Quotulatiousness

December 16, 2011

Lorne Gunter on the Kyoto cult: “Ottawa is right to get out of it while it could.”

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:44

Much has been made — at least in the British press — about Canada announcing it will withdraw from the Kyoto agreement. Lorne Gunter agrees with the government that it was high time to leave:

It has been written in several places that should Canada fail to bring its emissions down drastically in the coming year, it could be subject to up to $19-billion in fines imposed by Ms. Figueres and the UNFCCC. How? The fines would be in the form of “carbon credits” — we would pay developing countries that aren’t current producing many emissions for their unused carbon. In other words, we could buy the equivalent of medieval indulgences to cover off our carbon sins. No emissions would be reduced, but the UN would be placated by this accounting device.

But what if we refuse to buy credits? In logic that would only ever make sense to UN bureaucrats, the UNFCCC then has the authority to penalize us by making us buy 30% more credits. That’s right, if we refuse to pay $19-billion in environmental baksheesh to cover off our extra emissions, the UN somehow thinks it will be able to convince us to pay $25-billion as a punishment.

Seriously, these people believe this stuff makes sense.

One of the reasons UN bureaucrats have begun using language such as “legal obligation” is that they are hoping to convince national supreme courts to enforce international treaties for them. At the Durban climate summit recently concluded in South Africa, delegates agreed to form an International Climate Court of Justice, partly in hopes that rulings from such a body would be enforced by domestic courts, even against countries, such as Canada, that withdraw from climate treaties.

The UN environmental cult becomes more dangerous to national sovereignty and personal freedom every day. Ottawa is right to get out of it while it could.

December 15, 2011

James Delingpole on Great Britain, the Green Movement, and the End of the World

December 13, 2011

Canada’s withdrawal from Kyoto was inevitable from the beginning

I was against the Kyoto agreement from the start, but the government of the day had to be seen to be more “green” than the Americans. John Ibbitson explains:

The Harper government’s decision to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol tarnishes Canada before the world. Liberal and Conservative incompetence and mendacity are to blame. You and I are to blame. And Lehman Brothers had something to do with it as well.

It isn’t easy for a country to descend, in the space of a single decade, from crusader to pariah, as Canada has done on the environment. But our political leaders were up to the task.

The first, worst mistake occurred at Kyoto itself in 1997, when then prime minister Jean Chrétien told Canadian negotiators to meet or beat the American commitment, whatever it took. The problem was that while the American commitment was ambitious, Bill Clinton never expected the Senate to ratify that commitment, and he was right.

The Liberals found themselves stuck with Draconian targets that, if met, would hobble oil sands production, hammer big industry in Ontario, and send home-heating bills through the roof. Their solution was to study the issue. And study. I remember sitting through an interminable briefing in 2003, in which officials patiently explained how Canada would meet its Kyoto targets. The only problem was that there was this enormous gap, which was to be closed through “future reductions.” It was like having a household budget in which Miscellaneous was bigger than Mortgage.

Given the hammering that British PM David Cameron has been taking in the British press, he should send a bouquet of flowers to Stephen Harper for giving the media a different villain to abuse.

Update: Stephen Gordon says the same thing: inevitable from the beginning.

Notwithstanding economically illiterate attempts to pretend otherwise, higher consumer prices for GHG-emitting goods and services are an essential component of any serious attempt to reduce emissions. Counting on people to reduce GGE emissions out of the goodness of their hearts was the strategy of the Chrétien-Martin Liberal governments, and adopting this policy made Canada’s Kyoto failure inevitable long before Stephen Harper’s Conservatives came to power.

Political parties rarely win when they campaign on a platform that promises to increase the price of fossil fuels — the Progressive Conservative government of Joe Clark lost power in large part because of its proposal to increase the gasoline excise tax by 18 cents a gallon (4 cents a litre).

Update, the second: Oh, it’s okay, apparently we’re not allowed to abandon the “voluntary” agreement:

Remember how this was phrased? “sign it, it’s just voluntary!”

Recall Rio 1992 “Earth Summit” where the meme was “hey, it’s voluntary! … with a negotiating schedule attached”. Apparently, like a Roach Motel, “countries check in but they can’t check out”. This email is from UNFCCC’s list server and note my bolded section below. The arrogance, it burns.

[. . .]

    “I regret that Canada has announced it will withdraw and am surprised over its timing. Whether or not Canada is a Party to the Kyoto Protocol, it has a legal obligation under the Convention to reduce its emissions, and a moral obligation to itself and future generations to lead in the global effort. Industrialized countries whose emissions have risen significantly since 1990, as is the case for Canada, remain in a weaker position to call on developing countries to limit their emissions.”

November 25, 2011

Climategate 2.0 for dummies

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:34

For anyone who managed to avoid hearing about the original release of emails from many of the leading lights in the anthropogenic global warming community, revealing a much more sordid and less-than-honest process to publicize information on the global climate, James Delingpole explains why the latest batch of emails are important:

The latest batch of emails, leaked by a person or persons unknown (but whoever they are they deserve a Congressional Medal of Honor at the very least) comprises 5,000 files, dumped as before onto a Russian server, revealing private correspondence between many of the scientists at the heart of the Great Global Warming scam.

These are men like Penn State’s increasingly infamous Michael Mann (inventor of the discredited Hockey Stick) and the University of East Angia’s Phil Jones: not just two-bit research assistants but the “experts” whose data, research papers and lobbying forms the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) pronouncements on Anthropogenic Global Warming.

The IPCC, in turn, is the organization on whose doomy prognostications of man-made climate disaster our political leaders base their policy. So when Obama pours billions of your tax dollars into failed clean-tech companies like Solyndra, when you are banned from using the kind of lightbulbs that actually illuminate a room rather than merely flicker and give you a headache, when the EPA’s Lisa Jackson tries reducing the number of showers you take or seeks to regulate when you use your aircon, when your energy bills rise and your flights grow more expensive due to carbon taxes — all these infringements on your economic wellbeing and your liberty can be traced back to these Climategate scientists. This is why Climategate matters.

October 22, 2011

IPCC authors: “They are people who are at the top of their profession”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:15

Whether you’re a global warming/climate change skeptic or not, Donna Laframboise has a book that might be of interest to you:

The people who write the IPCC’s report — which is informally known as the Climate Bible — are supposedly the crème de la crème of world science. Rajendra Pachauri, the person who has been the IPCC’s chairman since 2002, tells us this repeatedly. In 2007 he explained to a newspaper how his organization selects individuals to help write the Climate Bible: “These are people who have been chosen on the basis of their track record, on their record of publications, on the research that they have done,” he said. “They are people who are at the top of their profession.”

Two years later, when testifying before a committee of the U.S. Senate, Pachauri argued that “all rational persons” should be persuaded by the IPCC’s conclusions since his organization mobilizes “the best talent available across the world.”

[. . .]

A close look at the IPCC’s roster of authors reveals that — on a wide range of topics including hurricanes, sea-level rise, and malaria — some of the world’s most seasoned specialists have been left out in the cold. In their stead, the IPCC has been recruiting 20-something graduate students.

For example, Laurens Bouwer is currently employed by an environmental studies institute at the VU University Amsterdam. In 1999-2000, he served as an IPCC lead author before earning his Masters degree in 2001.

How can a young man without even a master’s degree become an IPCC lead author? Bouwer’s expertise is in climate change and water resources. Yet the chapter for which he first served as a lead author was titled Insurance and Other Financial Services.

It turns out that, during part of 2000, Bouwer was a trainee at Munich Reinsurance Company. This means the IPCC chose as a lead author someone who was a trainee, who lacked a master’s degree, and was still a full decade away from receiving his 2010 PhD.

October 14, 2011

When will Tuvalu be inundated?

Filed under: Environment, Media, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

The answer, according to Lorne Gunter is . . . not very soon, if at all:

For nearly a decade now, the tiny Pacific island-group nation of Tuvalu has made news for its government’s claim that the archipelago is being swallowed up by rising sea levels caused by global warming. The island government has even considered suing the world’s largest industrial powers for emitting the carbon dioxide that many scientists believe is trapping solar radiation in the atmosphere and leading to allegedly higher global temperatures. When the highly vaunted UN climate summit in Copenhagen in Dec. 2009 failed to produce a successor agreement to the 1997 Kyoto accords, the Tuvalu delegation was not shy about expressing its disgust and outrage, claiming that world leaders had consigned them to a slow extermination. (So slow — over 100 years — that almost no current Tuvaluns will live long enough to be killed by the encroaching oceans and their descendents will have plenty of time to row to safety. But let’s not pick nits.)

[. . .]

Two American experts on coastal construction and sea-level — James Houston, director emeritus of engineering research and development for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Robert Dean, professor emeritus of civil and coastal engineering at the University of Florida — examined decades worth of data from all the tidal monitors around the U.S. and determined earlier this year that “worldwide-temperature increase has not produced acceleration of global sea level over the past 100 years.” indeed, the rate at which oceans have been rising has “possibly decelerated for at least the last 80 years.”

Houston and Dean are committed warmists. They started their study with the expectation that their results would show rapidly increasing sea levels. Instead, they found that the oceans around the U.S. had risen little in the 20th Century and that the far from rising faster due to global warming were actually rising more slowly. If the trend of the past 80 years continued, the pair estimated that at most worldwide oceans would rise by 15 cms (ankle depth) by 2100, rather than the one to two metres most recently projected by the UN, or the 10 metres estimated by Al Gore.

September 27, 2011

ReasonTV: ManBearPig, Climategate, and Watermelons

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:14

James Delingpole is a bestselling British author and blogger who helped expose the Climategate scandal back in 2009. Reason.tv caught up with Delingpole in Los Angeles recently to learn more about his entertaining and provocative new book Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors. At its very roots, argues Delingpole, climate change is an ideological battle, not a scientific one. In other words, it’s green on the outside and red on the inside. At the end of the day, according to Delingpole, the “watermelons” of the modern environmental movement do not want to save the world. They want to rule it.

September 22, 2011

“A piece of half-baked speculation had simply been used without checking because, well, it seemed true enough”

Filed under: Americas, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:49

Tim Black on the recent Times Atlas gaffe over the Greenland ice sheet:

For those all too inclined to believe the worst in the warmest of all possible worlds, there was no need to question the Times Atlas’s revelation. It merely told them what they already knew — that our nasty industrialised ways are destroying Earth.

But among those who actually know a little about ice sheets, the atlas’s findings were a little too much of a revelation. First up were researchers from the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, who promptly wrote to the atlas’s editors: ‘There is to our knowledge no support for this [15 per cent] claim in the published scientific literature.’ Other scientists in the field were quick to back up the Cambridge researchers. ‘The claims here’, said Graham Cogley from Trent University, ‘are simply not backed up by science; this pig can’t fly’. Others agreed. Jeffrey Kargel of the University of Arizona, principal scientist on a project involving the mapping of ice and glaciers from space, was unequivocal: ‘These new maps are ridiculously off base, way exaggerated relative to the reality of rapid change in Greenland. I don’t know how exactly the Times Atlas produced their results, but they are not scientific results.’

So how exactly did the Times Atlas cartographers produce their results? More kindly commentators have suggested that the atlas bods foolishly relied on the National Snow and Ice Data Center-maintained online resource, the Atlas of the Cryosphere. This apparently shows the thickness of the central part of the ice sheet over Greenland, but it does not show the thickness of the ice sheet’s periphery. The cartographers presumably interpreted this to mean that the peripheral ice did not exist — that it had melted. Other critics have been less generous, with one suggesting they might have been just a little too reliant on that bastion of truth, Wikipedia.

While it’s fun to pile on when a respected publication gets caught out trying for sensation instead of presenting facts, Black also sounds a note of caution:

Yet such over-eager triumphalism on the part of climate-change sceptics is misplaced. This is not because advocates of climate change are not frequently making mistakes. And it is not because the climate-change narrative, demanding so many facts to fit its story of manmade doom, is not fundamentally flawed. No, the problem with celebrating every scientific, factual refutation of the climate-change thesis as the beginning of the end for what remains the dominant narrative of our times, despite growing public indifference, is that climate change is not primarily a scientific issue. It was not born in science labs or in meteorology centres. And likewise, it will not be defeated by scientists or meteorologists, either.

That is because climate change is principally a political issue, not a scientific one. Climate-change alarmism is about channelling a vision of the future in which man, producing too much and consuming far more, is conceived as a problem. And the only way to challenge this widespread political and moral outlook is by coming up with something a little less human-hating — a political vision in which humanity’s needs and desires, our productive capacities and our consuming wants, are championed rather than denigrated. To rely on the mistakes of climate-change advocates to undermine their own cause is no substitute for the long-awaited, never-seen political debate about climate change.

September 20, 2011

New Times Atlas vastly overstates Greenland ice sheet shrinkage

Filed under: Americas, Books, Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

You know it’s a major gaffe when even the BBC’s Environment correspondent is saying things like this:

The part of News Corporation that makes Times Atlases is currently taking the same kind of kicking from scientists that some of its newspapers took from the general public over phone-hacking.

What it’s being kicked for is for claiming, in the edition that came out last week, that the Greenland ice sheet has shrunk by 15% over 12 years, necessitating the re-drawing of its boundaries.

[. . .]

The problem is, it’s not true; and glaciologists have been queuing up to say why not.

“In the aftermath of ‘Himalayagate’, we glaciologists are hypersensitive to egregious errors in supposedly authoritative sources,” said Graham Cogley from Trent University in Canada.

“Climate change is real, and Greenland ice cover is shrinking. But the claims here are simply not backed up by science; this pig can’t fly.”

As Professor Cogley was the scientist who raised the alarm over “Himalayagate” — the erroneous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contention that Himalayan glaciers could largely melt away by 2035 — he is well placed to make the comparison.

Update: Breaking! James Delingpole discovers the advance plans for the next Times Atlas:

Following its controversial decision to produce a map suggesting that Greenland has lost 15 per cent of its ice cover in the last twelve years — a loss rate disputed by most credible scientists: and even, amazingly, the Guardian agrees on this — the Times Comprehensive Atlas Of The World has decided to take its new role as cheerleader for Climate Change alarmism a step further. In its upcoming 14th edition, unconfirmed rumours suggest, it will completely omit Tuvalu, the Maldives and major parts of Bangladesh in order to convey the “emotional truth” about “man made climate change.”

“All right, it may not be strictly geographically accurate to say the Maldives and Tuvalu will definitely have disappeared in about ten years time when our next edition appears,” said Times Atlas spokesman David Rose. “But did you see that picture of the Maldives cabinet holding a meeting underwater? If the Maldives government says the Maldives are drowning, they must be drowning. And frankly I think it’s despicable, all those deniers who are saying it was just a publicity stunt, cooked up by green activist Mark Lynas, to blackmail the international community into giving the Maldives more aid money while simultaneously trying to lure green Trustafarians to come and spend £1500 a night in houses on stilts with gold-plated organic recyclable eco-toilets made of rare earth minerals from China. Why would a government lie about something as serious as climate change?”

September 13, 2011

QotD: Responding to the “Climate Reality Project”

Today begins the 72-hour observance of the Climate Reality Project’s “24 hours of reality” info-event on the so-called “climate crisis” on Facebook and Twitter. I know, I know. Why call it “24 hours of reality” when you’re going to spend 72 hours doing it? Because SHUT UP YOU DENIALIST NAZI SYMPATHIZER!

I’m not on Twitter, but let me share what I’ve communicated to my friends on Facebook:

If ANYONE allows that fat bastard access to their Facebook account in order to spam me with their “THE SKY IS FALLING AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT, WINGNUTZ” crap; not only will I de-friend you and refuse to speak to your dumb ass strictly out of principle, I solemnly vow that I will mail a LIVE OPOSSUM to your house in a big box full of styrofoam peanuts.

LIVE. OPOSSUM.

Please don’t test me. I’m serious here. Much like me, live opossums don’t care about fake science. They’re more interested in breaking stuff and having panicked bowel movements on the top shelf of your china hutch.

“Russ from Winterset”, “My Response to ‘The Climate Reality Project'”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2011-09-13

September 4, 2011

UK “will lose 2 to 3 per cent GDP a year for around 20 years” on renewable energy subsidies

A report in The Register says that the subsidies for green renewable energy will be a big net drain on the national economy:

The UK’s headlong rush into renewable energy — one ignored by the rest of the world — will hit British jobs and then general incomes, an economic study finds.

The report, The Myth of Green Jobs by economist Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University, examines the long-term impacts of subsidising expensive “green” renewable energy projects. It says that if the UK continues to do so, it will lose 2 to 3 per cent GDP a year for around 20 years. If reducing CO2 emissions is your goal, says Hughes, your economy really can’t afford renewable energy.

[. . .]

“All forms of green energy tend to be substantially more expensive than conventional energy, so there is a trade-off between higher costs and lower emissions,” writes Hughes. “This trade-off is not specific to green energy, since there are many ways of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Hence, the starting point of any assessment of such programmes should be the total cost per tonne of carbon dioxide saved — or its equivalent — which will be incurred by relying upon different measures or policies to reduce emissions.”

August 23, 2011

The value of computer models

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Over the last several years, we’ve been bombarded with advice from climate scientists that in order to slow down global warming, we needed to abandon any hope of economic growth, as their models clearly showed that it was our growth that was causing increased temperatures around the world (except for the last ten years, somehow). In a case like this, we are assured that the models are (practically) infallible and that any delay in cutting our various emissions will invariably doom the planet to runaway temperature increases.

However, when we take the scientific community (or the more outspoken members thereof) at their word, and go with computer modelling, that’s dangerously irresponsible of us:

The current plan for Environment Canada is to monitor and measure less, and to rely more on modelling. Models are computer simulations based on scientific understanding that are applied to problems ranging from weather forecasting to economics. Models of complex systems can easily get it wrong, as the unanticipated economic collapse in 2008 revealed. This is not to say that models are not useful: in economics they give helpful guidance for investments and policy.

Models are, however, no substitute for measurements. No economist would suggest that we stop measuring economic performance, and neither should we abandon monitoring the environment in which we live. New data leads to better models and more accurate predictions.

H/T to Elizabeth for sending me the link and pointing out the models good/models bad case.

July 22, 2011

Mark Lynas goes from green activist to “denier”

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

Ben Pile reviews Mark Lynas’s new book:

Since becoming an advocate of genetic modification (GM) and nuclear power, Mark Lynas has drawn increasingly hostile criticism from his erstwhile comrades in the green movement. In turn, he has sharpened his criticism of environmentalists for their hostility to technological and economic development. In his new book, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, he attempts to reformulate environmentalism to overcome the excesses that have so far prevented it from saving the planet. This book will no doubt provoke debate, but what is this transformation really about, and is it really based on new ideas or merely the revision of old ones?

[. . .]

As a result, there is much to agree with in The God Species. Most importantly, Lynas makes a clean break from deep ecology — the idea that ‘nature’ has intrinsic moral value and a ‘right’ to be protected from our ambitions. He rebukes the environmentalism that imagines a return to a pristine nature, and that shows contempt for development as an attempt to ‘play god’ over nature. We should ‘play god’, he says, for the planet’s sake as well as our own comfort. There is a convincing criticism of green demands for austerity and environmentalists’ unrealistic expectations that people should make do with ‘happiness’ rather than material progress. These are the conceits of well-off, middle-class and self-indulgent whingers, Lynas explains. Some of us have been making similar arguments for a very long time.

In spite of some of his accurate criticisms, Lynas fails to get to the substance of environmentalism. We do not find out what takes environmentalists to their bleak view of the world and their low view of humanity. This is a shame, because Lynas is in a unique position to reflect on it, having once thrust a custard pie into Bjorn Lomborg’s face, with the words: ‘That’s for everything you say about the environment which is complete bullshit. That’s for lying about climate change. That’s what you deserve for being smug about everything to do with the environment.’

A decade on, Lynas now emphasises science and pragmatism rather than… erm… pies. It’s worth remembering that Lomborg started out on mission similar to Lynas’s: as an environmentalist, keen to establish the sensible limits of our interaction with the natural world. Before writing The Skeptical Environmentalist, Lomborg aimed to debunk the works of the economist, Julian Simon, but ended up sympathetic to many of his arguments. Lynas, too, now finds himself sympathetic to many of the ideas from the economic right (he calls for the privatisation of all publicly owned water companies, for instance). And like Lynas, Lomborg never ended up ‘denying’ climate change, but instead sought to bring a sense of proportion to the problem, and to put it into context with other problems in the world. That is all it takes to find oneself called a ‘denier’: merely seeking a sense of proportion about environmental problems will put you in the lowest moral category, as Lynas, the ‘Chernobyl death denier’, has now discovered.

July 20, 2011

UN contemplating “Green Helmet” climate peacekeping forces

No, this isn’t taken from the pages of The Onion — the United Nations is seriously considering adding “climate change” to its peacekeeping portfolio:

A special meeting of the United Nations security council is due to consider whether to expand its mission to keep the peace in an era of climate change.

Small island states, which could disappear beneath rising seas, are pushing the security council to intervene to combat the threat to their existence.

[. . .]

Wittig seems to agree, noting that UN peacekeepers have long intervened in areas beyond traditional conflicts.

“Repainting blue helmets into green might be a strong signal — but would dealing with the consequences of climate change — say in precarious regions – be really very different from the tasks the blue helmets already perform today?” he wrote.

In an official “Concept Note” ahead of the meeting, Germany said the security council needed to draw up scenarios for dealing with the affects of extreme temperatures and rising seas. How would the UN deal with climate refugees? How would it prevent conflicts in those parts of Africa and Asia which could face food shortages?

July 17, 2011

James Delingpole anticipates his heroic progress through Australia

Filed under: Australia, Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:45

No, really:

Gosh I’m looking forward to visiting Australia later this year. And the reason I’m so excited — apart from the fact that I’ve never been before to the Land of the Taipan, the Sydney Funnel Web, the Box Jellyfish, the Saltwater Crocodile, and the Great White Shark — is that I know I’m going to be given a hero’s welcome.

After all, by the time I arrive in Oz sometime in November to promote the Aussie edition of Watermelons (Connor Court), the Australians will have had a good three months to reflect on the disasters which have been inflicted on their economy in the name of “combating climate change.” They’ll have noticed the $25 billion shaved off the share markets in a spectacular vote of investor confidence in Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s new carbon tax; they’ll have started to feel the effects of the blackouts caused by the needless (and uncosted) closure of 2000 mega watts worth of “dirty” brown coal power stations; and above all, they’ll have done their calculations — as the mighty Andrew Bolt has done — and come to a robust Aussie conclusion:

$24.5 billion is too bloody much, too bloody much by far, for Australia to pay for the privilege of reducing the world’s temperature, by 2020, by 1/4000th of a degree.

Yep, you read that aright. Australian Prime Minister Julia “Toast” Gillard has hit on the ingenious idea of clobbering one of the world’s most thriving — and also one of the most carbon-intensive — economies with a tax on one of its main industrial by-products, CO2, which will punish business, hamstring economic growth, boost unemployment and make life for everyone outside the enviro-rent-seeking professions more difficult and expensive. And all in order to achieve the wonderful goal of ensuring that by 2020 the world’s temperature will be altered with such refinement and subtlety that not even the most sophisticated measuring equipment yet devised is likely to notice the difference.

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