Editorials The Death of Global Warming
| 02 February 2010
The global warming movement as we have known it is dead. Its health had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a ‘politically binding’ agreement to be agreed that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.
The movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics.
After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all. This latest story in the London Times is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It seems as if a scare story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care about whether it was reality-based.
With this in mind, ‘climategate’ — the scandal over hacked emails by prominent climate scientists — looks sinister rather than just unsavory. The British government has concluded that University of East Anglia, home of the research institute that provides the global warming with much of its key data, had violated Britain’s Freedom of Information Act when scientists refused to hand over data so that critics could check their calculations and methods. Breaking the law to hide key pieces of data isn’t just ’science as usual,’ as the global warming movement’s embattled defenders gamely tried to argue. A cover-up like that suggests that you indeed have something to conceal.
The urge to make the data better than it was didn’t just come out of nowhere. The global warmists were trapped into the necessity of hyping the threat by their realization that the actual evidence they had — which, let me emphasize, all hype aside, is serious, troubling and establishes in my mind the need for intensive additional research and investigation, as well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources — was not sufficient to get the world’s governments to do what they thought needed to be done. Hyping the threat increasingly doesn’t look like an accident: it looks like it was a conscious political strategy.
Now it has failed. Not everything that has come out of the IPCC and the East Anglia Climate Unit is false, but enough of their product is sufficiently tainted that these institutions can best serve the cause of fighting climate change by stepping out of the picture. New leadership might help, but everything these two agencies have done will now have to be re-checked by independent and objective sources.
The global warming campaigners got into this mess because they had a deeply flawed political strategy. They were never able to develop a pragmatic approach that could reach its goals in the context of the existing international system. The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet. As it happened, the movement never got to the first step — it never got the world’s countries to agree to the necessary set of treaties, transfers and policies that would constitute, at least on paper, a program for achieving its key goals.
Even if that first step had been reached, the second and third would almost surely not have been. The United States Congress is unlikely to pass the kind of legislation these agreements would require before the midterm elections, much less ratify a treaty. (It takes 67 senate votes to ratify a treaty and only 60 to overcome a filibuster.) After the midterms, with the Democrats expected to lose seats in both houses, the chance of passage would be even more remote — especially as polls show that global warming ranks at or near the bottom of most voters’ priorities. American public opinion supports ‘doing something’ about global warming, but not very much; support for specific measures and sacrifices will erode rapidly as commentators from Fox News and other conservative outlets endlessly hammer away. Without a commitment from the United States to pay its share of the $100 billion plus per year that poor countries wanted as their price for compliance, and without US participation in other aspects of the proposed global approach, the intricate global deals fall apart.
Comments
The "Climategate" emails reveal organized efforts to subvert transparency laws and keep the public misinformed about the state of climate science, which influences trillion-dollar policy decisions and critical issues of energy sovereignty and security.
Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed, says these revelations may prompt courts to refuse to take judicial notice of any claims attributed to the IPCC.
publicnuisancewire.com/.../...
Calls to introduce a licensing system to police the Internet on behalf of a powerful UN agency represent the latest salvo in a long-running battle to kill free speech on the web and bring an end to the powerful digital democracy that has devastated the carbon tax agenda of the UN by exposing the Climategate scandal.
UN International Telcommunicatio ns Union secretary general Hamadoun Toure told the World Economic Forum in Davos this past weekend that global treaties need to be enacted in the name of stopping cyber warfare.
Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer for Microsoft, told fellow globalists at the summit that the Internet needed to be policed by means of introducing licenses similar to drivers licenses -- in other words government permission to use the web.
"We need a kind of World Health Organization for the Internet," he said.
"If you want to drive a car you have to have a license to say that you are capable of driving a car, the car has to pass a test to say it is fit to drive and you have to have insurance."
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