"One should doubtless keep an open mind...though open at both ends, like the food pipe, and have a capacity for excretion as well as intake." -- Northrop Frye, 'The Great Code'
I don't know if Bill Gates celebrated it or not but one of his recent tweets highlighted the amazing human progress over the last 200 years, much of it due to the availability of cheap fossil fuel:
The number 97 has become an almost magical symbol among true believers for their righteous belief that man-made global
warming is a dangerous threat. Both clueless believers and those who ought to know better shamelessly peddle that number as if it were some absolute truth. Skeptics (aka "deniers"), on the other hand, try again and again to explain what is really going on.
In the lead-up to the Paris climate summit, massive activist pressure is
on all governments ... to fall in line with the
global warming agenda ... One of the most powerful rhetorical weapons being
deployed is the claim that 97 per cent of the world’s scientists agree
what the problem is and what we have to do about it. ... on what exactly are 97 per cent of experts supposed to
agree? In 2013 President Obama sent out a tweet claiming 97 per cent of
climate experts believe global warming is “real, man-made and
dangerous.” As it turns out the survey he was referring to didn’t ask
that question, so he was basically making it up. ... The Canadian government has the unenviable task of defending the
interest of the energy producers and consumers of a cold,
thinly-populated country, in the face of furious, deafening global
warming alarmism. Some of the worst of it is now emanating from the
highest places. Barack Obama’s website says “97 per cent of climate scientists agree that climate change is
real and man-made…Find the deniers near you — and call them out today.”
How nice.
True believers will no doubt be appalled by Prof McKitrick's heresy.
... Modern science seems less about science and more about working up
consensus, agitating for social agreement, shaping opinion and aligning
political decision-making, from climate to smog to chemicals. Science
becomes the backdrop to an exercise in marketing and propaganda.
... A sidelight to the science of climate change is the willingness of even
our most learned academics to fall into line behind the idea of climate
“consensus.”Margaret MacMillan, one of the world’s most celebrated historians, told a Toronto audience recently that a consensus will likely never form
around the origins of World War One. “The past is not settled,” she
said. “We should not be trying to find a single settled version of the past.
We should be arguing about it because these are important questions.”
About 15 minutes before saying that a war fought 100 years ago was
ultimately unknowable, Ms. MacMillan saw no need to argue or debate over
climate change issues. We have, she said, something like 90% agreement
among scientists. As a result, she was more than willing to accept that climate change
would bring a crisis 100 yearsfrom now. We can have no consensus on the
past, but the future is settled.
Ouch! Ms. MacMillan would do well to avoid embarrassing contradictions brought on by pontificating on subjects she clearly knows little about. And to improve her understanding of climate science the least she could do is take the time to read Ross McKitrick's excellent update.
... [the IPCC's AR5 report claims:] “In summary, the globally-averaged surface temperatures are well within the uncertainty range of all previous IPCC projections, and generally are in the middle of the scenario ranges.” Later, in Chapter 9, it states with “very high confidence” that models can correctly simulate global surface temperature trends.
... The IPCC must take everybody for fools. Its own graph shows that observed temperatures are not within the uncertainty range of projections; they have fallen below the bottom of the entire span. Nor do models simulate surface warming trends accurately; instead they grossly exaggerate them. (Nor do they match them on regional scales, where the fit is typically no better than random numbers.)
... since we are on the verge of seeing the emergence of data that could rock the foundations of mainstream climatology,this is obviously no time for entering into costly and permanent climate policy commitments based on failed model forecasts. [Someone call Stephen Harper.]
"Without providing any links to or citation of Climate Audit, they now concede:
20th century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions."
"... the authors made very strong claims about the implications of their findings regarding 20th-century warming. Yet at no point did they mention the fact that the 20th century portion of their proxy reconstruction is garbage..."
Ross McKitrick,
Professor of Economics,
University of Guelph,
Image via Wikipedia
In 2009 I was asked by a journalist for my thoughts on the importance of Earth Hour.
Here is my response.
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.
Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.
Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water.
Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases.
Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.
The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that, instead I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity.
Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness. By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called “the Earth,” all the while hypocritically retaining the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.
People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.
I don’t want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in “nature” meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.
Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply.
If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations.
No thanks.
I like visiting nature but I don’t want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.
Ross McKitrick Professor of Economics University of Guelph
Excellent presentations by very credible people - Ross McKitrick, Ian Clark, Jan Veizer and Tim Patterson. There was a goofy event during Ian Clark's (U of Ottawa) briefing on CO2 and the paleoclimate record in which he used several graphs which unfortunately were not being displayed. The chair, Senator Angus interrupted Prof Clark (at about the 27 min mark) to explain that the graphs were not being broadcast to TV and web audiences because they were not bilingual. Idiotic but, hey, this is Canada. Happily, this lead to a good discussion by Clark of greenhouse gases and the dishonesty exposed by the Climategate emails.
Professor Patterson hit one of my favourite contentions - that global cooling is a much greater threat than warming, especially to Canada. If we were properly looking out for our own interests we'd be promoting anything that might lead to warming not trying to suppress it.
Senator Paul Massicotte (Liberal) brought up the "concensus" issue. He asked why should he, a non-technical political decision maker, believe the skeptics when the vast majority of scientists including government scientists believe in AGW? Tim Patterson attempted an answer but Massicotte wasn't impressed.
Senator Banks (Liberal) believes that we should be following the precautionary principle. Gaaakk! He laid out four extreme but uncertain scenarios and asked: Where should we place our bet? McKitrick responded that Banks had set up an impossibly difficult decision-making problem and suggested that rather than betting on one of a set of bad options a carbon tax based on global temperature could be set up (McKitrick's T3 Tax).
Senator Richard Neufeld (Conservative) said he agreed with Massicotte. They hear from scientists on one side that it that it's so simple, AGW is happening [probably that's all that they've heard until this session] and from the other side not so or not necessarily so. He said he's not sold either way and asked how many scientists would be "on the same wave length" as the four presenters. "Are there a lot of them? Are they just quiet? Why are they quiet? Because the other side is very loud." [Good point! Thank you Senator!] The chair, Sen Angus, then spoke up to confirm that the committee had heard much, much more from AGW true-believers (not his words) than from skeptics. Good answer from Prof. Veiser starting with a bandwagon analogy and his experience with bandwagon thinking in communist Czekoslovakia. He moved on to the corruption in the UN IPCC process, including suppression of contrary views and intimidation tactics.
Senator Robert Peterson (Liberal) brought up the tipping point ("break point" or catastrophic AGW) scare. Clark said these "break points" are based on speculation about the predictability of how climate will behave. Climate is too complex to reliably predict. He referred to such talk as "alarmist" and "wild speculation" (giving as an example the prediction by the scientific advisor to the British government that "in 100 years the only habitable place on the planet will be Antartica").
More to follow (next post) re idiot Senator Grant Mitchell's disgraceful, insulting remarks (see video at 1hr 50 min mark).
"It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences." -- C. S. Lewis
