, Mann told the Times, but the calculations were “not something secret.”

The Telegraph has posted some of the more scathing excerpts from these emails, which the newspaper suggests points to manipulation of evidence and private doubts about the reality of global warming, though the much of the scientific language in the e-mails is esoteric and hard to interpret.

Others suggest the comments are simply “scientists talking about science.” In an interview with Wired, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, points out that “if you read all of these e-mails, you will be surprised at the integrity of these scientists.”

Still, one notable e-mail from the hacked files clearly describes how to squeeze dissenting scientists from the peer review process:

“I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”

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>>Document Reveals U.N.’s Goal of Becoming Rule-Maker in Global Environmental Talks (Foxnews, 091130)

Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion “as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity,” according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world’s would-be environmental watchdog.

The purpose of the paper, put together after an unpublicized day-long session in Switzerland by some of the world’s top environmental bureaucrats: to argue for a new and unprecedented effort to move environmental concerns to “the center of political and economic decision-making” around the world — and perhaps not coincidentally, expand the influence and reach of UNEP at the tables of world power, as a rule-maker and potential supervisor of the New Environmental Order.

The positions argued in that paper now appear to be much closer at hand; many of them are embedded in a four-year strategy document for UNEP taking effect next year, in the immediate wake of the much-touted, 11-day Copenhagen conference on “climate change,” which starts on Dec. 7, and which is intended to push environmental concerns to a new crescendo.

The major difference is that the four-year UNEP plan expresses its aims in the carefully soporific language that U.N. organizations customarily use to swaddle their objectives. The Swiss document makes its case passionately — and more plainly — than any U.N. official document ever would.

The ambitious paper, entitled “The UNEP That We Want,” was the product of a select group of 20 top environmental bureaucrats and thinkers, including UNEP’s current No. 2 official, Angela Cropper. The document was later delivered to UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.

Other participants included Janos Pasztor, currently head of the team pushing U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s unprecedented Seal the Deal lobbying campaign to pressure U.N. member governments into signing a new environmental agreement at Copenhagen; Julia Marton-Lefevre, head of the World Conservation Union; Dominic Waughray, currently head of environmental initiatives at the World Economic Forum; and Maria Ivanova, a Bulgarian academic who is director of the Global Economic Governance Project at the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy.

Another important attendee was John Scanlon, listed on UNEP’s website as principal advisor to UNEP’s Steiner. Among other things, Scanlon is credited in his UNEP biography with being the leader in developing UNEP’s new medium-term strategy, “Environment for Development,” covering the period from 2010 to 2013. The draft version of the strategy was presented to a UNEP’s Governing Council and a meeting of the world’s environmental minister’s in February 2008, and subsequently approved.

The Swiss paper was written not by Scanlon but by Mark Halle, the Europe-based director of trade and investment for an influential environmental think-tank, the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), which originated in Canada and now operates in some 30 countries. IISD, which still has heavy Canadian government support, bills itself as a research institute promoting policies that are “simultaneously beneficial to the global economy, the global environment and to social well-being.”

Even though all of the Swiss participants took part in the brainstorming, the responsibility for the ideas in the paper are his own, Halle emphasized to Fox News, after he was contacted last week about the document. The paper itself says it offers “elements,” not a “complete offering,” of what UNEP should consider for its role in the years ahead.

Despite those limitations, the report was “very well received” by UNEP’s hierarchy, according to Halle, and “it has had a great impact internally.” He added, “I have participated in several discussions and presentations of the ideas.”

In fact, there is a high degree of overlap between the ideas pulled together at the small Swiss meeting of experts and the ideas that also appear in the new strategic plan for UNEP, a copy of which has been obtained by Fox News.

Those ideas are being espoused at a highly charged time. Both environmentalists and the entire United Nations, led by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, are still fervently pressuring governments around the world to sign a legally binding and more global successor to the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas suppression, which expires in 2012. At the moment, that deal appears likely to be delayed, at least until next spring, as some wealthy countries, including the U.S., balk at the high cost and potentially crippling economic impact of targets to reduce carbon emissions into the earth’s atmosphere, even though President Barack Obama supports an ambitious Copenhagen deal.

But UNEP’s strategic plan, as well as the IISD document that grew out of the Swiss gathering, look well beyond the horizon of Copenhagen in suggesting the outlines of the world’s environment-centered future, to what the strategic plan calls “the next phase in the evolution of UNEP.”

Among other things, both documents argue for:

—a “new and central position for environmentalism in the world’s thinking,” as the Swiss paper puts it. “The current environmental challenges and opportunities will cause the environment to move from often being considered as a marginal issue at the intergovernmental and national levels to the centre of political and economic decision-making,” says the medium-term plan.

—a new position in the international power game for UNEP, reaching far beyond the member governments that currently finance its core budget and make up its normal supervisors. “It will have to make itself relevant well beyond the world of those already concerned with the environment, including very prominently its own formal constituency,” as the Swiss paper puts it.

UNEP will “actively reach out to Governments, other United Nations entities, international institutions, multilateral environmental agreement secretariats, civil society, the private sector and other relevant partners to implement the Medium-term Strategy,” says the UNEP document.

—a major restructuring of international institutions to merge environmental issues with economics as the central priority. “We require an Environmental Bretton Woods for the 21st Century,” Halle argues — a reference to the meeting that laid the foundations of Western international finance and economic regulation after World War II. “The linkages between environmental sustainability and the economy will emerge as a key focus for public policymaking and a determinant of future markets opportunities,” according to the UNEP strategic plan.

—new environmental rules, regulations and standards, and the linking of existing environmental agreements, in a stronger global lattice-work of environmental law, with stronger authority to command national governments. The Swiss paper calls it a series of “ambitious yet incremental adjustments” to international environmental governance. Indeed, the document says, UNEP’s “role is to ‘tee up’ the next generation of such rules.”

The UNEP four-year strategy puts it more obliquely, and only in a footnote on page 7 of the document: “UNEP will actively participate in the continuing international environmental governance discussions both within and outside the United Nations system, noting the repeated calls to strengthen UNEP, including its financial base, and the ‘evolutionary nature of strengthening international environmental governance.’”

—an extensive propagandizing role for UNEP that reaches beyond its member governments and traditional environmental institutions to “children and youth” as well as business and political groups, to support UNEP strategic objectives.

As the Swiss paper puts it, UNEP “should pioneer a new style of work. This requires going beyond a narrow interpretation of UNEP’s stakeholders as comprising its member states — or even the world’s governments — and recruiting a far wider community of support, in civil society, the academic world and the private sector.” At the same time the paper warns that these groups need to be “harnessed to the UNEP mission without appearing to make an end-run around the member governments.”

The official four-year plan uses more restrained language in declaring that “civil society, including children and youth, and the private sector will be reached through tailor-made outreach products and campaigns.... Civil society will also be engaged to assist with UNEP outreach efforts.” (The term “civil society,” as used by the U.N., usually refers to organizations and associations that have received formal recognition from one branch or another of the sprawling world organization.)

—along with increased political leverage for UNEP, bringing increased financial leverage to its cause, once again by reaching beyond the national environmental ministries that traditionally are the organization’s financial base to more powerful sectors of government as well as business and other interest groups that will see profit and advantage in the new, environment centered approach.

Says the Swiss paper: “UNEP must focus on priorities that meet two characteristics: they should appeal to the more powerful [government] ministers responsible for economic policy; and they should empower environmental ministers at the cabinet table. UNEP’s message is not for environment ministers — the already converted.... It must aim higher.”

As UNEP’s four-year strategy more circumspectly puts it: “Mobilizing sufficient finance to meet environmental challenges, including climate change, extends well beyond global mechanisms negotiated under conventions. It will require efforts at local, national and global levels to engage with Governments and the private sector to achieve the necessary additional investment and financial flows.”

As far as UNEP itself is concerned, the document says, the organization “will raise contributions from the private sector, foundations and non-environmental funding windows…Funds will also be drawn from humanitarian, crisis and peacebuilding instruments, where appropriate.”

—Perhaps the most important function both documents see for the newly enhanced UNEP is to seek influence as the world’s guiding arbiter of a new measurement of human development. “We believe the environmental argument should be recast in terms of its importance for and potential contribution to prosperity, stability and equity,” the Swiss paper argues.

Or, more discreetly, as the strategy document puts it: “Integrated environmental assessments that highlight the state of the environment and trends will be used to inform decision-makers and ensure UNEP plays its lead environmental role in the United Nations system and strengthens its capacity to respond better to the global, regional and national needs of Governments.”

According to Halle, however, in an e-mail exchange with Fox News, there are signs that the hugely ambitious role he and his fellow-thinkers sketched for UNEP as religion’s main competitor are “beginning to happen.” Halle pointed to UNEP’s espousal this year of a so-called Green Economy Initiative, a proposal to radically redesign the global economy and transfer trillions of dollars in investment to the world’s poorest developing countries, but one that is couched in terms of providing new green jobs, an end to old, unfair carbon-based energy subsidies, and greater global fairness and opportunity. Halle called the development “quite exciting.”

The Green Economy Initiative, also called the Global Green New Deal, is a major counterpart to the new treaty on greenhouse gas suppression that all branches of the United Nations, and a horde of environmental organizations, are lobbying loudly to bring to agreement at the environmental summit in Copenhagen.

It is certain to remain a UNEP rallying cry long after the Copenhagen meeting is over — and while the other brainstorming ideas that went into the new four-year strategy, not to mention the strategy itself, go into effect.

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>>Think ‘Climate-Gate’ Is Nonevent? Think Again (Foxnews, 091201)

The big question is whether universities have too much at stake, both ideologically and financially, to impartially investigate what has happened with Climate-gate

President Obama’s climate czar, Carol M. Browner, and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs might think that Climate-gate is a nonevent, but on Monday Pennsylvania State University announced that it was launching an investigation into the academic conduct of Michael Mann, the school’s Director of the Earth System Science Center. And Tuesday, Phil Jones, the director of the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia, announced that he would stand aside as director while his university conducted an investigation.

Dozens of researchers at other institutions could soon face similar investigations. While Dr. Jones has been the center of much of the discussion because the e-mails were obtained from the server at his university, Mann is named in about 270 of the over 1,000 e-mails, many of which detail disturbing and improper academic behavior.

Last week, Mann told USA Today that the controversy over the leaked e-mails was simply a “smear campaign to distract the public from the reality of the problem and the need to confront it head-on in Copenhagen” next week at the climate summit.

Take one of Mann’s e-mail exchanges with Jones. In an e-mail entitled “IPCC & FOI” (referring to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Freedom of Information Act) Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, wrote Dr. Mann: “Mike: Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith [Briffa] re [the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report]? Keith will do likewise. . . . Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new e-mail address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”

Mann acknowledges that he received the e-mail, but he claims that neither he nor anyone else actually deleted any e-mails to hide information from a Freedom of Information Act request on how the U.N.’s IPCC report was written. Yet, his response is quite damning as it seems that he goes along with Dr. Jones. Far from criticizing the request, Dr. Mann wrote back: “I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new e-mail is: generwahl@yahoo.com. talk to you later, Mike.”

After the first week of revelations of academic fraud and intellectual wrongdoing, the University of East Anglia denied there was a problem. Professor Trevor Davies, the school’s pro vice chancellor for research, issued a statement on Tuesday claiming: “The publication of a selection of the e-mails and data stolen from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) has led to some questioning of the climate science research published by CRU and others. There is nothing in the stolen material which indicates that peer-reviewed publications by CRU, and others, on the nature of global warming and related climate change are not of the highest-quality of scientific investigation and interpretation.”

The move to investigate the destruction of information requested under the Freedom of Information Act is a big change. In Britain, the destruction of such documents is a criminal offense and the e-mails indicate that Jones had been warned at least once against destroying such information.

On Monday, Mann tried to justify the damaging e-mails by telling the Penn State college newspaper: “Someone being constantly under attack could be what causes them to make a poor decision.” On the one hand, he denies that anything improper happened, but he then seems to accept that improper actions did occur. Regarding pressure, possibly, Mann should ask what the academics, who Mann and others involved in Climate-gate tried to prevent them from publishing in academic journals, think about these events. The e-mails discussed above involve the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s controversial assessment report and raise additional questions about what subterfuge might have been involved in its production.

The big question is whether universities have too much at stake, both ideologically and financially, to impartially investigate what has happened with Climate-gate. Given the amount of taxpayer money at stake, Congress should follow Sen. Inofe’s suggestion and investigate these charges issues of destroyed documents and data as well as the general unwillingness to share the raw data paid for by taxpayers.

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>>Protestant Pastors Evenly Split on Global Warming Beliefs (Christian Post, 090417)

Protestant pastors are split on global warming and whether it is real and man-made, a new survey shows.

LifeWay Research found that 47% of Protestants pastors agree with the statement “I believe global warming is real and man-made” while 47% do not.

Among pastors in churches affiliated with mainline denominations, 75% agree. Notably, fewer (67%) pastors who consider themselves mainline say global warming is real and man-made.

Meanwhile, only 32% of pastors in evangelical denominations and 41% of those who consider themselves evangelical agree with the statement, according to the survey of 1,002 pastors conducted in October 2008.

“Not all pastors who consider themselves mainline serve in churches in denominations that are traditionally considered mainline,” said Scott McConnell, associate director of LifeWay Research. “Similarly, not all pastors who consider themselves evangelical serve in denominations that are traditionally considered evangelical. Yet these denominational roots provide a strong indication of what a church’s pastor believes about global warming.”

More specifically, 93% of pastors who consider their political ideology liberal or very liberal say global warming is real and man-made compared to 53% of those who identify themselves as conservative or very conservative politically.

More Christians have jumped on the climate change bandwagon as they view global warming as a major crisis, but some believe the warnings are exaggerated.

Last year, a group of conservative Christians launched a “We Get It!”

campaign that asks Christians to examine the hard evidence and not let their environmental stewardship be based on mere emotions or media hype.

The campaign calls for genuine biblical stewardship and defending the poor, whose needs and even lives are often sacrificed for a cap on CO2 emissions, among other global warming policies.

“As Bible-believing Christians, we must understand that we don’t have to choose between caring for people or nature - that in God’s wise design, lifting people out of poverty, and helping them fulfill their God-given potential as producers and stewards not only assists the poor, but is the best thing we can do for the environment as well,” the campaign states. “We must foresee the devastating impacts that skyrocketing costs for food, energy, and other essential needs will have on the poor, and how they can lock millions of our neighbors in the developing world into generations of grinding poverty, disease, and early death.”

Campaign supporters, including Tony Perkins of Family Research Council, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, and award-winning radio host Janet Parshall, say it isn’t about whether they care about the environment but how they care.

In other survey findings, LifeWay Research found that 52% of Protestant pastors address environmental issues once a year or less and

25% say they address it several times a year. Pastors who consider themselves mainline (53%) are more likely to speak on the environment throughout the year than pastors who identify as evangelical (32%).

“Protestant pastors are split on the issue of man-made global warming and their views impact their communication,” said Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research. “Mainline clergy answer the question with similar numbers to self-identified Democrats and liberals in surveys of the general public. Evangelical clergy answer the question in similar percents to Republicans and conservatives. At the end of the day, Protestant pastors are as divided as Americans are on the issue of global warming.”

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>>Averting Global Meltdown (BreakPoint, 080704)

By Regis Nicoll

Are Kyoto-Like Controls the Answer?

AN ENVIRONMENTAL WAGER

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner, an Oscar winning film, and “What Would Jesus Drive” evangelicals, a sizzling future awaits us unless something is done—and done quickly—about man-made global warming (AGW).

On the other end of the spectrum are credentialed experts from around the world, many of whom worked on the IPCC, who reject the science of AGW, believing that corrective measures for climate change have little, or no, merit.

Hedged betwixt them is a muddle of confused laymen who either accept what the media portrays as the consensus position—after all, that tweed-jacketed bloke on the telly is a scientist!—or are not sure about all this science, but sincerely believe that something should be done; just what, they do not know.

For the bewildered middle, Christian columnist Andy Crouch points to 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (Mr. Crouch, by the way, believes that global warming is fact, and that we’re the cause).

Pascal is famous for, among other things, his “wager” to unbelievers; namely, they have little to lose from belief if God does not exist, but everything to lose from unbelief if He does. In the same way, argues Couch “we have little to lose, and much . . . to gain, if we act on climate change now—even if the worst predictions fail to come to pass.”

But is Crouch’s wager good stewardship?

SIX FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS

In the opening chapter of Genesis, God turns the day-to-day care of nature over to man. Flora, fauna, and the whole created order are placed under human dominion. Creation exists for man’s benefit, but also for God’s glory. Thus, the use of nature for the betterment of humankind must be balanced with caring custodianship that promotes the flourishing of creation.

Under the Creation Mandate, efforts to conserve natural resources, optimize energy use and efficiency, recycle, and reduce consumption and consumerism are examples of faithful stewardship. Problem is, say global warming alarmists, such voluntary measures are not sufficient to avert our cataclysmic meltdown. Maybe that’s why An Inconvenient Truth pitchman, Al Gore, has not seen fit to reduce the energy consumption of his own residence, which is using 10% more energy than a year ago, enough to supply the energy needs of nearly 20 average homes.

What is needed, according to the climate change party line, are governmentally-enforced controls like the Kyoto Treaty. But whether or not forced restrictions such as Kyoto are demanded by principles of Christian stewardship really depends on the answers to six questions:

1. Is the earth warming?

2. Is warming an overall bad thing?

3. Is human activity the primary cause?

4. Would forced standards sufficiently reduce global temperatures?

5. Would they be cost-effective?

6. Would forced standards not create more—or more severe—problems than they solve?

If the answer to all six questions is “yes,” then Kyoto-like measures would be morally warranted. But, if just one of those questions is answered in the negative, they would be irresponsible, at best, and harmful at worst.

In reality, none of them can be answered with absolute confidence. That’s because our knowledge is limited by data that consist of a finite number of observations, and that vary depending on processes which, in some cases, are not fully known and, in others, not even yet identified.

To fill data “holes,” interpret data “scatter,” and make predictions climate scientists rely on computer models. And because every model is customized to some extent with user-defined assumptions, approximations, and algorithms, credentialed experts who look at the same data can come to widely varying conclusions.

Recognizing that an unqualified “yes” to many environmental questions is difficult-to-impossible to establish, the scrupulous researcher considers probabilities to determine whether a proposed action can be justified.

In the case of global warming, the probability that the answer to any given question is “yes” will range from greater than 0% to less than 100%. If the cumulative probability over all six questions is large—say, over 70%, then forced restrictions have a reasonably solid basis; if it is between 40-60%, their justification is weak, and if it is less than, say, 40%, they should be considered baseless.

Let’s examine each question and see what level of probability might be applied.

IS THE EARTH WARMING?

This is the most fundamental question in this controversy. Yet even here there is significant disagreement among experts. Not only are there indications that warming has stopped, data shows that temperatures in the southern hemisphere are falling, and that the ice masses in Antarctica are increasing. Others insist that because of the wide variability in temperature measurement over the earth, the notion of “global temperature” itself is meaningless, rendering it nigh impossible to know, on a global scale, what the temperature is, much less whether it is rising or falling.

Based on those uncertainties, the probability that the earth is warming could be generously set at 80%.

IS WARMING AN OVERALL BAD THING?

Again, experts are divided. One side points to melting polar caps, drowning polar bears, rising sea levels, and speculations about floods, famines and disease.

The other side cites the benefits of “increased carbon dioxide and warmer climates that lead to better crop yields over larger areas, and longer growing seasons, milder winters, and decreasing heating costs.” They also note that between AD 850 and AD 1350, the earth underwent “sharp and pronounced” warming, equivalent to 2.5 degrees Celsius, during which “there were marked increases in agricultural productivity, trade, human amenities, and measurable improvements in human morbidity and mortality.”

Consequently, a figure of 80% should be quite liberal for the probability that warming is a bad thing.

IS HUMAN ACTIVITY THE PRIMARY CAUSE?

On this one there is significant disagreement, with numerous studies pointing to natural weather patterns, sunspots, ocean currents, and naturally-produced carbon dioxide and methane as the primary culprits in global climate. One peer-reviewed study estimates that natural causes are 4 to 5 orders of magnitude (that’s tens to hundreds of thousands of times) more important than human causes.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this exercise, I’ll assign a 70% chance that human activity is an important factor in climate change.

WOULD KYOTO-LIKE PROTOCOLS SUFFICIENTLY REDUCE GLOBAL TEMPERATURES?

Interestingly, most experts on both sides of the global warming issue cede this point.

Even Al Gore’s expert, Tom Wigley, calculates “that Kyoto would reduce emissions by only 0.07 degrees Celsius by the year 2050,” which happens to fall well within natural year-to-year temperature variations.

Despite this admitted failure, warming advocates cling to the hope that “space-race” innovations would be born out of necessity to meet the challenges of climate change.

Their unbridled optimism notwithstanding, I’ll place the probability that forced controls would sufficiently affect climate change at a very generous 70%.

WOULD THE FORCED STANDARDS BE COST-EFFECTIVE?

From the previous question, the answer should be obvious. If not, it has been estimated that Kyoto has already cost $500 billion to achieve a whopping 0.005 degree reduction. To achieve a full 1.0 degree reduction, world citizens would need to cough up $100 trillion. By any standard, that’s a high price tag to avert a 1.0 degree rise in global temperature that could turn out to be a net good thing.

In the US alone, the U.S. Energy Information Administration has estimated that Kyoto would reduce the GDP by nearly a trillion dollars in a twenty-year period.

Because of these astronomical costs, I am hard-pressed to grant any more than a 50% chance that forced standards would be cost-effective.

WOULD FORCED STANDARDS NOT CREATE MORE—OR MORE SEVERE—PROBLEMS THAN THEY SOLVE?

Even if the costs are significantly less than the calculated estimates, forced standards like Kyoto, while effecting negligible improvement in global temperatures, would put a drain on precious resources needed to solve the very real and imminent challenges of AIDS, Malaria, clean water, health care, sanitation, and affordable energy—problems most severely felt by the poor, especially those in developing countries.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this exercise, I’ll assign a 70% chance that forced controls would not exacerbate the global “misery index.”

THE OVERALL PROBABILITY

By multiplying the probabilities for all six conditions, the chance that global warming is a problem that can be solved cost-effectively, without producing more harm than good, is calculated at 11%, suggesting that the party-line of global warming hardliners is groundless. And that’s based on some pretty generous allowances that don’t even include the inherent (and considerable!) uncertainties in the computer models upon which all of their dire predictions are based.

In my career as a nuclear specialist, I worked with computer models used to predict short term pollutant levels on local scales considering atmospheric, climatological, and topographical effects. Yet, even in that limited application, we were happy if the model versus actual measurements agreed within a factor of two (We considered anything less than a factor of ten an acceptable variance based on model limitations). When one considers the global effects, decades in the future, that climate change models are being used to calculate, it should be obvious that confidence in any long-range prediction is folly.

Consequently, while responsible stewardship requires Christians to care for creation by conserving, recycling, and reducing consumer-oriented lifestyles, it does not justify global governmental controls for climate change. Instead, as the Cornwall Declaration warns,

“Public policies to combat exaggerated risks can dangerously delay or reverse the economic development necessary to improve not only human life but also human stewardship of the environment. The poor, who are most often citizens of developing nations, are often forced to suffer longer in poverty with its attendant high rates of malnutrition, disease, and mortality; as a consequence, they are often the most injured by such misguided, though well-intended, policies.”

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>>31,000 scientists reject ‘global warming’ agenda (WorldNetDaily, 080519)

‘Mr. Gore’s movie has claims no informed expert endorses’

More than 31,000 scientists across the United States, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s in fields including atmospheric science, climatology, Earth science, environment and dozens of other specialties, have signed a petition rejecting “global warming,” the assumption that the human production of greenhouse gases is damaging Earth’s climate.

“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate,” the petition states. “Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

The Petition Project actually was launched nearly 10 years ago, when the first few thousand signatures were assembled. Then between 1999 and 2007, the list of signatures grew gradually without any special effort or campaign.

But now, a new effort has been conducted because of an “escalation of the claims of ‘consensus,’ release of the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Mr. Al Gore, and related events,” according to officials with the project.

“Mr. Gore’s movie, asserting a ‘consensus’ and ‘settled science’ in agreement about human-caused global warming, conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary movie goers and to public school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore’s movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse,” said project spokesman and founder Art Robinson.

WND submitted a request to Al Gore’s office for comment, but did not get a response.

Robinson said the dire warnings about “global warming” have gone far beyond semantics or scientific discussion now to the point they are actually endangering people.

“The campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded,” he said. “In the course of this campaign, many scientifically invalid claims about impending climate emergencies are being made. Simultaneously, proposed political actions to severely reduce hydrocarbon use now threaten the prosperity of Americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries,” he said.

In just the past few weeks, there have been various allegations that both shark attacks and typhoons have been sparked by “global warming.”

The late Professor Frederick Seitz, the past president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and winner of the National Medal of Science, wrote in a letter promoting the petition, “The United States is very close to adopting an international agreement that would ration the use of energy and of technologies that depend upon coal, oil, and natural gas and some other organic compounds.”

“This treaty is, in our opinion, based upon flawed ideas. Research data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful. To the contrary, there is good evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful,” he wrote.

Accompanying the letter sent to scientists was a 12-page summary and review of research on “global warming,” officials said.

“The proposed agreement would have very negative effects upon the technology of nations throughout the world, especially those that are currently attempting to lift from poverty and provide opportunities to the over 4 billion people in technologically underdeveloped countries,” Seitz wrote.

Robinson said the project targets scientists because, “It is especially important for America to hear from its citizens who have the training necessary to evaluate the relevant data and offer sound advice.’

He said the “global warming agreement,” written in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, and other plans “would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.”

“Yet,” he said, “the United Nations and other vocal political interests say the U.S. must enact new laws that will sharply reduce domestic energy production and raise energy prices even higher.”

“The inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness include the right of access to life-giving and life-enhancing technology. This is especially true of access to the most basic of all technologies: energy. These human rights have been extensively and wrongly abridged,” he continued. “During the past two generations in the U.S., a system of high taxation, extensive regulation, and ubiquitous litigation has arisen that prevents the accumulation of sufficient capital and the exercise of sufficient freedom to build and preserve needed modern technology.

“These unfavorable political trends have severely damaged our energy production, where lack of industrial progress has left our country dependent upon foreign sources for 30% of the energy required to maintain our current level of prosperity,” he said. “Moreover, the transfer of other U.S. industries abroad as a result of these same trends has left U.S. citizens with too few goods and services to trade for the energy that they do not produce. A huge and unsustainable trade deficit and rapidly rising energy prices have been the result.”

“The necessary hydrocarbon and nuclear energy production technologies have been available to U.S. engineers for many decades. We can develop these resources without harm to people or the environment. There is absolutely no technical, resource, or environmental reason for the U.S. to be a net importer of energy. The U.S. should, in fact, be a net exporter of energy,” he said.

He told WND the issue has nothing to do with energy itself, but everything to do with power, control and money, which the United Nations is seeking. He accused the U.N. of violating human rights in its campaign to ban much energy research, exploration and development.

“In order to alleviate the current energy emergency and prevent future emergencies, we need to remove the governmental restrictions that have caused this problem. Fundamental human rights require that U.S. citizens and their industries be free to produce and use the low cost, abundant energy that they need. As the 31,000 signatories of this petition emphasize, environmental science supports this freedom,” he said.

The Petition Project website today said there actually are 31,072 scientists who have signed up, and Robinson said more names continue to come in.

In terms of PhD scientists alone, it already has 15 times more scientists than are seriously involved in the United Nations’ campaign to vilify hydrocarbons, officials told WND.

“The very large number of petition signers demonstrates that, if there is a consensus among American scientists, it is in opposition to the human-caused global warming hypothesis rather than in favor of it,” the organization noted.

The project was set up by a team of physicists and physical chemists who do research at several American institutions and collects signatures when donations provide the resources to mail out more letters.

“In a group of more than 30,000 people, there are many individuals with names similar or identical to other signatories, or to non-signatories – real or fictional. Opponents of the petition project sometimes use this statistical fact in efforts to discredit the project. For examples, Perry Mason and Michael Fox are scientists who have signed the petition – who happen also to have names identical to fictional or real non-scientists,” the website said.

The petition is needed, supporters said, simply because Gore and others “have claimed that the ‘science is settled’ – that an overwhelming ‘consensus’ of scientists agrees with the hypothesis of human-caused global warming, with only a handful of skeptical scientists in disagreement.”

The list of scientists includes 9,021 PhDs, 6,961 at the master’s level, 2,240 medical doctors, and 12,850 carrying a bachelor of science or equivalent academic degree.

The Petition Project’s website includes both a list of scientists by name as well as a list of scientists by state. (www.petitionproject.org)

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>>Environmentalists’ Wild Predictions (townhall.com, 080507)

By Walter E. Williams

Now that another Earth Day has come and gone, let’s look at some environmentalist predictions that they would prefer we forget.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book “The Doomsday Book,” said Americans were using 50% of the world’s resources and “by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them.” In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, “The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000.”

Harvard University biologist George Wald in 1970 warned, “... civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That was the same year that Sen. Gaylord Nelson warned, in Look Magazine, that by 1995 “... somewhere between 75 and 85% of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”

It’s not just latter-day doomsayers who have been wrong; doomsayers have always been wrong. In 1885, the U.S. Geological Survey announced there was “little or no chance” of oil being discovered in California, and a few years later they said the same about Kansas and Texas. In 1939, the U.S. Department of the Interior said American oil supplies would last only another 13 years. In 1949, the Secretary of the Interior said the end of U.S. oil supplies was in sight. Having learned nothing from its earlier erroneous claims, in 1974 the U.S. Geological Survey advised us that the U.S. had only a 10-year supply of natural gas. The fact of the matter, according to the American Gas Association, there’s a 1,000 to 2,500 year supply.

Here are my questions: In 1970, when environmentalists were making predictions of manmade global cooling and the threat of an ice age and millions of Americans starving to death, what kind of government policy should we have undertaken to prevent such a calamity? When Ehrlich predicted that England would not exist in the year 2000, what steps should the British Parliament have taken in 1970 to prevent such a dire outcome? In 1939, when the U.S. Department of the Interior warned that we only had oil supplies for another 13 years, what actions should President Roosevelt have taken? Finally, what makes us think that environmental alarmism is any more correct now that they have switched their tune to manmade global warming?

Here are a few facts: Over 95% of the greenhouse effect is the result of water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere. Without the greenhouse effect, Earth’s average temperature would be zero degrees Fahrenheit. Most climate change is a result of the orbital eccentricities of Earth and variations in the sun’s output. On top of that, natural wetlands produce more greenhouse gas contributions annually than all human sources combined.

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>>Perhaps the climate change models are wrong (National Post, 080324)

They drift along in the worlds’ oceans at a depth of 2,000 metres — more than a mile deep — constantly monitoring the temperature, salinity, pressure and velocity of the upper oceans.

Then, about once every 10 days, a bladder on the outside of these buoys inflates and raises them slowly to the surface gathering data about each strata of seawater they pass through. After an upward journey of nearly six hours, the Argo monitors bob on the waves while an onboard transmitter sends their information to a satellite that in turn retransmits it to several land-based research computers where it may be accessed by anyone who wishes to see it.

These 3,000 yellow sentinels —about the size and shape of a large fence post — free-float the world’s oceans, season in and season out, surfacing between 30 and 40 times a year, disgorging their findings, then submerging again for another fact-finding voyage.

It’s fascinating to watch their progress online. (The URLs are too complex to reproduce here, but Google “Argo Buoy Movement” or “Argo Float Animation,” and you will be directed to the links.)

When they were first deployed in 2003, the Argos were hailed for their ability to collect information on ocean conditions more precisely, at more places and greater depths and in more conditions than ever before. No longer would scientists have to rely on measurements mostly at the surface from older scientific buoys or inconsistent shipboard monitors.

So why are some scientists now beginning to question the buoys’ findings? Because in five years, the little blighters have failed to detect any global warming. They are not reinforcing the scientific orthodoxy of the day, namely that man is causing the planet to warm dangerously. They are not proving the predetermined conclusions of their human masters. Therefore they, and not their masters’ hypotheses, must be wrong.

In fact, “there has been a very slight cooling,” according to a U.S. National Public Radio (NPR) interview with Josh Willis at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a scientist who keeps close watch on the Argo findings.

Dr. Willis insisted the temperature drop was “not anything really significant.” And I trust he’s right. But can anyone imagine NASA or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the UN’s climate experts — shrugging off even a “very slight” warming.

A slight drop in the oceans’ temperature over a period of five or six years probably is insignificant, just as a warming over such a short period would be. Yet if there had been a rise of any kind, even of the same slightness, rest assured this would be broadcast far and wide as yet another log on the global warming fire.

Just look how tenaciously some scientists are prepared to cling to the climate change dogma. “It may be that we are in a period of less rapid warming,” Dr. Willis told NPR.

Yeah, you know, like when you put your car into reverse you are causing it to enter a period of less rapid forward motion. Or when I gain a few pounds I am in a period of less rapid weight loss.

The big problem with the Argo findings is that all the major climate computer models postulate that as much as 80-90% of global warming will result from the oceans warming rapidly then releasing their heat into the atmosphere.

But if the oceans aren’t warming, then (please whisper) perhaps the models are wrong.

The supercomputer models also can’t explain the interaction of clouds and climate. They have no idea whether clouds warm the world more by trapping heat in or cool it by reflecting heat back into space.

Modellers are also perplexed by the findings of NASA’s eight weather satellites that take more than 300,000 temperature readings daily over the entire surface of the Earth, versus approximately 7,000 random readings from Earth stations.

In nearly 30 years of operation, the satellites have discovered a warming trend of just 0.14 C per decade, less than the models and well within the natural range of temperature variation.

I’m not saying for sure the models are wrong and the Argos and satellites are right, only that in a debate as critical as the one on climate, it would be nice to hear some alternatives to the alarmist theory.

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>>By any means necessary: David Suzuki says he wants anti-Kyoto politicians thrown in jail. How did environmentalism become this totalitarian? (National Post, 080207)

Terry O’neill

No one knows how many forests have been felled to print all the stories that have been published about David Suzuki, Canada’s much-honoured but continuously controversial environmental crusader. The dead trees probably number in the many thousands, a (supposedly) global-warming-causing harvest so plenteous as to lead one to assume that preacher Suzuki might have begun moderating his apocalyptic sermonizing, lest he trigger yet another round of clear-cutting.

But no. Instead, Suzuki has lately pumped up his rhetoric with even more frantic language, apparently as part of an all-out, last-ditch attempt to persuade Canadians that the world is fast approaching an environmental meltdown. It’s not clear whether he’s changing any minds with his new bellicosity, but he has at least been doing his bit to keep the country’s loggers busy.

So what exactly has Suzuki, who is on the university-lecture circuit these days, been saying? For starters, he told a University of Toronto audience last month that the next federal election ought to be about the environment. No problem there. However, as reported by a student newspaper, he then opined that government leaders who aren’t acting quickly enough to save the environment “should go to jail for what they’re not doing right now. What our government is not doing is a criminal act.”

His allegation of law-breaking was apparently no mere slip of the tongue. Speaking a few weeks later at McGill University, Suzuki again equated governments’ alleged inaction on the environment with a criminal act; in fact, he is reported to have said students ought to find a legal way to throw politicians in jail for ignoring climate-change science.

The geneticist-turned-broadcaster had particularly harsh words for Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Premier Ed Stelmach of Alberta because of their alleged favouring of economic growth over environmental protection. “It is an intergenerational crime” — there’s that concept again — “that, in the face of the work of scientists over the last 20 years, they keep dithering as they are,” Suzuki declared.

Suzuki’s alarmism is nothing new, and more-prudent scientists have long ago answered his hyperbole and exposed his faulty logic. And it’s also long been abundantly clear from his speeches and books that his position is driven by both a quasi-religious zeal and a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

On this latter matter, he told the McGill crowd there is actually no difference between human beings and the environment in which they live. “We are the environment. There is no distinction,” he declared, thereby equating, for example, a newborn baby with a mud puddle. How heartening.

But this is old ground. What we haven’t seen from him until now is such an incendiary call to arms. Taking to the streets to protest climatechange inaction is one thing. Calling for the jailing of politicians is quite another — especially considering the fact that, the last time I checked anyway, there is nothing in the Criminal Code of Canada to prevent the Prime Minister from attempting to enhance both the country’s economy and its environment. It’s called balance.

We shouldn’t really be surprised at Suzuki’s latest tactic. Eco-pirate Paul Watson, formerly of the Sea Shepherd Society, has long argued that he answers not to the law of man, but to the law of nature. And we’re not talking here about his need to take bathroom breaks while chasing down whaling ships on the high seas. Suzuki now seems to be adopting a similar philosophy: that human-written law should be subordinate to that of Mother Nature (except, of course, when it comes to incarceration; human-constructed jails are so much more reliable than caves or thickets). And, of course, it’s only Watson and Suzuki’s special hot-line to Gaia that allows them to interpret nature’s law; the rest of us unenlightened ones need not apply.

We should also not be surprised at the intolerance that permeates Suzuki’s “lock ‘em up” rhetoric. After all, despite the multicultural mantra that we “celebrate our differences,” there’s a disturbingly illiberal tendency these days (as shown in the recent “human-rights” prosecutions of Ezra Levant and Mark Steyn, for example) to censor those with whom one doesn’t agree. It’s only a very small step to try to throw such disagreeable persons into prison, too. Perhaps U.S. author Jonah Goldberg ought to be thinking of adding a chapter to his high-profile new book, Liberal Fascism, to explore this subject further.

Actually, Czech President Vaclav Klaus (who, coincidentally, is up for reelection tomorrow) has already done a lot of thinking in this area and has concluded that environmental zealotry poses as great a threat to human freedom as did communism. Klaus, whose book Our Planet is Blue not Green will soon be translated into English, believes that climate-change alarmists persuade governments to launch costly and unnecessary programs that have the ultimate effect of impoverishing people, thereby making them less free.

“When we look at it in a proper historical perspective, the issue is — once again — freedom and its enemies,” Klaus wrote last year. “Those of us who feel very strongly about it can never accept the irrationality with which the current world has embraced climate change (or global warming) as a real danger to the future of mankind, as well as the irrationality of [anti-globalwarming] measures because they will fatally endanger our freedom and prosperity.”

Suzuki is actually supporting a more direct attack on freedom than that which worries Klaus. Suzuki’s plan would lead to a loss of freedom, not though punitive economic measures, but through the incarceration of politicians with whom he disagrees. I have a better idea: Let the court of public opinion decide this at the polls. And if Suzuki doesn’t like the democratic outcome, he can always show his displeasure by giving us back his Order of Canada medal.

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>>Study: Part of Global-Warming Model May Be Wrong (Foxnews, 071212)

Part of the scientific consensus on global warming may be flawed, a new study asserts.

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate “models” — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth’s surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions.

“Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? It seems that the answer is no,” said lead study author David H. Douglass, a physicist specializing in climate at the University of Rochester.

Douglass and his co-authors S. Fred Singer, a physicist at the University of Virginia, and John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, are noted global-warming skeptics.

However, Christy was a major contributor to the 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and is one of the world’s premier authorities on collection and analysis of satellite-derived temperature data, having been commended by both NASA and the American Meteorological Society for his efforts.

“We do not see accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere,” said Christy. “Instead, the lower and middle atmosphere are warming the same or less than the surface.”

The difference between the climate models and the satellite data has been known for several years.

Studies in 2005 found that improper compensation for temperature differences between day and night was the cause of most of the satellite-data discrepancy, a correction that Christy has accepted.

No explanation has been put forth for the weather-balloon discrepancy.

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>>New Study Increases Concerns About Climate Model Reliability (ScienceDaily, 071212)

A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere.

This research, published online in the Royal Meteorological Society’s International Journal of Climatology, raises new concerns about the reliability of models used to forecast global warming.

“The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth’s climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic,” said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. “Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? “It seems that the answer is no.”

Scientists from Rochester, the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and the University of Virginia compared the climate change “forecasts” from the 22 most widely-cited global circulation models with tropical temperature data collected by surface, satellite and balloon sensors. The models predicted that the lower atmosphere should warm significantly more than it actually did.

“Models are very consistent in forecasting a significant difference between climate trends at the surface and in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere between the surface and the stratosphere,” said Dr. John Christy, director of UAH’s Earth System Science Center. “The models forecast that the troposphere should be warming more than the surface and that this trend should be especially pronounced in the tropics.

“When we look at actual climate data, however, we do not see accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere. Instead, the lower and middle atmosphere are warming the same or less than the surface. For those layers of the atmosphere, the warming trend we see in the tropics is typically less than half of what the models forecast.”

The 22 climate models used in this study are the same models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which recently shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

The atmospheric temperature data were from two versions of data collected by sensors aboard NOAA satellites since late 1979, plus several sets of temperature data gathered twice a day at dozens of points in the tropics by thermometers carried into the atmosphere by helium balloons. The surface data were from three datasets.

After years of rigorous analysis and testing, the high degree of agreement between the various atmospheric data sets gives an equally high level of confidence in the basic accuracy of the climate data.

“The last 25 years constitute a period of more complete and accurate observations, and more realistic modeling efforts,” said Dr. Fred Singer from the University of Virginia. “Nonetheless, the models are seen to disagree with the observations. We suggest, therefore, that projections of future climate based on these models should be viewed with much caution.”

The findings of this study contrast strongly with those of a recent study that used 19 of the same climate models and similar climate datasets. That study concluded that any difference between model forecasts and atmospheric climate data is probably due to errors in the data.

“The question was, what would the models ‘forecast’ for upper air climate change over the past 25 years and how would that forecast compare to reality?” said Christy. “To answer that we needed climate model results that matched the actual surface temperature changes during that same time. If the models got the surface trend right but the tropospheric trend wrong, then we could pinpoint a potential problem in the models.

“As it turned out, the average of all of the climate models forecasts came out almost like the actual surface trend in the tropics. That meant we could do a very robust test of their reproduction of the lower atmosphere.

“Instead of averaging the model forecasts to get a result whose surface trends match reality, the earlier study looked at the widely scattered range of results from all of the model runs combined. Many of the models had surface trends that were quite different from the actual trend,” Christy said. “Nonetheless, that study concluded that since both the surface and upper atmosphere trends were somewhere in that broad range of model results, any disagreement between the climate data and the models was probably due to faulty data.

“We think our experiment is more robust and provides more meaningful results.”

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>>Sizzling study concludes: Global warming ‘hot air’: ‘You can spit, have same effect as doubling the carbon dioxide’ (WorldNetDaily, 070820)

A major new scientific study concludes the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on worldwide temperatures is largely irrelevant, prompting one veteran meteorologist to quip, “You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide.”

That comment comes from Reid Bryson, founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Wisconsin, who said the temperature of the earth is increasing, but that it’s got nothing to do with what man is doing.

“Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.”

“Anthropogenic (man-made) global warming bites the dust,” declared astronomer Ian Wilson after reviewing the newest study, now accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research.

The project, called “Heat Capacity, Time Constant, and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System,” was authored by Brookhaven National lab scientist Stephen Schwartz.

“Effectively, this (new study) means that the global economy will spend trillions of dollars trying to avoid a warming of (about) 1.0 K by 2100 A.D.,” Wilson wrote in a note to the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works Sunday. He was referring to the massive expenditures that would be required under such treaties as the Kyoto Protocol.

“Previously, I have indicated that the widely accepted values for temperature increase associated with a double of CO2 were far too high, i.e. 2-4.5 Kelvin. This new peer-reviewed paper claims a value of 1.1 +/- 0.5 K increase,” he added.

Bryson’s and Wilson’s comments were among those from a long list of doubters of catastrophic, man-made global warming, assembled by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., and posted on a blog site for the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Another leader, Ivy League geologist Robert Giegengack, chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, said he doesn’t even consider global warming among the top 10 environmental problems.

“In terms of [global warming’s] capacity to cause the human species harm, I don’t think it makes it into the top 10,” he said. “[Former Vice President Al Gore] claims that temperature increases solely because more CO2 in the atmosphere traps the sun’s heat. That’s just wrong … It’s a natural interplay. As temperature rises, CO2 rises, and vice versa. It’s hard for us to say CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2.”

Gore made – and stars in – a film about purported global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” that won an Oscar. It has become mandatory for students in many high schools and colleges.

However, the studies assembled by Inhofe’s team said that’s not necessarily so, according to the scientists.

“If we were to stop manufacturing CO2 tomorrow, we wouldn’t see the effects of that for generations,” Giegengack said.

“Carbon dioxide is 0.000383 of our atmosphere by volume (0.038%),” said meteorologist Joseph D’Alea, the first director of meteorology at The Weather Channel and former chief of the American Meteorological Society’s Committee on Weather Analysis and Forecast.

“Only 2.75% of atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic in origin. The amount we emit is said to be up from 1% a decade ago. Despite the increase in emissions, the rate of change of atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa remains the same as the long term average (plus 0.45% per year),” he said. “We are responsible for just 0.001% of this atmosphere. If the atmosphere was a 100-story building, our anthropogenic CO2 contribution today would be equivalent to the linoleum on the first floor.”

Former Harvard physicist Lubos Motl added that those promoting the fear of man-made climate changes are “playing the children’s game to scare each other.”

“By the end of the (CO2) doubling, i.e. 560 ppm (parts per million) expected slightly before (the year) 2100 – assuming a business-as-usual continued growth of CO2 that has been linear for some time – Schwartz and others would expect 0.4 C of extra warming only – a typical fluctuation that occurs within four months and certainly nothing that the politicians should pay attention to,” Motl explained.

Joel Schwartz, of the American Enterprise Institute, said, “there’s hardly any additional warming ‘in the pipeline’ from previous greenhouse gas emissions. This is in contrast to the IPCC, which predicts that the Earth’s average temperature will rise an additional 0.6 degrees C during the 21st Century even if greenhouse gas concentrations stopped increasing,” he added.

“Along with dozens of other studies in the scientific literature, [this] new study belies Al Gore’s claim that there is no legitimate scholarly alternative to climate catastrophism. Indeed, if Schwartz’s results are correct, that alone would be enough to overturn in one fell swoop the IPCC’s scientific ‘consensus,’ the environmentalists’ climate hysteria, and the political pretext for the energy-restriction policies that have become so popular with the world’s environmental regulators, elected officials, and corporations. The question is, will anyone in the mainstream media notice?” AEI’s Schwartz concluded.

The Senate committee assessment said 2007 could go down in history “as the ‘tipping point’ of man-made global warming fears.”

Meteorologist Joseph Conklin, of the website Climate Police said “global warming” is disintegrating. “A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global temperatures have leveled off. But instead of possibly admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a group of British scientists concluded that the real global warming won’t start until 2009,” Conklin wrote.

However, a United Nations scientist, Jim Renwick, recently conceded that climate models do not account for the variability in nature, and so are not reliable. And Conklin noted the U.S. National Climate Data Center has compiled data that shouldn’t be used, because its reporting points are located on hot black asphalt, next to trash burn barrels and even attached to hot chimneys, a methodology that is “seriously flawed.”

WND has previously reported on significant doubts about global warming.

Last September, a leading U.S. climate researcher claimed there’s a decade at most left to address global warming before environmental disaster takes place, but the federal government issued a report showing the year 1936 had a hotter summer than 2006.

“The average June-August 2006 temperature for the contiguous United States (based on preliminary data) was 2.4 degrees F (1.3 degrees C) above the 20th century average of 72.1 degrees F (22.3 degrees C),” said the NOAA report. “This was the second warmest summer on record, slightly cooler than the record of 74.7 degrees F set in 1936 during the Dust Bowl era. This summer’s average was 74.5 degrees F. Eight of the past ten summers have been warmer than the U.S. average for the same period.”

WND also reported on NASA-funded study that noted some climate forecasts might be exaggerating estimations of global warming. The space agency said climate models possibly were overestimating the amount of water vapor entering the atmosphere as the Earth warms.

The theory many scientists work with says the Earth heats up in response to human emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, causing more water to evaporate from the ocean into the atmosphere.

In addition, WND reported that Dr. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, maintains there has been little or no warming since about 1940.

“Any warming from the growth of greenhouse gases is likely to be minor, difficult to detect above the natural fluctuations of the climate, and therefore inconsequential,” Singer wrote in a climate-change essay. “In addition, the impacts of warming and of higher CO2 levels are likely to be beneficial for human activities and especially for agriculture.”

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>>Conservative GOP Senator Again Blasts Enviromentalist Fearmongers (Free Republic, 050106)

The following is the text of a speech given by Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.) today:

As I said on the Senate floor on July 28, 2003, “much of the debate over global warming is predicated on fear, rather than science.” I called the threat of catastrophic global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people,” a statement that, to put it mildly, was not viewed kindly by environmental extremists and their elitist organizations. I also pointed out, in a lengthy committee report, that those same environmental extremists exploit the issue for fundraising purposes, raking in millions of dollars, even using federal taxpayer dollars to finance their campaigns.

For these groups, the issue of catastrophic global warming is not just a favored fundraising tool. In truth, it’s more fundamental than that. Put simply, man-induced global warming is an article of religious faith. Therefore contending that its central tenets are flawed is, to them, heresy of the most despicable kind. Furthermore, scientists who challenge its tenets are attacked, sometimes personally, for blindly ignoring the so-called “scientific consensus.” But that’s not all: because of their skeptical views, they are contemptuously dismissed for being “out of the mainstream.” This is, it seems to me, highly ironic: aren’t scientists supposed to be non-conforming and question consensus? Nevertheless, it’s not hard to read between the lines: “skeptic” and “out of the mainstream” are thinly veiled code phrases, meaning anyone who doubts alarmist orthodoxy is, in short, a quack.

I have insisted all along that the climate change debate should be based on fundamental principles of science, not religion. Ultimately, I hope, it will be decided by hard facts and data—and by serious scientists committed to the principles of sound science. Instead of censoring skeptical viewpoints, as my alarmist friends favor, these scientists must be heard, and I will do my part to make sure that they are heard.

Since my detailed climate change speech in 2003, the so-called “skeptics” continue to speak out. What they are saying, and what they are showing, is devastating to the alarmists. They have amassed additional scientific evidence convincingly refuting the alarmists’ most cherished assumptions and beliefs. New evidence has emerged that further undermines their conclusions, most notably those of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—one of the major pillars of authority cited by extremists and climate alarmists.

This evidence has come to light in very interesting times. Just last month, the 10th Conference of the Parties (COP-10) to the Framework Convention on Climate Change convened in Buenos Aires to discuss Kyoto’s implementation and measures to pursue beyond Kyoto. As some of my colleagues know, Kyoto goes into effect on February 16th. I think, with the exception of Russia, an exception that I will explain later, the nations that ratified Kyoto and agreed to submit to its mandates are making a very serious mistake.

In addition, last month, popular author Dr. Michael Crichton, who has questioned the wisdom of those who trumpet a “scientific consensus,” released a new book called “State of Fear,” which is premised on the global warming debate. I’m happy to report that Dr. Crichton’s new book reached #3 on the New York Times bestseller list.

I highly recommend the book to all of my colleagues. Dr. Crichton, a medical doctor and scientist, very cleverly weaves a compelling presentation of the scientific facts of climate change—with ample footnotes and documentation throughout—into a gripping plot. From what I can gather, Dr. Crichton’s book is designed to bring some sanity to the global warming debate. In the “Author’s Message” at the end of the book, he refreshingly states what scientists have suspected for years: “We are also in the midst of a natural warming trend that began about 1850, as we emerged from a 400 year cold spell known as the Little Ice Age.” Dr. Crichton states that, “Nobody knows how much of the present warming trend might be a natural phenomenon,” and, “Nobody knows how much of the present trend might be man-made.” And for those who see impending disaster in the coming century, Dr. Crichton urges calm: “I suspect that people of 2100 will be much richer than we are, consume more energy, have a smaller global population, and enjoy more wilderness than we have today. I don’t think we have to worry about them.”

For those who do worry, or induce such worry in others, “State of Fear” has a very simple message: stop worrying and stop spreading fear. Throughout the book, “fictional” environmental organizations are more focused on raising money, principally by scaring potential contributors with bogus scientific claims and predictions of a global apocalypse, than with “saving the environment.” Here we have, as the saying goes, art imitating life.

As my colleagues will remember from a floor speech I gave last year, this is part and parcel of what these organizations peddle to the general public. Their fear mongering knows no bounds. Just consider the debate over mercury emissions. President Bush proposed the first-ever cap to reduce mercury emissions from power plants by 70%. True to form, these groups said he was allowing more mercury into the air. Go figure.

BUENOS AIRES

As I mentioned earlier, several nations, including the United States, met in Buenos Aires in December for the 10th round of international climate change negotiations. I’m happy to report that the U.S. delegation held firm both in its categorical rejection of Kyoto and the questionable science behind it. Paula Dobriansky, under secretary of state for global affairs, and the leader of the U.S. delegation, put it well when she told the conference, “Science tells us that we cannot say with any certainty what constitutes a dangerous level of warming, and therefore what level must be avoided.”

Ms. Dobriansky and her team also rebuffed attempts by the European Union to drag the U.S. into discussions concerning post-Kyoto climate change commitments. With the ink barely dry on Kyoto ratification, not to mention what the science of climate change is telling us, Ms. Dobriansky was right in dubbing post-2012 talks “premature.”

It was clear from discussions in Buenos Aires that Kyoto supporters desperately want the U.S. to impose on itself mandatory greenhouse emission controls. Moreover, there was considerable discussion, but no apparent resolution, over how to address emissions from developing countries, such as India and especially China, which over the coming decades will be the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases. But developing nations, most notably China, remained adamant in Buenos Aires in opposing any mandatory greenhouse gas reductions, now or in the future. Securing this commitment, remember, was a necessary component for U.S. ratification of Kyoto, as reflected in the Byrd-Hagel resolution, which the Senate passed 95 to 0. Without that commitment, Kyoto, at least in the U.S., is dead.

Kyoto goes into force on February 16th. According to the EU Environment Ministry, most EU member states won’t meet their Kyoto targets. They may do so only on paper due to Russia’s ratification of the treaty. Russia, of course, ratified Kyoto not because its government believes in catastrophic global warming—it doesn’t—but because ratification was Russia’s key to joining the World Trade Organization. Also, under Kyoto, Russia can profit from selling emissions credits to the EU and continue business as usual, without undertaking economically harmful emissions reductions.

As talks in Buenos Aires revealed, if alarmists can’t get what they want at the negotiating table, they will try other means. I was told by reliable sources that some delegation members of the European Union subtly hinted that America’s rejection of Kyoto could be grounds for a challenge under the WTO. I surely hope this was just a hypothetical suggestion and not something our European friends are actively and seriously considering. Such a move, I predict, would be devastating to US-EU relations, not to mention the WTO itself.

But I suspect it’s not just hypothetical. The lawsuit is the stock in trade of environmental activists, and we are witnessing a new crop of global warming lawsuits now being leveled at individual U.S. companies and the U.S. itself.

In Buenos Aires, Earth Justice, a San Francisco-based environmental group, and the Center for International Law, announced plans to seek a ruling from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the U.S., because of its supposed contribution to global warming, is causing environmental degradation in the Arctic, and therefore violating the human rights of Alaska’s Inuits, or Eskimos. As the New York Times wrote, “The commission, an investigative arm of the Organization of American States, has no enforcement powers. But a declaration that the United States has violated the Inuits’ rights could create the foundation for an eventual lawsuit, either against the United States in an international court or against American companies in a U.S. court, said a number of legal experts, including some aligned with industry.”

The Times didn’t mention that such lawsuits already have been filed in the U.S. Eliot Spitzer, New York’s state attorney general, along with 8 other state attorneys general, mainly from the Northeast, last year sued 5 coal-burning electric utilities in the Midwest. The reason? “Given that these are among the largest carbon dioxide polluters in the world,” Mr. Spitzer wrote, “it is essential that the court direct them to reduce their emissions.”

To me, this is a clear-cut sign of desperation by the alarmists, but I’m not surprised. President Bush has rejected Kyoto, the United States Senate rejected Kyoto 95 to 0, the United States Senate rejected the McCain-Lieberman bill 55 to 43, and there is little hope that Congress will pass mandatory greenhouse gas reductions, at least not in the near future. So resorting to the courts is their last, best hope.

I hope the courts have enough sense and moderation to reject these lawsuits out of hand. I am interested, for one, to see how Mr. Spitzer quantifies with scientific precision just how these particular companies have contributed to climate change. How is it, one might ask, that emissions, specifically from American Electric Power, are causing rising sea levels, droughts, and hurricanes?

NEW SCIENCE

Such efforts fly in the face of compelling new scientific evidence that makes a mockery of these lawsuits. By now, most everyone familiar with the climate change debate knows about the hockey stick graph, constructed by Dr. Michael Mann and colleagues, which shows that temperature in the Northern Hemisphere remained relatively stable over 900 years, then spiked upward in the 20th Century. The hockey-stick graph was featured prominently in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report, published in 2001. The conclusion inferred from the hockey stick is that industrialization, which spawned widespread use of fossil fuels, is causing the planet to warm. I spent considerable time examining this work in my 2003 speech. Because Mann effectively erased the well-known phenomena of the Medieval Warming Period—when, by the way, it was warmer than it is today—and the Little Ice Age, I didn’t find it very credible. I find it even less credible now.

But don’t take my word for it. Just ask Dr. Hans von Storch, a noted German climate researcher, who, along with colleagues, published a devastating finding in the Sept. 30, 2004 issue of the journal Science. As the authors wrote: “We were able to show in a publication in Science that this [hockey stick] graph contains assumptions that are not permissible. Methodologically it is wrong: Rubbish.”

Dr. von Storch and colleagues discovered that the Mann hockey stick had severely underestimated past climate variability. In a commentary on Dr. von Storch’s paper, T. J. Osborn and K. R. Briffa, prominent paleo-climatologists from the University of East Anglia, stressed the importance of the findings. As they wrote, “The message of the study by von Storch et al. is that existing reconstructions of the NH [northern hemisphere] temperature of recent centuries may systematically underestimate the true centennial variability of climate” and, “If the true natural variability of NH [northern hemisphere] temperature is indeed greater than is currently accepted, the extent to which recent warming can be viewed as ‘unusual’ would need to be reassessed.” In other words, in obliterating the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age, Mann’s hockey stick just doesn’t pass muster.

Dr. von Storch is one of many critics of Michael Mann’s hockey stick. To recount just one example, three geophysicists from the University of Utah, in the April 7, 2004 edition of Geophysical Research Letters, concluded that Mann’s methods used to create his temperature reconstruction were deeply flawed. In fact, their judgment is harsher than that. As they wrote, Mann’s results are “based on using end points in computing changes in an oscillating series” and are “ just bad science.” I repeat: “just bad science.”

ARCTIC CLIMATE ASSESSMENT

These findings come alongside a spate of new reports that, at least in the eyes of the media, supposedly confirm the “consensus” on global warming. “The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment,” released last fall, perfectly fits that mold. “Arctic Perils Seen in Warming,” blared a headline in the New York Times. As the Times wrote, “The findings support the broad but politically controversial scientific consensus that global warming is caused mainly by rising atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, and that the Arctic is the first region to feel its effects.”

What do we really know about temperatures in the Arctic? Let’s take a closer look. As Oregon State University climatologist George Taylor has shown, Arctic temperatures are actually slightly cooler today than they were in the 1930s. [Chart #1] As Dr. Taylor has explained, it’s all relative—in other words, it depends on the specific time period chosen in making temperature comparisons. “The [Arctic Climate Impact Assessment],” Dr. Taylor wrote, “appears to be guilty of selective use of data. Many of the trends described in the document begin in the 1960s or 1970s—cool decades in much of the world—and end in the warmer 1990s or early 2000s. So, for example, temperatures have warmed in the last 40 years, and the implication, ‘if present trends continue,’ is that massive warming will occur in the next century.”

Dr. Taylor concluded: “Yet data are readily available for the 1930s and early 1940s, when temperatures were comparable to (and probably higher than) those observed today. Why not start the trend there? Because there is no net warming over the last 65 years?”

This is pretty convincing stuff. But, one might say, this is only one scientist, while nearly 300 scientists from several countries, including the United States, signed onto the Arctic report. Mr. President, I want to submit for the record a list of scientists, compiled by the Center for Science and Public Policy, from several countries, including the United States, whose published work shows current Arctic temperature is no higher than temperatures in the 1930s and 1940s. For example, according to a group of 7 scientists in a 2003 issue of the Journal of Climate: “In contrast to the global and hemispheric temperature, the maritime Arctic temperature was higher in the late 1930s through the early 1940s than in the 1990s.” Or how about this excerpt from the 2000 International Journal of Climatology, by Dr. Rajmund Przybylak, of Nicholas Copernicus University, in Torun, Poland: “The highest temperatures since the beginning of instrumental observation occurred clearly in the 1930s and can be attributed to changes in atmospheric circulation.”

THE TSUNAMI AND GLOBAL WARMING

Despite this evidence, alarmism is alive and well. [Chart #2] As you can see behind me, the Washington Post today ran an editorial cartoon that actually blames the Indian Ocean tsunami on global warming. Are we to believe now that global warming is causing earthquakes? The tsunami, of course, was caused by an earthquake off Sumatra’s coast, deep beneath the sea floor, completely disconnected from whatever the climate was doing at the surface. Regrettably, the tsunami-warming connection is yet another facet of the “State of Fear” alarmists have concocted. As Terence Corcoran of Canada’s Financial Post wrote, “The urge to capitalize on the horror in Asia is just too great for some to resist if it might help their cause…Green Web sites are already filling up with references to tsunami risks associated with global warming.”

To address this, let’s ask some simple questions: Is global warming causing more extreme weather events of greater intensity, and is it causing sea levels to rise? The answer to both is an emphatic ‘no’. [Chart #3] Just look at this chart behind me. It’s titled “Climate Related Disasters in Asia: 1900 to 1990s.” What does it show? It shows the number of such disasters in Asia, and the deaths attributed to them, declining fairly sharply over the last 30 years.

Or let’s take hurricanes. Alarmists linked last year’s hurricanes that devastated parts of Florida to global warming. Nonsense. Credible meteorologists quickly dismissed such claims. Hugh Willoughby, senior scientist at the International Hurricane Research Center of Florida International University stated plainly: “This isn’t a global-warming sort of thing.... It’s a natural cycle.” A team led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Dr. Christopher Landsea concluded that the relationship of global temperatures to the number of intense land-falling hurricanes is either non-existent or very weak. In this chart [chart #4], you can see that the overall number of hurricanes and the number of the strongest hurricanes fluctuated greatly during the last century, with a great number in the 1940s. In fact, through the last decade, the intensity of these storms has declined somewhat.

What about sea level rise? Alarmists have claimed for years that sea level, because of anthropogenic warming, is rising, with ominous consequences. Based on modeling, the IPCC estimates that sea level will rise 1.8 millimeters annually, or about one-fourteenth of an inch.

[Chart #5] But in a study published this year in Global and Planetary Change, Dr. Nils-Axel Morner of Sweden found that sea level rise hysteria is overblown. In his study, which relied not only on observational records, but also on satellites, he concluded: “There is a total absence of any recent ‘acceleration in sea level rise’ as often claimed by IPCC and related groups.” Yet we still hear of a future world overwhelmed by floods due to global warming. Such claims are completely out of touch with science. As Sweden’s Morner puts it, “there is no fear of massive future flooding as claimed in most global warming scenarios.”

CONCLUSION

What I have outlined today won’t appear in the New York Times. Instead you’ll read much about “consensus” and Kyoto and hand wringing by its editorial writers that unrestricted carbon dioxide emissions from the United States are harming the planet. You’ll read nothing, of course, about how Kyoto-like policies harm Americans, especially the poor and minorities, causing higher energy prices, reduced economic growth, and fewer jobs. After all, that is the real purpose behind Kyoto, as Margot Wallstrom, the EU’s environment minister, said in a revealing moment of candor. To her, Kyoto is about “leveling the playing field” for businesses worldwide—in other words, we can’t compete, so let’s use a feel-good treaty, based on shoddy science, fear, and alarmism, and which will have no perceptible impact on the environment (Chart #6), to restrict America’s economic growth and prosperity. Unfortunately for Ms. Wallstrom and Kyoto’s staunchest advocates, America was wise to the scheme, and it has rejected Kyoto and similar policies convincingly. Whatever Kyoto is about—to some, such as French President Jacques Chirac, it’s about forming “an authentic global governance”—it’s the wrong policy and it won’t work, as many participants in Buenos Aires grudgingly conceded.

Despite the bias, omissions, and distortions by the media and extremist groups, the real story about global warming is being told, and, judging by the welcome success of Michael Crichton’s “State of Fear,” it’s now being told to the American public.

Sen. Inhofe is Chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

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**Liberal losses in the SUPREME COURT (World Magazine, 110621)

Rulings reject a climate change lawsuit and workers’ suit against Walmart

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court issued two major, unrelated rulings Monday, but both unanimous decisions were a blow to liberal groups.

First, the court rejected a lawsuit from six states that sought to enforce carbon emissions caps on utility companies as a way to combat climate change. The headline on Mother Jones: “SCOTUS Sides With Emitters in Major Global Warming Case.” Then the court sided with Walmart in a massive class action lawsuit where female employees alleged sexual discrimination. The headline from an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer blogging on the Huffington Post: “Women, You’re on Your Own.” The court also declined to hear a lawsuit from the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a suit challenging the elimination of the group’s federal funding. A lower court upheld Congress’ ban on the group’s federal funding.

While the opinions were complex, with justices concurring in parts, dissenting in others, they weren’t ideologically divided between conservatives and liberals. The court ruled unanimously in rejecting the climate change lawsuit. It also unanimously rejected the Walmart employees’ class action lawsuit against the company.

The Walmart case could have been the largest class action settlement in history, potentially affecting 1.6 million women and amounting to potentially billions of dollars in damages to the company. The unanimous decision rejecting the suit reversed a ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which said the women could sue as a class.

The high court, in throwing out the suit, didn’t decide whether the women had been discriminated against—the employees will have to argue their cases individually—it simply said they could not sue the company as a class. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing the court’s opinion, said the women lacked “some glue” holding their allegations of discrimination together, a requirement if they wished “to sue about literally millions of employment decisions at once.” The cases were too individualized, under local managers, Scalia wrote, not based on some corporate policy.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing a partial dissent that Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan joined, agreed that the women couldn’t be certified as a class, but wrote that they could perhaps have sued as a class under a different statute. Ginsburg wrote that the evidence “suggests that gender bias suffused Walmart’s company culture.”

“The Supreme Court has ruled against all women of a poor background in this country,” Betty Dukes, the Walmart employee representing the class in court, told Forbes. “It will cost us quite a bit to fight one on one. We are determined to move forward and present our case in court.” National unions, the NAACP, and the ACLU had filed amicus briefs in support of the class action suit.

In the carbon emissions suit, the court said that states didn’t have the right to enforce emissions’ caps for utilities under “public nuisance” laws, laws that states use to curb pollution. The court said that enforcing those caps is the job of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which so far hasn’t issued carbon emissions regulations for existing utilities, but enforces rules for new plants.

The Supreme Court in 2007 issued a ruling encouraging the EPA to issue carbon emissions regulations in compliance with the Clean Air Act—that ruling addressed the agency under the Bush administration. The Obama administration joined the five major utilities in the debate on behalf of the government-owned Tennessee Valley Authority. Environmental groups like Defenders of Wildlife sided with the states—New York, California, Connecticut, Iowa, Rhode Island, and Vermont—in seeking authority to cap carbon emissions.

Justice Ginsburg, writing for the majority in the case, included a note: “The Court, we caution, endorses no particular view of the complicated issues related to carbon dioxide emissions and climate change.”

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**Fewer Protestant Pastors Believe in Global Warming, Poll Reveals (Christian Post, 110420)

Fewer Protestant pastors believe global warming is real and that humans are responsible for the phenomena, a faith-based research organization reported.

“Pastors’ sentiments on global warming have shifted right in step with Americans in general,” said Scott McConnell, director of LifeWay Research, in a statement released Monday.

A thousand randomly-selected pastors with different denominational backgrounds and political ideologies were interviewed in a survey conducted by LifeWay Research in October last year. Participants were asked if they “believe global warming is real and manmade” and told to answer either “strongly disagree,” “somewhat disagree,” “somewhat agree” or “strongly agree.”

Results revealed that 13% “somewhat agree” and 23% “strongly agree” with global warming warnings. On the other side, 41% of interviewees “strongly disagree,” up from 27% in 2008, while 19% “somewhat disagree.”

Pastors aren’t alone in their skepticism. A 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Research Center revealed growing skepticism among the general American public. While in 2008, 47% of Americans said the earth is warming because of human activity, that percentage dropped to 34 in 2010. Also, 32% of Americans said they feel there is no solid evidence supporting global warming, up from 21% in 2008.

In late 2009, a series of leaked e-mails by the world’s top climate scientists suggested that they may have manipulated data to support their claim of the threat of global warming. This is believed by some analysts as damaging to global warming advocates among the American general public.

Following that incident, a group of evangelical scholars have questioned the way mainstream scientists measure and interpret the data in climate change.

“I think people think that science is as simple as making measurements,” said Dr. Roy Spencer, climatologist and principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Ala., at The Heritage Foundation-hosted event in Washington, D.C., in Dec. 2009.

“[But] believe it or not most scientists – probably all the scientists I know that work in climate change – do have religious views about the earth and how fragile it is and that colors their research and how they interpret data.”

From a scientific perspective, Spencer stressed that the earth’s feedbacks to increased CO2 in the atmosphere has always been the “biggest missing piece” in the climate change puzzle.

According to the newly released survey, evangelicals are most skeptical to global warming. LifeWay’s report found that 68% of evangelical pastors “strongly disagree” or “somewhat disagree” with the statement that global warming is real and manmade. Among mainline pastors, less than half (45%) disagree with that notion.

Only 14% of evangelical pastors strongly agree that global warming is real and manmade.

The LifeWay Research poll also revealed that pastors with a more liberal political leaning tend to be convinced that global warming is real and manmade. Among pastors who describe themselves as progressive or liberal, 78% strongly agree with that notion. Yet only 7% of conservative pastors and 6% of very conservative pastors strongly agree.

Protestant pastors rarely address environmental issues to their congregation, the survey also found.

Only half of Protestant pastors (52%) do so once a year or less. Pastors who consider themselves evangelical speak to their churches on the environment less often than mainline pastors. While 49% of evangelicals address the environment once a year or more, 67% of mainline pastors address it once a year or more.

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**Climate change: the top conspiracy theories (Daily Telegraph, 110127)

Conspiracy theorists agree the data purported to show our planet is warming has been fabricated - but can’t agree on whether to blame the East, the West, the Left or the Right.

The top theories include:

... a plot to test a US secret weapon: Andrei Areshev, a Russian political scientist, suggested that talk of climate change might be intended to facilitate tests of US weapons that could cause “droughts, erase crops, and induce various anomalous phenomena in certain countries.”

... an anti-West plot: Melanie Phillips, a columnist, says the talk of climate change is a “variation of left-wing, anti-American, anti-west ideology which goes hand in hand with antiglobalisation and the belief that everything done by the industrialised world is wicked.”

... an anti-East plot: Gou Hongyang, a Chinese author, has posited that global warming is a plot hatched by the West to deprive the developing world of its legitimate share of the world’s wealth.

... a Globalist plot: Senator James Inhofe accused the media of peddling “climate porn” alarmism, which he said was intended to bring about “global governance.”

... a Right-wing plot: A Channel 4 documentary proposed, in 2007, that Margaret Thatcher latched on to the climate change idea to help promote nuclear power, and thus make Britain’s energy industry independent of the unions.

... a Left-wing plot: Vaclav Klaus, the Czech president, said the climate change fears were part of an ideology that, “similarly to the old Marxists, wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central, now global, planning of the whole world

... a plain and simple scam: Martin Durkin, a film marker, scientists have been “peddling scare stories to chase funding.”

... and a plot to get rid of the human race: Alan Caruba, an author, claims environmentalists are seeking “to undermine economic growth and to enhance the reduction of human life on this planet.”

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**Global Warming and Ideology: The Planet vs. Humanity? (Christian Post, 101028)

By Chuck Colson

From the start, fear has been the primary tool for motivating people to fight man-made global warming-or as it’s currently being called, “climate change.” We have been told that if we don’t limit carbon-dioxide emissions, we can expect to be visited by an entire cavalry of apocalyptic horsemen.

These include the flooding of our cities, entire island chains disappearing beneath waves, pestilence, infestation by vermin, famine and even increased earthquake activity.

You can add another horrible to this list: genocide.

At least that’s what an article in the October 28 issue of the New Republic would have us believe. In it, Yale historian Timothy Snyder points out that the genocidal policies of Hitler and Stalin were driven by more than their murderous ideologies-they also served “a vision of economic development that would overcome environmental limitations.”

For Hitler, the goal was to turn Eastern Europe into the bread-basket that Germany lacked. For Stalin, these same areas contained the wealth that would finance his socialist utopia. Both were willing to kill millions of people to turn these visions into reality.

Well, Snyder now describes a scenario in which climate change spawns massive instability: “failed states, ungoverned spaces, and widespread war . . . [even] significantly increased risks of nuclear war and worldwide terrorism.”

In some places, the competition for resources will lead competitors to deny the humanity of other claimants, which is a necessary step to genocide.

Well, even if you doubt the science behind man-made global warming, Snyder makes some important points: Despite our technological hubris, civilization is vulnerable to environmental change. We can’t control the weather-we don’t even really understand it.

That’s why Snyder is also right when he stresses the need to invest in those technologies that help us to ameliorate the impact of climatic shifts, regardless of their causes.

Still, I can’t help but notice that in his speculation about future instances of ideology leading people to deny the humanity of others, he overlooks actual instances of what is happening today.

An obvious instance is abortion-on-demand. It’s hard to think of a better illustration of ideology-in this case the exaltation of personal autonomy-which denies the humanity of others and kills people.

On the environmental front, global-warming hysteria has given license to an anti-human view that portrays people as a problem to be managed. This ideology leads some to openly discuss the need for “culling” the human race, as if people were livestock.

Others talk about more vigorous and even coercive population-control measures as a way of “saving” the planet. One recent ad even portrayed a teacher blowing up students who weren’t committed to reducing their personal CO2 emissions! I’m not making this up!

Snyder’s argument reflects what happens when we abandon the biblical worldview, with its inherent dignity given to every single human life, and when we deny the sovereignty of God. Worldviews, as you’ve heard me preach so many times, do matter-not just in preventing climatic disaster-but in preventing human beings from being killed in the name of a human ideology.

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**Evangelicals and Global Warming (Christian Post, 100917)

Benjamin B. Phillips

Since 2005, evangelicals have divided into two roughly opposing camps over the question of anthropogenic global warming. Official statements of the Southern Baptist Convention through its resolution process, its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and the Cornwall Alliance have typically rejected the theory of anthropogenic global warming and catastrophic climate change predictions. They assert that it is more likely that global warming will be moderate and have moderate or even helpful effects on the environment over all. They also argue that the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions is unlikely to have significant impact on global warming. These groups have focused primarily on the impact of climate-change policy on developing economies and the poor. On the other side, the Evangelical Environmental Network, through its Evangelical Climate Initiative and (as it seems) the SBECI have affirmed the existence and danger of anthropogenic global warming and have called for action to prevent it.

Despite conflict among evangelicals over the existence of anthropogenic global warming, there has been a great deal of consensus on the theological basis for addressing environmental degradation. Most evangelical statements appeal to the fact that God is the creator of the world as a basis for understanding the value of nonhuman creation, and many note that God is its owner. Virtually every evangelical statement on the environment and climate change acknowledges that God has commissioned humanity with the responsibility of stewardship/dominion over the earth and that the execution of this responsibility has been perverted by sin, with negative impact on the environment. Evangelicals have also, almost without exception, affirmed the responsibility of Christians to care for the poor as an important factor in considering environmental policy.

One major motivation for all of the evangelical statements on climate change has been a genuine concern for humanity’s treatment of God’s creation. Another motivation, no less important, has been an apologetic concern to engage non-Christians with a Christian witness. The heart of the evangelical witness in the world is the gospel of salvation by grace through faith in Christ Jesus alone. Seeking the conversion of men, women, and children is the sine qua non of evangelicalism. The priority of missions and evangelism has made evangelicals cautious about the potential of social ministry to overtake and swamp concern for the souls of men. As a result, evangelicals have traditionally subordinated social ministry to evangelism by seeing social ministry as a means to win a hearing for the gospel. Evangelicals have heeded the warning of James 2:14–16 that a faith that does not meet real physical needs is of no practical value.

Care for the poor, while a real good in and of itself, also serves the furtherance of the gospel. This strategy explains, in part, why evangelicals have taken great pains to tie their concern for the environment to concern for the poor. Some appeal to Christ’s command to love our neighbor; most affirm our responsibility to care for the poor. The connection between care for the poor and environmental concern is the fact that both the environment itself and human treatment of the environment by the private and public sectors will affect the poor, especially in developing countries.

Unfortunately, the public-policy response to global warming proposed by some evangelicals makes actually helping the global poor more difficult. The resources of the developed world are vast, but they are still limited. Addressing global warming through capping carbon dioxide emissions at 20% of current levels by 2050 will be hugely expensive. Directing a large portion of our resources at this problem will mean that other problems cannot be met. We may be able to meet some needs, but we cannot meet them all. Furthermore, if global warming prevention strategies have a negative impact on the economies of developed countries (as seems likely), this will further shrink the pool of available resources for addressing the pressing needs of the global poor.

If helping the poor in developing nations is made more difficult by the public policy proposals of evangelical environmentalists, then these policies would also undercut the traditional evangelical strategy of using social ministry to win a favorable hearing for the gospel. Drastic reductions of carbon dioxide emissions call for sacrifice on the part of both rich and poor nations. The rich however, are better able to absorb these changes with only marginal adjustments to their lifestyle. The global poor face the more difficult choice. To poor nations, the choice between electricity from expensive and/or unreliable carbon neutral sources and inexpensive, reliable fossil fuel burning sources is no choice at all. If required to build only carbon neutral power plants, which they cannot afford, they will not have power at all. The result will be continued exposure to a wide range of environmental hazards that lead to disease, malnutrition, and early death.

To hear a Western (i.e., rich!) evangelical environmentalist tell the poor that they must sacrifice the technologies that would improve the length and quality of life for them and their families in order to achieve a merely speculative benefit they will never see can only make the poor less likely to listen to the gospel that the evangelical brings. Such disillusionment will only deepen when it is realized that those evangelicals continue to enjoy the same lifesaving technologies they are effectively asking the poor to forego.

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**Lawrence Solomon: Catastrophism collapses (National Post, 100702)

G20 leaders in Toronto tried to avoid the fate of colleagues felled by warming advocacy

Last week’s G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto and its environs confirmed that the world’s leaders accept the demise of global-warming alarmism.

One year ago, the G8 talked tough about cutting global temperatures by two degrees. In Toronto, they neutered that tough talk, replacing it with a nebulous commitment to do their best on climate change — and not to try to outdo each other. The global-warming commitments of the G20 — which now carries more clout than the G8 — went from nebulous to non-existent: The G20’s draft promise going into the meetings of investing in green technologies faded into a mere commitment to “a green economy and to sustainable global growth.”

These leaders’ collective decisions in Toronto reflect their individual experiences at home, and a desire to avoid the fate that met their true-believing colleagues, all of whom have been hurt by the economic and political consequences of their global-warming advocacy.

Kevin Rudd, Australia’s gung-ho global-warming prime minister, lost his job the day before he was set to fly to the G20 meetings; just months earlier Australia’s conservative opposition leader, also gung-go on global warming, lost his job in an anti-global-warming backbencher revolt. The U.K.’s gung-ho global-warming leader during last year’s G8 and G20 meetings, Gordon Brown, likewise lost his job.

France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, who had vowed to “save the human race” from climate change by introducing a carbon tax by the time of the G8 and G20, was a changed man by the time the meetings occurred. He cancelled his carbon tax in March, two days after a crushing defeat in regional elections that saw his Gaullist party lose just about every region of France. He got the message: Two-thirds of the French public opposed carbon taxes.

Spain? Days before the G20 meetings, Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, his popularity and that of global warming in tatters, decided to gut his country’s renewables industry by unilaterally rescinding the government guarantees enshrined in legislation, knowing the rescinding would put most of his country’s 600 photovoltaic manufacturers out of business. Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi similarly scrapped government guarantees for its solar and wind companies prior to the G8 and G20, putting them into default, too.

The U.K may be making the biggest global-warming cuts of all, with an emergency budget that came down the week of the G20 meetings. The two government departments responsible for climate-change policies — previously immune to cuts — must now contract by an extraordinary 25%. Other U.K. departments are also ditching climate-change programs — the casualties include manufacturers of electric cars, the Low Carbon Buildings Program, and, as the minister in charge put it, “every commitment made by the last government on renewables is under review.” Some areas of the economy not only survived but expanded, though: The government announced record offshore oil development in the North Sea — the U.K. granted a record 356 exploration licences in its most recent round.

Support for global-warming programs is also in tatters in the U.S., where polls show — as in Europe — that the great majority rejects global-warming catastrophism. The public resents repeated attempts to pass cap and trade legislation over their objections, contributing to the fall in popularity of President Barack Obama and Congress. Public opinion surveys now predict that this November’s elections will see sweeping change in the United States, with legislators who have signed on to the global-warming hypothesis being replaced by those who don’t buy it.

In the lead-up to the Toronto meetings and throughout them, one country — Canada — and one leader — Prime Minister Stephen Harper — have stood out for avoiding the worst excesses associated with climate change. Dubbed the Colossal Fossil three years running by some 500 environmental groups around the world, Canada — and especially Harper — are reviled among climate-change campaigners for failing to fall into line.

Not coincidentally, Canada has also stood out for having best withstood the financial crisis that beset the world. Fittingly, Canada and its leader played host to the meetings.

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**Scientist Disputes EPA Finding that Carbon Dioxide Poses Threat to Humans (Foxnews, 100518)

CHICAGO — Carbon dioxide is hazardous to your health, the Environmental Protection Agency says. Oh really?

EPA scientists say manmade carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming of the global climate — and as such represent a threat to human welfare. Officials went so far as to declare the gas a danger to mankind in early December. But a leading climatologist says his research indicates that CO2 poses no threat to human welfare at all, and he says the EPA should revisit its findings.

“There is an overestimation of the environment’s sensitivity to CO2,” said Dr. Patrick Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at the CATO Institute and a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists.

Michaels spoke before a group of about 700 scientists and government officials at the fourth International Conference on Climate Change. The conference is presented annually in Chicago by the Heartland Institute, a conservative nonprofit think tank that actively questions the theory of man’s role in global warming. Last year the Institute published Climate Change Reconsidered, a comprehensive reply to the United Nations’ latest report on climate change.

Michaels described how the U.N. gathers weather information for its computer models, on which the EPA based its ruling. He said data gathering at weather stations in some parts of the world is spotty, and U.N. scientists add new figures to compensate. But in doing so, he said, they also add errors to the final research product.

“There is a systemic bias in the computer models,” said Michaels: whose research suggests that the U.N.’s adjusted computer modeling data, rather than actual observed data, is what connects the rise in temperatures to manmade causes. When one takes away the computerized modeling enhancements, he said, mankind’s contribution to global warming is virtually nil, approximately .03 degrees, rather than .07 degrees, over the last 50 years.

Thus, he said, most of the planet’s warming is not from manmade sources. “This idea that most of the warming is due to greenhouse gases caused by man just isn’t right,” he said.

But Catherine C. Milbourn, a spokeswoman for the EPA in Washington, disagreed with Michaels’ conclusions.

“The U.S. Supreme Court ruled three years ago that greenhouse gas emissions constitute air pollution, and EPA set out to determine whether that pollution threatens the health and welfare of Americans,” she told FoxNews.com, explaining that the EPA ruling was based on a comprehensive review of available science from an array of peer-reviewed sources across the globe.

“The conclusion: The scientific evidence of climate change is overwhelming, and greenhouse gases pose a real threat to the American people. The question of the science is settled,” Milbourn said.

Greg Wiles, an associate professor of geology at The College of Wooster in Ohio, agreed with Milbourn. “Despite the recent attacks on the scientific community and large-scale buy-in by some of the public, the science behind the conclusion that contemporary warming is largely anthropogenic (manmade) still stands,” he told FoxNews.com.

But others disagree. Former Virginia Gov. George Allen, chairman of the American Energy Freedom Center think tank, said that the U.S. is “at a crossroads in energy policy,” but that the country “cannot stand with pompous elites.”

He noted that a bill has been introduced in the U.S. Senate to essentially veto the EPA’s “endangerment finding” — and he said that others, like the legislature of the state of Kansas, have also gone on record against implementing an energy policy based on EPA’s findings.

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**Global Cooling Is Coming — and Beware the Big Chill, Scientist Warns (Foxnews, 100519)

The hottest new trend in climate change may be global cooling, some researchers say.

Contrary to the commonly held scientific conclusion that the Earth is getting warmer, Dr. Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University and author of more than 150 peer-reviewed papers, has unveiled evidence for his prediction that global cooling is coming soon.

“Rather than global warming at a rate of 1 F per decade, records of past natural cycles indicate there may be global cooling for the first few decades of the 21st century to about 2030,” said Easterbrook, speaking on a scientific panel discussion with other climatologists. This, he says, will likely be followed by “global warming from about 2030 to 2060,” which will then be followed by another cooling spell from 2060 to 2090.

Easterbrook spoke before a group of about 700 scientists and government officials at the fourth International Conference on Climate Change. The conference is presented annually in Chicago by the Heartland Institute, a conservative nonprofit think tank that actively questions the theory of man’s role in global warming. Last year the Institute published Climate Change Reconsidered, a comprehensive reply to the United Nations’ latest report on climate change.

“Global warming is over — at least for a few decades,” Easterbrook told conference attendees. “However, the bad news is that global cooling is even more harmful to humans than global warming, and a cause for even greater concern.”

Easterbrook made several stunning claims about the effects of the coming cold. There will be twice as many people killed by extreme cold than by extreme heat, he predicted, and global food production will suffer because of the shorter, cooler growing seasons and bad weather during harvest seasons.

But not everyone is breaking out the overcoat and mittens.

“It’s absurd to talk of global cooling when global heating is with us now and accelerating,” said Dan Miller, managing director of the Roda Group, and an expert on climate change. “According to NASA, this past April was the hottest since temperature measurements began. And 2010 is on track to be the hottest year since temperature records began.

“North America was relatively cool last year, but the Earth as a whole was much warmer than average,” he said.

Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) also points to a warming trend. The agency recently reported that global land and ocean surface temperatures for the first four months of 2010 were the warmest it had on record.

Easterbrook, one of 75 climate and policy experts presenting at the conference, uncovered sudden climate fluctuations of warming and cooling — all of which occurred before 1945, when carbon dioxide levels began to rise sharply — through geologic evidence.

Ten big climate changes occurred over the past 15,000 years, and another 60 smaller changes occurred in the past 5,000 years.

Based on new analysis of ice cores from Greenland to Antarctica, Easterbrook said global temperatures rose and fell from 9 to 15 degrees in a century or less — swings that he said were “astonishing.”

In addition, he explained that energy consumption will rise — and consumer prices will rise along with it — and political and social instability could result as the world population grows 50% in the next 40 years while food and energy demand soars.

Another presenter at the conference, James M. Taylor, an environmental policy expert and a fellow at the Heartland Institute, said that global cooling is already happening. Based on figures provided by the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab, he noted that snow records from the last 10 years exceeded the records set in the 1960s and 1970s.

A sign of global cooling? This past “decade set a record for largest average global snow extent,” Taylor said.

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**More Americans Think Global Warming Is Exaggerated (Christian Post, 100311)

A strikingly higher percentage of Americans believe that the threat posed by global warming is exaggerated, a new Gallup survey found.

Nearly half of the public (48%) think that the seriousness of global warming is generally exaggerated, up from 41% in 2009 and 31% in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question. Gallup noted that the percentage of Americans who believe global warming is generally overblown is the highest on its record.

“The last two years have marked a general reversal in the trend of Americans’ attitudes about global warming,” reported Gallup. “[T]he public opinion tide turned in 2009, when several Gallup measures showed a slight retreat in public concern about global warming. This year, the downturn is even more pronounced.”

The results are based on the annual Gallup Social Series Environment poll, conducted March 4-7 of this year. A random sample of 1,014 national adults, aged 18 and older were interviewed by telephone.

Although Americans think global warming has in general been exaggerated, the majority of the public still believe it is real. 53% say the effects of global warming have already begun or will occur in the next few years.

But the percentage has steadily dropped in recent years. In 2008, 65% believed the effects of global warming already began or will happen soon. That figure dropped to 58% last year, and now stands at 53%.

Meanwhile, 35% of Americans say that global warming will either never happen (19%) or will not happen in their lifetime (16%). By comparison, only 24% of the public held these views in 2008.

There was also a sharp change in American opinion on what causes global warming. Exactly half of the public believes that human activities are mainly responsible for the increase in the Earth’s temperature over the last century. This is a significant drop from the 61% in 2007 that held this view and the 58% in 2008.

The percentage of Americans who believe the warming of the Earth is mostly due to natural changes in the environment has steadily increased in recent years.

In 2010, 46% hold this view, up from 38% in 2008 and 35% in 2007.

Americans also increasingly think that scientists themselves are unsure whether global warming is occurring. 36% of the public this year said they think scientists are unsure about global warming, up from 26% in 2008.

Meanwhile, 52% said they think most scientists believe that global warming is occurring, down from 65% in 2008.

Gallup noted that the shift in Americans’ opinion on global warming might reflect the events occurring in the world, including media scrutiny of allegations of scientific fraud relating to global warming evidence, and possibly the recent record-breaking snow and cold temperatures in parts of the United States.

Christians in recent years have increasingly become engaged in the global warming debate. The environmental issue has been packaged in a way Christians can understand, using religious terms such as creation care and good stewardship of the Earth. It is unclear how the recent climate change scandal and historic blizzards have affected the attitude of Christians toward global warming.

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**An Inconvenient Driveway: Only Thing Warming Is the Debate (Christian Post, 100218)

By Chuck Colson

As you probably heard, between 40 and 50 inches of snow fell in the Washington, D.C., area in early February. The record snowfall brought the entire mid-Atlantic region to a halt-paralyzing the government, this time for snow.

A Washington Post online headline captured it: “Senate climate change hearings canceled because of storm.”

The people most inconvenienced by the blizzards weren’t the residents of this region, or the senators-it was the proponents of man-made global warming. Scientists and activists insisted that people on this side of the Atlantic ignore the evidence in their driveways and, instead, trust their computer models.

Not only did they tell us that this winter’s weather didn’t disprove their global warming data, they told us that the record snows were caused by global warming. Really!

Of course, 10 years ago, they told us that, on account of the same global warming, “snow is starting to disappear from our lives.” We were told that, because of all that nasty CO2, British children “just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

Ten years later, they most certainly do. Not only British children, but children in every state except Hawaii. All of Britain, much of the rest of Europe, and the United States have experienced snowfalls this winter. The data suggests, in fact, that “snow is coming earlier and heavier than it used to.”

If all of the white stuff hasn’t left you doubting those computer models, maybe Phil Jones can help you. That would be ironic since, until recently, Jones was the director of the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s East Anglia University. He was the keeper of the data upon which the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) based its predictions-data that has been, to put it mildly, called into question.

In an interview with the BBC, Jones acknowledged that there has been no significant warming since 1995. Let me repeat that. One of the world’s leading global warming advocates says there has been no significant warming since 1995. Fifteen years.

He also indicated that there is nothing exceptional about the warming the occurred between 1979 and 1995. He even admitted that is was possible that it might have been warmer during the pre-industrial Middle Ages than it is now.

If all of that sounds familiar, it ought to. Those very points have been made by global warming skeptics and reported frequently on BreakPoint. If there has been no significant warming during a period when the models predicted exactly that, or if the world was warmer 1000 years ago before we started burning fossils fuels, then maybe these models, just maybe, are wrong.

And threatening us with global catastrophe and upsetting children with pictures of drowning animals becomes unconscionable.

Of course, neither Jones nor his fellow advocates will admit that. As Jones also acknowledged, the IPCC tends to leave “inconvenient findings” out of its reports.

Why? It’s a matter of worldview.

Activists and scientists have too much invested in human-caused global warming. For activists, it’s the threat by which they can create their version of a better world, and scientists have staked their careers and reputations on the accuracy of those computer models.

Given what’s at stake, inconvenient snow and cold has to be explained away. Assuming, that is, the people who do so can get out of their driveways.

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**30 Years of Global Cooling Are Coming, Leading Scientist Says (Foxnews, 100111)

From Miami to Maine, Savannah to Seattle, America is caught in an icy grip that one of the U.N.’s top global warming proponents says could mark the beginning of a mini ice age.

Oranges are freezing and millions of tropical fish are dying in Florida, and it could be just the beginning of a decades-long deep freeze, says Professor Mojib Latif, one of the world’s leading climate modelers.

Latif thinks the cold snap Americans have been suffering through is only the beginning. He says we’re in for 30 years of cooler temperatures — a mini ice age, he calls it, basing his theory on an analysis of natural cycles in water temperatures in the world’s oceans.

Latif, a professor at the Leibniz Institute at Germany’s Kiel University and an author of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, believes the lengthy cold weather is merely a pause — a 30-years-long blip — in the larger cycle of global warming, which postulates that temperatures will rise rapidly over the coming years.

At a U.N. conference in September, Latif said that changes in ocean currents known as the North Atlantic Oscillation could dominate over manmade global warming for the next few decades. Latif said the fluctuations in these currents could also be responsible for much of the rise in global temperatures seen over the past 30 years.

Latif is a key member of the UN’s climate research arm, which has long promoted the concept of global warming. He told the Daily Mail that “a significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these cycles — perhaps as much as 50%.”

According to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado, the warming of the Earth since 1900 is due to natural oceanic cycles, and not man-made greenhouse gases. The agency also reports that Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26%, since 2007.

Many parts of the world have been suffering through record-setting snowfalls and arctic temperatures. The Midwest saw wind chills as low as 49 degrees below zero last week, while Europe saw snows so heavy that Eurostar train service and air travel were canceled across much of the continent. In Asia, Beijing was hit by its heaviest snowfall in 60 years.

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**Fox News Poll: Majority of Americans Don’t See Global Warming As Crisis (Foxnews, 091217)

While a majority of Americans believe global warming is happening, far fewer see it as a crisis.

A Fox News poll released Wednesday finds that a 63% majority of Americans say they believe in global warming, down from 69% earlier this year, and from a high of 82% in 2007.

Just over half of Americans (51%) believe in “man-made” global warming, that is, believe it is caused by human behavior (33%), or by both people and climate patterns (18%).

Less than a third (29%) believe global warming is caused naturally (11% climate patterns and 18% both human behavior and climate patterns).

Among groups, women (58%) are somewhat more likely than men (50%), and young people under age 30 (59%) are more likely than seniors 65 and over (50%), to believe in man-made global warming. Democrats (78%) are more than twice as likely as Republicans (32%) and significantly more likely than independents (54%) to believe it exists.

The national telephone poll was conducted for Fox News by Opinion Dynamics Corp. among 900 registered voters from December 8 to December 9. For the total sample, the poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 3%age points. The poll was conducted for an upcoming Bret Baier special, “Fox News Reporting: Global Warming...Or Hot Air?” that airs Sunday, December 20 at 9 PM ET.

Just how bad is the threat from global warming? About one in six Americans (17%) think the global warming situation is a crisis, which is essentially the same number who thought so when the question was asked last in 2005. One-third (33%) currently think the situation is best described as a “major problem, but not a crisis,” down 11%age points from 44% previously (October 2005).

Nearly half of Americans think global warming is either a “minor problem” (25%) or “not a problem at all” (23%). Furthermore, the 23% who think global warming is “not a problem at all” is up 11%age points from 12% in October 2005.

Democrats (29%) are almost six times more likely than Republicans (5%) to call the global warming situation a crisis, while Southerners (14%) are 10 points less likely than those living in the West (24%) to do so.

When asked who “thoroughly understands the science behind global warming,” the poll finds most Americans (79%) think scientists who study the climate understand it. That’s significantly more than the number who think journalists who report on global warming (37%) or elected officials (25%) have a good understanding of the issue.

What about the public? Most Americans think they themselves are knowledgeable, yet not necessarily their neighbors. Just over half (52%) say they personally understand the science — nearly three times as many as think “everyday Americans” do (18%).

Americans put addressing the issue of global warming at the bottom of the national to-do list. When asked about the most important issues for the government to be working on right now, fixing the economy (27%) and creating jobs (26%) are the two top items — far outdistancing all others.

The remaining issues — including health care — are bunched together with much less support: reforming health care (10%), handling Iraq and Afghanistan (8%), reducing the deficit (7%) and cutting taxes (6%). Addressing global warming comes last among these issues at 2%.

Finally, views are split evenly on how to describe the global warming movement: 41% of Americans think it is a group of “truly concerned citizens” who see global warming as posing an immediate danger and the same number think the movement is made up of people who see an “opportunity to gain political power and make money.”

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**Czech President Klaus: Global Warming Not Science, but a ‘New Religion’ (Foxnews, 091218)

In an interview with FoxNews.com, Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus argued that man’s natural ingenuity will lead to new technologies that will lessen any impact mankind has had on the planet’s environment.

As the Copenhagen climate conference drew to a close Friday, Czech President Vaclav Klaus, long a global warming skeptic, had a message for the world: do not dictate to humanity how to live based on an “irrational ideology,” which he sees as the product of political correctness.

Global warming is a “new religion,” not a science, he said in an interview with FoxNews.com.

“I’m convinced that after years of studying the phenomenon, global warming is not the real issue of temperature,” said Klaus, an economist by training. “That is the issue of a new ideology or a new religion. A religion of climate change or a religion of global warming. This is a religion which tells us that the people are responsible for the current, very small increase in temperatures. And they should be punished.”

Klaus, the second president of the Czech Republic since the fall of communism, is often called the Margaret Thatcher of Central Europe. In the interview, he sounded more like Winston Churchill, vowing to defend liberty and freedom from those who would restrain global economic growth.

“I’m absolutely convinced that the very small global warming we are experiencing is the result of natural causes,” Klaus told FoxNews.com. “It’s a cyclical phenomenon in the history of the Earth. The role of man is very small, almost negligible.”

Klaus believes man’s natural ingenuity can create new technologies that will lessen any impact that mankind has had on the planet’s environment. “I don’t think the radical measures just now suggested in Copenhagen are necessary,” said Klaus.

“Politicians and their fellow travelers, the media and the business community, simply understood that this is a very good topic to take on. It’s an excellent idea to escape from the current reality. Not to solve the crisis, but to talk about the world in 2050, 2080, 2200. This is for them an excellent job. They will not be punished by the voters for making a totally wrong decision, a wrong forecast.”

Klaus says that many interested parties get “a lot of money and influence” by backing the idea of global warming and organizing the Copenhagen conference, as well as its predecessor the Kyoto conference. “Some of them are really just rent seekers who hope to get some money either for their businesses or for their countries,” says Klaus. “Some of them are really true believers.”

The president reckons that environmentalism, executed on the scale suggested by global warming adherents, is a “real way to stop progress, industrial progress…and this is something unfair.”

Klaus fears that turning global warming into binding law would impede civilization as we know it.

“We’ll be the victims of irrational ideology. They will try to dictate to us how to live, what to do, how to behave,” Klaus said. “What to eat, travel, and what my children should have. This is something that we who lived in the communist era for most of our lives — we still feel very strongly about. We are very sensitive in this respect. And we feel various similarities in their way of arguing or not arguing. In the way of pushing ahead ideas regardless of rational counter-arguments.”

Klaus thinks that the world’s “silent majority” would agree with his position on global warming. “I’m so sorry that Al Gore and others around the IPCC succeeded in influencing so many people,” he said.

Klaus, who graduated from the University of Economics in Prague, and also studied in the U.S. at Cornell University, worked in banking during the communist era. He was also an outspoken reformer during the “Prague Spring” in the late 1960s, a cultural revolt against totalitarian ideology. Klaus was previously prime minister of his country, has received more than 50 honorary degrees and is colloquially known as “Mr. Professor” by his countrymen.

He worries that schoolchildren around the world are being fed global warming ideology, and that this will give the ideology more power in the future.

“We need to bring new arguments. The real problem isn’t the arguments. The real problem is to motivate people to listen to other arguments against this. This is the missing link in the current debate.”

Klaus says that he is in favor of “green” technology, but cautions that he is not in favor of the government dictating the development of the technology.

“I lived in a communist world where politicians told us what to do,” Klaus said. “I don’t think politicians or presidents should suggest to firms what to do. That has always been a mistake.”

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**The Climate Question: Road to Copenhagen—a good summary (National Post, 091204)

What the #!%*?, climate change

The Copenhagen conference is the sequel to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012 and lacks teeth. Since Kyoto — which the U.S. never ratified and Canada all but abandoned in 2006 — world emissions have increased and most signatories have missed their targets by a country mile.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change unequivocally pegged global warming to human activity.

Now, delegates from more than 190 countries will meet in Copenhagen to agree on a new deal on climate change. The developed world will also face the developing world, which blames countries like the U.S. for the historic build-up of emissions and wants the West to finance mitigation efforts.

Involves capturing carbon dioxide from heavy emitters and then storing emissions underground. Technology still developing and environmentalists fear safety and health effects. Roughly 200 carbon-sequestration projects underway worldwide. U.S. stimulus bill set aside US$3.4-billion for carbon-capture research. U.S. House bill includes provision that future coal plants use carbon-capture technologies.

Cap and trade

Allows companies to buy and sell allowances to pollute. Country sets cap on how much total pollution is allowed. Companies are issued licences to pollute, called credits. One carbon credit equals one ton of carbon. If company comes in below its limit, it can sell extra credits at prevailing market price to companies that exceed cap. Credits are exchanged among parties, through a broker, or an exchange. Since the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme began in 2005, price of greenhouse gas emissions has ranged from US$9 to US$46 per ton. May prompt carbon-emitting companies to move to “carbon havens,” where caps are higher and cost of polluting is lower. U.S. House bill includes tax provision on imports from nations with less stringent targets. France has urged the EU to do the same. Ontario moving toward provincial cap-and-trade program beginning in 2010. Program will affect industrial facilities that emit more than 25,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases.

Carbon tax

An environmental tax on emissions of carbon dioxide. EU considered carbon tax in 1990s, but proposal quashed by industrial lobby. Sweden enacted its own carbon tax on use of oil, coal, natural gas, petrol and aviation fuel used in domestic travel. Finland, the Netherlands and Norway have followed suit, and the U.K. introduced a tax on retail petroleum products in 1993. France recently detailed a new carbon tax which would come into effect in 2010 and would levy oil, gas and coal consumption by households and businesses. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton proposed tax on all fuel sources except wind, solar, and geothermal, but tax never adopted.

Canada’s Liberals proposed a carbon tax during 2008 election, but measure was unpopular and Conservatives retained power. British Columbia went ahead with own carbon tax, which levies gasoline at 2.41¢ per litre. Skeptics fear “carbon leakage” because energy-intensive industries may migrate to tax-free countries.

Transfer of wealth

An arrangement where developed countries transfer money to developing nations to help fight global warming. Scheme forces world’s worst emitters to shoulder financial burden of climate action. Industrialized countries formed two Climate Investment Funds in 2008, and have since pledged more than US$6-billion. The funds are available to multilateral development banks, including the Asian Development Bank, which recently announced plan to channel US$700-million to developing member-countries. Continued and more generous transfer of wealth considered non-negotiable by developing nations attending Copenhagen talks. The EU estimates US$150-billion required to compensate developing countries for restraint in factory pollution and deforestation. Half of the fund anticipated to come from private sector through carbon trading.

LULUCF

Among the more technical sticking-points in emissions discussions. Human activities — through land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF) activities — affect the carbon sinks that accumulate carbon emissions. Because trees and soil absorb carbon, forests represent hefty chunk of the world’s carbon stock. Deforestation therefore causes immediate release of carbon stored in trees. The IPCC says reducing deforestation is the best short-term mitigation option. Inclusion or exclusion of LULUCF emissions affects a country’s data and skews reduction targets. When Canada’s pledge is calculated compared to 1990 levels, and if LULUCF is included, the pledge actually allows for emissions growth. Countries will need to clarify whether LULUCF emissions will be factored into any framework agreed in Copenhagen.

The key players

Canada

2020 Target 20% below 2006 level, which represents a 3% reduction from 1990 levels. Canada missed its Kyoto targets by nearly 35% and has been criticized as the “dirty old man of the climate world.”

Approach Spends US$77 per capita in environmental stimulus, ranking ninth out of 13 G20 countries evaluated by the UN. Prime Minister Stephen Harper committed to a “truly continental approach to climate change.” Environment Minister Jim Prentice promises a “do no harm” approach that impacts existing industry as little as possible. Canada has been threatened with suspension from the Commonwealth over its climate change policies. Condemned by environmentalists for its mining of Alberta’s tar sands.

United States

2020 Target 17% below 2005 levels by 2020, which represents a 4% reduction from 1990 levels. Ottawa says Canada’s commitments are “virtually identical” to that of the United States, but the U.S. commitment may be more ambitious in reality. According to a World Resources Institute report, the U.S. goes further in reducing emissions if fuel-efficiency regulations, investments in clean technologies, and renewable electricity standards are considered. Together, these measures could mean a 35% emissions reduction.

Approach Spends US$365 per capita in environmental stimulus, ranking third out of the 13 G20-countries evaluated. President Barack Obama committed to passing a climate change bill this year. Environmental Protection Agency moving toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and industrial facilities. The House’s American Clean Energy and Security Act includes a cap-and-trade system and green-energy investment funds. Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards to increase steadily beyond 2011.

European Union

2020 Target 20-to-30% below 2005 levels by 2020. EU benefits from its inclusion of post-Soviet Union countries, whose emissions levels dipped in the 1990s because of economic collapse.

Approach Committed to improving emissions data, channeling revenue from auctioned cap-and-trade allowances into vulnerable sectors, and financing emissions-reductions efforts in developing countries. Germany subsidizes solar energy and the U.K. legally committed to reducing emissions by 34% by 2020.

Australia

2020 Target Anywhere from 5% to 25% below 2000 levels by 2020. Upper-end pledge is reportedly rife with strings attached.

Approach Spends US$420 per capita on environmental stimulus, ranking second out of the 13 G20-countries evaluated. Senate voted down an ambitious climate-change bill, which included a cap-and-trade emissions scheme. Liberal opposition recently threw out its pro-Kyoto leader.

Russia

2020 Target 25% below 1990 levels by 2020. Russia’s emissions are down roughly 20% since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet economy, but have climbed roughly 15% since 1998.

Approach Kremlin wants huge surplus of Kyoto carbon-credits rolled over into new agreement. Environmentalists say this would make it cheaper for countries to buy credits than to cut emissions. Expansion of gas pipelines continues.

China

2020 Target 40% reduction in emissions per unit of GDP, as compared to 2005 levels. Translation: China will improve its economy’s energy efficiency by as much as 40%. Environmentalists say this only amounts to an absolute cut of between zero and 12%, and condemn pledge as “business as usual.”

Approach Spends US$166 per capita on green stimulus spending, which translates to 35% of its economic stimulus. Dedicated more than US$100-billion to transit infrastructure. Committed to boosting energy efficiency and curbing carbon footprint through fiscal, tax and pricing policies.

Developing Nations

2020 Target Leaders from India, Brazil, South Africa and Sudan drafted 10-page agreement asking developed countries to assume responsibility for emissions-reduction targets. Brazil pledged 35% reduction on projected 2020 emissions. Mexico committed to reducing annual emissions by 50 million tonnes in the next three years. India pledged to cut carbon intensity by 20-to-25% from 2005 levels by 2020.

Approach India to improve its energy efficiency through expansion of clean energy sources and promotion of public transport. Brazil committed to hydro power and bio-fuels, and pledged to protect rainforest. South Africa considered leader among 52-country African Union, but has offered little other than a study of mitigation options. The Maldives plans to buy homeland in another country in case the sea overcomes its islands.

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**An Inconvenient Lie Exposed (Christian Post, 091205)

By Dr. Tony Beam

My dear grandmother on my father’s side believed until her dying day that “the landing on the moon was fake but wrestling is real.” There was no sense presenting her with evidence concerning the validity of the moon landing. She decided that from the beginning that “President Kennedy dreamed the whole thing up and NASA had to go along because he was the president. “ “But grandma,” I used to say, “They brought back rocks and we saw the landing on T.V.” “Nonsense,” she would growl, “Those rocks came from Florida and all that T.V. stuff was straight out of Hollywood.”

Any attempt to convince her that wresting was straight out of a bad play production was also futile. She had more faith in Rick Flair, Wahoo McDaniel, and Andrea the Giant, than she did in Neil Armstrong, Buzz Alderin, and Mike Collins. Facts, even irrefutable facts, had no effect on my grandmother. She would just smile, lean forward, and say, “Some people can make the facts say whatever you want them to say.”

We now know the scientists at the formerly prestigious Climate Research Unit (CRU) agree with my grandmother’s philosophy of fact manipulation. Leaked documents and hacked emails have surfaced that point to widespread data deception and manipulation as well as outright suppression of facts that contradict the party line on manmade climate change. There can now be little doubt that science has been twisted for social and political ends.

It began with Al Gore’s wildly popular (at least among environmentalists) documentary An Inconvenient Truth. The former Vice-President-turned-carbon-footprint-hawker shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Accepting the award in Oslo, Gore said, “We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

No so said a British court. When then Environment Secretary David Miliband convinced the British government to send copies of An Inconvenient Truth to all British Schools, a British truck driver and part time school governor sued the government claiming the film pushes “partisan political views.” A British court reviewed the film and sided with the truck driver. The court issued a statement requiring teachers to make clear to their students that the film was “a political work and promotes only one side of the argument.”

The court also found “eleven inaccuracies” and ruled they must “be specifically drawn to the attention of the school children.” The inaccuracies ranged from the claim that Lake Chad, which borders on northeastern Nigeria, dried up because of global warming (proven wrong by government experts on climate change) to the fact that polar bears had drowned because of disappearing arctic ice (Gore misread the report…the bears drowned in a violent storm).

So the so-called fact of climate change isn’t backed up by the facts offered by Al Gore. Now we know why. The facts Al Gore relied on are the same facts the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relied on. They are facts that we now know were not facts at all but were deliberately manipulated by the scientists closely associated with the Climate Research Unit to lead an entire world astray.

The inconvenient lie of climate change has been brought out of the shadows of scientific doublespeak and into the light of revealing emails that prove manipulation of the facts. The leaked emails from climate change giants such as Phil Jones, the current Director of the CRU, Tom Wigley, Michael Mann, Hubert Lamb, and a host of others reveal three shocking strands of a tightly woven web of deception.

First, the emails show a systematic refusal to release the data that forms the basis for the computer models that scientists use to prove the planet is heating up. In fact, according to the emails, scientists are encouraged to delete large chunks of data and to claim other large chunks were simply “lost.”

Second, it is obvious from the emails and leaked documents that the CRU scientists tried to manipulate data through tortuous computer programs designed to always lower past temperature and adjust recent temperatures upward to convey the impression of accelerated warming.

Finally, the emails and documents reveals the ruthless way in which scientists who defend the faulty climate change data have attempted to intimidate into silence any expert who questions their findings and challenges the faulty methods used to reach their false conclusions. In much the same way Intelligent Design proponents were drummed out of the science of biology this handful of powerful influential scientists threatened to freeze out and fully discredit any scientific journal that published the findings of detractors. True scientific debate was stifled so a political face could be drawn on a scientific straw man.

The question is why. The answer is simple. When communism suffered the ultimate setback of the failure of the Soviet Union and the falling of the Berlin Wall its proponents simply scattered into the radical environmental movement. There, they were reborn as climate change gurus, who warned that apart from global government intervention the world would come to an end. Global government intervention means the shifting of wealth away from evil, polluting, carbon gas emitting, industrialized countries to third world countries and the submission of all countries to a U.N. backed treaty that will ultimately lead to the confiscation of private property and bankruptcy. This is the goal of the push to reach a climate change agreement this month in Copenhagen.

Maybe my grandmother was right. Not about the moon landing and wrestling but about her belief that “some people can make the facts say whatever they want them to say.”

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**Lawrence Solomon: Dirty climate data (National Post, 091205)

The data from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University — headquarters for Climategate — is now discredited. This discredits any findings by other research bodies that relied on the Climategate data.

How much falls from Climategate, whose participants read like a Who’s Who at the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change? Not much, says CRU’s disgraced director, Phil Jones, pointing out that CRU’s data for global temperatures is but one of several datasets, all in general agreement. Besides, many argue, CRU was no linchpin to the science. The IPCC relied on numerous other sources. Throw CRU out, they say, and the IPCC’s conclusions remain unshakable.

In truth, if you throw CRU out, you’ve eviscerated the findings of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, the most recent and most definite opus from the UN. This is the report, received with universal acclaim in 2007, which scarily stated: “The warming of the climate system is unequivocal.”

The argument over global warming requires evidence that the globe is warming in dangerous ways. This evidence the IPCC presents forcefully in its third chapter on surface and atmospheric warming, which rests overwhelmingly on the official global temperature record of the United Nations World Meteorological Organization, called the HADCRUT3 temperature dataset.

And who produced the HADCRUT3 dataset for the World Meteorological Organization? The Hadley Centre of the UK government’s meteorological office (the HAD of HADCRUT3) and the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (the CRU).

With HADCRUT3 in hand, the IPCC’s warming chapter confidently pronounced that “The rate of warming over the last 50 years is almost double that over the last 100 years,” that “2005 was one of the two warmest years on record,” and that “Changes in extremes of temperature are also consistent with warming of the climate.” With HADCRUT3, the co-authors of the IPCC warming chapter could show the temperatures going up, up, up.

Who were the IPCC co-authors who decided to use the HADCRUT3 temperature data? None other than two of the most questionable characters in the Climategate cast: the head of CRU, Phil Jones himself, and his cross-Atlantic correspondent, Kevin Trenberth, a lead author with the IPCC. Trenberth in 2004 also had a starring role in another noteworthy IPCC episode, held in the swirl of an active U.S. hurricane season. Not one to pass up an opportunity to sway the public to the urgency of global warming, Trenberth called a press conference to link global warming with hurricanes even though the IPCC’s own hurricane expert, Christopher Landsea, pleaded with Trenberth not to — the link of hurricanes and global warming had no basis in science.

If any chapter in the IPCC opus is more important than the warming chapter it is chapter nine, which concludes that man is the culprit “based on analyses of widespread temperature increases throughout the climate system and changes in other climate variables.” The source for the temperature data? HADCRUT3.

The centrality of HADCRUT3 data is no coincidence. The two British organizations, Hadley and CRU, have worked hand-in-glove since the Hadley Centre was created in 1989 by Margaret Thatcher. One year earlier, in a major address that established the UK’s early promotion of the global warming issue, Thatcher — a foe of the coal mining union and a fan of nuclear power — had pledged to tackle the greenhouse effect by replacing fossil fuels with nuclear power. She then promoted climate change science with funding and diplomacy, placing her people in senior positions at the nascent IPCC and elsewhere at the United Nations.

Hadley and CRU became major players in every IPCC report, in the World Meteorological Organization, in the IPCC’s iconic hockey-stick graph and in the UK government’s Stern Review that predicted economic calamity. In the minds of many, the Hadley-CRU datasets are the most authoritative source of global temperatures, both because their temperature records date back to 1850 and because they produced the first-ever synthesis of land and marine temperature data — the first truly global temperature record.

Except now we’re told that CRU disposed of the raw data some 20 years ago after it was manufactured into “homogenized” and “value added data.” The manufacturer 20 years ago? Another Climategate star, Tom Wigley, who was then the head of CRU.

But what of Phil Jones’s argument, that the Hadley and CRU datasets are nothing special. “Our global temperature series tallies with those of other, completely independent, groups of scientists working for NASA and the National Climate Data Centre in the United States, among others,” he says. “Even if you were to ignore our findings, theirs show the same results. The facts speak for themselves.”

The answer to Phil Jones comes from the Hadley Centre itself, through another fact that speaks for itself. “The datasets are largely based on the same raw data,” the FAQ page at the Hadley Centre website states, in explaining that NASA, the National Climate Data Center and Hadley-CRU all use the same data. The different results these organizations sometimes obtain, it elaborates, stems not from the data but from its absence — where the data is poor or non-existent, the different agencies employ different types of guesswork.

There is no unimpeachable raw data in which we can have confidence. There is a large cast of impeachable characters in the Climategate drama with an evident appetite for cooking the books.

And there are but two honest options for our governments to now employ. They can choose to redo the studies, with data, scientists, and a peer-review process that can be trusted. Or they can recognize that the IPCC process has been politicized from the start, and that the prima facie evidence for dangerous global warming does not meet the threshold required to prolong the scientific sham of the generation.

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**Lawrence Solomon: Even before Climategate, the public suspected fraud (National Post, 091204)

59% of Americans say it’s at least somewhat likely that some scientists have falsified research data to support their own theories and beliefs about global warming, according to a Rasmussen survey released yesterday. 35% say it’s Very Likely and just 26% say it’s not very or not at all likely that some scientists falsified data.

“This skepticism does not appear to be the result of the recent disclosure of e-mails confirming such data falsification as part of the so-called Climategate scandal,” notes Rasmussen. “Just 20% of Americans say they’ve followed news reports about those e-mails Very Closely, while another 29% have followed them Somewhat Closely.”

Rasmussen speculates that the UN’s credibility problem undermines the credibility of the scienctists associated with it. “One reason for this skepticism may be the role the United Nations has played in promoting the global warming issue. Only 22% of Americans consider the UN to be a reliable source of information on global warming. 49% disagree and say the international organization is not reliable on that topic. 29% aren’t sure.”

The Rasmussen survey also finds just 25% of Americans believe most scientists agree on global warming.

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**Terence Corcoran: Climatism and the new green industrial state (National Post, 091021)

Industry, government and NGOs are creating a new political model

By Terence Corcoran

One of the big green lies about global warming science and climate change policy is that the issues are vicious battlegrounds between corporate interests and environmentalists. David Suzuki has been pushing this idea for years, at times going so far as to claim that the National Post and some of its editors/writers are corporate pawns and shills for big business’s anti-climate change agenda. One of Mr. Suzuki’s associates and chairman of the Suzuki Foundation, Jim Hoggan, operates a blog site and has a new book dedicated to the corporate-manipulation theme. Mr. Hoggan claims there exists a concerted public relations assault on climate science and policy that “could not be accomplished without the compliance of media as well as the assent and participation of leaders in government and business.” He talks of “a global PR machine that is too often in the service of special interests and too little concerned about the public interest.”

Let us now return to reality, where this idiot’s guide to climate policy making doesn’t survive 24-hours’ worth of news reports and press releases. The daily news flow is packed with evidence to the contrary and proof that the opposite is true: Big business and the globe’s greatest corporate powers are marching in lock step with governments and environmentalists to impose climate policy on the world and its people. At the Copenhagen climate conference in December, no group looks forward more fervently than big business to a global carbon control agreement filled with firm targets, big tax increases and massive subsidies for special interests all over the world.

If there’s a corporate-driven global PR machine, it’s firmly on the side of climate control, grinding out one corporate climate agenda after another, an avalanche of business-government co-operation the likes of which the world has never seen. And smack in the middle of this global PR machine, shifting the gears and greasing the wheels, are the world’s leading environmentalists and green NGOs: The World Wildlife Fund, David Suzuki, the Sierra Club, Environmental Defence, Forest Ethics, the Pembina Institute and many more. Together with industry, they pressure government in the creation of the green industrial state.

The shape of the green industrial state rises out of a not-so-attractive place in history. The two great theories of modern statism are part of the recent past: Communism has been dead for two decades, discredited with the fall of the Soviet Union; and full-blown fascism, with government in total control of a subservient corporate private economy, has been a non-starter since 1945. What we have now rising out of the ashes to fill the void is climatism.

Signs of climatism are everywhere. Here’s news yesterday from the Forest Products Association of Canada, whose president, Avrim Lazar, threw Canada’s forest firms behind a World Wildlife Fund campaign to stop global deforestation. Claiming Canada has no “net” deforestation — which means Canada does deforest, but offsets it by planting trees — Mr. Lazar said deforestation accounts for almost 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Could it be that Mr. Lazar’s forest firms are looking for other governments to take action that would favour Canadian industry?

On Tuesday, another green corporatist group — the Canadian ENGO-Industry Cap-and-Trade Dialogue — issued a final statement calling on the Canadian government to jump-start a national cap-and-trade carbon regime that would make no exceptions, for instance, for Canada’s rapidly expanding oil sands industry. The group’s members are a rogues gallery middlemen, energy consumers and green activists: The David Suzuki Foundation, Dow Canada, DuPont Canada, Environmental Defence, Forest Ethics, Pembina Institute, Royal Bank of Canada, Rio Tinto, Sierra Club of Canada, the Toronto-Dominion Bank and the World Wildlife Fund.

Looks like Jim Hoggan, chair of the Suzuki Foundation, is in bed with a mess of powerful corporations to promote their private interests so they can cash in on climate policy. The group also said it agreed with “the broad scientific view that the increase in global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed 2 degrees C.” Oh really. Did the Royal Bank’s risk department conduct the appropriate scientific assessment to determine the logic of global temperatures? Did they assess the risk of the bank being sucked into a perilous carbon trading market, carbon being a likely global investment bubble? Or is the bank just keen to rake in the billions that could be made trading credits and doling out loans to fund carbon credit purchases?

Corporate fingerprints, smudged with government and green group participation, is nowhere more evident than in the climate-driven rush into renewable energy. In Ontario, the list of corporations supporting and circling the province’s new Green Energy Act is an appalling demonstration of climatism run amok. From TransCanada to GE, from wind farm developers to solar panel makers, it’s a corporatist free for all. All have joined forces with David Suzuki, Environmental Defence and other green groups in cahoots with government to install a regime that looks all to much like a giant swindle. Mr. Suzuki’s image, and his video support for their cause, is a fixture on the Ontario green energy web site.

The model for Ontario’s green renewable schemes is Germany, where climatism is well advanced and where solar and wind power programs — fuelled by the same feed-in tariffs proposed for Ontario — has created an economic fiasco. A new study, “Economic impacts from the promotion of renewable energies: The German experience,” published this month by the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Institut in Essen, Germany, found tens of billions had been wasted, consumers gouged, and carbon emissions essentially unchanged.

Also exposed in the German study (summarized elsewhere on this page) is the myth of “green jobs” from renewables. In Ontario, Rick Smith, head of Environmental Defence and a prominent front-man for renewable programs, boasted that since Germany created 250,000 green jobs, Ontario would create 50,000 green jobs. But Germany’s job creation is doubtful. The institute report said Germany created 50,000 jobs at most — but at a cost of $240,000 per job.

Renewable energy may well be the best demonstration yet of the folly of climatism. But there is much more to come, at Copenhagen and beyond. Last week, to pick one example, a Canadian green business summit boasted Walmart, Maple Leaf Foods, Coca-Cola Bottling, McDonald’s, Home Depot as leaders, with a keynote speech by David Suzuki titled, “Business, like every other sector in society, must understand that being green is about sustainability.” He’ll be speaking to the converted.

Formal state corporatism is unmarketable as a political model, but green industrial statism looks like a winner.

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**Lawrence Solomon: Climate change dominoes fall (National Post, 091016)

By Lawrence Solomon

Australians are the latest citizenry to turn against climate change catastrophism. For the first time, according to a Lowy poll released this week, a majority of the population turned thumbs down to the proposition that “global warming is a serious and pressing problem. We should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs.” This rejection applied to younger segments of the population as well as old, especially disappointing to Australian decision makers, given their efforts to indoctrinate youths through the educational system.

Last year, 60% of the populace bought into global warming fears and in 2006, the figure was 68%.

Neither did Aussies view tackling global warming as particularly important. When compared to other foreign policy issues, such as illegal immigration, protecting jobs, combating terrorism, strengthening the United Nations, or protecting Australians living abroad, climate change fared miserably. In fact, of the 10 foreign policy issues the poll cited, only “promoting democracy in other countries” was deemed less of a priority.

The Australian results come the same week that the United Kingdom’s Department of Energy and Climate Change released a survey showing most Britons do not fear harm from climate change. Until last week, the government had kept up a brave face, refusing to acknowledge that its relentless efforts over decades to convince the public of the need for action on climate change had failed.

With Copenhagen fast approaching, the government has decided to pull out all the stops with an unprecedented prime time TV ad campaign to turn public opinion around. “The survey results show that people don’t realize that climate change is already under way and could have severe consequences,” Joan Ruddock, the Energy and Climate Change Minister explained in justifying the need for her aggressive campaign. The £6-million ad campaign showing scenes of devastation through animation — flooding, drowning animals and humans, a sign that reads “The World’s End” — fittingly premiered on the night-time soap opera, Coronation Street, with an ad entitled “Bedtime stories.”

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**8 Extreme Solutions to Global Warming (Foxnews, 091204)

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

While the politicians fiddle in Copenhagen, many believe the only way to solve the global warming problem is to take radical, creative new steps, deploying new technologies to tweak the temperature.

Over the past few years scientists have offered up some extreme measures — from carbon-capturing rocks to space nets — that could solve the crisis. Some focus on reducing or capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, which trap the heat on Earth, while other solutions are aimed at cooling the planet by preventing some of the sun’s rays from hitting its surface.

We’ve rounded up eight of the most innovative — or at least the strangest — ideas that are currently getting attention.

1. Spray It Away

The Idea: Remember how we all had to stop spraying ozone-depleting aerosols into the atmosphere? Maybe it’s time to re-think that.

A proposal known as stratospheric aerosol insertion suggests that chemicals — sulfur dioxide, in this case — sprayed into the Earth’s nearest atmospheric levels could bind with other chemicals to reflect sunlight from the Earth. Helium balloons or high-flying planes could disperse the sulfur dioxide. The gas would oxidize and reflect back some (but not all) of the sunlight that would otherwise hit the planet’s surface. Less sunlight hitting the surface means a cooler earth.

The sulfur would be cheap; it’s a common industrial pollutant. According to the Council on Foreign Relations, one kilogram of the stuff could offset the effect of hundreds of thousands of kilograms of carbon dioxide.

Potential Problems: It could end up working too well, causing catastrophic weather changes in certain areas (such as sudden droughts). One scientist proposed trying it over the Arctic first, just in case things got a little too chilly.

The concept also involves using one pollutant to offset another — very tricky business indeed, especially when it’s explained that stratospheric aerosol insertion creates sulfuric acid and would contribute to ozone depletion — the problem we licked a few years ago by banning CFCs.

2. Use Sunscreen

The Idea: We use sunscreen every day (or we should). Why not use the same principal on the Earth?

Like something out of ‘Star Trek,’ the concept is to build a giant screen made of criss-crossing aluminum strands and put it into space. The screen would act like a filter, preventing some infrared radiation from reaching the planet.

As wacky as the idea sounds, it’s been promoted by scientists like Lowell Wood (one of the original Reagan-era Star Wars supporters) and “Whole Earth Catalog” founder Stewart Brand. Proponents claim the screen would appear as a tiny spot on the sun as viewed from the earth and that it wouldn’t affect plant growth, which of course consumes CO2 themselves.

Potential Problems: A sunscreen is a last ditch effort. Building such a screen — an estimated 600,000 square miles in size — launching it into space and maneuvering it into a precise, gravity-neutral location between the sun and Earth may be beyond our current means. After all, we don’t even have a working Space Shuttle replacement yet.

3. Scrub Like the Wind

The Idea: How about developing a giant air filter, like the HEPA filters used in homes and offices, to take the carbon dioxide out of the air?

The concept works, in theory. Like a huge radiator filled with chemicals instead of water, such filters could catch CO2 from the air and bind it with chemicals in the filter. Later, the carbon dioxide would be stripped from the chemicals and stored, hopefully nearby to avoid issues of transporting the compressed carbon.

Potential Problems: Testing the theory on a large scale is difficult. No one is sure how many filters you would need to make a significant impact (how many thousands of acres of land would need to covered with giant filters?). And there’s the issue of separating the CO2 from the capturing chemicals: This would take a significant amount of energy, which in turn produces more CO2.

4. Plant Fake Trees

The Idea: Trees are superb at absorbing carbon dioxide, but what if we could build a better tree, at least one that could capture even more carbon dioxide?

A synthetic tree with plastic leaves could attract CO2 (much like smokestack filters or those wind scrubbers), then trap and compress the carbon dioxide to be stored in a harmless location. These fake trees wouldn’t need direct sunlight, so they could be installed anywhere (not just in some forsaken place in the Midwest or desert). With the right design, fake trees could also work 1,000 times faster than the real thing.

Potential Problems: Fake trees wouldn’t look like real trees (although they could be hidden indoors). Then there’s that nagging problem of what to do with captured carbon dioxide. Several proposals to use it to enhance vegetable production or in jet fuel look too costly. The most difficult problem, however, is the same one that bedevils the idea of wind-scrubbing filters: it takes too much energy to separate the carbon from the filtering chemicals.

5. Needs More Salt

The Idea: Clouds protect the earth from overheating, so more clouds would be good, right?

The concept is reasonably sound. Clouds do help protect the Earth, so some scientists have proposed creating more clouds by blowing salt into the air. That would increase the chances of water vapor clinging to particles (the salt) and forming clouds. Salted clouds are also whiter and therefore would reflect more sunlight back into space, cooling the planet.

But how to get salt into the air? Some suggest computer-guided sailboats to create giant plumes of sea spray. The boats would use little energy, because they would be largely powered by the wind. And the idea wouldn’t expose us to much climate risk: If extra clouds started creating hurricanes and tropical storms, for example, the process could be shut down simply by stopping the boats.

Potential Problems: No one knows how many boats it would take or if the idea would even work — cloud seeding has been notoriously unpredictable, after all. Plus the salt crystals from the evaporating sea water might be too small to form clouds.

6. Needs More Iron

The Idea: It has been demonstrated on a small scale that iron powder dumped into the ocean promotes the rapid growth of plankton. Plankton eats CO2, so the more the better.

Iron fertilization was tried in the Southern Ocean near the Antarctic, and based on those results it’s estimated that we could at the very least offset 1,000 pounds of carbon emissions for as little as 10 cents. The low cost is what makes this idea so attractive.

Potential Problems: There just one problem, but it’s a biggie: Large plankton blooms can destroy the underwater ecosystem, killing off other species as it consumes other nutrients. Without natural resources from the sea, we’d really be in a pickle.

7. Get Stoned

The idea: Limestone (aka calcium carbonate) actually contains trapped carbon dioxide. So why not turn carbon dioxide into stone?

It takes nature thousands of years to harden chemicals into stones, but scientists think they could do it in a very short time using a process called mineral carbonation. In this approach, carbon dioxide is compressed, heated and then mixed with a mineral such as serpentine or olivine and a chemical catalyst to form limestone-like rock. The end product would be harmless and might even be used as a building material.

Potential Problems: We would have to mine significant amounts of minerals to mix with the carbon dioxide for mineral carbonation to work, and mining has an environmental impact of its own. And heating the mixture to the high temperatures required would take — you guessed it — more CO2-producing energy. Ultimately, the cost may be prohibitive: an estimated $70 per 1 ton of carbon dioxide.

8. Push the CO2 Underground

The Idea: We have lots of cheap coal, but it’s the biggest polluter of CO2. Why not filter it out and then pump it underground to store it? Better still, why not pump it into places where we’re trying to push oil out of the ground?

This is the principal concept behind the so-called clean coal movement, and at least one such program is still being studied: the Weyburn Project in Saskatchewan, Canada. Researchers there have already shoved millions of tons of CO2 underground and say that if similar projects were initiated around the world, underground reservoirs could trap 200,000 gigatons of CO2; worldwide annual emissions are only 28 gigatons.

Potential Problems: Governments, researchers, and major companies around the world are racing to try to make such a system work. But so far the approach has proven too costly. The gas has to be captured, compressed, and then transported safely to the site of injection. And what if it escapes years from now? Trapped in cellars, carbon dioxide could be more lethal than radon.

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**WEA: Climate Change Not Controversial Among Non-U.S. Evangelicals (Christian Post, 091118)

WASHINGTON – Unlike in the United States, there is little controversy among evangelicals around the world on whether climate change is real, said an evangelical representative at a press briefing on Capitol Hill.

“They know it is real,” said Deborah Fikes, executive advisor of the World Evangelical Alliance – a global alliance of churches in 128 nations and over 100 international organizations. But in the United States, many evangelicals deny climate change is real because they are “self-absorbed” and “lack [the] spiritual will” to change their lifestyle to help solve a problem that is life threatening, she said.

Fikes was a member of the delegation of evangelical leaders and leading climate scientists that briefed top White House advisors and U.S. Senate offices Tuesday about climate change. The self-described odd partners urged lawmakers to put aside their differences, as they had, and quickly act to address the climate change problem.

Pastor Joel C. Hunter of the Florida megachurch Northland, A Church Distributed, touched on what Fikes said about the “inconvenient truth” of climate change to American evangelicals.

“We are the most unlikely characters” to take action on climate change, said Hunter, who noted his church members are mostly white and wealthy. “We are the most difficult to convince because we have an idea that if there are changes we will be the most likely to be able to insulate our lives.”

But despite the challenges, the pastor said his church has taken action to spread awareness and address climate change by: watching movies about the issue, doing an audit of expenditures that could lower the church’s carbon footprint, hosting energy expos, and listing the changes congregants can make in their personal lifestyle.

Commending such efforts, Fikes commented, “We are encouraged that there are rapidly growing numbers of churches in America who understand that they are the key to solving these problems.”

But while some evangelicals are vocal supporters of efforts to stop climate change, others are skeptical and have described global warming as “hype.”

Nearly 100 conservative Christians, many of which were evangelicals, argued last year that there is no hard evidence that climate change is as devastating as mainstream media and society claims. The group – which included Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family, Dr. Barrett Duke of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and radio host Janet Parshall – said while they agree that humans are responsible to take care of God’s creation, policy changes meant to alleviate climate change could do more damage than good.

“The number of premature deaths, number of diseases, and the harm to the human economy that can be predicted from the policies used to fight the warming” is more destructive than even if all the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)-predicted global warming-caused disasters came true,” argued Dr. E. Calvin Beisner, founder and national spokesman for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, at the launch of the “We Get It!” campaign last May.

But the Harvard and Smithsonian scientists at Tuesday’s panel discussion were adamant that climate change is real and mainly caused by human activities.

Nancy Knowlton, who is a marine science expert at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, said a third of all corals in the world are currently in danger of extinction because of the effects of climate change. Knowlton explained that corals are important because about one out of three of all ocean species are somehow associated with corals and they provide coastline protection.

“The decisions we are making today not only affect tomorrow because carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for decades and sometimes centuries; it affects not only ourselves, our children and grandchildren but literally our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren,” Knowlton said. “So these are incredibly important and long-term decisions that we are making.”

While the delegation spoke strongly on the U.S. government taking bolder action on climate change, it clarified that it does not recommend or take position on policies.

The evangelical-scientist briefing with U.S. lawmakers came weeks before a key U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the world’s governments will discuss setting limits for greenhouse emissions.

“If we scientists and evangelicals can put aside whatever differences we may have to find solutions to protect the global environment, then surely so can our elected officials, and we would urge them to do so starting now,” said Eric Chivian, the Harvard Medical School scientist who organized the coalition with the Rev. Richard Cizik.

Chivian and Cizik [KH: known for his liberal positions on social issues, cannot be trusted], former vice president for government affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, formed the alliance in 2007 after discovering their shared concern about the issue. The two quickly assembled evangelical leaders and top scientists to work together to find solutions to the climate change problem. The idea was that scientists would provide the latest facts and information about climate change while evangelical leaders would influence the American people by informing them what scientists have found and calling on them to change their lifestyle.

Tuesday’s evangelical-scientist event was the 22nd briefing of its kind on climate change.

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**Peter Foster: Climatism is more than a belief system (National Post, 091110)

By Peter Foster

The case of fired British “sustainability official” Tim Nicholson has attracted much interest. That’s because Mr. Nicholson is pursuing redress from his former employer, home developer Grainger plc, under the UK’s Employment Equality (Religion and Belief) Regulations of 2003. He claims he was fired for his convictions about catastrophic man-made climate change.

Horrified commentators on both left and right have suggested that environmentalism will now be established as a religion. Environmentalists are none too keen on this notion, true though it may be, because it undermines their assertion that their case is based on pure science (which is Mr. Nicholson’s position). Business supporters suggest that a victory by Mr. Nicholson will force the cost of quasi-religious green irrationality onto the bottom line.

Mr. Nicholson seems to have been one of those souls who had a personal environmental epiphany (just like Al Gore) after which he started to lay off meat and travel by fold-up bicycle. He is certainly not outside the green mainstream in eco-renovating his house, trying to buy local produce, and composting his food waste. Above all he fears for “the future of the human race given the failure to reduce carbon emissions on a global scale.” He sought, inevitably, to carry his crusade into the company, but claims that Grainger didn’t like the extent of this commitment, refused to give him the information he needed to do his job, and treated his concerns with “contempt.”

I hope everybody is sitting down, because I’m on Mr. Nicholson’s side.

The overlooked issue here is not irrational Gaian convictions and whether they should be considered as tantamount to religion. They should. The issue is why companies would employ individuals whose job titles specifically indicate that they are agents of a subversive concept.

Sustainable Development, which sprung fully-armed from the fretful socialist head of the UN’s Brundtland Commission, is indeed a religion, and it has a devil: capitalism. It thus seems suicidal for any company to accommodate it, let alone embrace it. It has no workable definition except for the feel good notion of “looking after the future.” It explicitly rejects free markets as leading to resource exhaustion and environmental destruction. As such it is not based on science, much less economics, but on primitive pre-market assumptions, which just happen to be very useful to prospective “global governors.”

A National Post editorial on Monday suggested that workplace anarchy would result if employees could veto their employers on the basis of claiming “This isn’t the way David Suzuki would do it.”

But unfortunately corporations have been moving closer to Generally Accepted Suzuki Principles (GASP) for years.

Radical Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery is a self-confessed, self-appointed high priest of an Earth Goddess he claims needs to be “served.” He also heads the Copenhagen Climate Council, whose members include some of the largest corporations in the world.

Grainger’s website — like those of most corporations — makes a good deal of its environmental stewardship, and all the recycling and re-using it does in the course of its operations. It buys “certified” wood. It works with charities. One of its objectives for 2008/2009 was to identify a “network of sustainability champions ... to develop environmental initiatives.”

But none of this was enough for Mr. Nicholson, who claimed that his employer’s commitment was hypocritical. Above all, his philosophical problems arose over the sin of carbon emissions.

Grainger’s website indicates that it monitors these emissions and wants to minimize its “carbon footprint,” but Mr. Nicholson has outed its executives for driving big cars, and its CEO, Rupert Dickinson, for having his BlackBerry flown to him after he left it at the office. Mr. Nicholson, who refuses to fly, says he was terminated for such “beliefs.” Grainger says he was let go because of the state of the economy. Now it will be up to a tribunal to decide.

The question of the employment implications of Mr. Nicholson’s convictions is a matter for the law. A more intriguing question is: Was Mr. Nicholson an over-the-top sustainability manager? How would one know? Sustainability has no operational definition. It is an open-ended invitation to outside interference in corporate activity, so corporations can hardly complain when it bites them.

The spread of SD, like that of its equally subversive sister concept, “Corporate Social Responsibility,” is yet another indication of companies’ willingness to go with the flow of a public opinion formed by their enemies. They do this in a fit of abstraction, or from hypocrisy, fear, or genuine naivete. After all, who doesn’t want to be responsible and sustainable? But in appointing vice presidents of CSR or SD, they are taking on board champions of an ultimately suicidal thrust. That’s because Climatism is not just a belief system, it is an activist belief system. It demands not merely repentance of carbon sin, but jihad against the emitting infidels.

Grainger’s defence, apart from claiming that Mr. Nicholson was fired for business reasons, was that his position is in fact “political.” It’s that too, but shouldn’t they have noticed that when they hired someone to support the anti-business opiate of the chattering classes?

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**Inconvenient Truth for Gore as Arctic Ice Claims Don’t Add Up (Foxnews, 091215)

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was hit by an inconvenient one yesterday.

The former vice president, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” became entangled in a new climate change row.

Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years.

In his speech, Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr. [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

However, the climatologist whose work Gore was relying upon dropped the former vice president in the water with an icy blast.

“It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr. Maslowski said. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

Gore’s office later admitted that the 75% figure was one used by Dr. Maslowski as a “ballpark figure” several years ago in a conversation with Gore.

The embarrassing error cast another shadow over the conference after the controversy over the hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, which appeared to suggest that scientists had manipulated data to strengthen their argument that human activities were causing global warming.

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**Junk Science: The Global Warming Bubble (Foxnews, 080320)

You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist in the 1990s to figure out that speculative investment in dot-coms with no revenues would be disastrous.

The same goes for lenders giving mortgages to borrowers with no jobs, no incomes and no assets.

So after surviving the tech bubble and while trying to extricate the economy from the housing bubble, why are we bent on heading into the global warming bubble?

Just this week the Environmental Protection Agency issued its economic analysis of the Lieberman-Warner global warming bill that is being considered by the Senate. The EPA projects that if the bill is enacted the size of our economy as measured by its gross domestic product would shrink by as much as $2.9 trillion by the year 2050.

That’s a 6.9% smaller economy than we otherwise might have if no action were taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For an idea of what that might mean, consider our current economic crisis.

During the fourth quarter of 2007, GDP actually increased by 0.6%, yet trepidation still spread among businesses, consumers and the financial markets. Though the EPA says that Lieberman-Warner would send our economy in the opposite direction by more than a factor of 10, few in Congress seem concerned.

For more perspective, consider that during 1929 and 1930, the first two years of the Great Depression, GDP declined by 8.6% and 6.4%, respectively. And what would we get for such a massive self-inflicted wound? It ought to be something that is climatically spectacular, right? You be the judge.

The EPA says that by the year 2095 — 45 years after GDP has been slashed by 6.9% — atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would be 25 parts per million lower than if no greenhouse gas regulation were implemented.

Keeping in mind that the current atmospheric CO2 level is 380 ppm and the projected 2095 CO2 level is about 500 ppm, according to the EPA, what are the potential global temperature implications for such a slight change in atmospheric CO2 concentration?

Not much, as average global temperature would only be reduced by a maximum of about 0.10 to 0.20 degrees Celsius, according to existing research.

Sacrificing many trillions of dollars of GDP for a trivial, 45-year-delayed and merely hypothetical reduction in average global temperature must be considered as exponentially more asinine than the dot-bombs of the late-1990s and the NINJA subprime loans that we now look upon scornfully.

So who in their right mind would push for this?

I met many of them up-close-and-personal last week at a major Wall Street Journal conference at which I was an invited speaker. My fellow speakers included many CEOs (from General Electric, Wal-Mart, Duke Energy and Dow Chemical, to name just a few), California’s Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the heads of several environmental activist groups.

The audience — a sold-out crowd of hundreds who had to apply to be admitted and pay a $3,500 fee — consisted of representatives of the myriad businesses that seek to make a financial killing from climate alarmism.

There were representatives of the solar, wind and biofuel industries that profit from taxpayer mandates and subsidies, representatives from financial services companies that want to trade permits to emit CO2, and public relations and strategic consultants to all of the above.

We libertarians would call such an event a rent-seekers ball — the vast majority of the audience was there to plot how they could lock in profits from government mandates on taxpayers and consumers. It was an amazing collection of pseudo-entrepreneurs who were absolutely impervious to the scientific and economic facts that ought to deflate the global warming bubble.

In the interlude between presentations by the CEOs of Dow Chemical and Duke Energy, for example, the audience was shown a slide — similar to this one — of the diverging relationship between atmospheric CO2 levels and average global temperature since 1998.

That slide should have caused jaws to drop and audience members to ponder why anyone is considering regulating CO2 emissions in hopes of taming global climate. Instead, it was as if the audience did a collective blink and missed the slide entirely. When I tried to draw attention to the slide during my presentation, it was as if I were speaking in a foreign dialect.

The only conclusion I could come to was that the audience is so steeped in anticipation of climate profiteering that there is no fact that will cause them to reconsider whether or not manmade global warming is a reality. The callousness of their blind greed was also on display at the conference.

In an instantaneous poll, the Wall Street Journal asked the audience to select the most pressing societal problem from a list of five that included infectious disease (malaria, AIDs, etc.), terrorism and global warming. Global warming was the most popular response, receiving 31% of the vote, while infectious disease was far behind in last place with only 3% of the vote.

It’s an amazing result given that billions are sickened and millions die every year from infectious disease. The consequences of future global warming, on the other hand, are entirely speculative.

Finally, I was astounded by the double-speak practiced by the global warmers. Virtually every speaker at the conference professed that they were either in favor of free markets or that they supported a free-market solution to global warming. But invariably in their next breath, they would plead for government regulation of greenhouse gases and government subsidies for alternative energy.

It’s hard to conceive of any good coming from a public policy in which facts play no substantial role in its development and words have no meaning in its public debate.

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**Climate alarmism hits a brick wall (National Post, 071218)

Benny Peiser

The success of the major Anglosphere nations at last week’s United Nations climate conference in Bali marks the beginning of the end of the age of climate hysteria. It also symbolizes a significant shift of political leadership in international climate diplomacy from the once-dominating European continent to North America and its Western allies.

This power shift has perhaps never been more transparent and dramatic than in Bali, when Australia’s Labour government, under the newly elected Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, announced a complete U-turn on the thorny issue of mandatory carbon dioxide emissions targets. Only days after Australia’s delegation had backed Europe’s demand for a 25% to 40% cut in emission by 2020, Mr. Rudd declared (his signature under the Kyoto Protocol wasn’t even dry) that his government would not support such targets after all.

Indeed, Australia’s position hardened further when Trade Minister Simon Crean announced that developing countries like China and India would have to accept tough binding emissions targets before Australia would ever agree to any post-Kyoto agreement beyond 2012.

Similar stipulations were made by Canada and Japan. Surprisingly, even the British government appeared to deviate from the European Union position when Britain’s Trade and Development Minister, Gareth Thomas, told the BBC that developing countries would also be required to accept targets for CO2 emissions.

Rather than being isolated, the decision by the United States and Canada to take the lead in international energy and climate diplomacy appears to have galvanized key allies, who are gradually rallying around a much tougher stance vis-a-vis China and India.

In Bali, the Anglosphere nations have in effect drawn a red line in the sand: Unless developing countries agree to mandatory emissions cuts themselves, much of the Western world will henceforth reject any unilateral burden imposed by future climate deals.

As a consequence, the so-called Bali road map adopted last Saturday has shifted the pressure further on to developing nations to share responsibility for CO2 emissions, a move that is widely regarded as a significant departure from the Kyoto Protocol.

For the first time, there are now firm demands for developing nations to tackle CO2 emissions by taking “actions in a measurable, reportable, and verifiable” way. There can be little doubt that the words adopted in Bali herald increasing pressure on China and India to accept mandatory emissions targets.

Australia’s public endorsement of this line of attack attests to the fact that the West’s climate strategy no longer depends on party politics. Nobody has made this new reality more obvious in recent days than Democratic U.S. Senator John Kerry. Speaking to reporters at the Bali meeting, he notified the international community that a rejection by China and other emerging economies to cut their own greenhouse gases would make it almost impossible for any U.S. administration to get a new global climate treaty through the U.S. Senate — “even under a Democratic president.”

Yet, neither China nor India will be able to agree to any emissions cuts in the foreseeable future. While their CO2 emissions are expected to rise rapidly over the next 20 to 30 years, there is simply nothing in the world of alternative energy or clean technology existing today that has the capacity to arrest this upwards trend. Any forceful attempts, on the other hand, to rein in the dramatically rising energy consumption in almost all of Asia would, inescapably, trigger economic turmoil, social disorder and political chaos.

In Bali, more than perhaps ever before, climate alarmism has finally hit the solid brick wall of political reality. It’s a reality that won’t go away or be changed any time soon. After more than 20 years of green ascendancy on the world stage, green politicians and climate campaigners are for the first time faced with a conundrum that looks as impenetrable as squaring the circle.

Reflecting on this predicament and the results of the Bali conference, Germany’s former foreign secretary, my old friend Joschka Fischer, declared that nothing short of divine intervention would be required to reach a post-Kyoto agreement by 2009, in face of insurmountable obstacles.

“Perhaps something will happen in the meantime, something that does not normally happen in politics, namely a small miracle. After all, given past experiences, one must fear that international climate policy won’t probably advance without the direct intervention of higher powers.”

That Europe’s most famous and most eminent green politician is prepared and desperate enough to publicly call for heavenly support is a strong indication that the age of climate alarmism is now being gradually replaced by fatalism. That’s what the encounter with a brick wall tends to do to hot-heads. One can only hope that a period of sobering up from green dreams and delusions will provide political leaders with the prerequisite for a realistic, pragmatic and most of all a manageable approach to climate change.

— - Benny Peiser is the editor of CCNet, an international science-policy network.

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**Climate Change Rallies, Realities, and Sacrifices (townhall.com, 071218)

By Paul Driessen

The mantra is repeated daily. There is consensus on climate change. Global warming is real. It will be a disaster. Humans are to blame. We have to do something – immediately.

However, the consensus of 100 scientists is undone by one fact, Albert Einstein noted. The United Nations and its Climate Cataclysm army of 15,000 in exotic Bali clearly understood that.

They were not about to let even one fact prevent them from promoting climate scares and a successor to the Kyoto treaty. Gloom-and-doom scientists and bureaucrats owned Bali’s podiums. Radical environmentalists fumed and staged stunts. Al Gore denounced President Bush, repeated myths that enthralled the Academy and Nobel committees, and demanded sacrifices – by others.

Meanwhile, respected climate scientists were barred from panel discussions, censored, silenced and threatened with physical removal by polizei, if they tried to hold a press conference to present peer-reviewed evidence on climate, such as:

Climate change is natural and recurrent. The human factor is small compared to that of the sun and other natural forces. There has been no overall global warming since 1998, and most local and regional warming trends have been offset by nearby cooling. A half-degree of net warming since 1900 (amid a number of ups and downs) does not foreshadow a catastrophe. Recent glacial retreats, sea-level rise and migrations of temperature sensitive species are all within the bounds of known natural variability.

The best approach is to adapt, as our ancestors did. Money and resources devoted to futile climate prevention actions would be better spent on malaria, AIDS, poverty and other pressing problems. Perhaps most important, no country can progress or prosper without abundant, reliable, affordable energy that would be in short supply if draconian climate laws are implemented.

UN alarmists would not tolerate such heresies. They blamed every regional weather and climate blip on human emissions, and trotted out computer scenarios that they insist “prove” we must take drastic actions to avert Armageddon.

But computer models do a poor job of incorporating our still poor grasp of complex and turbulent oceanic, atmospheric and solar processes. They are based on conjecture about future technologies and emissions, and cannot predict climate shifts even one year in the future, much less 50 or 100. They simply produce “scenarios” and “projections” of what might happen under assorted assumptions – enabling alarmists to trumpet the most alarming outputs to support drastic action.

Those scenarios are evidence of climate chaos the way “Jurassic Park” proves dinosaurs can be cloned from DNA trapped in prehistoric amber.

However, Bali negotiators insisted that the world faces a climate crisis that can be averted only by slashing greenhouse gas emissions. Ultimately, they could agreed only to “deep cuts” by 2050, with definitions to be written later by countries that are not about to commit economic suicide. Many environmentalists and members of Congress nonetheless continue to demand CO2 reductions of up to 40% below current emission levels by 2020 – and 80% or more by 2050.

It’ll be easy, they insist. Rubbish, Even a 25-40% reduction over the next twelve years would impose major sacrifices on families, workers and communities, especially poor ones – while leaving no room for population or economic growth.

Fossil fuels provide 85% of the energy we use. Slashing emissions by even 25% means slashing the use of these fuels, paying vastly more to control and sequester emissions, and radically altering lifestyles and living standards. Families will do so voluntarily, or under mandatory rationing systems, enforced by EPA, courts, climate police and “patriotic” snitches. Getting beyond 25% would require a “radical transformation” of life as we know it.

Senator Joe Lieberman admits his “climate protection” bill would cost the United States “hundreds of billions” of dollars. Economist Arthur Laffer calculates that “cap-and-trade” schemes would reduce economic growth and penalize average American families $10,800 in lost income by 2020.

That’s on top of the $2000 in higher energy costs that US families have endured since 1998 – and the 11% extra that USA Today says average households will pay this winter compared to a year ago. Higher energy costs will increase the price of everything we eat, drive, buy and do.

Reaching or exceeding 25% targets could require transformations like these.

o Parking your car – and riding a bike. You’d get to work and the grocery in better shape – and guilt-free if you don’t exhale.

o Disconnecting air conditioners and setting thermostats to 50 degrees all winter. Swim suits and UnderArmor are excellent substitutes.

o Eating all leftovers. Seattle has decreed that by 2009 single-family homes must recycle all table scraps – because their decomposition generates greenhouse gases – or have their garbage collection terminated.

o Shutting down coal and gas power plants, and replacing them with new nuclear plants or forests of gargantuan wind turbines. Blanketing Connecticut with turbines could meet New York City’s electricity needs, and covering Texas and Louisiana could satisfy US needs, at least when the wind is blowing, says Rockefeller University professor Jesse Ausubel.

o Closing paper mills and factories. Perhaps newly unemployed workers could find jobs in China and other developing countries, where the tough emission standards won’t apply – or in the new carbon-free economy that politicians promise will arise once climate bills are enacted.

o Closing dairy and poultry farms. Producing meat accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions, so this would make both greens and PETA happy.

o Adopting “sustainable green technologies,” like the treadle-powered irrigation pumps environmentalists are sending to poor countries, to replace diesel pumps. An Indian villager toiling on his eco-bicycle for three years could offset the CO2 from one jetliner full of environmentalists heading to Bali.

An appropriately green solution would be requiring that climate confabs be via video-conference – from Albania or Zambia, to discourage attendance by bureaucrats and activists. We might also insist that politicians eschew private jets and take Smart Cars to campaign and global warming rallies.

Meanwhile, China is adding the equivalent of another Germany every year to global greenhouse emissions, says climatologist Roger Pielke. Thus, if CO2 really does cause climate change, all these sacrifices might prevent global temperatures from rising 0.2 degrees.

Adapting to whatever heat, cold, floods, droughts and storms nature (or mankind) might bring seems a much saner and less costly course of action.

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**A new call to reason (National Post, 071213)

Terence Corcoran, National Post

Two days ago, the following e-mail circulated from the Alliance for Climate Protection, an Al Gore activist group.

From: “Al Gore, Alliance for Climate Protection” Subject: 48 Hours

Dear Friend,

In less than forty-eight hours, I will step on stage at the UN Climate Conference in Bali. With me I will bring hundreds of thousands of messages demanding a visionary global treaty be completed and brought into effect by 2010. If we want to solve the climate crisis, we need to demonstrate the broad public support for action together. That’s why it is vital you sign our petition right now ...

Only two days remain before I deliver your messages to the delegates meeting in Bali. Over the past few days, more than 174,612 people have added their voices. Don’t miss this incredible opportunity to demonstrate your support for a visionary global treaty to end the climate crisis. Thank you, Al Gore”

By the time you read this, Al Gore will already have made his presentation to IPCC delegates, no doubt attracting global coverage from the thousands of media reps combing for nits of news at an event that offers little. By early last night, the Gore petition had accumulated 239,150 names. A box-office disaster, one would think, for a climate event that’s the product of a decade of polished political showmanship, billion-dollar marketing campaigns and relentless manufacturing of headline hyperbole.

On the hype front, which one would have thought pretty well exhausted by now, the Secretary-General of the United Nations cranked out a fresh one: “We are at a crossroads,” Ban Ki-moon said. “One path leads to a comprehensive climate-change agreement; the other to oblivion.” Oblivion! From now on, Mr. Ban is to be known around these parts as Ban Ka-boom!

Silly, to be sure, but what else can one do in the face of meetings such as Bali, where thousands gather to needle 190 governments into some kind of action to reduce the world’s output of carbon emissions, the objective being to change the global climate for the next 100 years and preserve some pseudo-scientific idea of what the world’s climate should be. Also on the agenda are schemes to redistribute unidentified megatonnes of cash and wealth from one part of the world to another.

The last time it pushed for agreement, in the early 1990s, the IPCC produced the Kyoto Protocol. So far, it looks like delegates this week will produce the Bali Discord. The latest reports say delegates will fail to adopt clear emissions-reduction targets and waffle on other issues. Bali, in any event, is just a warmup for the big meeting, the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009. That’s where the IPCC plans to replace Kyoto with the Copenhagen Protocol.

While some people might like to get their science and economic inputs from Al Gore and Ka-boom!, there are plenty of sensible experts who see no need for apocalyptic scare tactics and Hollywood sales gimmicks. Watching Al Gore pipe 240,000 or so petitioners over a cliff looks like a fun experiment in mass psychology and a sure media hit. But why would a list of no-name petitioners dragged from the Internet deserve any attention, let alone credibility, especially since they were assembled by a documented faker of science and economics?

Compare the Gore petition and message with an Open Letter to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, to be distributed in Bali tomorrow (see right). Signed by more than 100 specialists from around the world — many are leading figures in their fields, from climate science to economics to biology — the letter begins with the obvious: “It is not possible to stop climate change.” The letter was assembled under Robert M. Carter, a professor at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory of James Cook University in Australia. Canadian signatories include IPCC expert reviewers Ross McKitrick of Guelph University and Ian D. Clark of the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa. Among the Americans is Edward J. Wegman, of George Mason University, Virginia.

The points of agreement in the letter are broad and by now all too familiar. They dispute the IPCC science process, argue against the existence of consensus and reject claims of abnormal climate change. Much new climate science research has also emerged since the last IPCC reports were written, undermining the official science. The IPCC reports, they say, are “materially outdated.”

This call to reason is obviously no match for Al Gore in the global competition for attention over climate change. It contains no warning of looming Armageddon. It offers no choice between oblivion and salvation. It simply suggests that Bali and the the whole IPCC process is a big mistake that will ultimately be futile.

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**Counterpoint: On deniers of global warming (National Post, 071017)

John Moore

These are tough times for global warming deniers: Even denier-in-chief George W. Bush finally knuckled under in July and admitted not only that the world is warming up but that man is part of the cause.

To continue to deny global warming, you have to first believe that the overwhelming majority of the planet’s scientists are stupid, misguided or lying for personal gain. Increasingly. global warming deniers remind me of the “9/11 Truthers” who believe the Sept. 11 attacks were engineered by the U.S. government. Both groups have constructed elaborate, artificial factual universes to suit their conspiracy theories.

The pied piper of global warming for a quarter of a century has been Al Gore. His movie An Inconvenient Truth has been instrumental in reshaping opinion in those few countries where denial remains a viable cottage industry. Dissenters look on Gore and his movie as a proxy for the greater theory: If they can just tear Gore apart, the whole theory will come tumbling down. That’s why the deniers are so angry: Al Gore’s Oscar could be written off to Hollywood’s limousine liberals but a Nobel Peace Prize, now that’s pretty hard to argue with. The deniers were thrown a bone last week by a British court ruling. There really wasn’t any meat on the bone but Gore-haters have gnawed on it for what marrow they can suck out.

The case was brought by an irate trucker fighting to prevent An Inconvenient Truth from being shown in U.K. schools. He won a pyrrhic victory when the judge failed to block screenings but ruled that children should be warned that it is a political film. And so it is. This is a film as much about Al Gore and his political aspirations as about the fight that he has made his life’s work.

The judge found “nine scientific errors.” What Gore’s chortling critics conveniently omit from their spin is that the judge also decreed that the film was “broadly accurate,” and that “it is based substantially on scientific research and opinion.”

National Post columnist Terence Corcoran describes the nine errors as “truly major,” insisting that each is “a pillar supporting hundreds of subsidiary claims that are now suspect.” Actually, if we may continue with the architectural metaphor, the errors are less pillars than articles of furniture in a structure that remains very much intact.

In the movie, Gore says sea levels will rise seven metres. Scientists say this is in the distant future and that in the near future the rise will be closer to one metre. The deniers insist this is a seven-fold lie, ignoring that the only thing in dispute is how much sea levels will rise and when. Apparently, that first metre will be a picnic.

Gore talks of Pacific Islands being evacuated. No evidence for this has been found. Score one for the deniers.

Gore talks of an ocean current slowing down or reversing, bringing cooling to the U.K. The judge finds that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says this is unlikely. Intriguingly, the deniers’ embracing of this point requires them to acknowledge the wisdom of a body they have worked doggedly to discredit. The IPCC has been labelled everything from a conniving cabal of lying bureaucrats to a UN plot for one world government.

The judge further criticizes Gore for using two graphs inaccurately. Gore’s point is accurate, he’s just using the wrong graphs to prove it. The deniers are crowing about this one because it’s about the famous “hockey stick” temperature graph, which they pretend has been debunked. It wasn’t debunked. It was replotted and — surprise, surprise —it’s still a hockey stick.

The rest of the judge’s points are trivial. He finds there are scientists who dispute the connection between global warming and melting snows on Kilimanjaro and a vanishing lake in Africa. Gore says coral reefs are bleaching but they aren’t bleaching yet. There’s no proof of drowning polar bears. Entire species of birds and insects are vanishing but the polar bear is fine for now.

If the deniers want to consume themselves with finding holes in Gore’s film like obsessive compulsives looking for the deliberate error in a pattern of Arab floor tiles, they can knock themselves out. The science that supports global warming exists independent of any errors or exaggerations in a would-be president’s movie.

For the deniers, that’s where the inconvenience really begins.

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**A better way to spend Kyoto’s trillions (National Post, 071122)

Bjorn Lomborg

The debate about global warming is about our generational mission. What do we want to achieve over the next 40 years? Global warming is happening; the consequences are important and mostly negative. It will cause more heat deaths, an increase in sea level, possibly more intense hurricanes and more flooding. It will give rise to more malaria, starvation and poverty. It is therefore not surprising that a vast array of environmental organizations, pundits and world leaders have concluded that we must act to fix global warming.

The problem with this analysis is that it overlooks a simple but important fact. Cutting CO2 — even substantially — will not matter much for the problems on this list. From polar bears to water scarcity, as I have shown in this book, we can do relatively little with climate policies and a lot more with social policies.

If we claim that our concern lies with people dying from climate effects, as in the European heat wave in 2003, we have to ask ourselves why we are primarily thinking about implementing expensive CO2 cuts, which at best leave future communities warming slightly less quickly, still causing ever more heat deaths. Moreover, as warming will indeed prevent even more cold deaths, we have to ask why we are thinking about an expensive policy that will actually leave more people dead.

Yet other social policies could allow us to both capture the benefits of global warming through reduced cold deaths and deal with the lower but increasing heat deaths through cities cooled by water, parks and white surfaces, and through better availability of air conditioning and medical care. This would be orders of magnitude cheaper and would do much more good. Would we not rather that be our generational mission?

We care about low-lying islands and people being flooded from rising sea levels. Then why talk primarily about limiting carbon emissions, which will reduce sea level rise but also leave islanders less well off, ultimately leaving them with more lost dry land?

We profess our concern for increasing hurricane damage in the United States and for the terrible toll such damage exerts on Third World countries. But why would we want to focus on CO2 cuts when, at best, we can reduce damage only by 0.5%? If we want to curtail hurricane damage, we could do much more through social policies, such as improved and enforced building codes, upgraded levees and reduced subsidized insurance. Such policies could reduce damage by more than 50% at a fraction of the climate-policy cost.

This pattern goes for many other issues connected to global warming. For each polar bear we save through Kyoto, we can save more than 800 bears through a cessation of hunting. Which should be our generational mission?

With Kyoto we can avoid about 140,000 malaria deaths over the century. At one-60th the cost, we can tackle malaria directly and avoid 85 million deaths. For every time we save one person from malaria death through climate policies, the same money could have saved 36,000 people through better anti-malaria policies. Which should be our first mission?

When focused on water scarcity, we see that global warming actually makes water more available. Climate change would improve access for a net 1.2 billion people, and Kyoto would actually make matters worse. Is that a good argument for global warming policies?

Yes, global warming makes flooding more likely, but other policies are vastly superior to Kyoto in dealing with flooding, from no public subsidies for flood-plain building to stricter planning, fewer levees, allowing floodplains to act as natural buffers and increased wetlands. For every dollar spent on Kyoto, we could do 1,300 times more good through smarter social policies.

Take hunger. Yes, global warming will probably mean more malnourished people, but again tackling hunger through climate policies is simply vastly inefficient. For each person saved from malnutrition through Kyoto, simple policies — like investing in agricultural research — could save 5,000 people.

With all these choices, we have to ask over and over again: When choosing our generational mission, which policies should come first? We have become fascinated by the big knob of climate change and been sold the idea that if we can just turn this one knob, we can ameliorate most other problems in the world. Yet this is demonstratively false.

What we must come to terms with is that even though CO2 causes global warming, cutting CO2 simply doesn’t matter much for most of the world’s important issues. From polar bears to poverty, we can do immensely better with other policies. This does not mean doing nothing about global warming. It simply means realizing that early and massive carbon reductions will prove costly, hard and politically divisive, and likely will end up making fairly little difference for the climate and very little difference for society. Moreover, it will likely take our attention away from many other issues where we can do much more good for the world and its environment. - Excerpted from Cool it: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming by Bjorn Lomborg. Copyright (c) 2007 by Bjorn Lomborg. Reprinted with permission from the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

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**Hotter weather, fewer deaths (National Post, 071031)

Bjorn Lomborg

What will happen over the coming century, with temperatures rising? The standard story is that our world will become a very unpleasant one. Famously, the chief scientific advisor to the British government, Sir David King, even envisions that an ice-free “Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked.”

Nearly all discussions of the future impacts of global warming use the 2003 heat wave in Europe as their prime example. In Al Gore’s words: “We have already begun to see the kind of heat waves that scientists say will become much more common if global warming is not addressed. In the summer of 2003 Europe was hit by a massive heat wave that killed 35,000 people.”

Yet while we will see more and hotter heat waves, talking only about heat waves means we leave out something even more important.

The International Panel on Climate Change finds that the trends we have seen over the 20th century will continue, with temperatures increasing more over land, more in the winter and especially in the high northern latitudes: Siberia, Canada and the Arctic. In the wintertime, temperatures might increase 9F in Siberia compared to perhaps 5F in Africa. There will be an increase in heat waves and a decrease in cold spells.

Models show that heat events we now see every 20 years will become much more frequent. By the end of the century, we will have such events happening every three years. This confirms the prospect that we could be seeing many more heat deaths — a tragedy that will indeed be caused by global warming.

But cold spells will decrease just as much as heat waves increase. In areas where there is one cold spell every three years, by the end of the century such spells will happen only once every 20 years. This means fewer deaths from cold, something we rarely hear about. It might seem callous to weigh lives saved versus those lost, but if our goal is to improve the lot of humanity, then it’s important to know just how many more heat deaths we can expect compared to how many fewer cold deaths.

For almost every location in the world, there is an “optimal” temperature at which deaths are the lowest. On either side of this temperature — both when it gets colder and warmer — death rates increase. However, what the optimal temperature is is a different issue. If you live in Helsinki, your optimal temperature is about 59F, whereas in Athens you do best at 75F. The important point to notice is that the best temperature is typically very similar to the average summer temperature. Thus, the actual temperature will only rarely go above the optimal temperature, but very often it will be below. In Helsinki, the optimal temperature is typically exceeded only 18 days per year, whereas it is below that temperature a full 312 days. Research shows that although 298 extra people die each year from it being too hot in Helsinki, some 1,655 people die from it being too cold.

It may not be so surprising that cold kills in Finland, but the same holds true in Athens. Even though absolute temperatures of course are much higher in Athens than in Helsinki, temperatures still run higher than the optimum one only 63 days per year, whereas 251 days are below it. Again, the death toll from excess heat in Athens is 1,376 people each year, whereas the death toll from excess cold is 7,852.

This trail of statistics leads us to conclude that, within reasonable limits, global warming might actually result in lower death rates.

The heat wave in Europe in early August 2003 was exceptional in many ways. It was a catastrophe of heartbreaking proportions. With more than 3,500 dead in Paris alone, France suffered nearly 15,000 fatalities from the heat wave. Another 7,000 died in Germany, 8,000 in Spain and Italy and 2,000 in the United Kingdom: The total death toll ran to more than 35,000.

The green group Earth Policy Institute, which first totalled the deaths, tells us that as “awareness of the scale of this tragedy spreads, it is likely to generate pressure to reduce carbon emissions. For many of the millions who suffered through these record heat waves and the relatives of the tens of thousands who died, cutting carbon emissions is becoming a pressing personal issue.”

Such reports fuelled the public perception that the heat wave became a sure indicator of global warming. But group wisdom can occasionally be wrong. A recent academic paper has checked this theory and concluded that although the circumstances were unusual, equal or more unusual warm anomalies have occurred regularly since 1979.

Moreover, while 35,000 dead is a terrifyingly large number, all deaths should in principle be treated with equal concern. Yet this is not happening. When 2,000 people died from heat in the United Kingdom, it produced a public outcry that is still heard. However, the BBC recently ran a very quiet story telling us that deaths caused by cold weather in England and Wales for the past years have hovered around 25,000 each winter, casually adding that the winters of 1998-2000 saw about 47,000 cold deaths each year.

It is remarkable that a single heat-death episode of 35,000 from many countries can get everyone up in arms whereas cold deaths of 25,000 to 50,000 a year in just a single country pass almost unnoticed.

In Europe as a whole, about 200,000 people die from excess heat each year. However, about 1.5 million Europeans die annually from excess cold. That is more than seven times the total number of heat deaths. Just in the past decade, Europe has lost about 15 million people to the cold, more than 400 times the iconic heat deaths from 2003. That we so easily neglect these deaths and so easily embrace those caused by global warming tells us of a breakdown in our sense of proportion.

How will heat and cold deaths change over the coming century? Let us for the moment assume— very unrealistically — that we will not adapt at all to the future heat. Still, the biggest cold and heat study from Europe concludes that for an increase of 3.6F, “our data suggest that any increases in mortality due to increased temperatures would be outweighed by much larger short-term declines in cold-related mortalities.” For Britain, it is estimated that a 3.6F increase will mean 2,000 more heat deaths but 20,000 fewer cold deaths. Indeed, a paper trying to incorporate all studies on this issue and apply them to a broad variety of settings both developed and developing around the world found that “global warming may cause a decrease in mortality rates, especially of cardiovascular diseases.” - Excerpted from Cool it: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming by Bjorn Lomborg. Copyright (c) 2007 by Bjorn Lomborg. Reprinted with permission from the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Lomborg on the flawed economics of Kyoto

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**Crunch the numbers: Kyoto doesn’t add up (National Post, 071101)

Bjorn Lomborg

The models that estimate the total costs and benefits of global warming have been around since the early 1990s. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, they all produce more or less the same results. What is unique about these models is that they include both a climate system and an economic system, with costs to the economic system stemming from both climate changes and CO2 cuts.

These integrated models try to incorporate the costs of all the different impacts from climate change, including those on agriculture, forestry, fisheries, energy, water supplies, infrastructure, hurricanes, drought damage, coastal protection, land loss (caused by a rise in sea level — as in Holland, for example), wetlands, human and animal survival, pollution and migration. Costs are expressed as the sum of two quantities: the costs of adaptation (building dams, changing to other crops and so on) and the costs we must incur from the remaining non-adapted consequences (not all land is saved by building dams; production may fall despite the introduction of new crops; and so on).

So we have a model that can take any CO2 policy and show us both the economic cost of CO2 cuts and the benefits (the avoided damage) from lower temperatures on agriculture, wetlands, human life and more. This means that we can see both the costs and benefits of the Kyoto Protocol and of more stringent carbon-control schemes. We can then ask, “What would be the best strategy for confronting global warming?”

For the full Kyoto Protocol with the United States participating, the total cost over the coming century turns out to be more than US$5-trillion. There is an environmental benefit, from the slightly lower temperature toward the end of the century (about 0.3F). The total benefit for the world comes to almost $2-trillion. Yet in total, this shows that the Kyoto Protocol is a bad deal: for every dollar spent, it does the world only about 34 cents’ worth of good.

Perhaps tellingly, it turns out that the United States would have borne the highest cost, with almost trivial benefits, which by itself might explain why the United States was the least engaged party in Kyoto. The same pattern repeats itself for Canada and Australia, with large costs and small benefits.

Conversely, Europe has the best deal of the rich world, paying US$1.5-trillion but getting almost half back in benefits. It is still not a good deal but certainly goes a long way to explain why Europe has been the most prominent backer of Kyoto.

Russia and the other transition economies would have benefited greatly from Kyoto, because they could have sold their emissions permits at a high price, to the tune of almost US$3-trillion. Of course, when the time came for Western countries to pay up, it seems politically unlikely that the public in either Europe or the United States would have accepted annual transfers of more than US$50-billion for what is essentially hot air.

Finally, the models show, the rest of the world is somewhat better off, with a little less than half the benefit accruing to the lowest-income countries. This benefit, however, has to be seen in the context of the rich world forking out trillions of dollars. For every dollar spent, the rich countries do about 16 cents of good in the developing world.

With the United States out of Kyoto, the models show that there is not much left. Essentially, Europe, Japan and a few other countries pay $1.5-trillion, most of which will buy hot air, and a little that will buy an extremely tiny temperature change of 0.07F by 2100.

It is perhaps worth noticing that all of the costs and benefits above assume that policies are implemented efficiently — that the smartest policies are used and co-ordinated globally, given the required reductions. Thus, should the rich countries not use Russia’s extra quotas, the costs could escalate to almost double with virtually no added benefit. And it requires that policy makers cut CO2 where it is absolutely cheapest. If not, the total cost has essentially no upper limit.

That cutting more gets ever more costly also makes good intuitive sense. If we cut a little, it is easy — surely any activity you do could be altered relatively cheaply to emit a little less CO2. The metaphor is that we pick the low-hanging fruit first, which is easily

accessible. However, as we try to cut more and more, it will get ever more expensive — we have to reach high into the tree for the remaining, scarce fruit. Also, the first cuts we make mean we cut into the highest, most scary part of the temperature increases. As we cut ever deeper, we will start to cut into less extreme temperatures. So while the cost increases with deeper cuts, the benefit decreases.

This is evident when we move from Kyoto to some of the more ambitious policies contemplated. For instance, a plan to stabilize the world’s temperature increase to 4.5F does more good than Kyoto, but at a rather high cost of US$15.8-trillion.

It is instructive to compare this to the total cost of global warming. Models show that if global warming weren’t happening, the world would end up about US$14.5-trillion richer. Thus, the cost of global warming can be estimated at US$14.5-trillion. Stabilizing the temperature increase at 4.5F actually means we end up paying more (US$15.8-trillion) for a partial solution than the cost of the entire problem (US$14.5-trillion). That is a bad deal.

The most ambitious plan is to stabilize the temperature rise at 2.7F. This is essentially the stated preference of the European Union. The EU has reconfirmed this decision over the last many years. One model shows it is possible to achieve such very low temperature increases, but only at the formidable cost of US$84-trillion. For every dollar spent, it would do 13 cents’ worth of good.

Actually, the models also show the possibility of a more modest CO2 reduction that does more good than it costs. This initiative sets a global carbon tax that balances with the future environmental benefits from CO2 cuts. It starts off with a carbon tax around US$2 per ton, rising to about US$27 at the end of the century, reflecting how damages rise with more CO2 in the atmosphere. The total climate impact is rather small — it only reduces the temperature increase by 0.2F by the end of the century. Uniquely, however, it costs just US$600-billion, and creates twice that amount in benefits, meaning for each dollar it does two dollars of social good.

This result is surprising and runs counter to most of the climate-change proposals. It shows that we need to be very careful in our willingness to act on global warming. Going much beyond the small optimal initiative described immediately above is economically unjustified.

This conclusion does not come from the output of just a single model. All major peer-reviewed economic models agree that only modest emissions reduction is justified. A central conclusion from a meeting of all economic modelers was: “Current assessments determine that the ‘optimal’ policy calls for a relatively modest level of control of CO2.” In a review from 2006, the previous research was summarized: “These studies recommend that greenhouse gas emissions be reduced below business-as-usual forecasts, but the reductions suggested have been modest.”

This is such a robust result because the economic cost comes up front, whereas the benefit comes centuries down the line. If we try to stabilize emissions, it turns out that for the first 170 years the costs are greater than the benefits. Even when the benefits catch up in the late 22nd century, there is still a payback time before the total benefits outweigh the total costs, which would come around 2250. Thus, as one academic paper points out, “the costs associated with an emissions-stabilization program are relatively large for current generations and continue to increase over the next 100 years. The first generation to actually benefit from the stabilization program is born early during the 24th century.” If our desire is to help the many generations that come before then, along with the world’s poor, cutting emissions is not the best way.

Perhaps more surprisingly, cutting emissions is also not the best way to help people in the 24th century, since we could have focused on solving many other immediate problems that would leave the far future much better off. We clearly need smarter ways to deal with climate change.

by Bjorn Lomborg. Copyright (c) 2007 by Bjorn Lomborg. Reprinted with permission from the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. - Excerpted from Cool it: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming

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**Kyoto’s cult of ‘institutionalized hypocrisy’ (National Post, 071113)

Bjorn Lomborg

The heated rhetoric surrounding global warming is polarizing the political debate around the issue to the extent that it incapacitates any sensible dialogue. This is perhaps no more clear than in the growth of the phrase “climate change denier,” which as of this writing now has more than 21,000 hits on Google. This phrase is typically used as a catch-all for people who don’t accept the standard interpretation that humanity is squarely to blame for global warming and that we should cut CO2 emissions dramatically.

The semantic invocation of Holocaust deniers is often explicit and certainly represents a strong symbolic undercurrent. One Australian columnist has proposed outlawing climate-change denial: “David Irving is under arrest in Austria for Holocaust denial. Perhaps there is a case for making climate change denial an offence — it is a crime against humanity after all.”

Mark Lynas is the author of a book revealing “the truth about our climate crisis.” (Disclaimer: I first met Lynas when he threw a pie in my face in an Oxford bookstore as a media stunt for his then upcoming book.) He finds that climate denial is “in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial” and envisions Nuremberg-style “international criminal tribunals on those who will be partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead.”

Even the top scientist of the International Panel on Climate Change, its chairman, R.K. Pachauri, has ventured into the Holocaust comparison. When presented with my economic analyses, he compared my way of thinking to Hitler’s: “Where is the difference between Lomborg’s view on humans and Hitler’s? You cannot just treat people like cattle.”

Though the alternative view has not yet been outlawed and is not always Hitlerized, it is often ridiculed. Al Gore typically replies to critical questions thus: “Fifteen per cent of the population believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona and somewhat fewer still believe the Earth is flat. I think they all get together with the global warming deniers on a Saturday night and party.”

The problem here is that the debate gets closed off. When Gore was challenged on The Oprah Winfrey Show that his estimates of sea-level rise are unrealistically high and his claims about malaria in Nairobi are unsupported by facts, he simply responded that many of the organizations that come out with studies questioning the effects of global warming are funded by the worst polluters.

While I appreciate the underlying moral intent to do good for humanity, the unwavering certainty that CO2 cuts are the best way to help is problematic, as I have shown in this book. Glib comparisons to flat-Earthers and Apollo deniers simply deflect considerations of real-world conditions and impacts in Africa.

For many writers and world leaders, global warming has been seized upon as a subject that can lift them out of the tedious bickering of distributional politics and instead allow them to position themselves as humanitarians and statesmen concerned with the grandest issue of the planet’s survival. They can capture the high ground as defenders of the interests of humanity, distancing themselves from the everyday infighting of self-interested politics.

Global warming has for a long time been the perfect issue, because it allows the politician to talk about things that have grandeur and yet are close to people’s hearts. It actually makes some taxes popular, and yet the true costs of policies are far removed. At a recent climate demonstration in London, protesters actually chanted: “What do we want? Carbon taxes! When do we want them? Now!”

Since the climate is constantly changing, there will always be a change that can be blamed on global warming, while it has an immediacy that communicates well with voters. One online editor has compiled a list of more than 300 problems claimed in the popular press to be caused by global warming — from allergies, gender inequality and maple-syrup shortages to yellow fever.

And perhaps most important, the real costs of cutting CO2 are postponed, preferably to the next generation of politicians. Kyoto was negotiated in 1997, but the restrictions will first hit between 2008 and 2012. The politicians who could claim victory in 1997 will generally not be the same ones to bear the costs of abiding by the restrictions. Likewise, the California equivalent of Kyoto has reaped a lot of political goodwill for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger since he signed it in September, 2006, but the target time is a convenient 14 years off, in 2020.

Many countries and the EU are beginning to suggest other long-term CO2 cuts, where again the honour lies with the present-day promoters and the hard work with politicians far down the line. This is perhaps most evident with Tony Blair’s proposal to reduce CO2 emissions by 60% by 2050. This sounds grand— which undoubtedly was the intention — but is also very far in the future. Since 1997, meanwhile, British CO2 emissions have increased by more than 3%.

Thus, many in the United Kingdom were understandably skeptical of the new proposal, and more than half the parliamentarians suggested that there should be annual goals, which would suddenly mean evaluating the grand goals of 2050 by 2008. The Blair government was horrified and resisted this — at present, the solution seems to be five-year plans, which reasonably allow judgment to be put off.

Nevertheless, this shows that when the time comes to commit to the political rhetoric of global warming, support suddenly withers away, because governments know that CO2 cuts will quickly become very expensive and likely be politically dangerous.

This then is the depressingly obvious but debilitating consequence of the many years of politicians, the media, and NGOs riding global warming, accepting and even reveling in the language of “fear, terror and disaster” — to quote one noted British climate-change expert. We have created a situation that is portrayed as ever more apocalyptic, but we have lost the opportunity for a sensible dialogue. If one suggests — as I do here — that we need to adopt a long-term perspective and that we should increase R&D in non-car-bon-emitting energy technologies to US$25-billion per year, most people’s reaction is simply that this is nowhere near enough, as we are facing an imminent environmental Armageddon. When emotions run this high, people stop listening to evidence and instead suggest solutions that are ever grander but also ever more unrealistic.

We have institutionalized hypocrisy. Politicians will stoke the climate scares and claim that they will cut back CO2 in 15 to 40 years, long after they have left office. But we haven’t seen much in terms of actual cutbacks, because those would be tremendously politically damaging, not to mention the effects they would have on many people’s daily lives. Politicians will talk about CO2 being the greatest threat to humanity, but still insist on opening new airports, as the British government has done repeatedly.

Likewise, the media will push the climate scare as the ultimate bad-news story, as often seen in The Guardian and The Independent in the United Kingdom. Yet at the same time, both newspapers carry travel offers to faraway destinations and ads for cars, cheap flights and energy-intensive consumer products. If these papers took the global-warming threat seriously, they would stop accepting advertising for all the trappings of the “good life.” The failure to do so illustrates both hypocrisy and our strong dependence on fossil fuels.

And we as voters are not blameless. We have let the politicians and the media inflate the climate scare and gone out chanting for higher carbon taxes. Yet when these taxes were actually considered, as in late 2006 in the United Kingdom, there was an outcry, because suddenly we couldn’t just be green. We would actually have to pay.

We have to begin to be honest about two things. First, climate change is not an imminent planetary emergency that will bring down civilization. It is one, but only one, of many problems that we will have to deal with over this century and beyond. Second, there are no short-term fixes to this problem. In the words of two eminent climate economists: “Stopping, or even significantly slowing, climate change will require deep emission cuts everywhere. This project will take 50 years at least, but probably a century or longer. The political will to support climate policy has to span across parties, continents and generations.”

If we are to get this support across parties, continents and generations, we must discard the debilitating scares and recreate a sensible and unbiased dialogue about goals and means, about costs and benefits, in dealing with global warming and the world’s other challenges.

Excerpted from Cool it: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming by Bjorn Lomborg. Copyright 2007 by Bjorn Lomborg. Reprinted with permission from the publisher Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

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**Save the world: Dump Kyoto: A new book by Bjorn Lomborg counts the millions of lives that could be saved if Kyoto’s trillions were spent on other projects (National Post, 071204)

Jonathan Kay

Everyone has their favorite barometer of Canadian left-wing received wisdom. Stephane Dion, the Toronto Star editorial board, Naomi Klein and Linda McQuaig are all worthy contenders. But lately, I’ve been tracking a more obscure pundit with equally impressive dogma-spouting ability: UBC political science professor Michael Byers, author of the recently published manifesto Intent for a Nation: What is Canada For? Anti-Americanism, greener-than-thou environmentalism, starry-eyed multilateral-ism, strident cultural and economic nationalism— Byers is the whole package.

In yesterday’s Star, Byers issued forth on Stephen Harper’s opposition to Kyoto. And he did not disappoint. Our Prime Minister is “playing games while the planet burns,” he concludes. Harper’s “nasty.” He’s a “small man” who’s damaging the “long-term interests of humanity” in the furtherance of a narrow political agenda.

And what are those “long-term interests”? This is where Byers’ column got interesting. Alongside the sloganeering against Harper, he also delivered a good synopsis of the stock humanitarian argument put forward on Kyoto’s behalf by environmentalists: “The droughts, floods, storms and sea-level rise caused by human-induced climate change are impeding efforts to alleviate poverty worldwide … Canada’s wealth has been developed through decades of heavy consumption of fossil fuels, with the atmosphere being treated as a free trash bin for the resulting emissions. Yet perversely, it’s the developing countries - with their dependence on subsistence agriculture, acute exposure to droughts, floods and sea-level rise, post-colonial political tensions and still inadequate infrastructures - that are most exposed.”

In a cold, guilty country like Canada, where most of us would actually prefer a warmer climate, this is one of the few arguments that gets traction. We’re so very lucky, and so very rich. How immoral would it be for us to keep consuming hydrocarbons while the rest of the world starves, fries up and drowns? Note the masterful way Byers pushes all the right buttons — right down to the “post-colonial” touch, just in case we forgot what colour the victims are.

What you’re reading on this page is not a Terence Corcoran-style attack on the science of global warming. Like just about every scientist who doesn’t have a regular opinion-writing gig at The Wall Street Journal or Financial Post, I believe anthropogenic global warming is real. My problem with the Kyoto camp isn’t that it’s peddling “junk science.” It’s that, like Byers, they go straight from the science to the politics without stopping to count the money. What if global warming is real, but Kyoto is still a rip-off — even according to the big-hearted humanitarian logic at the core of the pro-Kyoto camp?

On that note, here’s something that pops out at you when you read Byers’ op-ed: a total absence of numbers. The same is true of most pro-Kyoto articles, and sometimes even whole books. Too often, the argument for fighting climate change is based on vague appeals to cuddly polar bears, our moral debt to mother nature, the “will of the international community” — as well as the usual litany of worst-case (and, often, worse-than-worst-case) disaster scenarios. You rarely see anyone actually crunch the numbers and prove Kyoto’s worth on a cost-benefit basis.

That’s because, as world-renowned Danish thinker Bjorn Lomborg demonstrates in a new book, you can’t.

In Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, Lomborg acknowledges that global warming is a serious problem. He also acknowledges that people will die, and human society at-large will suffer, as a result. What he disputes is that we can do much about it without breaking the bank. Consider: The global all-in compliance costs of Kyoto amount to about $180-billion per year. Yet all these billions — even paid in perpetuity — would delay the globe’s expected rate of heating over the next century by just 5%. Assuming Kyoto is allowed to expire in 2012, its total effect will have been to delay the pace of global warming by one week. In terms of Canada’s contribution to Kyoto, the effect would be measured in hours. Think about that the next time Dion or David Suzuki lectures you about Canada’s lost opportunity to save the world.

Lomborg’s book — excerpted in a three-part series that appeared on these pages a month ago — is built around the (surprisingly) rich body of peer-reviewed studies that measure the aggregate social cost of climate change on human societies — including its impacts on agriculture, fisheries, fresh water supplies, hurricanes and land loss. The bottom line Lomborg presents is that the world has about $15-trillion worth of damage coming to it if global warming proceeds unabated. Kyoto — even if it were fully implemented by all its signatories — would knock off a little less than $2-trillion of that, but at a cost of more than $5-trillion. For every dollar we spend on Kyoto, we get back 34¢.

And even this analysis is optimistic — because it assumes the most efficient carbon-abatement policies available. In practice, many nations have opted instead for inefficient, but optically attractive, solutions such as windmills.

Schemes that are even more ambitious than Kyoto result in even greater economic inefficiencies. That’s because of the law of diminishing marginal returns. Our first carbon cuts are always going to be the easy ones — dropping the house thermostat when we go away for the weekend, screwing in a few CFL light bulbs, buying a slightly smaller SUV, etc. But the deeper you cut carbon emissions, the more painful and difficult the cuts become. A European Union proposal that would freeze the world’s temperature increase at 1.5 C, for instance, would cost $84-trillion — without even generating the complete $15-trillion benefit that would accrue if warming were eliminated completely.

If I have Byers pegged right, I’m guessing that he’d say that none of this matters:Whatever the numbers tell you, Kyoto is still advisable because it allows developed nations to pay back some of the moral debt they owe the developing world.

But here’s where Lomborg’s analysis is especially trenchant. While his methods are ruthlessly utilitarian, he shares the same humanitarian goals ostensibly championed by climate change activists. Indeed, there’s nothing he’d like more for the $180-billion a year demanded by Kyoto to be shovelled into other programs that address human misery more directly. If we did so, he shows, we’d save millions more lives.

Lomborg’s foray into global warming is only his latest project. Before that, he became famous as the organizer of the “Copenhagen Consensus,” an elite global think-tank that has created a sort of master list of problems facing humanity, ranked according to how cost-effectively we can fight them. At or near the top of his wish list are HIV/AIDS prevention, micro-nutrient provision, trade liberalization, malaria control, water purification and basic local health services. In all of these cases, lives of people in the developing world can be saved for thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars each. Kyoto is at the bottom of the list: To save a single life through carbon-abatement costs millions.

The details here are striking—and should be digested by anyone who claims to champion Kyoto on a humanitarian basis. In the case of AIDS prevention, for instance, Lomborg cites statistics that show a single dollar invested in simple measures such as condom distribution and antiviral drugs can bring about $40 worth of social good — more than 100 times Kyoto’s 34¢ rate of return.

Malaria is a particularly good example, since its spread if often cited among the parade of horribles that global warming is set to unleash. Through Kyoto-style carbon abatement, we could save something like 140,000 malaria deaths over the next century. Or, we could spend one-60th of Kyoto’s cost on direct anti-malarial policies like mosquito netting and drugs, and save 85 million people.

The debate about climate change has become increasingly surreal in recent years. We live in an intensely monetized world where even five-and six-figure capital projects typically are subject to the most exacting cost-benefit analysis before being embarked upon. Yet when it comes to Kyoto-style policies — which would require the investment of a 13-digit sum over coming generations — many of our most impassioned pundits urge our decision-making to be guided by nothing more than guilt and green emotionalism.

Reading Byers, I shudder to imagine that this is the level of analysis that informs our nation. One hopes that the people who actually make decisions about climate change in this country — Harper and his Environment Minister, John Baird, spring to mind — are also finding the time to read authors like Lomborg, who actually care enough about what they’re writing about to crunch the numbers. They are the real humanitarians.

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**Separating climate fact from fiction (Washington Times, 070926)

Timothy Ball/ Tom Harris [KH: Canadian scientists!!]

This week is especially challenging for citizens trying to separate fact from fantasy in the climate debate. From the excited rhetoric of United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s high-level event in New York, the pontifications of Ted Turner at the Clinton Global Initiative or politicians pandering for the green vote at President Bush’s leaders summit, the public is in dire need of self-defense strategies.

The most reliable tool is simple skepticism. “I don’t believe you; prove it” is an appropriate response to Al Gore and his climate campaigners. But such a charge is politically incorrect when applied to climate change so most people need something more passive, a climate change propaganda detector.

Here’s what will cause alarm bells to ring on a properly tuned detector:

• Activists claiming natural events are unnatural, or normal events abnormal. This guarantees that claims we are seeing more extreme events are always right. The “warmest/wettest/driest/snowiest/windiest” actually means the most extreme in the official record, which for most of the world is less than 50 years. Such a short time interval guarantees records will be set all the time.

• Speculation and exaggeration presented as unbiased fact. It’s revealing to compare U.N. and other political pronouncements about climate with the scientific research that supposedly backs them. Conditional words — “could,” “may” or “possibly” — that appear in the science papers vanish when the issue becomes political. Ban Ki-moon’s assertions in May are classic: “The recent report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) emphasizes that the science on climate change is very clear, that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and that this is happening because of human activities.” IPCC scientists concluded no such thing, but the secretary-general’s exaggerations draw more attention to his cause.

• Exploitation of basic fears, a common practice well-documented by Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore. Humans are naturally fearful of the environment because they know it can kill them. Animism, the earliest form of religion, revolved around worshipping and placating nature, even at the expense of human well-being. Much of today’s environmentalism takes the same tack.

• Taking advantage of public ignorance about science. Mislabeling carbon dioxide as pollution is standard practice for many campaigners and politicians — Sen. Barbara Boxer, California Democrat, has proposed a “Global Warming Pollution Reduction Act” riddled with this deception, and Mr. Gore often refers to CO2 as pollution. “Climate change is real,” “The science is settled” and other meaningless but loaded assertions are used to manipulate public opinion by political operatives.

• Continuously shifting goalposts. Initially, global warming fears dominated public consciousness. Then, starting in 1998, the world began to cool while atmospheric CO2 continued to rise in complete contradiction to the theory. So the mantra became “climate change” and any variation could then be attributed to human activities. To avoid addressing the fact that climate change is a natural occurrence on all planets a new goal post shift is occurring; now the phraseology is “dealing with climate chaos.”

• Continuously “upping the ante” if concerns do not seem sufficient, making statements everyone eventually understands to be ridiculous. John Ritch, director general of the World Nuclear Association, provided a perfect example in June: “Greenhouse gas emissions, if continued at the present massive scale, will yield consequences that are — quite literally — apocalyptic. ... If these predictions hold true, the combined effect would be the death of not just millions but of billions of people— and the destruction of much of civilization on all continents.”

Climate alarmism may defeat itself by simply overplaying its hand. This week’s conferences could speed that process, helping end what is becoming the most expensive science swindle in history. Let’s hope so.

Timothy Ball, chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP.com), is an environmental consultant in Victoria, British Columbia, and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. Tom Harris is a mechanical engineer in Ottawa and NRSP executive director.

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**The Left’s Global Warming Solution: No More Children! (townhall.com, 070509)

By Ben Shapiro

Proving once again that foolish ideas don’t die or fade away — they walk the earth eternally, preying on the brains of the living — scientists at a UK think tank have determined that the greatest threat to the planet is more human beings. “The effect on the planet of having one child less is an order of magnitude greater than all these other things we might do, such as switching off lights,” explains Professor John Guillebaud, co-chairman of the Optimum Population Trust (OPT). “The greatest thing anyone in Britain could do to help the future of the planet would be to have one less child.”

The OPT is hardly the first to jump on the Malthusian bandwagon. The environmental left is in a constant state of apoplexy about the environmental cost of human existence. Back in 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich published his famous — and entirely erroneous — anti-reproduction manifesto, “The Population Bomb.” “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich claimed. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” His solution: “The birth rate must be brought into balance with the death rate. We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out.”

Naturally, no such disaster occurred. Nonetheless, “Children Are Global Cancer” Ehrlich remains a highly respected figure for the global left. In 1990, Al Gore trumpeted the sequel to “The Population Bomb,” writing a glowing blurb for its dust jacket: “The time for action is due, and past due. The Ehrlichs have written the prescription.” Gore neglected to mention that Ehrlich’s prescription is mass distribution of RU-486.

The radical left embraces Ehrlich and OPT because it fundamentally believes in an atheistic version of original sin: We are all endowed with the evil capacity to consume. For the radical left, the planet is not a bountiful source to be protected and used for human happiness — it is a Higher Power to be protected from humanity’s rapaciousness. The planet should not be protected for future generations, they say — it should be protected for its own sake.

This concept of Mother Earth as feckless deity and Man as apocalyptic destroyer is deeply perverse. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party has been infused with this planet-as-deity cultish fanaticism. The major item of faith for Democratic devotees is religious belief in manmade global warming, which every major Democratic politician has termed the most dramatic threat facing America.

The Party has its own religious figures. There’s Gore, whom the Democrats have labeled a “prophet.” There’s House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who religiously dismisses all evidence that global warming is not manmade: “The science of global warming and its impact is overwhelming and unequivocal.” There’s Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who has seen the light: “Today, the world’s best and brightest scientists made clear that the debate on global warming is over. The world has moved beyond doubt, and now all that remains is to work urgently toward solutions.” There’s Barack Obama, who, during the recent Democratic presidential debate, mentioned only one lesson he’s trying to teach his daughters: “working to install light bulbs that last longer and save energy.”

Democrats have not yet openly embraced OPT’s Heaven’s Gate strategy, though many of them buy into the idea of “stabilizing population growth.” For now, the Democrats will settle for crippling American standards of living in the name of a phantom threat. But it will not be long before Democrats — like their more radical allies in Europe — demand more in the name of protecting Gaia.

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**Anna Nicole Smith’s Death Blamed on Global Warming (townhall.com, 070210)

By Doug Giles

Our globe would probably cool off several degrees if Al Gore would just shut up and loose some weight. First things first, Al.

The unsubstantiated hot air that emits from Gore’s pie hole, the friction heat his chunky thighs generate when he waddles, plus the greenhouse gas he bellows out his backside after scarfing down the grande enchilada platter at Casa Ole are enough to make a polar bear bust a sweat.

Speaking of polar bears, I do hope it gets a little warmer up north. I’ve always wanted to hunt polar bear, but it’s just been too cold. Go warmer temps!

Back to Gore. You and I both know that Gore would be warning us about the negative effects of Spider Monkey urine if it would ingratiate him to the voting public. And that’s what his global warming, god awful warbling is all about: the unavoidable Presidential aspirations of Albert Gore. Jose Feliciano can see that.

Evidently, global warming didn’t hit Texas last month when I was there during Dallas’ Safari Club. It was cold. I’m talkin’ Hillary chilly. Also, I believe it snowed in Malibu this year. But that, too, could be a sign.

As a matter of fact, everything is now an omen that our orb is getting over-cooked.

• Lindsay Lohan’s fire crotch? Global warming.

• Paula Abdul’s speech slurs? Global warming.

• The tarpon bite has been a little slow and late this year in Miami. Global warming. I’ve noticed also that the flying fish have shortened their glide paths. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

• Anna Nicole Smith’s untimely death? Global warming . . . or possibly, her opportunistic lawyer, Howard K. Stern?

• Astronauts doing whacky things with BB guns, love triangles and adult diapers? Must be global warming. Think about it.

• This could also be the reason why Rosie’s so angry all the time. The gradual roasting of our terra firma under her feet is making her irritated. Or, maybe she’s just plump and pouty. It’s a coin toss on that one.

I was watching a guy on TV a few weeks ago talk about earthy balminess. He had his running helicopter parked on a slab of ice. As he spoke about our toasty planet, the viewing audience got hit with the obligatory sad seal pictures, melting snowman, gloomy Eskimo photos and a watery Slushy from 7-Eleven.

After his opening remarks, the snow prophet of doom pointed to a nearby ice bank and said, “Behold, even as I speaketh the ice melteth.” I’m thinking, “Really? How about turning off the helicopter? The red hot engine and the 200mph wind storm the chopper is generating could possibly be culpable for your nippy apocalypse.” I guarantee if he would have switched off Chopper 1 and held still for 30 minutes, Nostradamus would be doing his prophecy with snotcicles hanging off his nose and his hands crammed down his pants in an attempt to keep them warm.

As the earnest tree humpers try to convince us all that their moist Armageddon is a soon coming slip-n-slide reality, I’m kinda thinking that maybe, just maybe, they’re full of crap, their stats are trumped, their science is specious and this is a politically driven liberal wet dream.

As a matter of fact, I’m sidin’ with Dr. Richard Lindzen (Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science prof at MIT) when he says, “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early twenty-first century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll back of the industrial age.”

In the Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, Christopher Horner shatters the global warming blather in 303 pages of earth cooling facts. He chills the left with several inconvenient truths for Al Snore, I mean Gore, and his 5 alarm cheerleaders. Stuff like:

• The earth has often been hotter than it is now.

• Only a tiny portion of greenhouse gases are manmade.

• Most of Antarctica is getting colder.

• The media only recently abandoned the “global cooling” scare.

• “Global warming” hasn’t made hurricanes worse. Our tendency to put up trailer houses in their path is getting greater.

• There is no scientific consensus on global warming.

• Climate is always changing with or without man.

• Many big businesses lobby for global warming policies that will increase their profits – and our costs.

• The Medieval Warm period was significantly warmer than temps today and was a golden age for agriculture, innovation and lifespan.

And these are just the tip of the re-freezing iceberg.

I’d love to see the alarmist, over-the-top doomsters of the left take on Horner’s book page by page and try, with a straight face, to dismantle it. They couldn’t do it.

God, if you are up there and you are listening to me and you’re taking requests, I would love to watch a televised debate between Horner and Gore—or any one of his greenhouse gas sniffers. I’ll even go so far as hosting it down here in Miami, Jesus. Please, Lord . . . will You make it happen? C’mon, God . . . I don’t ask for much.

Amen.

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**A convenient lie (Townhall.com, 060705)

By John Stossel

When he was in college, atmospheric-science professor John Christy was told, “it was a certainty that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy.”

That prediction has gone the way of so many others. But environmentalists continue to warn us that we face environmental disaster if we don’t accept the economic disaster called the Kyoto treaty. Lawyers from the Natural Resources Defense Council (another environmental group with more lawyers than scientists) explain: “Sea levels will rise, flooding coastal areas.” And Al Gore’s new movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” depicts a future in which cities are submerged by rising sea levels.

Wow.

But many scientists laugh at the panic.

Christy says, “Doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines but have proven to be completely false. Similar pronouncements today about catastrophes due to human-induced climate change sound all too familiar.”

But the media can’t get enough of doomsday.

The Washington Post reported that because of melting ice caps and glaciers, “The End Is Near!” But melting Arctic ice won’t raise sea levels any more than the melting ice in your drink makes your glass overflow.

MSNBC and the BBC ran stories on the coming calamity from Greenland’s melting glaciers. Unlike Arctic ice, those melting glaciers could raise sea levels. But other reports note that Greenland’s ice has been thickening in the interior of Greenland.

The former vice president’s film shows dramatic film of big chunks of ice breaking off glaciers, but the “calving” of icebergs is a normal, natural process involved in the growth of glaciers into the sea. The movie features some majestic glaciers that existed in the 19th Century that have all but disappeared today — but it doesn’t bother to mention any of the glaciers growing in Norway, New Zealand and even the United States. The U.S. Forest Service reports that the Hubbard Glacier in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest is advancing so rapidly, it threatens to close off a major fjord.

He shows shocking time-lapse photos of ice disappearing from Mt. Kilimanjaro. The ice there has been melting for over a hundred years.

Climate always changes. “An Inconvenient Truth” implies that all serious scientists agree that it is a crisis, and that the United States must immediately reduce carbon dioxide emissions as dictated by the Kyoto treaty the Bush administration so arrogantly refuses to sign — the same treaty the Clinton-Gore administration didn’t even submit to the Senate.

But even advocates of Kyoto admit that if all nations signed the agreement and obeyed it, it would affect global temperatures by less than a tenth of a degree!

To achieve a meaningful reduction in emissions, politicians would have to set drastic limits on driving, air conditioning and all industrial production. I suppose “essential” car use would be allowed, and politicians would decide what is essential. A $10 a gallon tax on gasoline might be a start, and Al Gore could funnel the tax money to the scientist “friends” he repeatedly cites in his movie.

Let’s calm down.

The scary claims about heat waves and droughts are based on computer models. But computer models are lousy at predicting climate because water vapor and cloud effects cause changes that computers fail to predict. They were unable to anticipate the massive amounts of heat energy that escaped the tropics over the past 15 years, forcing modelers back to the drawing board. In the mid-1970s, computer models told us we should prepare for global cooling.

The fundamentalist doom-mongers ignore scientists who say the effects of global warming may be benign. Harvard astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas says added carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may actually benefit the world because more CO2 helps plants grow. Warmer winters would give farmers a longer harvest season.

Why don’t we hear about this part of the global warming argument?

“It’s the money!” says Dr. Baliunas. “Twenty-five billion dollars in government funding has been spent since 1990 to research global warming. If scientists and researchers were coming out releasing reports that global warming has little to do with man, and most to do with just how the planet works, there wouldn’t be as much money to study it.”

And the politicians would have one less excuse to take control of our lives.

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Supplemental Articles in a separate file (click here to read)