Saving Civilization: 2009 vs 2015

Five years ago, we were told that the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit was the last chance to save civilization. As the 2015 Paris summit approaches, the same sort of fear mongering is ramping up.

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Climate Holocaust - Exhibit #8 in the Drama Queen Files

It’s 2009 all over again – when people got hysterical prior to the last-chance-to-save-ourselves Copenhagen climate summit.

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Where the Money Goes

Junkets abroad, handsomely-paid positions at home – no wonder government employees love the environment.

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Papering Over the Sappy Bill McKibben

A new, 73-page paper about America’s “most visible environmental activist” doesn’t mention that he’s an emotional basketcase.

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Hugo Chavez vs Prince Charles

Which remarks were uttered by the heir to the British throne – and which were delivered by Venezuela’s late president?

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Pachauri: It's Too Late to Fight Climate Change

Back in 2007 IPCC chairman Pachauri made a prediction regarding the year 2012.

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Just One Cotton-Pickin' Minute

A column appeared in the Toronto Star (Canada's largest circulation daily) yesterday, under the ridiculous headline: "Questions for climate change skeptics."

It should have been titled: Questions for asleep-at-the-wheel journalists.

The Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) currently finds itself mired in scandal over erroneous glacier info, frequent use of material produced by green advocacy groups (not to mention newspaper and magazine clippings), patently false claims regarding the non-existent link between climate change and hurricanes, etcetera, etcetera.

After bloggers performed a good deal of the spade work concerning these matters, reputable UK newspapers are finally calling for the resignation of the IPCC's chairman - and urging that its findings be subject to an audit.

Yet the Toronto Star, which appears to have done absolutely nothing to inform its readers about these controversies (despite UK papers reporting on them non-stop for weeks) doesn't feel it should be held accountable. Rather, its senior political columnist, Carol Goar, thinks it is skeptics who now deserve to be peppered with questions.

"Suppose the scientific consensus on climate change is wrong," she began yesterday's column. Suppose arctic ice melts naturally, that greenhouse gases pose no risk, and that climatologists are misguided in their concerns about "rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, longer droughts [and] more violent storms."

Doesn't it make sense "to set tougher emissions standards for the vehicles that pollute the air we breathe" anyway, she asks. Doesn't it also "make sense to stop burning up and selling off non-renewable resources as if there were no tomorrow?"

Now wait just one cotton-pickin' minute. Everyone thinks fighting pollution is a good thing. Most of us also believe in using natural resources wisely.

But those are not the measures media outlets such as the Toronto Star have been telling us we need to adopt. On December 7th, 2009 - that's 66 days ago - the Star was one of 56 newspapers worldwide that jointly ran the same alarmist climate change editorial [full list here]. The Star took the unusual step of printing said editorial on its front page [photo here], beneath large type that declared:

The world must kick its carbon habit and we'll have to change our lifestyle...Our survival depends on it. [bold added]

Within the body of this editorial, the Star told its readers that:

• climate change "will ravage our planet"
• climate change consequences "will endure for all time"
• our prospects for fighting climate change "will be determined in the next 14 days" (at the Copenhagen climate summit)

The editorial also claimed that, if the average global temperature was to rise 3-4 degrees Celcius at some later date:

• farmland would be turned into desert
• half "of all species could become extinct"
• "millions of people would be displaced"
• entire nations would be "drowned by the sea"

It warned about temperatures rising to "dangerous levels," and further declared that:

...every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level. [bold added]

This is a strange argument, of course. It says we must, by applying the brakes to virtually all economic activity, deliberately embrace the kind of hardship we'd only otherwise experience during a severe recession/depression. Moreover, the reason we must endure this permanent hardship is to prevent speculative bad things from happening to not-yet-born humans at an unspecified time in the future.

As Bjorn Lomborg points out, however, "nobody emits C02 for fun." Emissions occur when we use energy. Energy refrigerates and cooks our food. It keeps us warm. It gets us to work and to church. It powers our hospitals and lights our schools. It is required to design, manufacture, and transport virtually every consumer good. In other words, it makes our world go round.

People who slip into energy poverty start burning books and furniture to protect themselves from winter's merciless bite. They perish from both the cold and their inability to access medical and social services. Their children are denied the opportunity to attend an arts school across town, because the cost of a transit pass is beyond their means.

This cramped, small, meagre, miserable existence is what the Star's editorial board told us was absolutely necessary 66 days ago, when it was urging us to "shop, eat and travel" less, and telling us we'd have to get used to paying more for energy while using it sparingly.

Near the end of her column yesterday, Ms. Goar acknowledges that:

Revelations about the shoddy research techniques and suppression of inconvenient information have cast doubt on the alarmist forecasts of the International Panel on Climate Change.

She also admits that: "Global warming may not be the greatest threat facing mankind."

This is marvelous news. It means that a lot of little kids have been told a lot of scary stories about ghastly things that might not happen, after all.

Now what really needs asking is this: How did the Toronto Star manage, within a period of 66 days, to go from telling us our very survival was at stake due to global warming to arguing that, well, fighting pollution is a good idea anyway?

Where are the soul-searching examinations of how this happened? Where are the front-page mea culpas? Where are the solemn promises to be more critically-minded (not to mention open-minded) in the future?

It isn't climate skeptics who have some explaining to do.

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(Full disclosure: my first regular gig during my 10-year stint as a journalist was a weekly opinions-page column in the Toronto Star that ran from 1992-1996. It was a great job, I was lucky to land it, and it paid the handsome sum of $200 a week.)

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>> What she said about the climate bible 3 months ago
>> Time magazine's controversial glacier expert
>> Systemic failure: invasion of the drama queens
>> Science says: hop on one foot

What She Said About the Climate Bible 3 Months Ago

As a Canadian, I've never seen or heard Margot O'Neill, a senior reporter with ABC television news in Australia. So this is in no way personal.

Rather, this post is about reminding ourselves why the current, raging controversy over the UN's climate bible is important. If the climate report includes significant mistakes, if it uses newspaper and magazine articles to make its case, if it relies on literature generated by activist organizations as evidence - then it is a rather different animal from the uber-respectable paragon of virtue Ms. O'Neill described a mere 12 weeks ago.

In mid-November, during the build-up to the Copenhagen climate summit, Ms. O'Neill posted an article on her blog titled: "Conspiracies and the IPCC" [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]. Aware that some people had doubts about the organization, she authored a piece that defended it. All three of the experts she chose to quote also defended it.

As one might expect, her post made prodigious use of that sorely misunderstood phrase "peer-review" (it's mentioned six times, in fact). So let's take a look:

[M]ake no mistake about how central the IPCC is to the global warming debate. The IPCC's reports are why ours and other governments...are calling for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; and why everyone will meet in Copenhagen next month..

So is the IPCC really that kooky?...

Each of these working groups is headed by two scientists, one each from a developed and developing nation, supported by up to 500 other scientists known as lead authors...Together they evaluate thousands of pieces of peer-reviewed research from around the globe...

Here is how Queensland University's Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, a world expert on coral reefs and climate change, describes what happened when he contributed a small slice of the 2007 IPCC report:

"The IPCC has one of the most rigorous review processes I have ever experienced...If you have been involved in this process, it is a quite an experience which takes months and years - involving a lot of pedantic haggling over detail - but always using the peer-reviewed literature as the base...The responses from the specialists are them [sic] independently reviewed to ensure...the comment/suggestion/objection...[is] refuted scientifically (ie with peer-reviewed literature)...I don't think you could have a more rigorous process."

...One of the lead authors on the 2001 and 2007 reports [is] UNSW's Professor Andy Pitman...Which brings us to one of the enduring sources of frustration among IPCC and many other scientists. Just about all the scientists attacking the IPCC, Prof. Pitman says, have never researched nor published any climate science in peer-reviewed journals - and peer review is how science works.

...When is science valid?...Has it been published in the peer-reviewed literature in that field of science? [bold added by me, italics in the original]

Here, in a nutshell, we see it all:

• the acknowledgment that IPCC reports are the reason the international community believes carbon dioxide emission cuts are necessary
• the repeated claims that the IPCC bases its findings on peer-reviewed science
• the smear that scientists who criticize the IPCC "have never researched nor published any climate science in peer-reviewed journals"
• the bold declaration that "peer review is how science works"

Nothing prevented Ms. O'Neil from taking a firsthand look at the IPCC report herself. She, like me, could have typed "WWF" (which stands for the activist group, the World Wildlife Fund) into a search box and found the 16 distinct WWF citations in the IPCC's 2007 report. Within a few minutes she could also have found the eight Greenpeace papers listed.

In the process she might have noticed that one of her scientific experts - Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg (whom she quoted as saying: "I don't think you could have a more rigorous process") - is a co-author of one of those non-peer-reviewed Greenpeace papers.

Hoegh-Guldberg, O., H. Hoegh-Guldberg, H. Cesar and A. Timmerman, 2000: Pacific in peril: biological, economic and social impacts of climate change on Pacific coral reefs. Greenpeace, 72 pp.

Instead, Ms. O'Neill - who has 25 years experience as a journalist - was utterly bamboozled by the PR machine which is the IPCC. She fell for their slick mirage. And then she passed it along to her viewers and readers.

In fairness, she isn't terribly different from thousands of other journalists out there. Which means that much of the world's media - and therefore much of the public - has been profoundly misled.

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>> Time magazine's controversial glacier expert
>> Did IQs drop sharply?
>> Science says: hop on one foot

Bill McKibben: Extravagant Emotional Excess

A few weeks ago I read Bill McKibben's 1989 book, The End of Nature. It's considered the first mainstream book on global warming and is, one presumes, part of the reason McKibben is a revered environmental guru.

I discuss that book in this blog post (see the section appearing in navy-colored text, midway through). What surprised me, as a newcomer to McKibben's work, is how utterly emotional his arguments are. Yes, he cites scientists and their research, but the book is first and foremost a philosophical/spiritual/highly emotive treatise. As I observed in my earlier post:

McKibben talks incessantly about his feelings of "sadness." In one paragraph, he uses that word four times (see pages 60, 68, 72, 73, 74, 160, 162). He also tells us about his other emotional responses to environmental questions:

• grief (p.73)
• loneliness (76, 144)
• fretfulness (86)
• fear, panic and nervousness (89, 175)
• revulsion (147)
• depression (182)

(The page numbers refer to the 2006 US paperback edition.)

There's a reason the term "cheap emotionalism" came into being. It's used by people who try to manipulate - rather than rationally persuade. And although it works well on teenaged girls, most grownups are less than impressed by it.

Smart, thoughtful people value dispassionate investigation, careful and systematic analysis, and logical arguments. But McKibben seems to think we should listen to him because he cares. Because he cries.

Yesterday he authored a guest blog while attending the Copenhagen climate conference. It appeared on a website associated with the Center for American Progress. (Actually, it's a reprint from the Mother Jones website, dated the day before - which makes this worse. Not one, but two separate publications judged this missive worthy of their readers' limited attention.)

I don't mean to be unkind, but this post is embarrassing. Second paragraph, first line:

"This afternoon I sobbed for an hour, and I’m still choking a little."

Third paragraph, first line (about a church service he attended):

"But my tears started before anyone said a word."

Fifth paragraph, first line:

"I cried all the harder a few minutes later when the great cathedral bell began slowly tolling..."

Sixth paragraph, first line:

"And these tears were now sweet as well as bitter..."

The eighth (and final) paragraph mentions his tears in its first sentence, too.

Bill, hon, it's time to pull yourself together. Take a vacation - maybe even some medication. And please stop imagining that your tears have the power to change the mind of anyone with a working brain.

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Copenhagen Banner: Scrap Capitalism

Above is a screen-grab from the CTV news website (associated with "Canada's largest private broadcaster"). I copied it at 5 pm on December 12th. Half an hour later, this particular photograph - of a banner that reads: Save the planet, scrap capitalism - had been replaced by a less incendiary one.

People traveled to the United Nations-sponsored climate conference in Copenhagen for a variety of reasons. Some of them protested in the streets of the Danish capital, some didn't. Of those who did, most demonstrated peacefully. Others donned masks and hurled bricks through windows. In other words, they're a diverse bunch.

We do, however, need to be honest about one thing. When Conservative, right-leaning folk accuse environmentalists of being "watermelons" - green on the outside and Red on the inside - they aren't pulling this accusation out of thin air.

There is, indeed, a portion of the environmental movement that sees capitalism as the problem. Never mind that capitalism is strongly correlated with prosperity and freedom. Never mind that socialist governments in China and the Soviet Union murdered tens of millions of souls during the 20th century. Never mind that socialist economies are typically basket cases - and that socialist governments have a long history of suppressing the basic freedoms of their citizens. Despite all of this painful experience, some people still think it would be cool to tear down capitalism.

Many of these folk have jumped on the environmental bandwagon because they think it will help them achieve their real goal.

So here's my question for the more sober-minded individuals attending Copenhagen - for those who sincerely believe the situation is dire, that climate catastrophe looms, that this is no ordinary crisis but a defining historical moment:

If this is more than just the latest installment in the on-going battle between left and right, Liberal and Conservative, greens and industry, why do you continue to behave as though it's business as usual?

If it's really, truly important to get as many people on board as quickly as possible why don't you act accordingly? Why are you not loudly distancing yourself from the capitalism-is-the-problem crowd? Why aren't you reassuring us that we needn't fear for our political structures?

Why aren't you telling everyone - on all sides of the climate debate - that the conversation about whether our particular political systems are right or wrong must wait for another day? That we must now focus all of our attention on climate issues.

Those who wish to argue for the destruction of capitalism have a right to free speech and should not be silenced. But environmental leaders - including all the politicians, celebrities and media commentators yakking on incessantly about climate - need to distance themselves from the "scrap capitalism" bunch.

Until that happens, don't expect me to share your sense of urgency. It looks like just another media circus to me. Plenty of drama - but no real substance.

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