Friday, February 16, 2007

To save the planet, we must defeat the climate models

And again, the climate models tried to destroy us. Fortunately, Earth responded back and crushed their (always wrong) predictions.
In a new report, Antarctic temperatures disagreed with climate model predictions.
It's something that Earth has been doing for a long time... don't forget that the IPCC reports are primarily based on a model which overestimated the warming over the past 2 decades by 300%.

Regarding the latest global warming scare, nobody said it better than Czech president Vaclav Klaus. A few excerpts from his recent interview, which received a lot less coverage (almost non-existent) than the political IPCC summary:
Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment. Also, it's an undignified slapstick that people don't wait for the full report in May 2007 but instead respond, in such a serious way, to the summary for policymakers where all the "but's" are scratched, removed, and replaced by oversimplified theses.
Perhaps only Mr Al Gore may be saying something along these lines: a sane person can't. I don't see any ruining of the planet, I have never seen it, and I don't think that a reasonable and serious person could say such a thing. Look: you represent the economic media so I expect a certain economical erudition from you. For example, we know that there exists a huge correlation between the care we give to the environment on one side and the wealth and technological prowess on the other side. It's clear that the poorer the society is, the more brutally it behaves with respect to Nature, and vice versa.

Friday, February 9, 2007

Fighting the Church of Global Panic

Two articles today in National Review are trying to calm down the global warming panic.

First, in The Church of Global Panic, Rich Lowry points out that the much-hyped IPCC report is actually less grim than the prior version from 2001. For example, the worst estimate for the effect of the CO2 over this century, was 3.5 C in the 2001 report. Now it is down to 3 C. Also, the report more than halved its high-end best estimate of the rise in sea level by 2100 from 3 feet to just 17 inches.” In his scare-documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore posited a catastrophic sea-level rise of more than 20 feet (feet, not inches). Again, these are not observations, they are just computer models. For now, it's not the climate that's gonna kill us, but the computers. And don't forget, the favorite computer model is one that overestimated the temperature increase over the last 20 years by 300%!

No one knows how to create a reliable model of the planet’s climate, and inconvenient anomalies muddy the story line of the warming zealots. From 1940 to 1975, the global temperature fell even as CO2 emission rose. Since 2001, global temperatures have only gone up a statistically insignificant 0.03 degrees Celsius. And in recent years, the oceans have actually gotten cooler.

In the other article, Global Cooling Costs Too Much, Jonah Goldberg tries to weigh the benefits and liabilities of the warming weather. Earth got about 0.7 degrees Celsius warmer in the 20th century while it increased its GDP by 1,800 percent. How much of that 0.7 degrees can be laid at the feet of that 1,800 percent is unknowable, but let’s stipulate that all of the warming was the result of our prosperity and that this warming is in fact indisputably bad (which is hardly obvious). That’s still an amazing bargain. Life expectancies in the United States increased from about 47 years to about 77 years. Literacy, medicine, leisure and even, in many respects, the environment have improved mightily over the course of the 20th century, at least in the prosperous West. Given the option of getting another 1,800 percent richer in exchange for another 0.7 degrees warmer, I’d take the heat in a heartbeat, Mr. Goldberg says.

The costs are just too high for too little payoff. Even if the Kyoto Protocol were put into effect tomorrow — a total impossibility — we’d barely affect global warming. Especially considering that China alone plans on building an additional 2,200 coal plants by 2030. Oh, but because China (like India) is exempt from Kyoto as a developing country, the West will just have to reduce its own emissions even more. Also, ethanol requires almost as much energy to make as it provides, and the costs to the environment and the economy may be staggering.

Sunday, February 4, 2007

Eco-Chondriacs: About the Global Warming Alarmists

Mark Steyn published an piece on the global warming alarmists in today's Chicago Sun Times, called What's so hot about fickle science?
Here are two paragraphs from his article, but I recommend you to read it in its entirety:

A thousand years ago, the Arctic was warmer than it is now. Circa 982, Erik the Red and a bunch of other Vikings landed in Greenland and thought, "Wow! This land really is green! Who knew?" So they started farming it, and were living it up for a couple of centuries. Then the Little Ice Age showed up, and they all died. A terrible warning to us all about "unsustainable development": If a few hundred Vikings doing a little light hunter-gathering can totally unbalance the environment, imagine the havoc John Edwards' new house must be wreaking.

If "global warming" is real and if man is responsible, why then do so many "experts" need to rely on obviously fraudulent data? The famous "hockey stick" graph showed the planet's climate history as basically one long bungalow with the Empire State Building tacked on the end. Completely false. In evaluating industrial impact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used GDP estimates based on exchange rates rather than purchasing power: As a result, they assume by the year 2100 that not only South Africans but also North Koreans will have a higher per capita income than Americans. That's why the climate-change computer models look scary. That's how "solid" the science is: It's predicated on the North Korean economy overtaking the United States.