The Evil, Black Heart of Environmentalism

For all the glitzy, fun, and hip messages we see on TV (especially children's programming) about earth day, the true essence of the green movement is most emphatically NOT about making the earth a better place for humans.

I've posted it a few times before, but it is so dead on, here it is again:

Most of the doe-eyed and brainwashed zealots who mouth platitudes about "saving the earth" aren't honest or intelligent enough to see what they're saying for what it is. But theirs is the malevolent view of human life, and their ultimate end--whether they grasp it or not--is the utter destruction of humanity, raising the value of bugs, weeds, and rocks above human happiness.

This is the life-or-death alternative faced by humanity. We either purposefully, rationally, happily exploit the resources of nature for our survival and flourishing, or we live the nasty, brutish, and short lives of savages.

Ask yourself which one of the alternatives is embraced by the likes of Gore and Holdren? Which one does the green movement idealize as perfection?

A Bossy and Power-hungry Lot

James Lakely at Breitbart's BigGovernment writes up some of the proceedings at recent environmental conference (Keith Lockitch presented as one of a small minority of "deniers"). In such a conference, it seems that views in contrast to the accepted wisdom were not well received:

The 13th Annual Energy & Environment Conference, held in Phoenix Feb. 1-3, isn’t the sort of place where global warming “deniers” are exactly welcome. In fact, by my observations, the skeptical caucus at the event consisted entirely of: James M. Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute; Keith Lockitch, a fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights; and me. All the other attendees spent their time discussing how the U.S. government — or, even better, a “global government” — needs to compel us all to live “greener” lives through schemes like cap-and-trade. Environmentalists are a bossy and power-hungry lot. [links dropped, bold added]

The surprise of Lakely's post is his description of the speech of one William Sprigg, prominent global warming proponet, who shockingly told the gathered scientists that they should actually act like scientists. Lakely wrote:

In his 24-minute lecture, Sprigg also:

• warned of a growing perception that “the IPCC is biased, conflicted, [and] pushing political agendas.”;

• called for a new climate research agency supported not entirely by the government, but in conjunction with the private sector;

• and declared: “We need to stick to our scientific principles,” and “improve our peer preview process, and expand the stakeholders’ role to keep us all honest.”

Recalling the parallels to climate science discussed in previous posts about nutrition science, here is a relevant quote from Good Calories, Bad Calories, in which Taubes discusses Richard Feynman (p. 82-82):

In 1964, when the physicist Richard Feynman presented what would become a renowned series of lectures at Cornell University, he observed that it was a natural condition of scientists to be biased or prejudiced toward their beliefs. That bias, Feynman said, would ultimately make no difference, "because if your bias is wrong a perpetual accumulation of experiments will perpetually annoy you until they cannot be disregarded any longer." They could be disregarded, he said, only if "you are absolutely sure ahead of time" what the answer must be.

The other way the perpetually annoying accumulation of evidence could be disregarded is if you're in the "bossy and power-hungry lot" and your need for funding and desire for prestige and acceptance outweighs your adherence to scientific method, reason, and reality.

Climate Science Forecasts: Opinion In, Policy Out

To those inclined to rational skepticism about the claims made by proponents of anthropogenic global warming, the recent revelations of Climategate greatly serve to validate what they have suspected all along: the models, forecasts, and predictions of AGW are heavily biased towards the opinions of the scientists. A simple layman's review of prominent computer models and forecasts shows they don't pass the sniff test. This is exemplified in the common thought that "if the weatherman's equipment is more sophisticated than the climate scientist's and even he can't predict local weather accurately for more than a few days, how can we trust forecasts of global catastrophe 50 or 100 years from now?"

A more specific and credible assessment of climate models comes from physicist Freeman Dyson:

I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.

Still, such models, and more importantly, the recommendations and forecasts of the scientists who create such models, are commonly used by policymakers, and feature prominently in IPCC reports. This is a disconcerting thought -- that billions of dollars and lives hinge upon such activities -- but nevertheless, forecasting is one of the cornerstones of climate policy, and the subject of much media attention. When the choice of what to cover is a relatively simple statement of what may happen in 20 years (especially if it claims looming disaster) versus detailed charts and graphs of temperature proxies that require pages of technical explanation, it's not at all surprising that we regularly read predictions of doom in the newspapers.

The science behind the forecasts is far from settled as the battle rages over the validity of this or that proxy series, and this or that model. But what of the accuracy and validity of the forecasting itself? Is there a way to empirically assess what a good forecast is?

The answer is: yes.

Authors KC Green and JS Armstrong describe basic principles of proper forecasting and how they apply to climate science in their 2007 paper Global Warming: Forecasts by Scientists versus Scientific Forecasts. These principles are ranked based on the strength of evidence supporting them, "for example some principles are based on common sense or received wisdom. Such principles are included when there is no contrary evidence. Other principles have some empirical support, while 31 are strongly supported by empirical evidence."

They go on to say that some principles are even counter-intuitive, and that "those who forecast in ignorance of the forecasting research literature are unlikely to produce useful predictions." They then name "some well-established principles that apply to long-term forecasts for complex situations where the causal factors are subject to uncertainty (as with climate)."

• Unaided judgmental forecasts by experts have no value. This applies whether the opinions are expressed in words, spreadsheets, or mathematical models. It applies regardless of how much scientific evidence is possessed by the experts.
  Among the reasons for this are:
  a) Complexity: People cannot assess complex relationships through unaided observations.
  b) Coincidence: People confuse correlation with causation.
  c) Feedback: People making judgmental predictions typically do not receive unambiguous feedback they can use to improve their forecasting.
  d) Bias: People have difficulty in obtaining or using evidence that contradicts their initial beliefs. This problem is especially serious for people who view themselves as experts.


• Agreement among experts is weakly related to accuracy. This is especially true when the experts communicate with one another and when they work together to solve problems, as is the case with the IPCC process.


• Complex models (those involving nonlinearities and interactions) harm accuracy because their errors multiply.. . .


• Given even modest uncertainty, prediction intervals are enormous. Prediction intervals (ranges outside which outcomes are unlikely to fall) expand rapidly as time horizons increase, for example, so that one is faced with enormous intervals even when trying to forecast a straightforward thing such as automobile sales for General Motors over the next five years.


• When there is uncertainty in forecasting, forecasts should be conservative. Uncertainty arises when data contain measurement errors, when the series are unstable, when knowledge about the direction of relationships is uncertain, and when a forecast depends upon forecasts of related (causal) variables. For example, forecasts of no change were found to be more accurate than trend forecasts for annual sales when there was substantial uncertainty in the trend lines (Schnaars and Bavuso 1986).

The application of these principles to our post-Climategate world should be obvious, especially the first two. Both unaided forecasts by experts, and the amount of agreement between said experts, has little to no relation to the accuracy of their opinions. Green and Armstrong address this question directly by questioning basic assumptions:

But is it necessary to use scientific forecasting methods? In other words, to use methods that have been shown by empirical validation to be relevant to the types of problems involved with climate forecasting? Or is it sufficient to have leading scientists examine the evidence and make forecasts?

Why is this an important question? As noted before, potentially disastrous public policy is at stake here, and "Many public policy decisions are based on forecasts by experts. Research on persuasion has shown that people have substantial faith in the value of such forecasts. Faith increases when experts agree with one another."

After listing some examples of expert forecasting gone horribly wrong and describing studies in the field of forecasting science, they state the conclusion succinctly:

Comparative empirical studies have routinely concluded that judgmental forecasting by experts is the least accurate of the methods available to make forecasts. [bold added]

What does this have to do with computer models currently used in climate science?

The methodology for climate forecasting used in the past few decades has shifted from surveys of experts’ opinions to the use of computer models. Reid Bryson, the world’s most cited climatologist, wrote in a 1993 article that a model is "nothing more than a formal statement of how the modeler believes that the part of the world of his concern actually works" (p. 798-790). Based on the explanations of climate models that we have seen, we concur. . . . Climate models are, in effect, mathematical ways for the experts to express their opinions. [bold added]

In this context, the emails between prominent proponents of AGW take on a particularly sinister quality. A "trick" may truly mean that the scientist is coming up with a novel hack to deal with a problem, but when it is used to "hide the decline" one has to wonder whether science has become the handmaiden to a political agenda. Couple that with the attempt to silence dissent, expel nonconformists, and blackball journals (and this is just scratching the surface of what Climategate shows us), as well as the original Opinion-generating Engine, the climate model behind the infamous Hockey Stick Graph, and it's difficult to see how any of this meshugas is taken seriously at all.

Sadly, it still is, because as the authors note repeatedly, "people have substantial faith in the value of such forecasts." This is why it is important for rational people to be able to question the very nature of the forecasts we hear every day, rather than simply quibbling about the validity of one proxy series over another, or going through a he said/she said about whether polar bear populations are decreasing or not.

I can't recommend reading this paper highly enough, but let me conclude by excerpting the abstract of the paper for those who just want the soundbyte version:

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group One, a panel of experts established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, issued its Fourth Assessment Report. The Report included predictions of dramatic increases in average world temperatures over the next 92 years and serious harm resulting from the predicted temperature increases. Using forecasting principles as our guide we asked: Are these forecasts a good basis for developing public policy? Our answer is “no”.

To provide forecasts of climate change that are useful for policy-making, one would need to forecast (1) global temperature, (2) the effects of any temperature changes, and (3) the effects of feasible alternative policies. Proper forecasts of all three are necessary for rational policy making.

...We audited the forecasting processes described in Chapter 8 of the IPCC’s WG1 Report to assess the extent to which they complied with forecasting principles. ... The forecasting procedures that were described violated [many] principles. Many of the violations were, by themselves, critical.

The forecasts in the Report were not the outcome of scientific procedures. In effect, they were the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing. Research on forecasting has shown that experts’ predictions are not useful in situations involving uncertainly and complexity. We have been unable to identify any scientific forecasts of global warming. Claims that the Earth will get warmer have no more credence than saying that it will get colder. [bold added]

A Modern Take on Original Sin

Dick Lindzen is slaying dragons again, this time in the Wall St. Journal.

The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA (globally averaged temperature anomaly), to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.

Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well. [bold added]

While I have discussed the irrationality of appealing to mystical forces to fight the weather before -- natives praying to stop mud in 2009 or priests praying to stop glaciers in the 1600's -- I think Lindzen's point here raises a wider issue. "Our perceptions of nature are. . .dragged back centuries so that normal [events]. . .are taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways."

The global warmists have exploited a deep-seated mystical streak in Western culture, and have co-opted the language and respectability of science to tap into great wells of guilt -- the Industrial Revolution as the Original Sin of the secular West. (Note that this also supports the fear of established religion and environmentalism joining forces.)

It's hard not to hope that Climategate will signal the death knell of the global warmist movement, and perhaps it might. But the feeling of guilt is still there. Environmentalists and the mainstream media have been worrying over climate change lately, covering their bases in case global warmism is exposed; Climategate may even take down this "climate changism". But the feeling of guilt is still there. Having identified and exploited such a powerful force as a culture willing to abandon reason and accept unearned guilt, all environmentalists need do is find new omens. The "sinners" will take care of the rest, begging for their punishments and buying indulgences.

Our Piltdown Man

I'm taking a break from tending my fully functional cold fusion reactor -- email me privately and I'll send you plans to build your own (only $29.95!) -- to link to a very good article by Robert Tracinski. Others have done a good job of examining the Climategate scandal, but Tracinski's article goes further and deeper than most by tying many threads together and then clearly stating the political and economic consequences of the giant global warmist scam:

For more than a decade, we've been told that there is a scientific "consensus" that humans are causing global warming, that "the debate is over" and all "legitimate" scientists acknowledge the truth of global warming. Now we know what this "consensus" really means. What it means is: the fix is in.

This is an enormous case of organized scientific fraud, but it is not just scientific fraud. It is also a criminal act. Suborned by billions of taxpayer dollars devoted to climate research, dozens of prominent scientists have established a criminal racket in which they seek government money. . .which they then use to falsify data and defraud the taxpayers. It's the most insidious kind of fraud: a fraud in which the culprits are lauded as public heroes. Judging from this cache of e-mails, they even manage to tell themselves that their manipulation of the data is intended to protect a bigger truth and prevent it from being "confused" by inconvenient facts and uncontrolled criticism.

The damage here goes far beyond the loss of a few billions of taxpayer dollars on bogus scientific research. The real cost of this fraud is the trillions of dollars of wealth that will be destroyed if a fraudulent theory is used to justify legislation that starves the global economy of its cheapest and most abundant sources of energy.

This is the scandal of the century. It needs to be thoroughly investigated-and the culprits need to be brought to justice.

Read the whole thing.

Imagine if Piltdown Man had become "settled science" and government thusly directed massive funding of chimp and orangutan research at the expense of human studies in the mistaken thought that it would lead to better medicine. Leaving aside the fact that there should be a separation of government and science, it took more than 40 years for the Piltdown fraud to be exposed. Billions of dollars could have been wasted in that time, and millions of lives lost because of scientific finds left unfound.

It's a strained analogy, I know. But it's difficult to find anything to compare to the massive scale of global warmism and all it comprises. Although I just had the thought that perhaps global warmists aspire to emulate the Catholic church and the Christian cosmology of Galileo's time.

Hand Waving

I unfortunately don't have time to get into detail about the recent hacking of global warming alarmists' emails and subsequent posting of them for all the world to see. Luckily, Peter Cresswell at Not PC has collected a number of links worth checking out.

He also has this to say:

That’s really the crux of it right there. The world is not warming. They don’t know why. And it doesn’t fit any of their models.

Which means the “consensus” is a bust, the “science is settled” meme is a bust – and The Team themselves know that.

All the rest is hand waving.

He also quotes Andrew Bolt saying, "Most of the media reporting is easing into this Great Global Warming Conspiracy story sideways, but the tide is slowly turning . . . " I certainly hope he's right, and that I'll have reason to blog about this issue again and again because it has blown up into a media firestorm. If it does, it will be about damn time that the MSM pays attention.

I'm not going to hold my breath, though. If nothing else, people's ever-increasing ability to evade reality is one thing that continues to amaze me.

Unambiguously No

The Bottom Line
The earth’s climate (in contrast to the climate in current climate GCMs [General Circulation Models]) is dominated by a strong net negative feedback. . . . such warming as may arise from increasing greenhouse gases will be indistinguishable from the fluctuations in climate that occur naturally from processes internal to the climate system itself. [bold added]

This comes from Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT, explaining how climate models and the IPCC's assumptions compare to actual observational data of sea surface temperatures and actual heat radiated into space.

Climate models are all based on the IPCC-accepted assumption that there is a positive feedback loop such that with increased temperature, greenhouse gases like water vapor will respond by blocking even more heat from escaping. By this logic, adding other greenhouse gases like CO₂ will only make it worse.

According to Lindzen and studies he cites, not only is this positive feedback not confirmed by observational data of heat radiation into space, the opposite is true.

Here is an easily appreciated example of positive and negative feedback. In your car, the gas and brake pedals act as negative feedbacks to reduce speed when you are going too fast and increase it when you are going too slow. If someone were to reverse the position of the pedals without informing you, then they would act as positive feedbacks: increasing your speed when you are going too fast, and slowing you down when you are going too slow.

Alarming climate predictions depend critically on the fact that models have large positive feedbacks. The crucial question is whether nature actually behaves this way? The answer, as we have just seen, is unambiguously no. [bold added]

Am I a climate scientist? No. But I certainly appreciate an analysis of evidence, rather than an appeal to suspect computer models and the "settled" consensus of politically-motivated authorities.

Also, the logic of the following statement Lindzen made in a recent presentation is unassailable:

Why do we need to deconstruct global warming? Simply because it has been an issue that has been routinely treated with misinformation and sophistry abetted by constant repetition, institutional endorsements, and widespread ignorance even (perhaps especially) among the educated. Because of the increasingly dangerous and expensive approaches being promoted to deal with this alleged problem, it is, I think, important to understand what is being said as well as to understand how climate actually works.

[HT: HBL]

Human Ingenuity: The Real Renewable Resource

A recent advertising campaign by the natural gas industry lobby, America's Natural Gas Alliance, states (paraphrasing), "we have a 100 year supply of natural gas and it's growing all the time," and that "we can't revitalize our economy by buying overseas oil," and that "natural gas is twice as clean as coal," and is thus much "greener."

As different sectors of the energy industry try to compete in today's hyper-regulated non-market, this pandering to both environmentalism and mercantilism ("energy independence" is the new "buy American!") is becoming a common strategy. It's an unfortunate, pragmatic, but also understandable reaction to a market that gets less free with every session of Congress and every presidential term.

The crushing weight of governmental regulation isn't the only thing industry is reacting against. As the government dedicates millions of redistributed dollars to "renewable" energy and "green jobs", thus denying legitimate, voluntary investment in the best available opportunities, it's not surprising to see real businesses respond to the distorted market by trying to offer options that try to take advantage of the situation. Producers still need to respond to demand in order to survive and profit, even if government distorts the demand beyond all reason.

An industry that raised the standard of living in not just the United States but in the whole world by a nearly immeasurable margin -- the petroleum industry -- has been demonized by the environmental lobby for decades, and attacked on all sides by government regulation and "reinvestment." And instead of developing a vibrant "green economy," such interference has only inflated energy prices, stifled real innovation, and wasted billions of dollars. Recall that Jimmy Carter tried to birth the solar power industry and its continued failure even during supportive later administrations cannot be dismissed as a partisan issue, or one which simply needs more taxpayer money thrown at it. Decades of government support for renewable energy has gotten us nowhere. [As a side note, if you happen to disagree and think that the oil industry is only an exploiter of the poor and of the environment, may I suggest some required reading?]

Assuming for the moment that we really do need "energy independence" and "green energy," and considering that government involvement has not solved these "problems," what are the alternatives? There just so happens to be a socio-economic system that has been proven throughout history to be perfect for handling just such quandaries.

Capitalism unleashes the political and economic possibilities of the best within humanity. All of the creative, positive, progressive aspects of human activity are fostered -- not oppressed -- by the socio-political framework of capitalism, which means the system that fully and consistently protects individual rights in all areas of human interaction, leaving men free to produce, to solve problems, and to make enormous sums of money in the process. Nearly every modern convenience and life-sustaining technology that we take for granted today is ultimately the product of men who were free, at least in part, to use their minds, to innovate, and to produce.

On the other hand, nearly every seemingly unsolvable socio-economic problem we face today can be traced to government interference. In the energy sphere, government distorts the market by restricting free inquiry and pushing an environmentalist agenda. Using redistributed dollars, government actively promotes one type of solution while regulating others out of existence. Individual rights and the freedom of supply and demand are ignored as irrelevant, while government directs private industry toward supposed socially- and environmentally-friendly goals that continually fail to deliver real return on investment (even the pseudo-investment of "public" dollars). Solar cells, windmills, etc., are subsidized again and again, despite the fact that the market is never there, and the desired innovation never comes.

But it is certainly a fact that there is only so much petroleum on the Earth, and at some point, someday, it could run out. What this should say to a free people is that there is a potential market there for someone ingenious enough to capture it, when the time is right. Is so-called renewable energy the place to look? Who knows? But it certainly isn't the government who knows.

Let us look at renewable resources themselves for a minute. Admittedly, wind is wind, and sun is sun; these things are "renewable" in that they will continue to be available in essentially their current forms until the Earth ceases to exist. But nothing about this means that they will necessarily be economically useful right now, or will benefit human life in the same way that petroleum has. They certainly may, someday, but only on their own timeline, as determined by the individual efforts of creative men, the needs they face, and the values they want to gain.

Was sunlight a useful energy source a few million years ago in the same way we think of energy now? Obviously not. What about wind? This is even more absurd. Wind was more of an enemy -- feeding wildfires while killing cooking fires, chilling bodies, blowing away seeds and arrows -- than it was a useful resource, though it was as plentiful then as it is now. The sun and the wind thus share something fundamental with any other resource. Imagine early Homo sapiens stumbling into a pit filled with a black, viscous, smelly liquid. What good was it to him?

Oil, just like sun and wind, is simply an obstacle until and unless the human mind reshapes it to its own purposes. Obviously, the human mind, reason, and ingenuity are the only things that can transform inanimate matter into life-sustaining values.

Human ingenuity, not wind, not sun, is the only truly renewable resource. Without it, nothing in nature would be transformed to further human life. Your car, your clothes, your food -- none of these things are naturally occurring. If all we can do is take what we get, then we are but hunter-gatherers without tools or any remnants of cognition to help us along. But because humans are rational animals, we can identify the materials in our environment and mold them to suit us.

Be it stones or soft metals or iron or oil or electricity or fusion -- or the sun -- the human mind is the inexhaustible resource that makes all others possible. It is time for the government to recognize this alternative energy source, and to unleash it fully upon the world by getting the hell out of our way.

Van Jones: Plucking the Leaves but Leaving the Roots

I recall reading well over a year go about a guy from California who was spearheading the "Green Collar Economy." It was a popular new catchphrase and I believe I heard about it first either on NPR or in the Boston Globe. I went to the website and read about someone named Van Jones who was organizing and trying to spread his terrible environmentalist and statist views on a national scale, with a book and a bunch of slick marketing and social media activities. Still, he was local from way across on the Left Coast, and I put it out of my mind.

Then Obama won. Eventually, I heard of a new "Green Jobs Czar" named... Van Jones. Yup, same guy. On top of all the other horrendous appointments he was making, it was hard to say he was any worse than the likes of Cass Sunstein or tax cheat Tim Geithner. Then recently, conservative commentators started digging into Jones' background, he became a liability, and over the weekend he resigned. (Expect a cacophony of claims that the Right was motivated by racism -- I'm betting on a Paul Krugman piece trumpeting that angle in the Times in the next day or two.)

Of course his resignation won't make a bit of difference. In fact, it may be a bad thing, because all that will happen is that Obama will search out a non-controversial person to hide in the background while he doles out billions of dollars of redistributed wealth, stolen from productive enterprises and tossed down the Green Hole of "sustainable" industry.

The Wall St. Journal appears to be cautioning Obama from its editorial page, but all it's doing is asking him to govern from the middle:

No President is responsible for all of the views of his appointees, but the rise and fall of Mr. Jones is one more warning that Mr. Obama can't succeed on his current course of governing from the left. He is running into political trouble not because his own message is unclear, or because his opposition is better organized. Mr. Obama is falling in the polls because last year he didn't tell the American people that the "change" they were asked to believe in included trillions of dollars in new spending, deferring to the most liberal Members of Congress, a government takeover of health care, and appointees with the views of Van Jones. [bold added]

The only item in that list that a Republican administration wouldn't be guilty of is appointing someone like Van Jones (though they'd likely go in the opposite direction and appoint a Christian Fundamentalist).

Still, the longer the radical leftists are sitting in positions of power in Washington, and the longer their explicit and implicit political philosophies are exposed to the harsh sunlight, it is more likely that the American people will start to wonder if there is a real, philosophical antidote more substantial than Reagan-era conservatism. They may, just may, start thinking about individual rights and questioning why both parties are so hellbent on violating them.

It's good to see someone like Jones get run out of town, but until the opposition starts fighting for individual rights and fully laissez-faire capitalism instead of complaining that one of Obama's czars said "Republicans are a-holes," there will be no alteration in the course of the country as it plunges into socialism. Because environmentalist and statist policies were not attacked at their rights-violating roots, one green czarist weed was pulled and we can expect another, stronger, harder-to-pull weed to spring up in its place.

Australia Defeats Cap-and-Trade

Robert Tracinski reports that "In a potential preview for America, the Australian Senate has just defeated that country's version of cap-and-trade by a vote of 42-30." Tracinski notes that while most media coverage predictably ignores the real reasons behind the defeat, concentrating on the mining lobby and other causes, he says:

In fact, the bill was defeated because there is now serious disagreement in Australia on the very existence of human-caused global warming. That's the backbone behind the collapse of what was supposed to be bipartisan agreement. As Senator Nick Minchin put it in a blistering speech opposing the bill, "this whole extraordinary scheme, which would do so much damage to Australia, is based on the as yet unproven assertion that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are the main driver of global warming… The Rudd government arrogantly refuses to acknowledge that there remains a very lively scientific debate about the extent of and the main causes of climate change, with thousands of highly reputable scientists around the world of the view that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are not and cannot be the main driver of the small degree of global warming that occurred in the last 30 years of the 20th century."

I hope Tracinski is right that this could be a preview for America. But as I discussed this previously,

our own Congress and press would do well to follow in Australia's footsteps. Nancy Pelosi is set to try and ram the Waxman-Markey bill through the House today, and she'll probably succeed. Hopefully enough Senators will show the same intellectual curiosity that Australia's [Senators] did, and defeat their version of the bill. Doubtful, I know.

Happer Testimony on Climate Change

William Happer, distinguished Princeton physics professor and former director of energy research at D.O.E. (apparently fired by Gore for not going along with politicized science), testified before a Senate committee chaired by Barbara Boxer on February 25, 2009. [HT: Doug Reich]

I was very impressed by the quality of his ideas and presentation, debunking the climate science that is being taken as gospel by the administration, and the resulting need to "do something!" to fix it. His arguments are carefully structured, accessible to the scientific layman, and he weaves in historically analogous situations to support his points. I can't recommend it highly enough (though I wish he would have stopped before writing the last two paragraphs.) As an anecdote unequivocally proving the potency of the speech--you only need one data point for proof, right?--I sent it to a friend, who sent it to his girlfriend, who sent it to her father, a retired oceanographer, and he is now afire with new ideas questioning all sorts of old notions.

Here are a few choice quotes, but they don't do the speech justice. I recommend downloading the PDF from this site and printing it out. You'll want a pen handy to underline key points. It's that good.

On Gore and causality:

Al Gore likes to display graphs of temperature and CO2 concentrations over the past million years or so, showing that when CO2 rises, the temperature also rises. Doesn’t this prove that the temperature is driven by CO2? Absolutely not! If you look carefully at these records, you find that first the temperature goes up, and then the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere goes up.

There is a delay between a temperature increase and a CO2 increase of about 800 years. This casts serious doubt on CO2 as a climate driver because of the fundamental concept of causality. A cause must precede its effect. For example, I hear my furnace go on in the morning about six o’clock, and by about 7 o’clock, I notice that my house is now so warm that I have too many covers on my bed. It is time to get up. It would never occur to me to assume that the furnace started burning gas at 6 o’clock because the house got warm at 7 o’clock.

On the corruption of language, and thus of concepts:

I keep hearing about the “pollutant CO2,” or about “poisoning the atmosphere” with CO2, or about minimizing our “carbon footprint.” This brings to mind another Orwellian pronouncement that is worth pondering: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving “pollutant” and “poison” of their original meaning.

On the folly of trying to claim there is some "ideal" concentration of CO2 that we must go back to:

I remember being forced to read Voltaire’s novel, Candide, when I was young. You recall that Dr. Pangloss repeatedly assured young Candide that he was living in “the best of all possible worlds,” presumably also with the best of all CO2 concentrations. That we are (or were) living at the best of all CO2 concentrations seems to be a tacit assumption of the IPCC executive summaries for policy makers.

But one of my favorite parts comes early in the speech where he talks of the futility of past efforts to to change the climate by wishing.

The climate has changed many times in the past with no help by mankind. Recall that the Romans grew grapes in Britain around the year 100, and Viking settlers prospered on small farms in Greenland for several centuries during the Medieval Climate Optimum around 1100. People have had an urge to control the climate throughout history so I suppose it is no surprise that we are at it again today. For example, in June of 1644, the Bishop of Geneva led a flock of believers to the face of a glacier that was advancing “by over a musket shot” every day. The glacier would soon destroy a village. The Bishop and his flock prayed over the glacier, and it is said to have stopped. The poor Vikings had long since abandoned Greenland where the advancing glaciers and cooling climate proved much less susceptible to prayer. Sometimes the obsession for control of the climate got a bit out of hand, as in the Aztec state, where the local scientific/religious establishment of the year 1500 had long since announced that the debate was over and that at least 20,000 human sacrifices a year were needed to keep the sun moving, the rain falling, and to stop climate change. [bold added]

Although the Bishop of Geneva's praying obviously worked -- wait... what was that about causality? -- the thought of someone praying in front of a glacier to make it stop made me chuckle. Then today, a friend sent me a link to some National Geographic photos of Indonesian cultures living near volcanoes. He was fascinated by the first photo, which is truly breathtaking. But I was amazed at seeing these human beings, living on earth, today, praying to volcano gods. The last photo was perhaps the most striking, taken along with its caption:
This man is praying to stop mud, just like the Bishop prayed to stop the glacier, and the Aztecs sacrificed thousands to their gods. Now the environmentalists and their friends in power are looking to march the economy, and therefore all of us, up to the top of the temple to sacrifice us to their climate god via Cap and Trade. Rather than appealing directly to faith, these last claim to fly the flag of science, all the while persecuting those who disagree with their hysterical claims as if this were an auto da fe.

If you're at all interested in this issue and would like some good points to bring up when you hear the typical "Denier!" assertions, or if you know someone on the fence who might be just active minded enough to listen to reason, you'll want to read this testimony and pass it on.

An Environmentalist's Hero

The Sunday Denver Post tells of a 41-year old man who hiked into the Rocky Mountains to starve because he "hated the materialism and greed that, in his view, prevented people from connecting with nature. And he was frustrated that he could not change that." [HT: Ari]

So, in a story that has dark parallels to the book and film "Into the Wild," this philosophical former Denver disc jockey and Silverton coffee-shop owner, went into the wilderness of western Colorado last summer to think through this quandary — or to die.

"He couldn't figure out how to make people change so they were not so caught up in money and cars and big houses and all that," said his sister, Jovanka Mersman, of Colorado Springs. "He ultimately ended up checking out."

What a brave environmental hero, right? Our evil natures are killing the planet, so unless he could come up with a solution, the only alternative was a slow, painful suicide. It is truly tragic that he didn't live long enough to read Doug Reich's "Corpses for Change" proposal. That would have been right up his alley.

He kept a "meticulously updated" journal, but sadly, it appears that we will never learn about his innermost hallucinations thoughts. It "was soaked by the 20 feet or so of snow that had entombed his body through the winter. The few decipherable words gave no clue to his thoughts."

One can only imagine what insane ramblings this journal contained. Surely, however, it would have been reprinted millions of times and been on Oprah's bestseller list.

What this guy did to himself reminds me of that terrible film, The Happening, except that instead of some mysterious substance that causes people to commit suicide for the sake of the planet, it was the toxic, literally death worshiping, ideas of environmentalism itself that drove this guy crazy.

Our Generation's Smoot-Hawley

I'm shocked to find a speech by a Republican with which I can find nothing to disagree. In fact, this speech given on the House floor last Friday by California Rep. Tom McClintock, after the passage of the Waxman-Markey Cap-and-Trade bill, is insightful, well constructed, and makes a comparison to the history of the Great Depression I hadn't heard before.

McClintock first discusses California's climate change legislation of 2007 and how it drastically deepened the state's financial woes, and then compares cap-and-trade to the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Tariff that sent the country into the Great Depression. It also doesn't hurt that he casually rips apart the claims of global warming alarmists used as a reason to support the bill. This is a very good speech, especially so in comparison to the dumbed-down discourse of our modern politicians.

Tom McClintock, June 26, 2009 8:31 PM - US House of Representatives:

I had a strange sense of Deja Vu as I watched the self-congratulatory rhetoric on the house floor tonight, and I feel compelled to offer this warning from the Left Coast.

Three years ago, I stood on the floor of the California Senate and watched a similar celebration over a similar bill, AB 32. And I have spend the last three years watching as that law has dangerously deepened California’s recession. It uses a different mechanism than Cap and Trade, but the objective is the same: to force a dramatic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

Up until that bill took effect, California’s unemployment numbers tracked very closely with the national unemployment rate. But then in January of 2007, California’s unemployment rate began a steady upward divergence from the national jobless figures. Today, California’s unemployment rate is more than two points above the national rate, and at its highest point since 1941.

What is it that happened in January of 2007? AB 32 took effect and began shutting down entire segments of California’s economy. Let me give you one example from my district. The City of Truckee, California was about to sign a long-term power contract to get its electricity from a new, EPA-approved coal-fired electricity plant in Utah. AB 32 and companion legislation caused them to abandon that contract. The replacement power they acquired literally doubled their electricity costs.

So when economists warn that we can expect electricity prices to double under the cap and trade bill, I can tell you from bitter experience that in my district, that’s not a future prediction, that is an historical fact.

Gov. Schwarzenegger assured us that AB 32 would mean an explosion of new, green jobs -- exactly the same promises we’re hearing from cap and trade supporters. In California, exactly the opposite has happened. We have lost so many jobs that the UCSB economic forecast is now using the D-word – Depression – to discuss California’s job market.

M. Speaker, the Cap and Trade bill proposes what amounts to endlessly increasing taxes on any enterprises that produce carbon dioxide or other so-called greenhouse gas emissions. We need to understand what that means. It has profound implications for agriculture, construction, cargo and passenger transportation, energy production, baking and brewing – all of which produce enormous quantities this innocuous and ubiquitous compound. In fact, every human being produces 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide every day – just by breathing.

So applying a tax to the economy designed to radically constrict carbon dioxide emissions means radically constricting the economy.

And this brings us to the fine point of it.

When you discuss the folly of the Hoover Administration – how it turned the recession of 1929 into the depression of the 1930’s, the first thing that economists point to is the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act that imposed new taxes on over 20,000 imported products.

Waxman-Markey is our generation’s Smoot-Hawley. In fact, it’s worse because it imposes new taxes on an infinitely larger number of domestic products on a scale that utterly dwarfs Smoot-Hawley.

Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that the planet’s climate is constantly changing and that long term global warming has been going on since the last ice age.

Let’s ignore the fact that within recorded history we know of periods when the earth’s climate has been much warmer than it is today and others when it has been much cooler.

Let’s ignore the thousands of climate scientists and meteorologists who have concluded that human-produced greenhouse gases are a negligible factor in global warming or climate change.

Ignore all of that and still we are left with one lousy sense of timing. In the most serious recession since the Great Depression – why would members of this house want to repeat the same mistakes that produced that Great Depression? Watching how California has just wrecked its economy and destroyed its finances, why would they want to do the same thing to our nation?

M. Speaker, this is deadly serious stuff. It transcends ideology and politics. This House has just made the biggest economic mistake since the days of Herbert Hoover.

If this measure becomes law, two things are certain. First, our planet will continue to warm and cool as it has been doing for billions of years. Second, Congress will have delivered a staggering blow to our nation’s economy at precisely that moment when that economy was the most vulnerable.

You can watch the speech here, and see transcripts of his other speeches here.

[HT: IBD]

Congress Should Emulate Australia On Cap And Trade

Australia is in the midst of a vote on a massive cap and trade plan to reduce carbon emissions. Australia, the home of some of the more virulent global warming propaganda around, is one of the last places where I would expect to hear of a backlash against the alarmists in the name of science.

But according to a couple of articles I've read this week, that very backlash is happening. Rob Tracinski asked on Wednesday, Could Australia Blow Apart the Great Global Warming Scare? He and co-author Tom Minchin from Australia detailed the fight that is currently raging in Australia's Sentate as they debate a cap and trade bill. One man in particular, Senator Steve Fielding, is a swing vote, and he decided to come to America to learn more before he cast his vote. He attended the Heartland Institute's conference on climate change at which Yaron Brook spoke. And then Fielding met with an Obama administration official to get his view. Tracinski writes:

Fielding went to the US to assess the American evidence for global warming at close quarters. As Melbourne's Age reported on June 4:

Senator Fielding said he was impressed by some of the data presented at the [US Heartland Institute's] climate change skeptics' conference: namely that, although carbon emissions had increased in the last 10 years, global temperature had not.

He said scientists at the conference had advanced other explanations, such as the relationship between solar activity and solar energy hitting the Earth to explain climate change.

Fielding has issued a challenge to the Obama White House to rebut the data. It will be a novel experience for them, as Fielding is an engineer and has an Australian's disregard for self-important government officials. Here is how The Age described his challenge:

Senator Fielding emailed graphs that claim the globe had not warmed for a decade to Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, after a meeting on Thursday…. Senator Fielding said he found that Dr. Aldy and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science. [bold added]

Kimberly Strassel writes about the same issue in today's Wall St. Journal, and just as Tracinski did, brings up Australian scientist Ian Plimer and his new book, Heaven and Earth.

Credit for Australia's own era of renewed enlightenment goes to Dr. Ian Plimer, a well-known Australian geologist. Earlier this year he published "Heaven and Earth," a damning critique of the "evidence" underpinning man-made global warming. The book is already in its fifth printing. So compelling is it that Paul Sheehan, a noted Australian columnist -- and ardent global warming believer -- in April humbly pronounced it "an evidence-based attack on conformity and orthodoxy, including my own, and a reminder to respect informed dissent and beware of ideology subverting evidence." Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public skepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.

This is all good news, and our own Congress and press would do well to follow in Australia's footsteps. Nancy Pelosi is set to try and ram the Waxman-Markey bill through the House today, and she'll probably succeed. Hopefully enough Senators will show the same intellectual curiosity that Australia's Fielding did, and defeat their version of the bill. Doubtful, I know.

UPDATE: Helpful commenter, Richard, pointed me to an EPA coverup that is just coming to light. Prior to the issuance of EPA's "Endangerment Finding" on carbon dioxide, an EPA expert wrote a detailed report stating why it shouldn't be issued. Alan Carlin's report was "disappeared" and he was taken off any teams dealing with climate change.

Read an interview with him here, some of the background and information from an anonymous EPA employee here, and the blog post linked in the comments here. The last contains actual emails written by EPA officials saying that including Carlin's comments would have "a very negative impact on this office."

It's Good To Be Right... Or Is It?

I'm sure many bloggers have experienced this situation, and I have before as well.  You see something happen and write a post about it, drawing conclusions from it that you haven't seen anywhere else.

Then, a few days or weeks later, you see a prominent journalist make the same argument.

This is most definitely not to say that such journalists are necessarily stealing ideas.  The likelihood that my small blog would have such an impact is slim to none. And I'm also not making innovative breakthroughs in philosophy or science. This isn't rocket surgery.

But I do look upon such situations with a bit of wry humor, as well as a sense of validation and satisfaction.  Even if it's not me who is getting the ideas out to the wider audience, at least someone is. 

It was in this context that I read Kimberley Strassel's opinion column in the Wall St. Journal, Global Warming Overreach.  In it, she discusses how the Democrats are pushing too hard for global warming-related legislation, and goes into great detail about the political implications.  Though I'll be glad if they fail, this isn't my concern here.

Near the end of the piece, she discusses Cap'n Trade vs. the EPA "dangerousness" ruling of CO2, and I saw my argument right there in black and white.  A couple of days ago, I said:

In October of last year, I wrote about the concept of "greenmail," where, if elected, Obama would wait to see if Congress would pass Cap'n Trade^TM, and if they didn't within 18 months, he'd have EPA declare CO2 a pollutant. Well, it appears that the Obama administration has decided to use the greenmail first, as a means of scaring the Congress into passing Cap'n Trade. [bold added]

Today, after discussing all the political battles around the issue and the difficulty ahead for the president's agenda, Strassel said to sum up: 

The Obama team is aware it has trouble, which explains last week's well-timed Environmental Protection Agency "finding" that carbon is a danger. The administration is now using this as a stick to beat Congress to act, arguing that if it doesn't the EPA will. (Reality: Any EPA actions will be tied up in court for years.) It also helps explain EPA's Monday analysis claiming the legislation won't cost all that much. (Reality: The agency could only make this claim by assuming an endless recession.)  [bold added]

It's good to be right, as it confirms the reasoning in which I was already confident.  But at the same time... I wish I wasn't right about this. Hopefully Strassel's wider readership will get more people to see this for what it is, and work against it¹.

---

1. See this site for instructions on submitting comments on EPA's ruling that CO2 is a "dangerous pollutant."  Scroll down to "Written Comments" and the instructions are in a linked EPA PDF.   Make sure to reference Docket ID No. EPA-HQ-OAR-2009-0171.  [HT: Paul Hsieh]

 

Holdren Channels Mr. Burns

I first heard about John Holdren's "climate hacking" ideas on NPR a few days ago. The short bit on Morning Edition described Holdren as saying that "we're near a tipping point" of catastrophic climate change, and we might have to take radical action. The two things listed were fake trees to vacuum up carbon and store it somehow (I thought real trees did that?) and shooting sulfur particles into the atmosphere, emulating a volcano, to block the sun's rays. There are some risks, such as burning off the ozone layer, but it's still an option that we must look into. Makes sense, right? Sure, we can't predict the weather accurately, even a few days out, but we have enough certainty to know that global warming is like being "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog."

A couple Objectivist bloggers have weighed in on this topic already. Brian at Reality Talk notes the absurdity of it all:

In light of recent evidence suggesting that some part of global warming has been caused by cleaner air, which allows more sunlight to hit the Earth’s surface and the oceans, it should come as no surprise that President Obama’s new science advisor, John Holdren, would seriously consider pumping the atmosphere full of pollution particles. [links dropped, bold added]

Yup, the air is now too clean and we need to pollute it, on purpose, to save the planet.

Doug Reich digs deeper and finds fascinating parallels between the unfathomably irrational programs of brutal dictators like Mao -- the "Kill a Sparrow Campaign," and handing out fly swatters? -- and Holdren's radical geoengineering ideas. Read his whole post.

And this morning, James Taranto of the Wall St. Journal captured the pure insanity of the whole situation in his "Best of the Web" column. Under the heading, "Life Imitates The Simpsons," he writes:

Smithers: "Well, sir, you've certainly vanquished all your enemies: the elementary school, the local tavern, the old age home. You must be very proud."

Burns: "No, not while my greatest nemesis still provides our customers with free light, heat and energy. I call this enemy the sun. Since the beginning of time man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing--block it out!" [bold added]

I can picture the crazed professor, John Holdren, cackling with spittle on his beard, as he cries, "Prepare to ignite the Holdren Volcano-izer! On my mark!... FIRE!"

Yes, this is a very serious issue, but sometimes gallows humor or a good quote from The Simpsons helps to retain sanity.

Coming Soon... An Inconvenient Truth II -- The Re-Truthinating

Bookstores, airwaves, and the Web will soon be awash in all things Al Gore again. He will releasing a new book, the sequel to An Inconvenient Truth, on November 9, 2009.

The new book, Our Choice, "will lay out a 'blueprint' for solving the climate crisis," according to a press release posted on the Huffington Post. Why publish a sequel (other than to satisfy Gore's need for the spotlight)?

Said Vice President Gore, "An Inconvenient Truth reached millions of people with the message that the climate crisis is threatening the future of human civilization and that it must and can be solved. Now that the need for urgent action is even clearer with the alarming new findings of the last three years, it is time for a comprehensive global plan that actually solves the climate crisis. Our Choice will answer that call." [bold added]

I'm not clear about what alarming new findings there have been in the last three years. I know that more and more scientists are publicly questioning the fantastical claims of the alarmists, that sun activity is thought to be the main factor in any warming, and that a decrease in sun activity is expected, along with a continuing of the cooling trends we are seeing now. Is that the crisis to which Mr. Gore refers?

Expect this book to ratchet up the hysteria, as the environmentalists frantically try to convince the world that the "science is settled" and drastic measures are needed.

Think of the Trees!

Have you ever received an email where the sender included something like the following at the end of their signature?

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail

I just got one like this, with the cute little webdings "P" (a tree with a... river?), and instead of green, it had me seeing red. It says to me, in effect, "I, the sender of this email, am an unthinking, dogmatic, idiot." Probably not what was intended, eh?

It also says to me that the sender has a tragically wrong view of values. She places intrinsic value on "the environment" wholly apart from the valuers -- humans. Sure, I'm making assumptions about a person based on their email signature, but if she puts her ideology out there like that, why shouldn't I? The woman just told me that I should think, not about my values, my ease or comfort in reading what she wrote, but instead I should be concerned with the impact of one sheet of paper and some ink on "the environment."

To this, I say "to hell with you!" I'll print the damn thing out five million times if it fits my needs.

I think I'll begin including a variation of this signature on my own emails:

Please consider using reason and your own independent judgment regarding the printing of this email. If it fits your needs, print a forest's worth. The environment be damned!

Mini Global Warming Roundup

Poll Numbers Down

The WSJ's "Best of the Web Today" feature by James Taranto highlights a recent NYTimes post about global warming's dropping poll numbers.

...there is a widespread belief that the voters handed President Obama a mandate to "do something" about global warming. A poll released last week by the Pew Research Center, however, calls this into question.

"According to the survey of 1,503 adults, global warming, on its own, ranks last out of 20 surveyed issues. . . ."

[The Times] also links to a Rasmussen survey that finds Americans increasingly skeptical about the science behind global warmism:

Forty-four percent (44%) of U.S. voters now say long-term planetary trends are the cause of global warming, compared to 41% who blame it on human activity. . . .

In July 2006, 46% of voters said global warming is caused primarily by human activities, while 35% said it is due to long-term planetary trends.

This is quite a shift. In two years, there was a 9 point surge in the numbers of those who take the reasonable view that man is not the primary cause of global warming (assuming it's even happening).

Taranto goes on to discuss a recent study that claims that humans have already done so much damage that it will take one thousand years to fix, assuming we stop all greenhouse gas emissions right now. The following is an excerpt from an article about the study, followed by Taranto's appropriately exasperated response:

"People have imagined that if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide, the climate would go back to normal in 100 years, 200 years," lead author Susan Solomon, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a telephone news conference. "That's not true." . . .

Solomon said in a statement that absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans and release of heat from the oceans - the one process acting to cool the Earth and the other to warm it--will "work against each other to keep temperatures almost constant for more than 1,000 years."

Is it absolutely crucial to the planet's future that we curtail greenhouse gases this instant, or would it not make any difference anyway? If the latter, what sense does it make to be alarmed? And that last quote by Solomon is a classic head-scratcher. We're supposed to worry that temperatures will be "almost constant for more than 1,000 years"? That's what they mean by global warming?

Weather forecast for the year 3009: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. ["The more things change, the more they stay the same" -ed]

The Boston Globe is delivered to my doorstep every morning, and since the inauguration I have noticed a sharp uptick in climate change hysteria (note: they do not say "global warming" anymore, to hedge their bets), along with calls for drastic action and obvious elation that we now have an administration that will "do something." The study by the NOAA scientist was presented as "news" in urgent tones, trying desperately to spin the interpretation of the reader towards the view that things are much worse than we ever anticipated. Taranto's derision is a welcome change, as are the poll numbers showing that people are starting to look behind the curtain.

Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

Despite growing evidence calling into question the theory of global warming, increased skepticism by the public (see above), and more and more public statements by prominent scientists debunking the theories... politicians and alarmists are pushing full speed ahead.

Today, John Lewis and Paul Saunders at Principles in Practice discuss the latest high-profile scientist to speak up.

The Obama administration continues to appoint radical environmentalists who want us to commit industrial suicide on behalf of nature. Meanwhile, top-rank scientists continue to renounce claims of a coming climate disaster.

The latest scientist to voice his conclusions is retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist Dr. John S. Theon. As chief of several NASA programs from 1982 to 1994, Theon was responsible for all weather and climate research...

"I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those who disagree that global warming is man made,” Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009.

It is always good to have more voices speak out for reason. But Lewis and Saunders go further and examine why politicians, in the face of mounting evidence in contradiction to their stated positions, continue to push for drastic and harmful regulations to "protect the planet."

In summary, while the vast majority of scientists are going in one direction—repudiating claims of a man-made climate disaster—politicians are going the other direction—embracing such claims and shackling industry on those “grounds.” Why? Why, as the scientific case for man-made global warming collapses, are politicians all the more determined to impose draconian controls on industry?

The answer is morality. Politics is directly dependent upon morality. Politicians who follow a morality of sacrifice will impose laws that enforce that “ideal.” Conversely, those who follow a morality of rational self-interest will act to protect our rights—including our rights to productive action.

The observations, analyses, and conclusions of scientists have never deterred those who are committed to the morality of sacrifice. This latest disparity between science and politics is yet another example of this fact. [bold added]

This is a crucial point to remember, both when trying to fathom how people could be so out of touch with the facts (i.e. reality), as well as when trying to fight the environmentalist menace. It is not only a scientific question, but more importantly a moral one.

Farming in Greenland

A new feature-length documentary has been made that confronts anthropogenic global warming alarmism head on. According to the website and trailer for the film, Not Evil Just Wrong: The True Cost of Global Warming Hysteria examines and debunks the claims made by Al Gore's fake-umentary and those of prominent environmentalists like Ed Begley Jr. and James Hansen of NASA.

The trailer has a surprisingly pro-capitalist message, and hopefully it is carried throughout the film. The Irish filmmakers, Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, have said that the "... theme is how environmentalism seems to harm the poorest people in the poorest places on the planet." This is certainly true, because as the green movement seeks to destroy our industrial society, those hurt first will be those with the fewest resources. For me, the key to the value of this movie will be if the filmmakers realize that the solution to this problem -- the impact on the most vulnerable populations by environmentalist policy and ideology -- is capitalism and the life-sustaining qualities of industrialization.

Based on the trailer, I'm optimistic that they "get it." If they recognize that human life is the standard of value, the thing that needs to be protected, and that capitalism is the tool to accomplish it then this movie could be great.

Here are some quick quotes that really jumped out at me:

"A lot of environmental activists still have not come to accept that the humans are a part of the environment." -- voiceover from one of the contributors

"You're comparing bugs with people! You'd rather save the bugs and lose the people." -- An African woman who lost her son to malaria, talking about the ban on DDT.

Perusing the website, the list of contributors is interesting -- from scientists and media to average Americans and Africans being impacted by environmental policy, with some enviro-alarmists thrown in for contrast -- and provides select quotes from the movie in addition to biographical information for each person. A professor from the University of Virginia named Fred Singer was quoted as saying the following:

The 20th Century is certainly not the warmest in 1,000 years. It was much warmer 1,000 years ago than it is today. There was agriculture in Greenland and they were growing wine grapes in England!, in Yorkshire.

Here's hoping that the film is as good as it looks and that enough money can be raised for a full theatrical release in the United States.

[HT: HBL]