June 3 in Amsterdam; June 4,5
Briefings around Holland <H.Labohm@freeler.nl>
June 6 Press briefing on NIPCC in Dusseldorf, Germany; interviews <limburg@grafik-system.de>
June 7 Cologne, Mainz
June 8 Frankfurt <stotko@vdst-akademie.de>
June 9 Briefing in Fkft,Stuttgart
<stotko@vdst-akademie.de>
June 12 Huckelrieden: NIPCC Briefing of Bundestag group [not open]
June 13,14 Vienna.
Luncheon talk Hayek Institute
<barbara.kolm@hayek-institut.at>
June 15 Venice and Padova
June 16 Padova-Verona – (Brixen)-
Milan <Renato.A.Ricci@lnl.infn.it>
June 17, 18 Milan.
Interviews, lectures, Luncheon talk June 18 <carlo.stagnaro@brunoleoni.it>
June 19-22 Paris.
Seminar <preiter@pasteur.fr>
June 23 Brussels. Seminar at Royal Observatory; Briefing at EU
Parliament
<roger.helmer-assistant@europarl.europa.eu>
June 24-26 London.
Luncheon talk on NIPCC at CPS on June 25 < jill@cps.org.uk>
*********************************
It’s not climate change, stupid, but the cost of mitigation Anon
********************************************
Big investors want strict
climate regulation. Shades of ENRON
[ITEM #1]
Can 32,000 scientists be wrong
about the GW scare? Not likely. But are 32,000 enough to convince Al Gore of
lack of consensus? [ITEM #2]
Larry Kudlow: The perils of Cap
& Trade regulation [ITEM #3]
Bruce Colbert: GW regulation –
a threat to freedom [ITEM #4]
Richard Rahn: A failure of
intelligence – on GW [ITEM #5]
Muriel Newman: Report from the
New Zealand Centre for Political Research
[ITEM #6]
Alarm journalists turn
realistic on models and hurricanes. Is
the tide turning? [ITEM #7]
More environmental problems
with biofuels. No redeeming features
left [ITEM #8]
NIPCC Report is now available
as an E-Book. To access, see [ITEM #9]
**************************************
BELOW THE BOTTOM
LINE:
************************
Climate change is "significantly
amplifying" the threats facing the world's bird populations, a global
assessment has concluded. The 2008 Bird
Red List warns that long-term droughts and extreme weather puts additional
stress on key habitats. The assessment
lists 1,226 species as threatened with extinction - one-in-eight of all bird
species. The list, reviewed every four
years, is compiled by conservation charity BirdLife International. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7409034.stm
************************
Travel industry promotes 'farewell tour'
of Earth's greatest sights before global warming hits hard. It's been called
climate sightseeing, a kind of farewell tour.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/travel/2004419854_webwarmingtrips18.html
*****************
Climate change
will lead to a "fortress world" in which the rich lock themselves
away in gated communities and the poor must fend for themselves in shattered
environments, unless governments act quickly to curb greenhouse gas emissions,
according to the vice-president of the intergovernmental panel on climate
change (IPCC).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/may/15/climatechange
############################################
1. BIG
INVESTORS SEEK STRICTER CLIMATE LAWS
By Rachelle
Younglai, May 20, 2008
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - Investors managing more than $2.3 trillion urged the government on
Tuesday to enact strict laws to cut greenhouse gas emissions, saying lax
regulation could hurt the competitiveness of U.S. companies. The group of some 50 investors, including
the world's biggest listed hedge fund firm, Man Group Plc and influential
venture capitalist John Doerr, want U.S. lawmakers to pass laws to reduce
climate-warming emissions by at least 60 to 90 percent by 2050. Legislation that promotes new and existing
clean technologies on the scale needed to dramatically cut down pollution is
needed, they said.
The same group of
investors is also pushing the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to force
publicly traded companies to disclose climate-related risks along with other
factors that affect their business. "Establishing
a strong national climate policy for emissions reductions will help investors
manage the enormous risks and opportunities posed by global warming," Anne
Stausboll, Calpers' interim chief investment officer, said in a statement. [Calpers is the largest U.S. pension fund
with about $250 billion in assets under management.]
Investors said the
lack of strong federal laws may hurt U.S. competitiveness because it is
preventing companies from making large-scale capital investments in clean
energy such as solar and wind power and other low-carbon technologies and
practices. The investors' letter,
addressed to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, comes ahead of Senate debate on legislation aimed at
limiting the carbon emissions that spur climate change.
The bill, America's
Climate Security Act of 2007, also includes a provision that would require the
SEC to craft a rule requiring companies to disclose material risks relating to
climate change.
************************************************
2a. COOLER HEADS
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY , May 19, 2008
Nearly 32,000 scientists sign a petition that says they reject the
claim that humanity is causing global warming. The media, who are heavily invested
in the Gore Consensus, yawn.
But a British royal, no
scientist he, says we have 18 months to save the rain forests or we will face a
climate disaster, and the media are fascinated. That same royal, Prince Charles, heir to the British throne, has
also said that the fight against global warming is much like the war his
predecessors fought against the Nazis.
He noted in a cleverly timed
May 1 speech at a climate summit that when he served "in the Royal Navy .
. . 'mayday, mayday, mayday' was the distress call used in cases of
emergencies. "And this
(human-caused global warming) is an emergency that we face."
Al Gore, naturally, gets the
same reverential treatment. He's no scientist, but the media dutifully report
all the crackpot statements he makes about climate change, including his
assertion that the deadly cyclone in Burma was likely due to global
warming. It's bunk, of course. The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in a newly released study,
says that warming will actually cause fewer hurricanes, not more.
Not that Gore will heed the
rebuke. He's been told before, by none
other than William Gray, professor emeritus of the atmospheric department at
Colorado State University, who is known as the country's most reliable
hurricane forecaster, that such claims are false. Yet he sticks to his story. And the media stick to him.
Meanwhile, Arthur Robinson,
of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, released Monday at the Press
Club in Washington a petition signed by 31,072 Americans with university
degrees in science, including 9,021 with doctorates, who reject the notion that
greenhouse gas emissions will cause catastrophic heating of the planet.
Didn't hear about it? Oh, that's right — the media can't be
bothered to report on something that challenges their narrative. They're too busy saving the world from
imagined risks and ignoring the real threats we all share.
=========================================
2b. 32,000 DENIERS: THAT’S THE NUMBER OF SCIENTISTS
WHO ARE OUTRAGED BY THE KYOTO PROTOCOL’S CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE
By Lawrence Solomon
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2008/05/17/32-000-deniers.aspx
Question: How many scientists does it take to establish that a
consensus does not exist on global warming?
The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate
change began before most people had even heard of global warming. The year was
1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was
billed as — and was — the greatest environmental and political assemblage in
human history. Delegations came from 178 nations — virtually every nation in
the world — including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic
bureaucrats. The world’s environmental groups came too — they sent some 30,000
representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this,
7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the publics
of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were
threatening the planet with catastrophe.
In February of that year, in an attempt to head off the whirlwind that
the conference would unleash, 47 climate scientists signed a “Statement by
Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming,” decrying “the unsupported
assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil
fuels and requires immediate action.”
To a scientist in search of truth, 47 is an impressive number,
especially if those 47 dissenters include many of the world’s most eminent
scientists. To the environmentalists, politicians, press at Rio, their own
overwhelming numbers made the 47 seem irrelevant. Knowing this, a larger
petition effort was undertaken, known as the Heidelberg Appeal, and released to
the public at the Earth Summit. By the summit’s end, 425 scientists and other
intellectual leaders had signed the appeal. These scientists — mere hundreds —
also mattered for naught in the face of the tens of thousands assembled at Rio.
The Heidelberg Appeal was blown away and never obtained prominence, even though
the organizers persisted over the years to ultimately obtain some 4,000
signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners.
The earnest effort to demonstrate the absence of a consensus continued
with the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change — an attempt to counter
the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Its 150-odd signatories also counted for naught. As
did the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship in 2000, signed by
more than 1,500 clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics
and policy experts, concerned about the harm that Kyoto could inflict on the
world’s poor.
Then came the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine’s Petition
Project of 2001, which far surpassed all previous efforts and by all rights
should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate
change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on
the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics,
the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the
National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as
they come.
The Oregon petition garnered
an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of
the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute
that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they
asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because “increases
in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural
plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
The petition drew media
attention, but little of it was for revealing to the world that an
extraordinary number of scientists hold views on global warming diametrically
opposite to those they are expected to hold. Instead, the press focused on
presumed flaws that critics found in the petition. Some claimed the petition
was riddled with duplicate names. They were no duplicates, just different
scientists with the same name. Some claimed the petition had phonies. There was
only one phony: Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, planted by a Greenpeace organization
to discredit the petition, and soon removed. Other names that seemed to be
phony — such as Michael Fox, the actor, and Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer
in a TV series — were actually bona fide scientists, properly credentialed.
Like the Heidelberg Appeal, the Oregon petition was blown away. But now
it is blowing back. Original signatories to the petition and others, outraged
at Kyoto’s corruption of science, wrote to the Oregon Institute and its
director, Arthur Robinson, asking that the petition be brought back. “E-mails
started coming in every day,” he explained. “And they kept coming.” The writers were outraged at the way Al Gore
and company were abusing the science to their own ends. “We decided to do the
survey again.”
Using a subset of the mailing list of American Men and Women of
Science, a who’s who of Science, Robinson mailed out his solicitations through
the postal service, requesting signed petitions of those who agreed that Kyoto
was a danger to humanity. The response rate was extraordinary, “much, much
higher than anyone expected, much higher than you’d ordinarily expect,” he
explained. He has processed more than
31,000 at this point, more than 9,000 of them with PhDs, and has another 1,000
or so to go — most of them are already posted on a Web site at www.petitionproject.org
Why go to this immense effort all over again, when the press might
well ignore the tens of thousands of scientists who are standing up against
global warming alarmism? “I hope the general public will become aware that
there is no consensus on global warming,” he says, “and I hope that scientists
who have been reluctant to speak up will now do so, knowing that they aren’t
alone.” At one level, Robinson, a PhD
scientist himself, recoils at his petition. Science shouldn’t be done by poll,
he explains. “The numbers shouldn’t matter. But if they want warm bodies, we
have them.”
Some 32,000 scientists is more than the number of environmentalists
that descended on Rio in 1992. Is this
enough to establish that the science is not settled on global warming?
The new web
site is www.petitionproject.org
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of
“The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming
hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.” LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
***************************************
3. CAP AND TRADE IS CAP AND ‘KILL THE ECONOMY’
By LAWRENCE KUDLOW, May 19, 2008
President Bush and Sen. John McCain went to bat on energy policy last week.
And guess what? They both struck out.
Bush went hat in hand to the Saudis to ask for more oil production in
order to bring down world prices. He
whiffed. They said no for the second time this year.
Exxon Mobil's chairman and
CEO, Rex Tillerson, said it's "astonishing" that Bush keeps asking
Saudi Arabia to pump more oil, rather than working harder for increased oil
production at home. Tillerson called
this "terribly upside down" and went on to say that the president
should be fighting to open U.S. coastal waters to drilling and production on
the outer continental shelf. He correctly wants to end the federal moratorium
on such offshore drilling, where kajillions of barrels of oil and natural gas
are being completely ignored.
Motorists are furious with
oil at $125 a barrel and a $4 pump price for gas. And they seem to be taking it
out on the GOP. That may not be fair, since Bush does favor a pro-production
energy policy that includes offshore drilling, building refineries, clean-coal
development, oil sands, natural gas and nuclear power. But Democrats in Congress stridently oppose
these ideas, as does Hill-Bama on the campaign trail. They want an
excess-profits tax. Brilliant.
Nonetheless, the longer the
energy stalemate lasts, the angrier voters get. You can see it in
consumer-confidence polls that are now hitting 25-year lows. What's to be done?
McCain weighed in with a
cap-and-trade program that he alleges will solve our global climate and energy
problem. It's a bad idea. It's really a ‘cap-and-kill-the-economy’
plan, as well as an unlimited spend-and-tax-and-regulate plan. It's a huge government command-and-control
operation that would make any old Soviet Gosplan bureaucrat smile.
Ironically, the United
States has virtually the cleanest air of any country in the world. And market
forces over the past 30 years have increased all manner of energy efficiency
per unit of gross domestic product by more than 50%. In fact, according to the editorial page of Investor's Business
Daily, U.S. carbon emissions grew by only 6.6% between 1997 and 2004, compared
with 18% for the world and 21% for the nations that signed the Kyoto Protocol
on greenhouse gasses. (Think Europe.)
Then there's a bunch of
scientists who don't think we have a global-warming problem at all. And many who do acknowledge the threat link
it to solar warming, or increased solar activity, rather than carbon. Cap-and-trade, in other words, may very well
be unnecessary. Meanwhile, it will
surely reduce economic growth in the years ahead.
The regulatory aspects are
mind-boggling. All manner of U.S. businesses — be they small pig farms, large
power plants or the millions of companies in between — will be subjected to
government rule making and standard setting.
EPA inspectors will literally have to visit 5 million American
businesses in order to evaluate carbon emissions and figure out allowances for
trading permits. Think of it. Some sort of federal cap-and-trade
department will send out 100,000 inspectors to comb through American
corporations and calculate their carbon stories. This is total insanity.
The Congressional Budget
Office guesses it will cost at least $1 trillion. And a lot of that cost comes
from the government's willingness to give companies carbon allowances that then
can be traded in some sort of aftermarket.
Later on, according to the McCain plan, the government will auction off
these allowances, reaping a gigantic windfall.
But so far there are no strictures on this revenue honey pot and the
unprecedented federal spending it will fuel.
Some global warmers simply
want to tax carbon. That at least would reduce the Gosplan effect. Responsible people like Harvard's Greg
Mankiw have even suggested taking the carbon-tax revenue and using it to cut
income-tax rates. This is a much better
idea — that is, if you buy into global warming at all.
My friend Art Laffer tells
me that Al Gore wants a carbon tax, with the revenues being used to abolish the
Social Security-Medicare payroll tax altogether. Laffer would prefer a big income-tax-rate reduction that would
get us to a 13% flat tax. I agree. Either way, taxing carbon, when compared
with cap-and-trade, is the lesser of two evils.
To be fair, McCain does
favor nuclear power. But he is opposed to Tillerson's idea of drilling offshore
and President Bush's idea of drilling in Alaska. That's not good. Make no
mistake about it, his cap-and-trade plan will vastly increase the cost of doing
business everywhere, including gas prices at the pump.
When you cap something like
power, well before so-called alternative-energy technologies have been invented
or commercialized, you put a cap on economic growth and prosperity.
**************************************************************
4. GLOBAL WARMING: A SCAM TO STEAL YOUR FREEDOM
By Bruce Colbert, Policy Brief, May 12, 2008
Publisher: Property Owners
Association of Riverside County
https://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=23240
Abstract: Global warming is not about a scientific problem that found political support; it is about activists and politicians who found a scientific issue they feel can leverage them into power and control. Given that so much is at stake, it is essential that people better understand this issue.
“Human activities are not
influencing the global climate in a perceptible way. Climate will continue to change, as it always has in the past,
warming and cooling on different time scales and for different reasons,
regardless of human action. I would
also argue that – should it occur – a modest warming would be on the whole
beneficial.”
This paper answers these
questions and others:
·
Is
global warming caused by humanity?
·
Is
the climate changing, and if so, why?
·
Is
global warming harmful or beneficial?
·
Why
are the media, activists, and politicians so alarmed about global warming?
·
Are
government actions on climate change helping or hurting me?
********************************************************************************
5. REAL INTELLIGENCE
FAILURES
By Richard W. Rahn, The Washington Times, May 18, 2008
What do you think was the most costly intelligence failure of all time?
No, was is not the world's leading intelligence agencies' failure to notice
that Saddam had few, if any, weapons of mass destruction. It was the failure of
many leading climate model builders to be modest enough about their
predictions, and the politicians' and media's failure to ask the tough
questions of these climate experts.
As a consequence of what we
now know was an overblown global-warming scare, everyone on the planet is
paying substantially more for food and fuel than is necessary.
Despite the prediction of
all the major climate models, the Earth has been getting cooler since 1998. At
first, it was not considered a big deal because temperatures fluctuate from
year to year. However, the drop has now been going for a decade, with another
big drop last year. The global warming
zealots have just been handed another rude shock, when the peer-reviewed
journal, Nature, reported on May 1 that according to a new (and
hopefully improved) climate model, global surface temperatures may not increase
over the next decade.
Roger A. Pielke, Jr,
environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado, and not
previously a global warming skeptic, reacted to the Nature article:
"Climate models are of no practical use beyond providing some intellectual
authority in the promotional battle over global-warming policy."
Hudson Institute
environmental economist Dennis Avery said: "The Earth's warming from 1915
to 1940 was just about as strong as the "scary" 1975 to 1998 warming
in both scope and duration -- and occurred too early to be blamed on
human-emitted CO2. The cooling from 1940 to 1975 defied the Greenhouse Theory,
occurring during the first big surge of man-made greenhouse emissions. Most
recently, the climate has stubbornly refused to warm since 1998, even though
human CO2 emissions have continued to rise strongly."
As a direct result of the
global-warming hysteria, which, as noted above, was grossly overblown to say
the least, governments reacted by restricting energy production from
traditional sources, such as oil, gas and coal, and by enacting very costly
regulations on CO2 emission sources. Governments also quickly jumped on the fad
of "biomass" production, which, at least in the case of corn, does
not result in less CO2 but more than standard oil and gas wells produce — a
clear "intelligence" failure.
The restrictions on oil and
gas have greatly increased the cost of gasoline and home heating oil, and the
production cost of almost everything else, especially plastics and food. In addition, the corn-based ethanol craze
has removed huge quantities of agricultural land that was used to produce
things like wheat, rice and corn for animal food, to corn to be used as motor
fuel. The predictable result was a huge
rise in global food prices.
A revisionist history is
underway, where many who believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, and
said so, and supported the war, are now in denial — another type of
"intelligence" failure.
We now see a similar thing
among these same politicians who used, in part, the excuse of global warming to
justify their votes against more drilling on the North Slope of Alaska, and
offshore in the Lower 48. If you prevent new oil supplies, gasoline prices will
rise. If you divert farmland used for growing food crops to that of growing
corn to make ethanol for transportation, food prices will increase. Two more clear cases of
"intelligence" failures, or worse.
Now some of the same
politicians who have, in part, created the oil and food price problems want to
put a "windfall" profits tax on oil companies. (New York Democratic
Sens. Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer and Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie
Sanders have been particularly outspoken advocates of this idea). They seem not to have noticed that the price
of oil is largely set by world supply and demand.
They have also failed to
notice that over the years, oil production and refining companies have had no
higher profits on average than most other industries, and if you tax away all
their profits this will not reduce prices at the gas pump. Most of the cost of a gallon of gasoline is
the price of crude oil (only 12 percent of it controlled by private companies,
the rest owned by state-controlled companies like Pemex in Mexico), and
federal, state and local taxes. A
windfall profits tax would only reduce investment in new production and
refining and incentives to produce more oil — another
"intelligence"" failure.
You may wonder — if the data
from the last decade show the Earth is not getting warmer, and the climate
models have been making incorrect predictions — why are so many in the
political and media classes continuing to shout about the dangers of global
warming and insisting the "science" is settled when the opposite is
true. (You may recall that Copernicus and Galileo had certain problems going
against the conventional wisdom of their time.)
The reason people like Al
Gore and many others are in denial is explained by cognitive dissonance. This occurs when evidence increasingly
contradicts a strongly held belief.
Rather than accept the new evidence and change their minds, some people
will become even more insistent on the "truth" of the discredited
belief, and attack those who present the new evidence — again an
"intelligence" failure.
Finally, many people
directly benefit from government funding of global warming programs and care
more about their own pocketbooks than the plight of the world's poor who are
paying more for food. This is not an
"intelligence" but an "integrity" failure.
--------------------------------------------------------
Richard W. Rahn is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and chairman
of the Institute for Global Economic Growth.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/article/20080518/COMMENTARY/673994116/1012
******************************************************
6. NEW ZEALAND CENTRE FOR
POLITICAL RESEARCH
Who Pays? This week, NZCPR Weekly looks into why climate change has emerged as such a dominant public policy issue, Guest Commentator Emeritus Professor S. Fred Singer shows that human activities are not causing global warming, the poll asks what you think should happen to the government's controversial emissions trading scheme, and I announce the launch of a new dynamic electronic book (complete with turning pages and other features) Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate edited by Prof Singer
Last week the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment came out in support of the Governments Emissions Trading Bill as the gateway to a carbon-constrained future: We should not forget the principle at the core of the emissions trading scheme of polluter pays. Polluter pays is actually a variant of user pays; we are using the atmosphere as a dumping ground for waste gases.1 The Commissioner has let New Zealanders down by abandoning the impartiality required of her Office, to buy into the political mantra of the Green movement by implying that carbon dioxide is a pollutant.
Carbon dioxide, the gas at the centre of the so-called global warming crisis, is not a pollutant; it is the source of life on earth. Without carbon dioxide, the planet would be lifeless and barren. Plants use carbon dioxide, along with water, as the raw materials to convert the sun’s energy into food. Life-giving oxygen is the byproduct. Carbon dioxide is therefore at the heart of the earths food chain.
Radical environmentalists and their fellow travelers demonise carbon dioxide, claiming it to be the primary exhaust product of modern civilization. They have succeeded in engaging politicians around the globe to join their de-industrialisation movement, for de-industrialisation will be the end result of global warming mitigation policies like biofuels, emissions trading, and an over-reliance on variable wind and solar power.
However, opposition to their approach is now growing, not only due to the public’s realisation that these policies will come at a huge cost, but because new scientific evidence is emerging to challenge the most basic assumptions of the global warming movement.
Just last week the Wall St Journal, in an article entitled Kiwi Climatology, concluded that by pushing ahead with our planned emissions trading scheme other countries will now have a chance to see what the anti-carbon crusade does to an economy. The article states that our government claims New Zealanders will be willing to take lower wages, but the reality is quite different. As the opinion polls are showing, householders are not that willing to pay an estimated $3,000 a year in costs, nor allow 22,000 jobs to be lost for a threat that they are not yet convinced really exists.
Meanwhile, the scientific community, which continues to examine the so-called evidence upon which the global warming doomsday predictions were based, have found that the models do not hold up: while man-made carbon dioxide emissions are estimated to have increased by around 5 percent over the last ten years, world temperatures have cooled, not risen as the alarmists models had predicted.
This has caused the star of An Inconvenient Truth, the movie promoting an impending global warming crisis (that was found to be full of errors by a High Court Judge), to launch a $300-million advertising campaign to raise awareness of global warming. Al Gore, who is the chairman of the $5 billion Generation Investment Management, recently became a partner in a venture capital company KPCB, which has invested $1.3 billion into start-up green growth companies. These companies that could profit from government policies designed to fight global warming will find the going tough if governments back down from imposing their biofuel, renewable energy, and emissions trading schemes.
Driving the anti-carbon crusade is the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. As New Zealand IPCC expert reviewer Dr Vincent Gray explains, “The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess scientific information on climate change and its impacts and mitigation. The Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 defined climate change as changes in climate caused by human interference with atmospheric composition. All the signatories to that Convention (which included NZ) accepted this definition. The task of the IPCC, therefore, has been to accumulate evidence to support this belief that all changes in the climate are caused by human interference with the atmosphere."
According to renowned climatologist Dr Tim Ball, in a series of informative articles about the global warming movement, Sir John Houghton, first co-chair of the IPCC and lead editor of the first three Reports, signaled that the objectives were political and not scientific. He said, “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” The IPCC has done this with ruthless efficiency while pretending what they are doing is science not politics.
The compilation of IPCC reports is a case in point. The Summary for Policy Makers is written by government representatives and released some three months ahead of the technical reports on which the summaries are meant to be based. While around 2,500 people are involved in the IPCC, only a handful ever see the final technical reports which are then carefully massaged to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policy-Makers so that there is nothing in conflict with what the politicians agreed.
Dr Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT, described the IPCC process in testimony to a Senate Committee: “It uses summaries to misrepresent what scientists say; uses language that means different things to scientists and laymen; exploits public ignorance over quantitative matters; exploits what scientists can agree on -- while ignoring disagreements to support the global warming agenda; and exaggerates scientific accuracy and certainty and the authority of undistinguished scientists.”
Over the years, thousands of scientists have spoken out against the IPCC and its reports. Following the publication of the 2005 report, Dr Frederick Seitz, President Emeritus of Rockefeller University and past President of the US National Academy of Sciences stated: “I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”
In the Foreword to the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate,” which provides an independent examination of the evidence on climate change that is available in peer reviewed literature, Dr Seitz states: “The IPCC is pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypothesis of anthropogenic warming and the control of greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Treaty. The 1990 IPCC Summary completely ignored satellite data, since they showed no warning. The 1995 IPCC report was notorious for the significant alterations made to the text after it was approved by the scientists in order to convey the impression of a human influence. The 2001 IPCC report claimed that the twentieth century showed unusual warming based on the now discredited hockey-stick graph. The latest IPCC report published in 2007, completely devalues contributions from changes in solar activity, which are likely to dominate any human influence.”
The NIPCC report is the brainchild of atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service. One of the most distinguished scientists in the US, Prof Singer, who, as a former IPCC reviewer shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, is this week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator. In his article The Great Global Warming Debate, Prof Singer explains:
“In the past few years there has been increasing concern about global climate change on the part of the media, politicians, and the public. It has been stimulated by the idea that human activities may influence global climate adversely and that action is required on the part of governments to do something about this problem. My purpose here is to show that this concern is misplaced, that human activities are not influencing the global climate in a perceptible way, and that, in any case, very little can be done about global climate change. It is unstoppable; we should not even try to influence it. Climate will continue to change, as it always has in the past, both warming and cooling on different time scales and for different reasons, completely unrelated to any human action. I will also argue that - should it occur - a modest warming is on the whole beneficial.”
In his article he warns, “There is however a serious problem. In the mistaken idea that something needs to be done, policies are arising that have the potential of distorting energy policies, severely damaging national economies, make us poorer, and hurting standards of living. Such a misdirection of resources will adversely affect human health and welfare in industrialized nations - and even more so in developing nations. It can lead to social tensions within nations and to conflict between nations. If it were not for this potential of inflicting serious economic damage, one might consider the present concern about climate change nothing more than just another fad or human aberration. But once it affects energy policy, it becomes essential to understand the issue to avoid inflicting any severe harm.”
The global warming juggernaut, driven by our politicians (aided by the IPCC) is charging ahead in New Zealand. Our Prime Minister promised that we would lead the world by becoming the first to be carbon neutral. We are therefore the only country in the world to include all greenhouse gases in a Kyoto agreement, a situation that could cripple our farming industry. We are the only country to even contemplate exposing the economy to the full cost of the volatile world price of carbon in the proposed emissions trading scheme. And we are the only country in the world to set renewable energy targets as high as 90 percent, even though the consequences in terms of threats to the security of supply and power price hikes are well known. The issue is: Are consumers prepared to bear that cost?
************************
7a. POOR FORECASTING
UNDERMINES CLIMATE DEBATE
Fred Pearce, New
Scientist Magazine issue 2654, 1 May 2008
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19826543.700?DCMP=NLC-nletter&nsref=mg19826543.700
"POLITICIANS
seem to think that the science is a done deal," says Tim Palmer. "I
don't want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional
climate change, are immensely uncertain."
Palmer is a leading climate modeler
at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK, and
he does not doubt that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has
done a good job alerting the world to the problem of global climate
change. But he and his fellow climate
scientists are acutely aware that the IPCC's predictions of how the global
change will affect local climates are little more than guesswork. They fear that if the IPCC's predictions
turn out to be wrong, it will provoke a crisis in confidence that undermines
the whole climate change debate.
==========================================
7b GLOBAL WARMING NOT
WORSENING HURRICANES
Global warming isn't to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, according to Tom Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall -- according to Knutson, in a study published online in the journal Nature Geoscience:
o By the end of the century the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic will fall by 18 percent.
o The number of hurricanes making landfall in the United States and its neighbors -- anywhere west of Puerto Rico -- will drop by 30 percent because of wind factors.
o The biggest storms -- those with winds of more than 110 mph -- would decrease in frequency by 8%
o Tropical storms, those with winds between 39 and 73 mph, would decrease by 27 percent.
NOAA hurricane meteorologist Chris Landsea, who wasn't part of this study, praised Knutson's work as "very consistent with what's being said all along." “I think global warming is a big concern, but when it comes to hurricanes the evidence for changes is pretty darn tiny," Landsea said.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Seth Borenstein, "Study says global warming
not worsening hurricanes," Associated Press, May 19, 2008. http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j9YzbkbPjYwP_3-9wZhTNbMcZSAQD90OGDV80
*********************************************
8. NEW TREND IN BIOFUELS
HAS NEW RISKS
In the past year, as the diversion of food crops like corn and palm to make biofuels has helped to drive up food prices, investors and politicians have begun promoting newer, so-called second-generation biofuels as the next wave of green energy. These, made from non-food crops like reeds and wild grasses, would offer fuel without the risk of taking food off the table, says the New York Times.
But now, biologists and botanists are warning that they, too, may bring serious unintended consequences:
o Most of these newer crops are what scientists label invasive species -- that is, weeds -- that have an extraordinarily high potential to escape biofuel plantations.
o Once they do, they overrun adjacent farms and natural land, and create economic and ecological havoc in the process.
o Currently, the Global Invasive Species Program estimates that the damage from all invasive species costs the world more than $1.4 trillion annually -- five percent of the global economy.
Consider Jatropha, the darling of the second-generation biofuels community:
o The plant is currently being cultivated widely in East Africa in brand new biofuel plantations.
o But jatropha has been recently banned by two Australian states as an invasive species.
o If jatropha, which is poisonous, overgrows farmland or pastures, it could be disastrous for the local food supply in Africa.
Similarly, biofuel plantations for giant reed production are being opposed in Europe and Florida because of the havoc they could wreak on ecosystems in those places. And at a recent United Nations meeting, scientists from the Global Invasive Species Program, the Nature Conservancy and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, as well as other groups, presented a paper with a warning about the potential danger of invasive species.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Elizabeth Rosenthal, "New Trend in Biofuels
Has New Risks," New York Times, May 21, 2008.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/science/earth/21biofuels.html?ref=business Courtesy of NCPA
***************************************
9. NIPCC REPORT IS
NOW IN A SPECTACULAR E-BOOK FORMAT
Muriel Newman and Frank Newman, New Zealand Centre for Political Research www.nzcpr.com have done a fantastic job in turning the NIPCC report into an E-Book. It is a BIG file of 11 Mb. One great feature relates to the graphs - if you click on them they will "pop up" into a nice large image, which you can print if you want to. Also, all of the URL links in the book are "live".
If you right click on the book, you will see that there are
a wide range of options for reading it, including making the background black
for easier reading, making the pages turn automatically, adding notes to the
text, highlighting the text, emailing the book and so on. Some of these can also be found on the
navigation bar under the opened book.
To distribute the book all you need to do is forward it on in an email along
with a message like this:
”The electronic book "Nature, Not Human Activity Rules the Climate"
is in DNL format. To view it you will
need to use a Windows operating system and have a DNL Reader installed (similar
to Acrobat Reader for a PDF file). If
you already have the DNL Reader installed on your computer, go to www.nzcpr.com
and simply click the "Nature rules" pix – or downloaded
directly from the NZCPR website: http://www.nzcpr.com/ebookNIPCC.htm
If you don't have the Reader, click on www.digitalwebbooks.com/reader and download the small file, which installs very quickly. You will then be able to read any other electronic books in DNL format.”
Please note that if you don’t have a WINDOWS operating
system, you may have difficulty with the DNL format, in which case you can use
the PDF version http://www.sepp.org/publications/NIPCC_final.pdf
********************************