By Dr. Benny Peiser of The GWPF
Politicians, today, have predictably “walked away” from the issue of global warming. In retrospect we have to ask why this mass illusion, the transition to “a new ecological society” imploded and fell off the teleprompters, off the front pages, and out of the seemingly endless TV special reports on threatened polar bears and collapsing ice cliffs. How could this all disappear so fast? –Andrew McKillop, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 28 June 2012
To be sure, the serried ranks of corporate profiteers from the global warming surge are still in the “shock” phase, following the effective collapse of what was going to be so big. Their business models had to be changed, on paper and in press releases at least. Unwinding their trading and investment positions, re-jigging their portfolios will take time – so for a while longer Big Business still plays carbon correct. Rather surely, however, corporate spin doctors are now at work to reconstruct the past in order to cancel the global warming business future. –Andrew McKillop, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 28 June 2012
As the climate-change theory crumbles, expect its supporters to be more vocal in its defence, more insistent that the science is ironclad. Like the cultish followers of any faddish religion when it nears the end of its fashionableness, they will proclaim their views even more vociferously and denounce more forcefully all those who disagree. But increasingly, their warnings of impending doom and their character attacks on their opponents will be performed before empty houses, as in Rio. –Lorne Gunter, Toronto Sun, 27 June 2012
The anti-global-warming crusade against carbon-based energy is the latest assault on progress and improvement. Zubrin is correct to call the climate-change movement a “global antihuman cult.” Its assaults against dissent, embrace of messianic leaders, and apocalyptic scenarios reveal a debased religious sensibility rather than scientific rigor. —Bruce Thornton, City Journal, June/July 2012
The paper by Schneider et al 2012 has the clever idea of looking at the temperatures of lakes and reservoirs around the world. They provide data for 169 of the largest inland water bodies world- wide using three satellite-borne instruments. Together they provide daily to near-daily data from 1981 through to the present, allowing them to calculate 25-year trends of nighttime summertime/dry-season surface temperature. My preliminary calculations suggest that there is no statistically significant trend post-1997. Hence an alternate description of their findings is that the world’s large bodies of water show the well known standstill of the past decade or so seen in global temperatures. –David Whitehouse, The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 27 June 2012
Between 1985 and 2011, global electricity generation increased by about 450 terawatt-hours per year. That’s the equivalent of adding about one Brazil (which used 485 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2010) to the electricity sector every year. And the International Energy Agency expects global electricity use to continue growing by about one Brazil per year through 2035. –Robert Bryce, National Review, 27 June 2012
Walter H. Schneider says:
June 28, 2012 at 10:25 am
We can very easily do so simply by siphoning off money from the working population. This will reduce domestic demand compared to a rational policy, but as long as there are nations who buy German goods it works.
As I said: Expect interventions to compensate manufacturing businesses for the rising energy prices. It will all be paid for by the working population. Unfortunately that group currently includes me. And there is no political alternative – all the parties are united in this.
Example: Watch Salzgitter and Thyssen, the German steelmakers. Amazing collapse. Expect government meddling in a few weeks.
spen says:
June 28, 2012 at 7:44 am
In the UK, the Climate Change Act is costing us £18 billion per year ……………
============================================================================
This was the original government estimate. I don’t think they factored in the cost of back-up power stations for when the wind doesn’t blow or the extra infrastructure to connect up all those wind farms to the grid. They certainly won’t have included the effect on the balance of payments through businesses re-locating to other countries nor reduced GDP because of our loss of competitiveness. (They actually think ruinable energy creates jobs.) We are already importing electricity from France and I can only see this getting worse.
And what about the opportunity cost – just think what the country could do with an extra £18 billion per year. Could someone introduce our dear leader to the musings of Frederic Bastiat.
I’m afraid this post represents wishful thinking on the part of Benny Peiser. The scientific debate may have been won but the the CO2 global warming zombie will walk this earth for many more years before it is finally buried.
Stefan says:
June 28, 2012 at 8:38 am
Stefan, I must be a remnant of some earlier developmental stage or maybe I didn’t smoke enough of the funny stuff; but I can tell you that if a sensitive egalitarian world-centric devotee of the environment knocks at my door I will express myself in no uncertain terms. And please explain to me what exactly the difference between the EU and an authoritarian dictatorship is; did you live under the illusion that it is a democratic entity?
(HUMOR) It might be fun to draw a chart between increased levels of CO2 and public doubt. I’m sure someone could create a computer model to show a strong correlation. :-))
KevinM says:
June 28, 2012 at 6:32 am
1) What makes you think that it eventually will start warming again?
2) Even when it does, we can still point to the trend starting from the beginning of the no trend period and show that the increase per decade is trivial to non-existant.
“In retrospect we have to ask why this mass illusion, the transition to “a new ecological society” imploded and fell off the teleprompters, off the front pages, and out of the seemingly endless TV special reports on threatened polar bears and collapsing ice cliffs. How could this all disappear so fast? –Andrew McKillop”
I don’t see this ‘implosion and falling off the telepromters’ happening. I’ve watched a hand full of PBS Nova presentations lately and all but one were advocacy pieces for AGW and the need to ‘act now’ to stop it. Washington State is spending huge sums of taxpayer dollars on ocean acidification studies and organizations. The federal Environmental Protection Agency is ‘all in’ on regulating CO2 adn using it to destroy the entire coal energy production system in the US of A. When coal is outlawed, oil and natural gas will be the next villians. These energy sources differ only modestly in the CO2 created as a result of combustion. The history of the EPA has always been to keep total lowering the emissions standards, as they have done for Hg, S, NO, CO, and particulates. Those who fail to learn the lessons of history….
I don’t ‘see AGW disappearing’ at all! I see accelerating implementation of AGW related legislation and regulation. I see accelerating expenditures of tax payer dollars on pro-AGW studies and organizations. I see the US of A having its energy production systems crippled by this today. This article seems to spring from a dangerously false premise, from my perspective.
“Between 1985 and 2011, global electricity generation increased by about 450 terawatt-hours per year”
Since electric appliances give off heat, that explains the 0.01 F/decade increase!
I don’t even want to start on the natural gas/propane powered appliances- Mr. “G” might be reading.
In the UK there was a debate today, June 28, in parliament on fiscal measures to strengthen the green economic sector.
“Conservative MP Peter Lilley said: “My honourable friends may want to return to a medieval economy relying on unreliable, high-cost, water, sunshine, wood and wind, but I don’t.
“Economic Secretary to the Treasury Chloe Smith reiterated the government’s commitment to cut the deficit but insisted: “Our entire economy needs to be environmentally sustainable…
“Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey has published a draft energy bill which
includes a minimum price for carbon emissions and the setting of feed-in tariffs** for individual consumers who are able to generate their own renewable energy supplies.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_9732000/9732959.stm
**Feed-in tariffs allow “many people to invest in small-scale low-carbon electricity, in return for a guaranteed payment from an electricity supplier of their choice for the electricity they generate and use as well as a guaranteed payment for unused surplus electricity they export back to the grid.”
Dept. of Energy and Climate Change.
In other words a guaranteed subsidy for very expensive energy generation given to well off people who can afford to install solar panels, paid for on their electricity bills by the less well off, who can’t afford to install solar panels.
In Australia it has gone quiet, because the legislation to tax energy production that happens to have C in it has passed and will effect our bills come July 1. My local gas and electricity supplier this morning gave a breakdown of the 17.7% increase in price. No need to sell the Carbon story anymore, we just have to pay up. Bring on the next election.
The “Climate Change (aka Global Warming, etc)” movement is far from over. In the matter of opinion, mine is that the battle for drastic action on Climate Change has been LOST by those that question it. Until the graphs show arctic ice cap increasing to above 50 year averages, the global temperature falling to levels of the 1700s, the sea level declining, the glaciers growing, etc, the case for AGW will continue to gain strength. Picking away at the edges will NOT win the day. I wish it were otherwise but ……
“Keith Minto says:
June 28, 2012 at 6:24 pm”
I haven’t seen my energy bill yet but my energy provider posted me a $55 gift card. I can assume my next power bill will be at least $55 more expensive than the last one for the same consumption.
“How could this all disappear so fast?”
As much as I agree with the sentiments Bernie Pesier and his GWPF express on this, any answering assessment that does not put Climategate front and center is stroking itself. The GWPF, as a policy-centered NGO, wants to focus us on governmental and big business, but that is completely and utterly missing the point – claiming, as it were, that the tail was wagging the dog.
The one and only tipping point was when the news media picked up on Climategate emails, and when they and their readers saw the deviousness and – there is no other word for it – conspiracy, the air was let out of the balloon. The anti-carbon movement started on a slide at the end of 2009, not because Copenhagen failed, but because Copenhagen was trumped by “hide the decline.”
“Hide the decline.” The Hockey Team was never able to sanitize or spin their way out of that one, and it has all been downhill since then. The cover-up panels only served to make their insiders think they had stanched the bleeding, but it was a chimera without substance. Even as the ‘investigatory’ inquiries were reporting, the blush was already off the rose, and the intensity of interest flagged. Everywhere. The vacuous reported into a vacuum.
It was all over but the shouting. All but the shills slid to the far end of the bench.
All the governmental and big business bailing began not long after that.
The failures of green energy were foreordained and are the coupe de grace, more or less. It was their deuce in the hole masquerading as an Ace. When the money was on the line, it was as if their bluff had been called, and the ace was shown for the deuce it was. Green energy was NEVER going to work, and those on the inside knew it. But they couldn’t stop hoping that the government moneys would produce a miracle – maybe the opposition would fall for the bluff and fold. But even if we had, green energy was an empty promise. It had no substance to carry on by itself. Without subsidies, no investor would have looked at it twice.
The mountain of promise of green energy was shown to be the molehill it was. And is.
But it is only the tail end of the bubble of CAGW. Had it not been for CAGW there never would have been any green energy except in Bucky Fuller classes in obscure university departments – curiosities and no more.
But the wound that wouldn’t heal was Climategate and “hide the decline.” Climategate was the Joker in the deck – and they played it themselves.
A right good irony that was!
KevinM says: June 28, 2012 at 6:32 am
The trouble with this continuous use of “no trend since 1997″ line is that it seems likely we will sometime soon return to the next-broader trend of slow warming. The opponent will then say “Told you so”, and rightfully so.
A far bigger trouble is that the no-trend claim has no merit at all. The underlying temperature trend is consistent at ~+0.16C/decade when ENSO is backed out and has been for 30 years (look up Foster and Rahmstorf). What will the excuses be when the next decent El Nino establishes new global temperature highs?
Robin,
Yes I’m sorry I got ahead of myself there and was unclear. I fully agree that those trends are very damaging for education — the way emotion and intuition is being raised above reason.
The point I’m trying to bring in from what little on developmental psychology I’ve read, is that the people who are pushing that sort of “consciousness” and “sharing” agenda, even though they believe it to be the best thing since sliced bread, they are already part of a cultural stage that is passing (they are old enough already to be in positions of influence) and the next cultural stage, one that goes beyond their limitations, is starting to emerge. It is the next stage that I was trying to describe.
And one way that people sort of develop to the next stage, is that people are growing up in a world where we’ve already had 60 years of people saying, “don’t think… feeeel!!!” and in that time we’ve been seeing the results. Problems like political correctness and the Middle East and the economy and the environment — it is obvious to the newer generation, that these things have not been solved by the very people who most make noise about solving them.
People are also more global in the sense that they have actually lived in several countries with different cultures. There’s a big difference when you actually have to try to get along with people who hold a very different set of values. There is no more romanticising “diversity”. You actually see for yourself what tribal Pakistan is like, or what Chinese corruption is like, and so on.
And regarding spirituality and eastern religions, people are nowadays much more able to go visit the sources of these things, and again, see what they are really like. Most of this notion that Eastern spirituality is about dropping reason and just feeling, is actually a Western interpretation — Zen for instance was brought to the West by imperialistic Germans who wanted to mix it with Christianity, and Hindu stuff was imported by American hippies. The versions they created in the West are all reflecting their pre-existing Western beliefs. Westerners still try to imagine that Zen is Christian and you can find God via enlightenment, whereas in the places of origin, the various religions don’t even agree with each other about the finer technical points of what enlightenment means, they aren’t even monotheistic, and some schools have a much more rigorous analysis that starts with reason. Westerners believe they can just “feel” whereas monks in Tibet will spend hours arguing rational philosophical points as part of their study, with examinations, and levels of achievement, and certification. So again, as people in the West start to go into this stuff more, they’ll start to disentangle the mess that the previous well-meaning but rather naive generation created, where they were celebrating diversity, but understanding not a bit of it.
Climate Change is off the agenda now because the warmists believe that that battle has been won. The war continues though. They are now moving on to other issues of world governance such as control of economic growth, sustainability, population control etc.
We should just listen to what the enviro radicals are actually SAYING and DOING.
Maybe they know their predictions of catastrophic humanmade global warming are false, but it suits their purpose to use global warming hysteria as a smokescreen to mask their true intentions.
The radical warmists have done everything in their power to starve the world of fossil fuel energy that is required for continued global prosperity.
They have squandered a trillion dollars of scarce global resources on catastrophic humanmade global warming (CAGW) nonsense.
Investing these squandered resources in clean drinking water and sanitation alone would have saved the ~50 million kids who died from drinking contaminated water in the past 25+ years of CAGW hysteria.
Intelligent use of these scarce global resources could have easily saved as many people as were killed in the atrocities of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.
50 million people died in Hitler’s WW2. Josef Stalin killed another 50 million of his own people in internal purges. Leftist hero Mao gets the prize, killing as many as 80 million Chinese during his Great Leap Backward.
The radical environmental movement has done equally well, rivaling Mao for fatalities caused by the banning of DDT and the misallocation of scarce global resources on the fraud of catastrophic humanmade global warming.
Since many of these enviro radicals are latter-day Malthusians, Club of Rome types, etc., it is reasonable to assume that THIS WAS THEIR INTENTION.
Is this proposal too extreme? Well, NO it is not: In addition to what the radical enviros DO, let’s EXAMINE what they SAY (h/t to Wayne):
”My three goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with its full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
David Foreman,
co-founder of Earth First!
”A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”
Ted Turner,
Founder of CNN and major UN donor
”The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
Jeremy Rifkin,
Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
”Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
Paul Ehrlich,
Professor of Population Studies,
Author: “Population Bomb”, “Ecoscience”
”The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.”
Sir James Lovelock,
BBC Interview
”We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Stephen Schneider,
Stanford Professor of Climatology,
Lead author of many IPCC reports
”Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.”
Sir John Houghton,
First chairman of the IPCC
”It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
Paul Watson,
Co-founder of Greenpeace
”Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.”
David Brower,
First Executive Director of the Sierra Club
”We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation
”No matter if the science of global warming is all phony… climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
Christine Stewart,
former Canadian Minister of the Environment
”The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
Emeritus Professor Daniel Botkin
”Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong,
Founder of the UN Environmental Program
”A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-Development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.”
Paul Ehrlich,
Professor of Population Studies,
Author: “Population Bomb”, “Ecoscience”
”
If I were reincarnated I would wish to return to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.”
Prince Phillip, Duke of Edinburgh,
husband of Queen Elizabeth II,
Patron of the Patron of the World Wildlife Foundation
”The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization we have in the US. We have to stop these third World countries right where they are.”
Michael Oppenheimer
Environmental Defense Fund
”Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
Professor Maurice King
”Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class – involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing – are not sustainable.”
Maurice Strong,
Rio Earth Summit
”Complex technology of any sort is an assault on the human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
Amory Lovins,
Rocky Mountain Institute
”I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. it played an important part in balancing ecosystems.”
John Davis,
Editor of Earth First! Journal
**********************************
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) ran a supportive series on global warming in 2007. I sent a small article to them, giving a geologic historical perspective as well as that for the last millennium (What melted 55 million cubic kms of ice from the last ice age, MWP, colonization and collapse of Greenlandic settlements, LIA, freezing of New York Harbour, the Thames and the Bosphorous, etc). The fix was in and, of course, this was not published. I have been waiting for the “Globe” to head for the escape hatches. I expect them to be one of the last to let go, however.
I don’t think these people have stopped at all. As others point out, way too much is at stake. It’s a great opportunity to collect power at the expense of the individual, for one factor. And there are people who sincerely believe in this stuff, that humanity is going to fail if we don’t return to nature’s ways. Or better yet, to government controlled ways.
Allan MacRae says:
June 29, 2012 at 6:04 am
Allan,
Thanks for the ‘enviro-mental’ quotes!
Copied, saved, and being deployed as quotes to many of my emails.
MtK
Gary Pearse says: June 29, 2012 at 9:33 am
The Globe and Mail has certainly succeeded in living down to your expectations, Gary, with their recent promotion of the “findings” of “Sustainable Prosperity” – evidently a relatively new kid on the enviro-activist “charity” block.
Details at: Sustainable what?!
Allan MacRae says: June 29, 2012 at 6:04 am
We should just listen to what the enviro radicals are actually SAYING and DOING.
MORE EVIDENCE
U.N. moves decisively against the Green message to end Capitalism
The U.N. conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro decisively rejected calls by green activists to shrink the world economy.
Published: June 26, 2012 at 6:30 AM
By ALAN OXLEY, UPI Outside View Commentator
RIO DE JANEIRO, June 26 (UPI) — The U.N. conference on sustainable development that concluded in Rio de Janeiro last week has decisively rejected calls by green activists to shrink the world economy. This aligns with commitments made coming out of the Group of Eight summit in Maryland in May where leaders promoted food security and agriculture investment.
Green groups like World Wide Fund for Nature and Greenpeace declared the Rio meeting a failure.
On the contrary, it was a rare success for finding agreement among U.N. members on how to advance environmental standards in ways that do not reduce economic growth.
It produced a lengthy declaration which addressed almost every major environmental issue on the global landscape. All of these problems are difficult. For each, a deliberate approach to address it was laid out.
It is pointless to advance measures which reduce economic growth as Green groups do. This is why the Copenhagen climate conference failed.
Yet unemployment, debt and failing economies are simply an inconvenience to environmental activists.
As they see it the planet is on the precipice of disaster — too many people, too much consumption and too much production. For rational observers this is, of course, beyond absurd.
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/Analysis/Outside-View/2012/06/26/Outside-View-UN-moves-decisively-against-the-Green-message-to-end-Capitalism/UPI-30321340706600/#ixzz1zSA4IRZo
Mac the Knife says: June 30, 2012 at 10:53 am
Allan MacRae says: June 29, 2012 at 6:04 am
Allan,
Thanks for the ‘enviro-mental’ quotes!
Copied, saved, and being deployed as quotes to many of my emails.
MtK
You are welcome Mac – but the credit goes to Wayne, who first posted these quotations.
It is apparent that these radical enviros are heartless elitists, who view their fellow humans as no better than insects, to be culled for the greater good of Gaia.
For example, one of them suggested that eradicating smallpox was a mistake, because it kept human population growth in check by “balancing ecosystems”.
I am frankly appalled by their views:
First, these radicals have NO predictive record –they have a demonstrated INability to grasp science and engineering, the basis for rational decision-making.
Next, they are delusional – they clearly believe that they are the great thinkers of their age, despite their inability to accurately predict anything of significance.
Finally, they are clearly elitist – they are advocating the eradication of large numbers of faceless humans – but one can be assured that their own families and friends will survive their desired new Holocaust.
I lost a friend last week – an elderly lawyer who was the finest true gentleman I ever met. He lived a long and happy life and yet I miss him and I mourn him. That is the nature of human respect and affection – we cherish our family and our friends – we value each other, and we understand that this affection is the privilege of humanity and other advanced species.
In comparison, these radical enviros easily and recklessly advocate the eradication of masses of humanity, human sacrifice to their god Gaia. They are a dangerous anti-human cult, and it is time they were so recognized.
The first 2 links in the posting are dead. Nice. Even a search of the home page there can’t find them. WTF?
I was following along quite well on your comment till I hit that nonsense. What on Earth is it trying to say? “substitute out of sight”??????