Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
One of the arguments frequently applied to the climate debate is that the “Precautionary Principle” requires that we take action to reduce CO2. However, this is a misunderstanding of the Precautionary Principle, which means something very different from the kind of caution that makes us carry an umbrella when rain threatens. Some people are taking the Precautionary Principle way too far …
Figure 1. Umbrella Exhibiting an Excess of Precaution
The nature of the Precautionary Principle is widely misunderstood. Let me start with the birth of the Precautionary Principle (I’ll call it PP for short), which comes from the United Nations Rio de Janeiro Declaration on the Environment (1992). Here’s their original formulation:
“In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capability. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”
This is an excellent statement of the PP, as it distinguishes it from such things as carrying umbrellas, denying bank loans, approving the Kyoto Protocol, invading Afghanistan, or using seat belts.
The three key parts of the PP (emphasis mine) are:
1) A threat of serious or irreversible damage.
2) A lack of full scientific certainty (in other words, the existence of partial but not conclusive scientific evidence).
3) The availability of cost-effective measures that we know will prevent the problem.
Here are some examples of how these key parts of the PP work out in practice.
We have full scientific certainty that seat belts save lives, and that using an umbrella keeps us dry. Thus, using them is not an example of the PP, it is simply acting reasonably on principles about which we are scientifically certain.
There are no scientific principles or evidence that we can apply to the question of invading Afghanistan, so we cannot apply the PP there either.
Bank loans are neither serious nor irreversible, nor is there partial scientific understanding of them, so they don’t qualify for the PP.
The Kyoto Protocol is so far from being cost-effective as to be laughable. The PP can be thought of as a kind of insurance policy. No one would pay $200,000 for an insurance policy if the payoff in case of an accident were only $20, yet this is the kind of ratio of cost to payoff that the Kyoto Protocol involves. Even its proponents say that if the states involved met their targets, it would only reduce the temperature by a tenth of a degree in fifty years … not a good risk/reward ratio.
Finally, consider CO2. The claim is that in fifty years, we’ll be sorry if we don’t stop producing CO2 now. However, we don’t know whether CO2 will cause any damage at all in fifty years, much less whether it will cause serious or irreversible damage. We have very little evidence that CO2 will cause “dangerous” warming other than fanciful forecasts from untested, unverified, unvalidated climate models which have not been subjected to software quality assurance of any kind. We have no evidence that a warmer world is a worse world, it might be a better world. The proposed remedies are estimated to cost on the order of a trillion dollars a year … hardly cost effective under any analysis. Nor do we have any certainty whether the proposed remedies will prevent the projected problem. So cutting CO2 fails to qualify for the PP under all three of the criteria.
On the other side of the equation, a good example of when we should definitely use the PP involves local extinction. We have fairly good scientific understanding that removing a top predator from a local ecosystem badly screws things up. Kill the mountain lions, and the deer go wild, then the plants are overgrazed, then the ground erodes, insect populations are unbalanced, and so on down the line.
Now, if we are looking at a novel ecosystem that has not been scientifically studied, we do not have full scientific certainty that removing the top predator will actually cause serious or irreversible damage to the ecosystem. However, if there is a cost-effective method to avoid removing the top predator, the PP says that we should do so. It fulfils the three requirements of the PP — there is a threat of serious or irreversible damage, we have partial scientific certainty, and a cost-effective solution exists, so we should act.
Because I hold these views about the inapplicability of the precautionary principle to CO2, I am often accused of not wanting to do anything about a possible threat. People say I’m ignoring something which could cause problems in the future. This is not the case. I do not advocate inaction. I advocate the use of “no-regrets” actions in response to this kind of possible danger.
The rule of the no-regrets approach is very simple — do things that will provide real, immediate, low-cost, tangible benefits whether or not the threat is real. That way you won’t regret your actions.
Here are some examples of no-regrets responses to the predicted threats of CO2. In Peru, the slums up on the hillside above Lima are very dry, which is a problem that is supposed to get worse if the world warms. In response to the problem, people are installing “fog nets“. These nets capture water from the fog, providing fresh water to the villagers.
In India’s Ladakh region, they have the same problem, lack of water. So they have started building “artificial glaciers“.These are low-cost shallow ponds where they divert the water during the winter. The water freezes, and is slowly released as the “glacier” melts over the course of the following growing season.
These are the best type of response to a possible threat from CO2. They are inexpensive, they solve a real problem today rather than a half century from now, and they are aimed at the poor of the world.
These responses also reveal what I call the “dirty secret” of the “we’re all gonna die in fifty years from CO2” crowd. The dirty secret of their forecasts of massive impending doom is that all of the threatened catastrophes they warn us about are here already.
All the different types of climate-related destruction that people are so worried will happen in fifty years are happening today. Droughts? We got ’em. Floods? There’s plenty. Rising sea levels? Check. Insect borne diseases? Which ones would you like? Tornados and extreme storms? We get them all the time. People dying of starvation? How many do you want? All the Biblical Plagues of Egypt? Would you like flies with that?
Forget about what will happen in fifty years. Every possible climate catastrophe is happening now, and has been for centuries.
So if you are truly interested in those problems, do something about them today. Contribute to organizations developing salt resistant crops. Put money into teaching traditional drought resisting measures in Africa. Support the use of micro-hydroelectric plants for village energy. The possibilities are endless.
That way, whether or not the doomsayers are right about what will happen in fifty years, both then and now people will be better prepared and more able to confront the problems caused by the unpleasant vagaries of climate. Fighting to reduce CO2 is hugely expensive, has been totally unsuccessful to date, will be very damaging to the lives of the poorest people, and has no certainty of bringing the promised results. This is a very bad combination.
Me, I don’t think CO2 will cause those doomsday scenarios. But that’s just me, I’ve been wrong before. If you do care about CO2 and think it is teh eeeevil, you should be out promoting your favorite no-regrets option. Because whether or not CO2 is a danger as people claim, if you do that you can be sure that you are not just pouring money down a bottomless hole with very poor odds of success. That’s the real Precautionary Principle.
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Brilliant article, Willis. Your mathematical/ statistical analytical skills are matched by your logical/ philosophical ones.
Wade (06:36:18) : “Remember, the goal of these people is not to make life better for the poor or to fix the world’s climate problems. The goal of these people is to make money and to become powerful.”
The “limit CO2 emissions” scam always reminds me of movies and TV shows about firefighters. We see a large building on fire with impressive amounts of water being flung in its general direction, but with no discernable effect on the fire. Obviously the goal is not to put out the fire; the goal is to shoot spectacular footage for the show, and the more the better.
The analogy isn’t limited to CAGW, of course; many political “solutions” also qualify, e.g. “War on Poverty”, “Energy Independence”, “Cash for Clunkers”, “Economic Stimulus”, etc.
Skeptical Skeptic (08:54:32) :
Thanks for your thoughts, but unless you haven’t noticed there is a significant amount of solid science that raises substantial doubt about the AGW hypothesis. Since you did not cite the “conclusive” science, I will skip that nicety on the contra side of the argument and point out that there is NO evidence that is CONCLUSIVE regarding AGW.
Science, especially of a complex phenomena such as climate, depends more on falsification than on “proof.” Your argument about 95% this and that (incorrect itself, BTW) is unscientific in any case. Trying to convince anyone of the AGW hypithesis on the basis of arguments that are inherently unscientific only points out how many people “believe” AGW based on ideology and not on analysis.
If you want to comment here, you will need to bring the best science forward. Explicitly. This site is about examining data, analysis, phenomenological principles, not about opinions as to what is proven or not.
I’d love to have you present the 5-10 studies that are incontrovertable evidence of AGW — but one restriction: no reference to computer models allowed. Real data, real physics, real chemistry only please.
“GP (10:31:28) :
[…]
We know how useful coal is. We know how useful Oil is.
The chances of the entire population of the world deciding to skip the benefits of those two resources (among many) is small.
So be it. If they offer a source of energy that allows humanity to move to another level of existence, fine. If they don’t and humanity fails to find a way forward, so what? That’s evolution. The planet survives, species develop (or don’t develop) and ‘the ecology’ moves to the next level.]”
A logical error. Wind and Solar are nonviable in the marketplace because they cost around twice as much as energy from fossil fuels and are not available round the clock. We spend about 2% of GDP for energy needs. So if fossil fuels become unavailable, we would have to spend 4% for energy and make do with the inconvenience of fluctuating availabilty. Which can be alleviated by more or less expensive storage solutions – pretty low tech like pumped-storage hydro.
It’s not like we would all die without fussil fuels. It’s just very expensive.
Just for the fun of it, compare the Laws of Fear (#1 – #5) to journals and newspaper articles associated with “Global Warming” and “Climate Change”.
Sounds like a plan to me; a game plan, that is. I do not blame Cass Sunstein, however. Anyone’s work can be misused.
Ross: Your link included an inadvertent concluding “).” Here’s the corrected link:
http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/
Believe it or not, it’s technically illegal. The state or municipality owns your rainwater. (There have been articles about this.)
Unless God doesn’t want you to “believe” (as a notion) in Him.
Anthony and Willis, a soothing, reasonable, and internet-viral-ready blog. Great intro to 2010. In thinking about PPs, however, you sent me into a few hours of research — and on New Years day, too. I found 14 meteorite (comet, asteroid) or meteorite field impacts after the 13,000 BP proposed major event (Clovis “extinction”). Most were not so major, but they could seriously effect local or regional populations. My proposal for a PP is to transfer a large amount of “global warming” grand funds into search for extratrestrial objects with Earth’s name on them. There must be quite a few aiming right at us.
Believe it or not, it’s technically illegal. The state or municipality owns your rainwater.
If that is true, then what all Frenches think of Statesiders is true: Statesiders are crazy!
That reminds me of the laws that say you are not allowed to hang your clothe out to dry!
Do you have a link?
I have not yet received a response as to what type of world the greens want. “Do it for the children” and all that. We must always plan for the worst, but hope for the best. When I say plan for the worst, is it possible to prepare for every possible contingency? Not likely, but to prepare for only one ( i.e. CAGW) is very dangerous. It is not being precautionary. Mankind’s future might be likened to a freight train. Very useful if headed in the right direction, but if you discover you are on the wrong track, it is very difficult to slow down and reverse course and get back on the right track. Let’s face it, it would not take much to push civilization off the rails. I like to use Montreal’s three days of freezing rain in the late 80’s as an example. Many were without power for 3 months. If we only prepare for warming and the cooling continues, we have backed the wrong horse. Also, with warming we would not have the food shortages we would get with cooling. If we apply the PP, it should be across the board, not just one contingency.
The other evening a friend was saying that man is the worst for wrecking the planet. I asked what’s different to say, giraffes eating leaves off trees? My friend replied that nature keeps those in balance. So I asked, what will happen when humans go past the limit, won’t we also simply be put back into check by nature? — It was one of those moments where there is no reply, the conversation just ends abruptly.
So just as you say… if there is a problem, nature will solve it for herself.
Another angle on it is, if man is just another species, no more privileged than any other, then why do all the other species get to compete, but we’re not allowed to? Isn’t our dominance simply a temporary and transitory evolutionary experiment by nature herself? To be shrugged off and forgotten when nature becomes bored with us? Is not our belief that we’re to “put nature back into balance” a tremendous arrogance on our part, presuming that we have the intellectual capacity to understand and put a planetary ecosystem into balance, when our technological peak is somewhere around the level of the mobile phone?
I loved that episode of Futurama, the one where the environmentalists feed their pet lion tofu (it looks sickly), where Leela at the end notes, something like, “wouldn’t it be better if we just let nature do its own thing, as that can’t possibly be any worse than all the things we did to save it?”
Theories of social development extend Piaget’s stages of child development through into adulthood, basically indicating that our development doesn’t stop at age 21, but continues into further stages through life. What we call Modernity, has a corresponding psychological stage (which is why minds in previous epochs didn’t invent Modernity, as their minds hadn’t developed that far yet.)
An interesting observation is that not everyone born today necessarily awakens to every stage available. Most people become Modern, and some develop further (evolution, even culturally, continues), but a notable percentage are still psychologically and socially pre-Modern.
The mind, the culture, the material means, and the society are all linked, so pre-Modern people prefer pre-Modern ways of life. Sure they can function in the Modern world, but they don’t resonate with it.
What I think is interesting about AGW, isn’t the science describing the problem, but rather the things that people culturally propose as “solutions”. This is how Lomborg can differer so much with many environmentalists, even through he accepts AGW in principle. His response is Modern at the minimum, whereas a number of environmentalists seem to be coming from a rather different place.
For example, this article praises the virtues of rural church life where the community make their own entertainment, in the context of reducing consumption for the sake of reducing emissions. Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the author wrote the piece on a computer, let’s just take him at his word for his expression of what he genuinely prefers and resonates with; it looks to me rather like a pre-Modern way of life.
http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/Tom_Hodgkinson/357974/shakespeare_had_no_blackberry_lets_have_a_technological_sabbath.html
Now I don’t resonate with pre-Modern ways of life, so when I look at AGW, my sense of solutions is quite different. Were the problem “alien invaders”, I wonder that pre-Moderns wouldn’t find some reason to again advocate the virtues of pre-Modern life an a solution.
I argued for a long while with a dear friend about AGW, and she gradually accepted, point by point, that AGW wasn’t happening, and in the end she said, “but don’t you think everything just needs to slow down??”
Modern life makes great demands of people—we leave our families and villages (the car) and perhaps never return, we are exposed to millions of strangers, we are expected to show loyalty to employers who will dismiss us cold-heartedly, we are made aware of the possibility of nuclear war, biological warfare, etc. We are expected to act as free individuals, taking personal responsibility for everything.
I’m not saying all environmentalists are pre-Modern, just that some of the solutions proposed seem to make sense only in the context of a pre-Modern mind and culture. Even the aesthetics of the architecture of “sustainable” buildings, has this wobbly curvy soft, cottage feel, covered in earth and grass, surrounded by open space. These completely ignore the city, which suggests a preference for simply returning to pre-industrial rural life.
Sorry if this is another long post, but it is not something I find easy to summarise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Kegan
http://www.spiraldynamics.net/
Roger: Thanks for correcting the link
Isnt the Precautionary Principle akin to insurance? When we take insurance we weigh the odds of a bad thing happening, like our house burning down, which will cost a great deal if it were to happen, and then pay a small recurring premium to the insurance company.
Then if our house does burn down the insurance company pays us so that we get a new house.
In the case of AGW however the agent is telling us the house WILL burn down unless we pay him. His yarn doesnt even seem plausible. But he wants a huge premium far greater than the cost of the house. Then he tell us the house will burn down anyway because we havent given him enough and if God forbid it does, he wont give us the money to build a new house and we wont have the money either as we would have given it all to him.
Now does that make sense?
“Stefan (15:28:53) :
[..]
The other evening a friend was saying that man is the worst for wrecking the planet. I asked what’s different to say, giraffes eating leaves off trees? My friend replied that nature keeps those in balance. So I asked, what will happen when humans go past the limit, won’t we also simply be put back into check by nature? — It was one of those moments where there is no reply, the conversation just ends abruptly.”
You have sabotaged his/her game. As in transactional analysis. A person in a conversation likes to talk about certain things in a certain way because it gives him/her satisfaction. This is very obvious with fearmongers. It makes them feel important.
This book is a must read: (Disclosure: no i don’t get paid for this)
Berne, Eric (1964). Games People Play – The Basic Hand Book of Transactional Analysis. New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-345-41003-3
What game do i play? Uh, maybe being a smartass? You decide… 🙂
So often it’s not so much about the logic behind the arguments. You can also see this in the behaviour of trolls. Trolling can go on and on and on and the troll changes his position all the time. It’s his game.
Miller,
Yes. That’s 95% of the experts:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html
And check this out:
http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/12/sorry-skeptics.html
I won’t present myself as an expert who can prove to you or anyone on this site, or any site that ACC is real.
And I’m willing to bet you aren’t an expert either. It’s up to you to educate yourself on the facts. Either understand the science, or leave it to the experts who may know just a bit more about this stuff than you or me.
However, you’re free to believe in whatever you want, and express your opinion. But stating an opinion about something does not necessarily make it true. You need facts. A lot more facts than I’ve seen from any denier.
It’s easy to deny something, but that’s not good enough. If you disagree with the consensus, you need to offer a viable alternative hypothesis to explain all the observations that have been made that support the other side. This is a sticking point for the deniers. Deniers’ alternate hypotheses break apart when independent data does not support their positions. Then they rant about a massive cover-up of their position.
What about all the independent data that cross-correlates with other data to support the facts about ACC? Here’s a list to get you started:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/What-happened-to-the-evidence-for-man-made-global-warming.html
If you need some nice urls to start your path to education, I can surely offer them to you, or anyone. But, it’s not my place to explain the facts to you.
You can start your search for the truth here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7074601.stm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/1206_041206_global_warming.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
http://climate.nasa.gov/
http://coaps.fsu.edu/climate_center/climatechange.shtml
http://www.ucsusa.org/ssi/climate-change/scientific-consensus-on.html
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12457&tid=282&cid=13366
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/1204climate_statement.shtml
http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/G8+5energy-climate09.pdf
http://royalsociety.org/Climate-Science-Statement/
http://www.logicalscience.com/consensus/consensusD1.htm
Or if you prefer videos, you can try these:
http://sites.google.com/site/dallastrees/potholer54-climate-change
http://sites.google.com/site/dallastrees/greenman3610-climate-denial-crock-videos
Here’s a good one to help you tell BS from facts:
Regardless what you think, ACC is real. The experts have spoken. You can argue and shout, but that won’t change the facts. Review the urls I’ve posted to know the truth.
A very moral approach to climate change!
Here’s a link to 38,000 links I found when I googled who owns rainwater:
http://www.google.com/search?q=who+owns+rainwater&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
“Skeptical Skeptic (18:05:09) :
[…]
Regardless what you think, ACC is real.”
With ACC, do you mean a warming?
Dear Skeptical Skeptic,
I don’t doubt there are more studies supporting global warming. That’s where the grant money is. Those studies are also unwittingly based on the “adjusted” data. If the adjusted data is wrong, all conclusions based on the adjusted data is wrong.
OK, I looked at some of those websites about who owns rain water. That is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard! If God drops the water on me, its mine. Try and take it. See how far you get.
As the author of a book titled, The Precautionary Principle: A Critical Appraisal of Environmental Risk Assessment (PP) which includes a chapter on applying the PP to global warming (early version of the chapter can be downloaded for free here), I was intrigued by Willis’s blog –- hi Willis, I enjoy your posts very much –- and have some quibbles. But my quibbles have no bearing on Willis’ conclusions which, IMHO, are solid (and very close to my recommendations, see, e.g., here, pp. 23-25).
My quibbles: First, the PP predates the 1992 Rio Declaration. Second, there is a precautionary principle that is explicitly included in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), but it is often ignored by environmentalists because it implicitly endorses cost-benefit analysis. Specifically, Article 3.3 of the UNFCCC states:
The version of the PP that most environmentalists prefer is the so-called Wingspread Declaration:
Note the absence of any language regarding costs, or any precaution that reducing one risk my increase another.
In my view, the only way to rationally operationalize the PP so that it actually reduces overall risks (rather than merely paying lip service to reducing risks) is to use risk-risk analysis, as discussed in the paper, From Precautionary Principle to Risk-Risk Analysis, Nature Biotechnology 20 (November 2002): 1075 -– of course, all within the broader framework of cost-benefit analysis (see book chapter draft here). And my attempt to do this leads to almost exactly the same conclusion as Willis (among other conclusions). However, I’m the first to admit, that those who most love the PP, probably also hate my approach to it, while those who hate the PP, don’t care much for it either. This is precisely the position I found myself twenty years ago when I was for adaptation but the mitigationists hated it, and those who were skeptical of the man-made contribution to GW (as I was and still am) had no use for it either.
C’est la vie.
Sorry, this is off track a bit (ok- a lot), but I can’t find a relevant thread and I am sure many of you will be interested if you haven’t seen Michael Mann’s extraordinary letter in the WSJ, which includes this passage:
“Society relies upon the integrity of the scientific literature to inform sound policy. It is thus a serious offense to compromise the peer-review system in such a way as to allow anyone—including proponents of climate change science—to promote unsubstantiated claims and distortions.”
Having read most of his contributions to the climategate e-mails (in the reference I posted earlier that was kindly corrected for me by Roger) I am, er, gobsmacked. The guy is in desperate need of some serious quality legal advice.
You can read the full letter here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703478704574612400823765102.html
WRT water property rights: “Gray water” can now (since July) be used by people in Colorado who don’t receive any city or municipal water supply, to increase soil moisture in gardens or to supply a home’s water needs.
http://www.water.state.co.us/pubs/pdf/RainWaterBills.pdf
For the rest of us, the old law is in effect. It’s often called the “first in time, first in right” priority system, and it says that the first person to allocate and use water is the “senior water right holder” within a particular stream system. Therefore, someone upstream who takes water from his roof is likened to a thief stealing from downstream water right holders.
Challenges to this are coming from hundreds of people who feel that they have a right to the water from their own roofs (I would be one of those), and from two conflicting studies. The first says that most of the run-off never reaches the city storm drains anyway because it’s just absorbed into the soil. The other study says precisely the opposite: that too much of Colorado’s run-off reaches the storm sewers, resulting in sewage back-ups and inundation of the water purification systems with herbicides, fertilizers and other materials flushed out of the soil by sudden downpours. In the first case, rain harvesters would “do no harm”, and in the second instance, they might actually do a lot of good by helping flood control.
Go figure.
The so-called “precautionary principle” has been misused and abused over the years; so Willis, your post is a breath of sanity on the subject. I used to represent clients with whom I would remonstrate about this subject all of the time (obviously, in a different context from the subject of climate). All social and political policy these days is getting away from the proper analysis of risk, in favor of the promotion of a specific type of ideology. The ideology of the technocrat, the bureaucrat: life is too complex to be run by the average person, the democrat, the representative government. So it becomes an exercise in the use of power to achieve the goals or ends of the “experts” as prescribed by the “experts.” A prescription for disaster if I’ve ever heard one. You and Bjorn Lomborg generally have the right idea. For myself, I am a “do nothing except further study the effects and the question” and I will stay that way because none of this stuff happened overnight, nor is it resolved overnight. I can, however, live with “no regrets” solutions as long as they are truly “no regrets.”
Skeptical Skeptic:
“You can start your search for the truth here:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7074601.stm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/12/1206_041206_global_warming.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/globalwarming.html
http://climate.nasa.gov/
http://coaps.fsu.edu/climate_center/climatechange.shtml
http://www.ucsusa.org/ssi/climate-change/scientific-consensus-on.html
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=12457&tid=282&cid=13366
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/1204climate_statement.shtml
http://www.nationalacademies.org/includes/G8+5energy-climate09.pdf
http://royalsociety.org/Climate-Science-Statement/
http://www.logicalscience.com/consensus/consensusD1.htm”
—…—…—
You consider these “unbiased and honest” sources of the “truth”?
BBC? New Scientist, National Geo, AAAS, WHOI, Royal Society, NASA? THEY are the ones pushing this exaggerated fear of 1/2 of one degree of warming. THEY are the ones propagandizing and exaggerating! Ignoring the benefits of AGW and (deliberately) lying about the (false) threats. Deliberating losing data, corrupting data, propagandizing their “extrapolations and unfounded (but well-funded) fears to get more money.
And each of those has been shown to be wrong. All have been receiving money, power, influence, political standing, international (political) applause and grants and tax money and corporate moeny to propagandize the AGW meme. Specifically, all have also been shown to be dead wrong when the actual data is
It takes only 1 man or woman to show that a false consensus is, well, still just a false consensus. It takes 52 to hide behind the politicians scheming to take 1.6 trillion from workers and put it in the hands of the corrupt UN governments.
So what does it show when 33,000 professionals say you are dead wrong in your faith in this (s)creed, and the politicians (who are making money from your mis-placed faith in false data and exaggerated extrapolations are proved wrong?