On yesterday’s “Hardball”, Democratic strategist (and promiscuous presidential campaign kamikaze) Bob Shrum got into an almost unwatchable scrimmage over global warming and the Copenhagen Conference with Pat Buchanan. In a tag-team effort with host Chris Matthews, Shrum tried to side-step the epistemological questions surrounding climate change by invoking the analogy of carrying fire insurance.
This meme, which has started showing up in Democratic talking points lately, tries to get around climate uncertainty by invoking the “precautionary principle”: that it’s prudent to take decisive action proportional to a catastrophic threat even if the potential of that threat being realized is miniscule. This irrational doctrine has been part of the environmental left’s catechism for decades, but its appearance in the political sphere shows that liberals are becoming sensitive to the fallout over Climategate and trying to reframe their position as a common sense hedge against catastrophe. Wrong.
The Precautionary Principle sounds good in a vacuum (who caucuses for increased risk, after all?), but is (ironically) non-empirical in its application. All of life is a matter of weighing probable rewards versus probable risks. Jettisoning this cost-benefit principle on a serious policy issue is dangerous — and the insurance analogy shows why.
Think about how fire insurance actually works. You pay a miniscule fee to hedge against the minute possibility of a catastrophic outcome. But that’s not how carbon abatement schemes work. First of all, there’s no pool to socialize risk within. As an inherently global “crisis”, everyone is supposedly effected — so it’s impossible to cross-subsidize in the way that insurance plans do. But more importantly, you wouldn’t buy fire insurance that costs exponentially more than the likely damage from a fire — and that’s what the economic disaster represented by cap and trade and other such schemes would mean.
Liberals can’t get their head around the fact that there’s only so much value swimming around in an economy (regardless of the money supply). If you use some of it in one place, you can’t use it in another. And when government mandates its use, it’s almost always less efficient than the private sector. This is called an opportunity cost. It’s usually covered in the first few days of an elementary economics course. This is what happens when we elect people who cut that class for a Sierra Club meeting.
A hat tip to James Delingpole of The Daily Telegraph (UK) is in order for his continuing coverage of the metastasizing Climategate controversy. The Russians are now weighing in with charges that global warming alarmists used only 25% of data reported by Russian scientists; intentionally leaving out information showing no signs of warming. Much of this doctored research was in turn folded into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report, the definitive statement supporting the calls for international regulation of energy consumption. (For a counter-argument using all the available climate data, see this report published by the Heartland Institute.) With the Copenhagen climate conference degenerating into anarchy and finger-pointing soon there may be another appellation added to “discredited” and “fraudulent”: convicted.
As Lord Christopher Monkton explains in this interview, he and another climate skeptic are requesting prosecution of the researchers responsible for destroying information sought through Britain’s version of the Freedom of Information Act. Others are calling for investigations into whether there is a case for criminal fraud against scientists using government grants to produce misleading reports. Many of the people who’ve profited from this scurrilous research are present or arriving in Copenhagen. When looking back on the group photos a few years from now, one wonders how many of them will be behind bars, owing millions in damages, or drummed out of office. Most likely, not enough.
Cold weather got you down? Is your child distraught and having trouble sleeping because of the government’s global warming scare tactics?
Watch the clever video below, put together by our friends at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and learn how you too can cash in on global warming alarmism.
Bjorn Lomborg is probably the coolest head when it comes to global warming and climate change. Rather than dispute the science – a task ably engaged in by Lord Christopher Monckton, among others – Lomborg takes aim at the Environmental Left’s specious claim that regulating energy consumption enables human flourishing. If the goal is to help people, then why not get the biggest bang for a nation’s tax dollars? As Lomborg points out:
The choice is stark: for a few hundred million dollars, we could help almost half of humanity now. Compare this to the investments to tackle climate change – $40 trillion annually by the end of the century – which would save a hundred times fewer starving people. For every person saved from malnutrition through climate policies, the same money could have saved half a million people from micronutrient malnutrition through direct policies.
Some argue that the choice between spending money on carbon cuts and on direct policies is unfair. But it is a basic fact that no dollar can be spent twice. Rich countries and donors have limited budgets and attention spans. If we spend vast amounts of money on carbon cuts in the belief that we are stopping malaria and reducing malnutrition, we are less likely to put aside money for the direct policies that would help today. Indeed, for every dollar spent on strong climate policies, we will likely do about $0.02 of good for the future. If we spent the same dollar on simple policies to help malnutrition or malaria now, we could do $20 or more good – 1,000 times better, when all impacts are taken into account.
If you haven’t encountered Lomborg before, here’s a link to his website. If you want to read a sensible viewpoint on using scarce resources to improve life for the most people possible, there’s no better place to start. Now, if Bjorn could just get Al Gore to debate him…
Beyond the photo ops and press statements, Obama was pushing President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for the kind of climate deals that eluded him at the G8 summit in Italy in the summer – and have eluded international negotiators for the last decade. China and India have played central roles in blocking past agreements, alongside the US, in a seemingly intractable dispute between fast-developing economies and the older, wealthier polluters.
Now Obama is at the point where he feels on the verge of a breakthrough, based on the kind of talks that don’t get covered by reporters obsessing about state dinners. “He had extensive conversations with President Hu specifically on climate and conversations with the prime minister of India,” said one senior White House aide. “So he has been building momentum for a political agreement to be brokered at Copenhagen.”
This is another example of what Obama meant during the campaign when he said as president he would “turn the page” on the old debates dividing America. Then, as now, the only page turning to be done is when it dismisses the opposition as unserious and uninformed. How tragic if the president succeeds in realizing Al Gore’s dream of a voluntary global energy contraction just as news is surfacing that the very data supporting it is corrupt.
Apologies for the misleading headline. According to recent reports by climatologists, it’s actually been several years since the globe we call Earth ceased warming. Although many global warming alarmists are at a loss to explain how a supposedly constant increase in global temperature could stop without warning (and just before a conference to fund its decrease), that doesn’t mean the cause for the sudden cessation is unknown. In fact, the real head scratcher here is how the mainstream media missed the obvious reason for winning the war on climate change.
Since at least 1970, Ed Begley, Jr. has waged a one man war for the environment. That year he bought his first electric car and celebrated the first Earth Day. As detailed in an interview with the New York Times Magazine, Begley is SERIOUS about his eco-responsibilities. He cooks food in a solar oven that “sits in the yard and gets up to about 375 degrees on a sunny day.” When he dies he wants to put his 205 pounds of organic matter to good use. “I want to be buried with a cardboard box and a sheet and put in the earth.” After all, we come from the earth, and return to the earth, right?
But life for an eco-warrior and global warming stopper isn’t just about capping your cooking temperatures and trading in your coffin. There are hassles too. According to Begley, the worst thing about being green is “when you don’t have a recycling bin nearby and you have to carry garbage around in your car to get it home.” That would be the two bedroom, one and a half bath home he shares with his wife and daughter. It’s also the one he’s plowed steady sums of money into adding a bevy of cutting-edge technologies to reduce his carbon footprint.
So while the climatologists scramble to fix their computer models and the diplomats try to convince each other that spending for a warmer day is still needed (if not necessary), remember the man who through eco-mortification and carbon penance became the green hued saint that saved the planet. (Until it starts warming again…)
One of the more frustrating aspects of debunking worldwide climate change hysteria is the false notion that a consensus exists that global warming is man-made.
On that front, there’s good news to report for those of us who prefer sobriety to fashionability. According to a new Rasmussen Reports public opinion poll, a 47% to 37% plurality believes that climate change results more from long-term planetary causes than human activity. Considering the fact that temperatures have declined since eleven years ago, and that global cooling was the trendy hysteria just thirty years ago, it’s refreshing to know that Americans are on to the scam.
And dangerously for Barack Obama, Americans by 50% to 20% believe that he still considers global warming man-made. Thus, like ObamaCare, this means that more Americans view his agenda as one opposing theirs, creating a precarious phenomenon for him. As he prepares to travel to Copenhagen to once again bow before the false international gods of global warming at the expense of America’s economy and taxpayers, it’s something of which his bumbling staff had better become aware.
Then watch this video. After foolishly agreeing to participate in a Q&A during a gathering of “environmental journalists,” Gore didn’t expect to find himself exposed by questions pointing out the myth that is man-made global warming alarmism. But exposed he was, by Irish film producer and director Phelim McAleer. Predictably, Mr. McAleer’s microphone was quickly silenced, but not before he made Al Gore sweat and puff. Coming at the end of a week in which even the BBC openly wondered “What Happened to Global Warming?,” it just wasn’t a very good week for poor Al Gore.
But a story out today just may take the cake. According to eTurboNews:
Sure, one person’s deposits into an airplane toilet don’t weigh much, but what about the pee from 200 people? Japanese airline ANA thinks full bladders lead to airplanes being weighed down by excrement, so it is implementing a wacky new policy: pee before you fly.
“The airline is putting up signs at airport gates asking passengers to go to the bathroom. So-called ‘loo attendants’ stand guard as well, asking potential pee-ers if they need to take a trip to the restroom. Bathrooms will still be on the plane, of course, in case of bathroom emergency. But ANA hopes that its shaming tactics will cut down on passengers’ overall weight, in turn reducing the weight of the plane and lowering fuel consumption and carbon dioxide emissions.”
Any bets on how long it will take Sen. Barbara Boxer or Rep. Henry Waxman to propose legislation requiring Americans to pee before driving?
In a new report, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that we must “invest” $10 trillion over the upcoming 20 years to stop global warming. That’s $500 billion per year, and we’ll give you one guess as to which nation will be asked to shoulder that crippling new burden…
Shamelessly, this amount is 37% higher than the IEA said was necessary just one year ago. The IEA also demands that developed nations such as the United States reduce carbon emissions even further than the economically destructive levels already being pushed by left-wing special interests and liberal politicians through such abominations as the Waxman-Markey bill, which will cost American families thousands of dollars each year and punish American business. This IEA report also comes just as global temperatures continue their cooling plateau over the past ten years, meaning that the global warming hysteria may be today’s equivalent of the discredited global cooling craze of the 1970s. But what’s a trifling $10 trillion, right?
The University of East Anglia is a taxpayer-supported university whose Climate Research Unit (CRU) has produced data serving as the basis for international studies alleging a global warming crisis. That includes our own Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which has proposed draconian, unnecessary and costly regulation of carbon dioxide. But in August of this year, the CRU admitted that it destroyed the original raw data for its global surface temperature set, claiming a lack of storage space.
In other words, the dog ate its homework?
Unfortunately, but conveniently for global warming alarmists, the EPA stopped accepting public comments on its proposed carbon dioxide regulation back in June. But fortunately, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) filed a petition with the EPA yesterday to re-open debate. As stated by CEI’s General Counsel Sam Kazman, “the EPA is resting its case on international studies that in turn relied on CRU data. But CRU’s suspicious destruction of its original data, disclosed at this late date, makes that information totally unreliable. If the EPA doesn’t reexamine the implications of this, it’s stumbling blindly into the most important regulatory issue we face.”
Dennis the Menace couldn’t get away with this excuse, and neither should the CRU or EPA bureaucrats.
Remember 2005, when global warming alarmists claimed that Hurricane Katrina proved the effects of climate change, and that Katrina-level hurricanes would occur with increasing frequency until draconian government climate legislation was imposed? The years 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 apparently didn’t get the memo, judging by the dearth of major hurricanes. Heck, remember the 1970s, when the fashionable climate-change hysteria was global cooling, not global warming?
Well, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman apparently has a short memory.
In his latest column, Krugman confidently instructs us that the sky is falling… yet again. For real this time. He assures us that “I’m not engaging in hyperbole,” but lacking any sense of irony or familiarity with recent history, he then asserts that “climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras — gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.” You mean, sort of like the “gifted” alarmists who predicted global cooling in the 1970s and an coming onslaught of Katrinas in 2005?
Instead of writing a New York Times column, perhaps Krugman should instead join the city’s street vagrants and carry his own “The End Is Near!” sandwich board sign.
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