SOS Forests

The Cost and Futility of Trading Hot Air

by Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, Friday, 09 May 2008

Full text [here]

Excerpt from The Cost and Futility of Trading Hot Air:

With climate change, politics regrettably predominates. This time, there is a dangerous complication: politicized science. The surprisingly small group of scientists who started and still stir the “global warming” scare have undesirably close financial links with politicians and corporations. Yet the notion that “global warming” is so severe a threat that it demands major increases in taxation and regulation, coupled with deep, strategic cuts in the Western economies, would only be defensible if all of the following propositions were true –

1. “The scientists, politicians, and news media behind ‘global warming’ are honest”: They are not;

2. “The debate is over and all credible climate scientists are agreed”: It is not; they are not;

3. “Temperature today has risen exceptionally fast and above natural variability”: It has not;

4. “Changes in solar activity do not significantly impact today’s global warming”: They do;

5. “Greenhouse-gas increases are the main reason why it is getting warmer”: They are not;

6. “The fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse warming is clearly present”: It is absent;

7. “Computer models are accurate enough to predict the climate reliably”: They cannot be;

8. “Global warming is to blame for present and future climate disasters”: It is not;

9. “Mitigating climate change will be cost-effective”: It will not;

10. “Taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible course”: It would not be.

Each of these ten conformist propositions, every one of which must be shown true before substantial policy changes can be considered advisable, is demonstrated to be questionable at best, false at worst.

There has been serious, serial scientific dishonesty, misrepresentation, and exaggeration. Increasing numbers of peer-reviewed papers are expressing open doubts about all of the main points of “global warming” theory. Today’s temperature is well within natural climate variability. The Sun’s activity is now declining from the recent 70-year-long solar Grand Maximum, during which the Sun was more active, for longer, than at almost any similar previous period in the past 11,400 years. Climate models have exaggerated the effect of all greenhouse gases on temperature, and have also increased the feedback multiplier by more than half in a decade, without explanation or justification. The models do not accurately represent major features of the climate, and it has long been proven impossible to predict the long-run evolution of any mathematically-chaotic object, such as the climate, unless one knows the initial state of the object to a degree of precision that, with the climate, is in practice unattainable.

Politicians and the media have flagrantly exaggerated the imagined effects on the climate of the comparatively mild warming to be expected as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas enrichment. Sea level, for instance, will rise not by 20ft imminently, as a notorious “global warming” profiteer and film presenter has suggested, but by about 1ft over the next 100 years.

Economically, adaptation to changes as they slowly occur is many times more cost-effective than attempts at mitigation, which – for powerful political as well as scientific reasons – are doomed to fail. The “precautionary principle” – regulate now, just in case – has killed tens of millions in the recent past, and is both scientifically and economically unworthy of the name “principle”.

Conclusion: the climate may grow warmer, though much or all of the warming may be offset over the coming century by a very substantial decline in solar activity that is confidently predicted by the solar physicists; but the relatively small amount of warming to be expected will be generally beneficial.

Climate change is a non-problem, and the correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. There are many real environmental problems: climate is not one of them. And there are many real political problems, not the least of which is the imminent scarcity of fuels, minerals, and other essential commodities, nearly all of which are already increasing rapidly in price.

Finally, the moral dimension is crucial. The policies advocated to mitigate climate change would condemn the Third World to remain abjectly poor, for unless all other countries cut their carbon emissions atmospheric concentrations will continue to rise even if the entire West shuts down and goes back to the Stone Age, but without even the ability to light fires. If the poorer countries remain poor, their populations will paradoxically continue to increase and, in the medium term, the global carbon footprint of humankind will be greater than if mitigation had not been attempted. It is the poor who have been the victims of unscientific but fashionable political decisions in the recent past: it is they who will die in their tens of millions if, yet again, an unscientific but fashionable political decision is taken by us and inflicted upon them. We must get the science right or we shall get the policy wrong. We have failed them before. We must not fail them again.

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Foreword by Robert Ferguson, President, The Science and Public Policy Institute

Foreword – A Political Context [here]

European and American statists, including activist NGOs like the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), assert that the moderate climate warming that is occurring today is a man-made catastrophe, and have embraced the dystopian fantasy that coercive policies for the elimination of fossil fuel production and usage can prevent or turn back the current warming cycle. They have, thus, made the “global warming planetary emergency” into the central plank of their ongoing campaigns for more centralized government.

Leftist commentator, Alexander Cockburn, put it this way:

This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice [liberal fascism].

For decades environmental activists have insisted that capitalism is not a “sustainable” (sufficient to “save the planet”) economic system. We now hear brazen declarations that democracy is no longer a “sustainable” political process. Al Gore lends a popular, philosophical/theological underpinning to collectivist impulses by casting the root of all environmental evils – real and imagined – in the scientific and industrial/technological revolutions. Put differently, for Gore and the EDF, the planetary environment, not human life, appears the supreme standard of value. Therefore, everything, most importantly Science and Economics, must be pried away from the benefit of man and pressed into total service of the State.

Given just a decade or two of such “sustainable” policies, bolstered by Gore’s religion, the world will be well on its way to a new Dark Ages, and the human misery it breeds.

The American people who owe their long, comfortable and healthy lives to the accomplishments of modern industry, technology, medicine and affordable fossil energy ought to be outraged by activists’ claims and policies. They should come to grasp the terrible costs and futility of the left’s policies; they must understand that life lived as the left envision it for them and their children is baneful; life lived in submission to the hard natural forces of climate and disease, increasingly lived without labor-saving technology, without the fruits of sophisticated agricultural techniques, and without modern medicine, sanitation, electrification and transportation systems is, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Economic growth requires energy growth, and restricting energy growth through self-interested international agreements such as Kyoto or domestic policies such as carbon taxes or cap-and-trade schemes is a recipe for global poverty and human deaths.

As Christopher Monckton herein points out, the necessity of getting the “big” policy decisions right, applies with the greatest force to those fields of policy where wrong decisions could kill and/or impoverish millions. The international community, spurred on by “green” NGOs, “too often gets the big ones wrong, and kills tens of millions, and does not care much.”

The moral dimension, Monckton ever reminds us, is crucial:

“The policies advocated to mitigate climate change would condemn the Third World to remain abjectly poor, for unless all other countries cut their carbon emissions atmospheric concentrations will continue to rise even if the entire West shuts down and goes back to the Stone Age, but without even the ability to light fires…It is the poor who have been the victims of unscientific but fashionable political decisions in the recent past; it is they who will die in their tens of millions if, yet again, an unscientific but fashionable political decision is taken by us and inflicted upon them. We must get the science right or we shall get the policy wrong. We have failed them before. We must not fail them again.”

The destructive outcomes of policies advocated by the EDF for the non-problem of modest global warming will also be inflicted on Americans, and not only will it fail “them” in the Third World, but will malevolently fail us, too.