Articles Tagged "Conrad Black"

A couple of years after the academic and statistical skullduggery of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other promoters of the global warming scare, and the shabby attempt at a comeback by the eco-centimillionaire, Nobel laureate and Oscar-winner, Al "Settled Science" Gore, it should be possible to develop a consensus for a less hair-raising (and harebrained) notion of climatic developments.

In the first decade of the new millennium, carbon emissions rose by 28.5 per cent without any discernible change in world temperature. The main ingredient in the carbon emission increase was a 47 per cent jump in coal consumption, the chief source for electricity generation in the largest carbon-footprint country of all, China. (This did not deter the Chinese from po-facedly demanding compensation from the advanced countries at the farcical Copenhagen Environment Conference two years ago, as it took the chair of the G-77 of aggrieved developing countries, demanding that the West pay massive Danegeld for the effrontery of their prior economic progress.)

The whole cap-and-trade, tax-and-limit movement has collapsed, just four years after the now thoroughly discredited IPCC announced that "most" of the world's average temperature increase in the last 60 years was "very likely due" to "anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions." The increase in that time is one centigrade degree, and the evidence of the last decade, which is the period when the connection to such emissions has been sought, debunks the notions that there is any increase and that there is any relationship to human-generated carbon emissions.

The incontestable need for increased energy production has overwhelmed the brief and delusional consensus behind the deranged boondoggle of cardigan-clad builders of windmills and solar panels. (Both business administration and psychiatry faculties of the future will want to know what possessed T. Boone Pickens to bet $1 billion on windmills.)

Till now, I have avoided more than very limited comment on the whole global-warming-carbon emissions controversy. But now that colossal spending and regulating programs impend on these issues, I must say that the Al Gore-David Suzuki conventional-wisdom hysteria is an insane scam.

The basic relevant facts are that carbon emissions are not the principal factor in global warming, and despite dire contrary forecasts and ever-increasing carbon-emissions in the world -- especially as the economies of China and India, representing 40% of the world's population, expand by 6% to 10% each year -- the world has not grown a millidegree warmer since the start of this millennium. And its mean temperature rose by only one centigrade degree in the 25 years before that. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide emissions does have a gentle warming effect if it is not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but cannot be measured directly against the volume of such emissions.

The chief source of apparently informed hysteria on this subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has estimated that the mean world temperature will increase by between 1.8 degrees C and 4 degrees C in this century, although a tenth of that warming has already failed to occur in the last decade. But even this prediction does not remotely justify all the cant and hype that the end of the world is nigh.