Recipe for conservative revival

By George F. Will, Published: January 25

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com

Happy days are not here again, but they are coming for conservatives. Barack Obama — with the lowest approval rating (according to Gallup, 50 percent, four points lower than that of the National Rifle Association) of any reelected president when inaugurated since World War II — has a contradictory agenda certain to stimulate a conservative revival.
Consider his vow to expend political capital on climate change. The absurdity of the Kyoto approach— global climate treaties agreed to by 190 nations — is now obvious even to most former enthusiasts. Obama can propose cutting U.S. fossil-fuel emissions (just 16 percent of the global total) with a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme, but Congress will pass neither. So he will be reduced to administrative gestures costly to job growth, and government spending — often crony capitalism — for green energy incommensurate with his rhetoric.
He says that “the threat of climate change” is apparent in “raging fires,” “crippling drought” and “more powerful storms.” Are fires raging now more than ever? (There were a third fewer U.S. wildfires in 2012 than in 2006.) Are the number and severity of fires determined by climate change rather than forestry and land-use practices? Is today’s drought worse than, say, that of the Dust Bowl, and was it caused by 1930s global warming? As for “more powerful storms”:
Because Sandy struck New York City, where the nation’s media congregate and participate in the city’s provincialism, this storm was declared more cosmically momentous than the 74 other hurricanes that have hit or come near the city since 1800. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina was called a consequence of global warming and hence a harbinger of increasing numbers of Category 3 or higher hurricanes. Since then, major hurricane activity has plummeted. No Category 3 storm has hit the United States since 2005. Sandy was just a Category 1.
Obama’s vow to adjust Earth’s thermostat followed the report that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the contiguous 48 states. But the Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins, who has concisely posed the actual climate policy choice (“How much should we spend on climate change in order to have no effect on climate change?”), has noted that although 2012 was 2.13 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than 2011, “2008, in the contiguous U.S., was two degrees cooler than 2006.” And “2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were all cooler than 1998 by a larger margin than 2012 was hotter than 1998.” Such is the rigor of many who preen as devotees of science that they declared the 2012 temperatures in the contiguous states (1.58 percent of the Earth’s surface) proof of catastrophic global warming.
A flourishing American economic sector is fossil fuels — especially oil and natural gas — which the Obama administration seems to regret and often impedes (see: fracking and the Keystone XL pipeline). Yet the natural gas boom is one of the main reasons why, in 2012, U.S. fossil-fuel emissions were the lowest since 1992. Obama’s wariness about the pipeline suggests that he subscribes to some environmentalists’ stupendously weird theory: If the pipeline is not built to carry oil from the (supposedly dangerous) development of Canadian tar sands, Canada will leave those sands undeveloped rather than sell the oil to China.
Small businesses create most new jobs, but many businesses are avoiding hiring a 50th employee, or are replacing full-time employees with those working fewer than 30 hours a week, to avoid Obamacare’s costly requirements regarding provision of health insurance. Some colleges and universities are reducing to 29 the number of hours adjunct professors can teach, which is condign punishment for those professors — most of them, surely — who favored Obamacare.
It and other regulatory burdens, combined with the subsidization of not working (47.5 million people receiving food stamps, 8.6 million receiving disability payments, unemployment benefits extended from 26 weeks to 73 weeks — so far), partially explain this fact provided by Richard Vedder of the American Enterprise Institute: “If today the country had the same proportion of persons of working age employed as it did in 2000, the U.S. would have almost 14 million more people contributing to the economy.” Fourteen million is more than the combined workforces of 18 states.
In the rhetorical cotton candy of his inaugural address — sugary, and mostly air — Obama spoke of “investing in” rising generations and said: “America’s possibilities are limitless.” He ignores the encroaching limits imposed on the nation by his policies that are funded by debt that will burden those generations.

Read more from George F. Will’s archive.
Read more at PostOpinions: World Bank President Jim Yong Kim: Our warming world Eugene Robinson: Climate-change denialists fall silent Stephen Stromberg: The Keystone pipeline distraction Naomi Oreskes: Mobilizing scientists on climate change The Post’s View: A sweltering planet’s agenda

Book Review: 'The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism'

By Russell Cook
http://www.americanthinker.com
January 23, 2013

Rush Limbaugh speaks frequently about the new breed of "low-information" voter in America handing President Obama a second term in the White House. No doubt a disturbing amount of these voters were unaware that Obama's inauguration on January 21st was a ceremonial re-enactment of the constitutionally required one the day before, and certainly they accepted unquestioningly the line in his ceremonial speech in which he said, "We will respond to the threat of climate change... Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms."
But that particular sentence only stays afloat when no one looks any deeper into it. The most damaging thing that can happen to a politicized thesis such as "climate change" is for more people to actually question it and discover for themselves that it looks like indefensible misinformation. For President Obama and others promoting the idea of man-caused global warming, any kind of plausible opposition to this issue imperils it, so they avoid  exploration of critical viewpoints and instead label them as "deniers". Case closed.
That is the hallmark of far-left agendas. The global warming issue showcases how spectacularly this tactic fails.
Steve Goreham's recently published, The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania, dives headlong into addressing those who promote the idea of man-caused global warming.
Mad, Mad, Mad World is very effective in revealing the three glaring errors in Obama's climate change inaugural speech statement. Goreham uncovers the false premise of the "denier" label in his chapter about the funding disparity between wealthy green organizations and the significantly less-funded conservative think-tanks. He points out how the "overwhelming judgment of science" myth falls apart in his "Big Whoppers about Climate Change" chapter, and notions about the supposed 'devastating impacts' of global warming crumble apart in his "Wild Weather and Snow Follies" chapter.
The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism addresses all that and more in a very readable way, while placing fun fact tidbits in the page margins which further undermine the global warming crisis narrative from multiple angles. Goreham's book has over thirty pages of chapter endnotes, most of them featuring web site links leading readers on an ever-widening path of discovery about the issue. A particularly inconvenient truth for those pushing the crisis narrative: neither the companion book for Al Gore's film nor his 2010 Our Choice book has a single footnote or endnote. Our Choice has vague source references for a few of its charts. The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism has endnotes on all of the short glosses in its margins.
Informed as I already am on the global warming issue, I still found new information in the book that I can use in debates with people on Al Gore's side. One in particular I hadn't known about: ex-EPA administrator Carol Browner had suggested "an electric company will be able to hold back some of the power so that maybe your air conditioner won't operate at its peak". I did know about the way inquiries into the ClimateGate scandal ended up looking like whitewashes, but Goreham boils that down in a way that any reader can easily understand and use against those who say ClimateGate was an inconsequential matter. Goreham deftly reinforces how the IPCC scientists involved in that matter are still in deep trouble and how the inquiries that supposedly exonerated them have readily-seen faults. I found this refresher especially useful.
As I noted in my review of Goreham's prior book, Climatism!, his label of "climatists" is quite appropriate, more so than the term "warmist". My own earliest notice of the so-called global warming crisis movement was the result of being puzzled about what happened to big concerns over global cooling. Goreham brings up that very topic on page 2, an episode emblematic of the need to solve whatever we are perceived to be doing to the planet.
I strongly urge people to buy and read this book, and to keep it on hand for quick reference when those who unquestioningly follow President Obama's call for action on global warming ratchet up the clamor for action. Allowing such rhetoric to go by without a hitting back is to let the handlers of low-information voters win the day. What these handlers can't tolerate is their minions losing the debate to high-information voters. Such losses breed more high-information voters, an anathema to the so-called global warming fraternity.
Borrowing an Indy-500 witticism about race drivers: there are those "who have hit the wall and those who will hit the wall." I apply it to the global warming issue by suggesting there are those who are skeptical of man-caused global warming, and those who will become skeptics after reading skeptic material. The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism is exactly the kind of book capable of accomplishing that transformation.
Russell Cook's collection of writings on this issue can be seen at "The '96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists." You may also follow him at Twitter via @questionAGW

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2013/01/book_review_the_mad_mad_mad_world_of_climatism.html at January 23, 2013 - 07:07:28 AM CST

New York Times closes Environmental Desk

Al Gore Declares Mission Accomplished; Gray Lady Hardest Hit

Posted By Ed Driscoll On January 11, 2013 @ 10:31 pm In Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal,God And Man At Dupont University,Liberal Fascism,Oh, That Liberal Media!,The Assault On Reason,The Future and its Enemies,The Memory Hole,The New Puritans,The Return of the Primitive,War And Anti-War | 43 Comments

http://pjmedia.com

“Lack of Global Warming Means Cold, Empty Chairs at New York Times Environment Desk,” Jim Lakely writes on the Heartland Institute’s blog:

From Inside Climate News [emphasis mine]:

The New York Times will close its environment desk in the next few weeks and assign its seven reporters and two editors to other departments. The positions of environment editor and deputy environment editor are being eliminated. No decision has been made about the fate of the Green Blog, which is edited from the environment desk.

Eliminated. Done. Over. Kaput. And if the Green Blog is not being edited by a non-existent environment desk, the blog may just go away, too — or end up lightly managed by a Times editor who is paid and pressured by a dying paper to do the important work of the newspaper. Any way you want to spin it, America’s “paper of record” no longer considers alarmist, sky-is-falling coverage of the climate and energy beats worthy of the full-court press of a dedicated staff. Go figure.

How can they, when Al Gore has just declared Mission Accomplished for environmentalism? He’s got his $100 payout, and the rest of the world is left wondering why we should care about a religion when its chief practitioner has just signed his non-aggression pact with Big Oil.
At Ricochet, Britain’s James Delingpole piles on: “New York Times Closes Its Environment Desk. Please, Nobody Laugh.” That desk has been the launching pad for “some of the most compelling and moving news stories of the last four years:”

Among them:

Every time you take an unnecessary shower a baby polar bear dies.
No, it’s getting hotter. Really, it’s getting hotter. Dr James Hansen says so and he works at NASA.
Just because global warming stopped in 1997 doesn’t mean it’s not going to start again, no sirree – and when it does it will be worse, much, much worse.
Al Gore: why selling my environmental channel Current TV to oil-funded Jew-haters for $100 million was the morally right thing to do.

Much more on that last thought right after the page break.
Delingpole’s last quip dovetails perfectly with John Podhoretz’s brilliant observation about why Al-Jazeera paid so much to acquire Current TV in the latest Ricochet podcast, alongside Jonah Goldberg and Rob Long:

JONAH GOLDBERG: I remember writing a column five years ago. Remember when [the first Cars movie from Pixar] came out? Al Gore has this whole thing in his books about how the internal combustion is the central focus of evil in the modern world, and we have to wean people off of it. I remember writing this column saying, how come Al Gore isn’t condemning this movie, which is indoctrinating little kids to love cars? Al Gore plays this game all the time, where he says this stuff to the rubes on the left, that they all eat up, while he’s now worth more than Mitt Romney from playing this sort of crony capitalist stuff, and the story ends with him taking nearly 100 million dollars in petro-dollars from the Middle East! It’s a fascinating, Tom Wolfe-ian kind of thing.
JOHN PODHORETZ: Well, I think it’s a little more sinister than that, in this one sense.
ROB LONG: How can it be more sinister than that?
PODHORETZ: Well, here’s why. [What Jonah is describing is] hypocrisy, and comic hypocrisy. [But] Al Gore, the student of Marty Peretz, his intellectual sponsor, the former editor and owner of the New Republic, who is basically the leading and maybe the last sort of hard-line Zionist Democrat, the man who chose Joe Lieberman as his running mate, is 12 years after that, selling out — literally selling out — to a network that regularly hosts Islamists and anti-Semites, and people who say things like, “Israel will be gone in ten years,” ominously.
Now: here’s the sinister part: Al-Jazeera apparently paid about $500 million for Current TV. It is not worth $500 million. Glenn Beck would not have offered it $500 million. Nobody would have offered it $500 million. Its revenue, which is about $100 million, came entirely from the fees that cable companies paid to have it on the air. That number was going to go down, and go down over time as they cancelled it, because it drew nobody, and there was no longer any reason to make nice to Al Gore, who no longer had any political power.
So the question is: why did Al-Jazeera pay $500 million, and who from Current is going to be on Al-Jazeera’s board? Well, the answer is, it’s not Joel Hyatt, Gore’s partner, the son-in-law of former Senator Howard Metzenbaum, and an ambulance-chasing lawyer, who started an ambulance-chasing firm, one of the first to advertise on television in the 1980s.
It is Al Gore, former vice president of the United States, winner of the popular vote in the 2000 election. They [Al-Jazeera] paid $500 million to get Al Gore as their front man, and that is sinister. That is sinister.
LONG: That’s interesting; I hadn’t quite worked it out that way. But it is true. Assuming for a minute that Al-Jazeera wants a cable channel. These channels do get sold. They get bought, and they got sold, and sometimes you buy a channel that has a very low value, and has a very low audience, and you revamp it, and you turn it into something big. That happens all the time. So I’m not sure about the actual price that Current would fetch, if it were up for auction. But if you were Al-Jazeera, with those pockets, you’d probably spend a little bit more, and get a whole lot more, than spend $100 million [sic], or whatever it was, to buy Current. It just doesn’t seem like a very good deal for Al-Jazeera, unless, as John says, they were buying some other product, which I guess, is Al Gore.
PODHORETZ: For you, it doesn’t mean anything. For [Al-Jazeera] to say that they have such credibility that the former Vice President of the United States is on their board, and is a consultant to them, was worth several hundred million dollars. That’s, I think, an inarguable fact.

Indeed.
Incidentally, Delingpole links to his article in the London Telegraph titled, “Now even Pravda admits the ‘global warming’ jig is up,” with Pravda as a joking euphemism for the Gray Lady. But that seems awfully unfair to the real Pravda, which lately has been making far more sense on several issues than America’s MSM — and not coincidentally staking out territory to the right of America’s MSM.

---

Article printed from Ed Driscoll: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/eddriscoll/2013/01/11/gray-lady-hardest-hit/

Current TV employees introduced to new owners, Al Gore conspicuously absent

**Written by Doug Powers
http://www,michellemalkin.com
January 8, 2012



Al Gore, a co-founder of Current TV, recently sold the network to oil-backed Al Jazeera. Gore was so proud of the sale that when the staff was introduced to the new owners he decided to share his glee with... nobody:

Yesterday morning, the still shell shocked staff at Current TV was called to an all hands staff meeting at its San Francisco headquarters, which was teleconferenced to their offices in LA and NYC, to meet their new bosses.

That would be two of Al Jazeera’s top guys: Ehab Al Shihabi, executive director of international operations, and Muftah AlSuwaidan, general manager of the London bureau.

Ominously missing was the creator of Current, the self proclaimed inventor of the Internet and savior of clean energy, Al Gore, although his partner, Joel Hyatt, stood proudly with the Al Jazeera honchos.

“Of course Al didn’t show up,” said one high placed Current staffer. “He has no credibility.

“He’s supposed to be the face of clean energy and just sold [the channel] to very big oil, the emir of Qatar! Current never even took big oil advertising — and Al Gore, that bulls***ter sells to the emir?”

The meeting, while not contentious, was, according to staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity, miserable.

Did Gore, who is by some accounts now richer than Mitt Romney, have some hypocrisy-induced shame or was his absence merely due to a previously scheduled engagement that required him to fire up the jet to fly halfway around the world to address an emergency strategy session about greenhouse gas reduction?

More:

"Al was always lecturing us about green. He kept his word about green all right — as in cold, hard cash!" the staffer added.

This can only come as a surprise to those who have been living in an eco-friendly bubble of denial for far too long.

(h/t JWF)

**Written by Doug Powers

Twitter @ThePowersThatBe

Professor Calls for Death Penalty for Climate Change 'Deniers'

By Timothy Birdnow
http://www.americanthinker.com
December 31, 2012

It is as inevitable as the rising of the sun; the Left, when thwarted in their quest for power, suggests the use of lethal force to compel those who disagree.
There is a nauseating litany of murders done by our betters in their pursuit of the Benthamite vision of "the greatest good for the most people" -- which in their minds equates to collectivization and socialism. You have Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Margaret Sanger, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot. Now we can add one more name to the list: Professor Richard Parncutt, Musicologist at Graz University in Austria.
Parncutt has issued -- and later retracted after it the public outcry -- a manifesto calling for the execution of prominent "Climate Change Deniers". What is interesting is that Parncutt hates the death penalty and supports Amnesty International's efforts to end it.
This would be a shocking thing for a college professor to do were it an isolated incident, but this call has been made a number of times in the past. For instance, an anonymous poster at the liberal website Talking Points Memo called for similar action, as did Climate Progress editor Joe Romm, who called for "deniers" to be strangled in their beds. Grist magazine writer David Roberts called for Nuremberg trials for "deniers" and NASA's James Hansen has likewise called for similar trials.
The violent rhetoric has been ongoing -- and disturbing. Liberals in the United States have repeatedly tried to blame mass shootings on talk radio for inflaming the public, yet they are strangely silent about actual calls to violence on the part of environmentalists.
Parncutt's argument is predicated on the notion that we know for a fact that human industrial emissions are causing Global Warming, err, Climate Change, err, Climate Disruption, err, whatever they are calling it today, and that this will lead to millions of deaths, so the public good would be served by murdering those who exercise their free speech and oppose the fundamental reorganization of the international order. (He also calls for the murder of the Pope for the Catholic Church's stand on contraception.)  He claims that scientists have no interest in promoting AGW (ignoring the Climategate e-mails and the fact that money flows from governments into research in direct proportion to the apocalyptic nature of said research) and that they would get caught if they fudged data (ignoring Michael Mann who was caught on a number of occasions and still indulges in government funded scientific malpractice). He claims that millions will die from climate change, ignoring the possibility that a warmer, wetter world may actually increase agricultural output and make a better world. He ignores the fact that draconian "sustainable" environmental laws will drastically increase the price of everything, which will guarantee the deaths of millions of people in Third World countries.
Perhaps Dr. Parncutt should volunteer for the first of these executions.
What is ignored here is that it is the radical environmentalists who engage in murder and mayhem. It was Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, who killed innocent people in his war against industrial civilization. We've had Daniel Andreas San Diego. We've had Chaim Nissim, Tre Arrow, Daniel McGowan, James Lee, Jeff Luers, Eric McDavid, Marie Mason and John Wade We've had organizations like the Earth Liberation Front. We have the proponents of Deep Ecology.
In the past we had the Nazis, as Mark Musser has so eloquently illustrated here at American Thinker. Today we have the return of Nazi thinking through Climate Reductionism.
And the first instinct of those on the Progressive Left is to murder their enemies. Parncutt is showing what is in his heart. Granted, he did apologize (no doubt to keep his position) but do we have any reason to fear him or his compatriots less?  Especially now; they are in great anger because they know their time is short; Global Warming theory just didn't pan out the way they planned.
Progressives have absolute faith in their intellectual powers, and will not allow facts to stand in their way. Scientism is the modern secular religion, and as Trevor Thomas points out in his article, scientism is not science, but rather a belief system bejeweled with scientific adornments. That there has been no global warming for over fifteen years (contrary to theory) is immaterial. That we see no acceleration of sea level rise, that Antarctica is not melting (see here and here ), that there is no tropical troposphere hot spot, and no major warming in the oceans, the theory is largely falsified. But there is far too much money in it, and too much power and prestige to let it go, so scientists continue to ignore the facts, as do the entire Progressive Left. It has become an article of faith, not a matter for reason. And it is a most useful article of faith, as it justifies world government and Progressive intervention in every aspect of life.
So now the call for executions of "deniers" is becoming more public, and this will only metastasize as the situation grows more desperate for the Gang Green.  They are reverting to type.
Timothy Birdnow is a St. Louis based writer. His website is www.tbirdnow.mee.nu

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/../2012/12/professor_calls_for_death_penalty_for_climate_change_deniers.htmlat December 31, 2012 - 08:29:34 AM CST

By George F. Will
The Wahington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com
August 18, 2012

Why doom has not materialized

By George F. Will, Published: August 17

Sometimes the news is that something was not newsworthy. The United Nations’ Rio+20 conference — 50,000 participants from 188 nations — occurred in June without consequences. A generation has passed since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which begat other conferences and protocols (e.g., Kyoto). And, by now, apocalypse fatigue — boredom from being repeatedly told the end is nigh.
This began two generations ago, in 1972, when we were warned (by computer models developed at MIT) that we were doomed. We were supposed to be pretty much extinct by now, or at least miserable. We are neither. So, what went wrong?
That year begat “The Limits to Growth,” a book from the Club of Rome, which called itself “a project on the predicament of mankind.” It sold 12 million copies, staggered the New York Times (“one of the most important documents of our age”) and argued that economic growth was doomed by intractable scarcities. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish academic and “skeptical environmentalist,” writing in Foreign Affairs, says it “helped send the world down a path of worrying obsessively about misguided remedies for minor problems while ignoring much greater concerns,” such as poverty, which only economic growth can ameliorate.
MIT’s models foresaw the collapse of civilization because of “nonrenewable resource depletion” and population growth. “In an age more innocent of and reverential toward computers,” Lomborg writes, “the reams of cool printouts gave the book’s argument an air of scientific authority and inevitability” that “seemed to banish any possibility of disagreement.” Then — as now, regarding climate change — respect for science was said to require reverential suspension of skepticism about scientific hypotheses. Time magazine’s story about “The Limits to Growth” exemplified the media’s frisson of hysteria:
“The furnaces of Pittsburgh are cold; the assembly lines of Detroit are still. In Los Angeles, a few gaunt survivors of a plague desperately till freeway center strips . . . Fantastic? No, only grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and ‘progress.’”
The modelers examined 19 commodities and said that 12 would be gone long before now — aluminum, copper, gold, lead, mercury, molybdenum, natural gas, oil, silver, tin, tungsten and zinc. Lomborg says:
Technological innovations have replaced mercury in batteries, dental fillings and thermometers; mercury consumption is down 98 percent, and its price was down 90 percent by 2000. Since 1970, when gold reserves were estimated at 10,980 tons, 81,410 tons have been mined, and estimated reserves are 51,000 tons. Since 1970, when known reserves of copper were 280 million tons, about 400 million tons have been produced globally, and reserves are estimated at almost 700 million tons. Aluminum consumption has increased 16-fold since 1950, the world has consumed four times the 1950 known reserves, and known reserves could sustain current consumption for 177 years. Potential U.S. gas resources have doubled in the past six years. And so on.
The modelers missed something — human ingenuity in discovering, extracting and innovating. Which did not just appear after 1972.
Aluminum, Lomborg writes, is one of earth’s most common metals. But until the 1886 invention of the Hall-Heroult process, it was so difficult and expensive to extract that “Napoleon III had bars of aluminum exhibited alongside the French crown jewels, and he gave his honored guests aluminum forks and spoons while lesser visitors had to make do with gold utensils.”
Forty years after “The Limits to Growth” imparted momentum to environmentalism, that impulse now is often reduced to children indoctrinated to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” Lomborg calls recycling “a feel-good gesture that provides little environmental benefit at a significant cost.” He says that “we pay tribute to the pagan god of token environmentalism by spending countless hours sorting, storing and collecting used paper, which, when combined with government subsidies, yields slightly lower-quality paper in order to secure a resource” — forests — “that was never threatened in the first place.”
In 1980, economist Julian Simon made a wager in the form of a complex futures contract. He bet Paul Ehrlich (whose 1968 book “The Population Bomb” predicted that “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in the 1970s as population growth swamped agricultural production) that by 1990 the price of any five commodities Ehrlich and his advisers picked would be lower than in 1980.
Ehrlich’s group picked five metals. All were cheaper in 1990.
The bet cost Ehrlich $576.07. But that year he was awarded a $345,000 MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant and half of the $240,000 Crafoord Prize for ecological virtue. One of Ehrlich’s advisers, John Holdren, is Barack Obama’s science adviser.
georgewill@washpost.com

The World Wildlife Fund Targets Humanity

To save the Earth, the WWF urges us to adopt the living standards of Chad or Sudan.

By Robert Zubrin

http://www.nationalreview.com

May 23, 2012

Climate Change Summit at Copenhagen (2009)

The World Wildlife Fund, the posh flagship of the global environmentalist movement, has just released its biennial publication assessing “the state of the planet.” Entitled “Living Planet Report 2012,” the publication bemoans alleged catastrophic effects that humanity is inflicting upon the Earth, and calls for drastic curbs on civilization as a necessary corrective measure.

According to the WWF, the human race is currently consuming at a rate that would be sustainable only if we had 1.5 Earths. Since we do not, overall human activity needs to be reduced by 33 percent to put mankind “in balance with the Earth’s biocapacity.”

The WWF amplified this thesis by determining how much acreage each person on Earth is using. With a total land mass of 12.6 billion hectares (a hectare is 10,000 square meters, or about 2.5 acres) and a population of 7 billion, there are now, on average, 1.8 hectares assignable to each person. However, according to the WWF, each American currently uses the resources of 7.2 hectares, so that if everyone lived like us, four Earths would be required. (The report does not consider productivity. For example, the fact that Americans on average produce eight times the per capita GDP and 24 times the number of inventions that non-Americans do goes unmentioned.) Even the living standards of countries like Botswana, Romania, and Iran, which score near the world average of 2.7 hectares used per capita, are still 50 percent too high.

No, if we are to live in harmony with nature, human consumption needs to be brought down to the consumption level of 1.8 hectares per capita. The feasibility of this is proven by the fact that this consumption level is currently being achieved by such model countries as Chad, Mali, and Sudan. In fact, even smaller “ecological footprints,” of less than 0.7 hectares per capita, are currently being demonstrated by the world’s top five environmental citizens, which are, from fifth to first place: Eritrea, Haiti, Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, and, best of all, “Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

So what is to be done? “The immediate focus must be on drastically shrinking the ecological footprint of high-income populations,” says the WWF. This can best be done by cutting carbon emissions. (The report presents no data showing what harm global warming may cause to wildlife.) The Kyoto Treaty’s target of reducing global carbon emissions to less than 80 percent of 1990 levels by 2020 (which would require cutting the world’s current 34 billion tons of annual CO2 emissions down to 18 billion tons over the next eight years) is insufficient, the report tells us. We must “increase the proportion of sustainable renewable energies in the global energy mix to at least 40 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050.” As a means for achieving this impossible, economy-destroying objective, wind power — which kills innumerable birds — is strongly recommended, and the use of biomass — which can destroy natural habitats — is supported implicitly. But nuclear power, which draws on no resources used by the wild biosphere, goes unmentioned.

In order to enforce the policy of global impoverishment, governance in accord with a “one planet perspective” that “proposes to manage, govern, and share natural capital within the Earth’s ecological boundaries” is set forth. The proposed governing body will have the power to “redirect financial flows” and enforce “equitable resource governance,” which will “explicitly integrate population dynamics . . . and per capita consumption trends into national planning policies to support a better balance between population and available resources.” This will ensure that we “produce better” (“manage resources sustainably,” “scale up renewable energy production”), “consume more wisely” (“achieve low-footprint lifestyles,” “change energy consumption patterns”), and “preserve natural capital.”

Founded in 1961 by British Eugenics Society president Sir Julian Huxley and the Netherlands’ prince consort, Prince Bernhard, and supported over the years by a galaxy of aristocrats and jet-setters, the WWF (whose U.S. branch alone boasts an operating budget of $240 million per year) is the high church of the global environmentalist movement. It has used its considerable resources over the past half-century to take possession, directly or indirectly, of millions of square miles of land in Africa and remove them from the possibility of development. However, as the 2012 report shows, its core agenda goes well beyond the protection of wildlife. Rather, it is hunting bigger game.

The Earth is not endangered by humanity. But humanity is being seriously threatened by those who follow the guides of the WWF.

— Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Astronautics, a senior fellow with the Center for Security Policy, and the author of Energy Victory. His newest book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, has just been published by Encounter Books.

Apocalypse deferred

By Melanie Phillips
http://phillipsblog.dailymail.co.uk/
24 April 2012

The great grand-daddy of the man-made global warming scam, the fifth horseman of the eco-apocalypse James Lovelock (pictured above), has now recanted. Well, sort of. Don’t get too excited.

Lovelock now admits to having been ‘alarmist’ about climate change, and says other fanatics environmental commentators such as Al Gore were too alarmist as well.

You don’t say.

It’s only taken a quarter of a century. During that time, Professor Lovelock was the guru of man-made global warming theory. More than that, he was the prophet of a cult which turned the earth into a kind of god -- or more specifically a goddess called Gaia, investing it with anthropomorphic characteristics while his disciples demonised the human race itself as the destroyers of the planet.

Lovelock made one chilling prediction of planetary doom after another. In 2006, he warned that the earth might soon pass

‘“into a morbid fever that may last as long as 100,000 years....as the century progresses, the temperature will rise 8 degrees centigrade in temperate regions and 5 degrees in the tropics. Much of the tropical land mass will become scrub and desert... Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”’

Now, however, MSNBC reports Lovelock as saying:

‘“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened.

‘“The climate is doing its usual tricks. There’s nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now,” he said. “The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time… it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising -- carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that,” he added.’

Indeed, there is no question about it. Not being able to tell what the climate is actually doing, let alone what it will do in the future, is in essence what climate sceptics have been saying consistently for the past 25 years or so. And so presumably we should now count Lovelock as one of their number? Er, not exactly:

‘Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.”’

Good Lord, perish the thought! ‘Climate change deniers’ are nasty, vicious, imbecilic, rapacious neo-Nazis, aren’t they? No, Lovelock’s latest position is... ah, as sophisticated and, um, nuanced as we would expect from someone with such a solid and distinguished scientific track record:

‘He said he still thought that climate change was happening, but that its effects would be felt farther in the future than he previously thought. “We will have global warming, but it’s been deferred a bit,” Lovelock said.’

Of course! Even though

“we don’t know what the climate is doing”

and

“there’s nothing much really happening yet”

and

“it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising”

--- in other words, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the theory of man-made global warming, its baleful effects have only

“been deferred a bit”.

Isn’t the environmental movement wonderful? Even when they admit they’re totally wrong, they still insist they were right all along.

Professor Lovelock is a Fellow of the Royal Society. Some years back that august body, the embodiment of the scientific establishment and the custodians of scientific integrity, told us that on man-made global warming ‘the science is settled’. What will the Society now be saying to Professor Lovelock FRS, or he to it?

Meanwhile, although on April 4 it was reported that

‘David Cameron is set to end his long silence on green issues, with a major speech in front of the world’s key energy and climate figures’,

and that according to climate change minister Greg Barker this would be

“a major policy intervention by the Prime Minister... a major keynote on the green economy’,

it was reported yesterday that

‘David Cameron is no longer making a pro-environmental oration on Thursday during a gathering of 23 energy ministers from around the world’

because according to Number 10:

‘...while Cameron may have mulled a set-piece speech it was only ever considered’ (hat tip: Benny Peiser).

Ah. Might the Prime Minister finally have detected that the winds of climate change are being blown somewhat off course – and the reputations of all who promoted this, the greatest anti-scientific scam of all time, now risk being blown away with it?

Too late. The planet won't fry, but the warmists are toast.

Carbon Emissions Are Good

It is erroneous to think that humans cannot change the environment for good.

By Robert Zubrin
http://www.nationalreview.com
April 3, 2012

Coal power plant in Datteln (Germany) at the Dortmund-Ems-Kanal
Image by Arnold Paul cropped by Gralo

Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its intention to enforce regulations that would effectively ban new coal-fired power plants in the United States. As coal is by far America’s cheapest and most plentiful fossil fuel, and coal-fired power stations account for 45 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S., the destructive economic effects of this edict can hardly be overstated. It is therefore imperative to subject the EPA’s logic to a searching examination.

According to the EPA, despite their disastrous economic effects, regulations to prevent the U.S. from making use of its coal resources are necessary, because coal combustion produces carbon dioxide, which allegedly will cause global warming, which would allegedly be harmful to the Earth’s biosphere and human society. Others, wishing to avoid an environmentalist-created economic catastrophe, have challenged this argument’s first premise, to wit, that global warming is really occurring. Since there is no actual global temperature, but only an average of many different constantly changing local temperatures, this approach has led to convoluted debates revolving around data sets that can easily be based upon an unrepresentative mix of measurements.

This has left the EPA’s second premise — that global warming would be a harmful development — largely unchallenged. This is unfortunate, because while it is entirely possible that the earth may be warming — as it has done so many times in the past — there is no rational basis whatsoever to support the contention that carbon-dioxide-driven global warming would be on the whole harmful to life and civilization. Quite the contrary: All available evidence supports the contention that human CO2 emissions offer great benefits to the earth’s community of life.

Putting aside for the moment the question of whether human industrial CO2 emissions are having an effect on climate, it is quite clear that they are raising atmospheric CO2 levels. As a result, they are having a strong and markedly positive effect on plant growth worldwide. There is no doubt about this. NASA satellite observations taken from orbit since 1958 show that, concurrent with the 19 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 over the past half century, the rate of plant growth in the continental United States has increased by 14 percent. Studies done at Oak Ridge National Lab on forest trees have shown that increasing the carbon dioxide level 50 percent, to the 550 parts per million level projected to prevail at the end of the 21 century, will likely increase photosynthetic productivity by a further 24 percent. This is readily reproducible laboratory science. If CO2 levels are increased, the rate of plant growth will accelerate.

Now let us consider the question of warming: If it is occurring — and I believe it is, based not on disputable temperature measurements but on sea levels, which have risen two inches in two decades — is it a good thing or a bad thing? Answer: It is a very good thing. Global warming would increase the rate of evaporation from the oceans. This would increase rainfall worldwide. In addition, global warming would lengthen the growing season, thereby increasing still further the bounty of both agriculture and nature.

In other words, from any rational point of view, global warming would be a very good thing. By enriching the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere from its impoverished pre-industrial levels, human beings have increased the productivity of the entire biosphere — so much so that roughly one out of every seven living things on the planet owes its existence to the marvelous improvement in nature that humans have effected. Through our CO2 emissions we are making the earth a more fertile world.

There is no reason to fear a more clement climate. A thousand years ago, the world was significantly warmer than it is today. A thousand years ago, the snow line in the Rockies was a thousand feet higher than it is now, and Canadian forests flourished tens of kilometers farther north. A thousand years ago, oats and barley were grown in Iceland, wheat in Norway, hay in Greenland, and the vineyards of England produced fine wines as far north as York. These warm temperatures were no disaster. On the contrary, persisting through the twelfth century, they are believed by historians to have contributed materially to the significant growth of population and prosperity in Europe during the High Middle Ages (roughly the years 1000 to 1300).

If we wish to look at a longer span of the earth’s history, average global temperatures can be estimated by examining sea-floor material. Looking at the data, we see significant global cooling since the time of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred 55 million years ago. The atmosphere contained 2,000 parts per million carbon dioxide, more than five times the 380 parts per million that is does today. New species of plants evolved that were capable of using carbon dioxide more efficiently. The most important of these were the grasses, which, originating at the end of the Paleocene about 58 million years ago, drove temperatures sharply down. Things then stabilized in the Oligocene, until the mid-Miocene, about 15 million years ago, when additional types of grasses appeared. These more advanced grasses were much more efficient at carbon-dioxide utilization, and as they replaced their predecessors, they drove atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels below 300 parts per million for the first time in the earth’s history. In the process, they sent the planet’s climate plunging into a glacial age that has continued to the present day.

Twenty million years ago, vast regions of what are today frozen polar deserts in the Arctic and Antarctic were forests, inhabited by vibrant communities of animal life. Today these regions are close to dead, made uninhabitable by the failure of the wild biosphere to maintain sufficient levels of atmospheric CO2.

The fact that the earth’s atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration was about 280 parts per million shortly before the industrial revolution implies that this value is close to the minimum acceptable equilibrium level for the modern biosphere. As human industrial activity pushes carbon-dioxide levels above this impoverished state, we increase plant productivity, causing the biosphere to push back like a spring, with the force of its push becoming ever stronger the further the system is displaced from equilibrium. The more fossil fuels we burn, the more carbon resources we make available for plant growth, and the more productive the biosphere becomes.

During the 1970s, the earth experienced a short-term cooling trend, and as a result many of the current cast of global-warming alarmists then predicted an icy doom unless human industrial and population expansion (which they blamed for the phenomenon) could be brought under strict control. This history has exposed them to some mockery, but in fact their previous stand was more to their credit. The global-cooling doomsayers of the 1970s may have been wrong, but at least they were yelling about something that, had it been real, would have been bad. Global cooling would indeed have been a disaster, leading to a drier, more sterile planet. Had the threat of another ice age actually been valid, a forceful government effort to avert such a catastrophe might well have been justified. But as the blame for global cooling could not be conclusively assigned to humanity, the case held little of enduring interest to humanity’s prosecutors.

In contrast, the role of humanity in raising global CO2 levels is relatively clear, and power allegedly needed to suppress it is enormous. The problem may be the direct opposite of what was previously alleged, but the solution is the same — more control. The fact that increased CO2 is constructive and highly beneficial to both mankind and the natural world is ignored.

This is deeply irrational. Indeed, consider for a moment what the situation would be if not only temperatures, but atmospheric CO2 levels, were to resume falling. That would truly be a cause for alarm, as it would imperil all life on earth.

But for those seeking the power to oppress humanity, any change in nature effected by humans, no matter how beneficial, is criminal by assumption. Thus all anthropogenic CO2 releases must be harmful to nature, by definition. Furthermore, since all human activity must, perforce, release CO2, all human existence partakes of crime against nature. Therefore nothing we can do is right, and controllers must be empowered to make sure we do as little as possible. Such is the case for the EPA.

— Robert Zubrin is president of Pioneer Astronautics, a member of the steering committee of Americans for Energy, and the author of Energy Victory. His next book, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, has just been published by Encounter Books.