The High Cost of Climate Lies
By Alan Caruba (10/22/07)
An energy-rationing bill has been introduced to address "global warming." The "Climate Security Act" would impose caps on how much carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions can be allowed and would institute an elaborate program to "trade" allowances among the industries and business affected.
Americans better hope that some members of Congress will ask if there truly is a threat of global warming and why a similar program in Europe has proven to be a resounding failure.
If you really wanted to undermine the nation’s economy, you could not devise a better way. It is the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol on steroids.
Little noted during all the headlines concerning Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize was the fact that it was shared with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among skeptical scientists I know, the emails were flying. Several had served as part of the vast array of scientists whose opinions on the various IPCC draft reports were requested and then ignored.
A lot of these expert reviewers are among the 2,000 scientists that the IPCC and Al Gore are always citing as being part of the “consensus” on global warming. The problem for both is that many really, really, really disagree that any planet-threatening global warming is occurring.
One of them is Dr. Vincent Gray, a New Zealand-based climate scientist who has been a part of the reviewing process since the IPCC came into being. He is one of those scientists who will not and cannot be shut up despite the din of the IPCC propaganda.
Briefly, Dr. Gray has a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Cambridge University, England, and his long career has included stints in France, Canada, China, and New Zealand. He has published more than a hundred scientific papers on energy and materials, plus a dozen in climate science.
So, following the announcement of the Nobel, Dr. Gray wrote to Professor David Henderson who has called for a “review” of the IPCC and its procedures. This is a nice way of saying that the Panel is so widely viewed as just one more corrupt United Nations instrumentality, a lot of scientists think it should be tossed in a garbage can behind the UN building.
Permit me to share some of Dr. Gray’s thoughts with you.
Commenting on his initial belief that the IPCC would proceed on the basis of “scientific ethics” and that its conclusions would result from “facts, logic and established scientific and mathematical principles”, Dr. Gray’s experience revealed that, “Penetrating questions often ended without any answer. Comments on the IPCC drafts were rejected without explanation, and attempts to pursue the matter were frustrated indefinitely.”
“I have been forced to the conclusion that, for significant parts of the work of the IPCC, the data collection and scientific methods employed are unsound…normal scientific procedures are not only rejected by the IPCC, but that this practice is endemic, and was part of the organization from the very beginning.”
“I therefore consider that the IPCC is fundamentally corrupt.”
Dr. Gray concluded that the only reform “I could envisage, would be its abolition.” Okay, okay, I hear all the environmentalists saying, “but he’s just one crazy, old New Zealand climate scientist. Boo! Hiss!” Character assassination is just one form of the corruption that is endemic to the entire environmental movement.
Undaunted, Dr. Gray continued, “The two main ‘scientific’ claims of the IPCC are the claim that ‘the globe is warming’ and ‘increases in carbon dioxide emissions are responsible.’ Evidence for both of this claims is fatally flawed.”
Aw, gee, I’m not a scientist you’re saying. What do I know? Well, if you know enough to be reading this, you know enough to wrap your brain around Dr. Gray’s assertion that “No average temperature of any part of the earth’s surface, over any period, has ever been made.” If the earth’s “average temperature” cannot be determined, how can you know that it’s dramatically heating? How can you predict anything about an unknown?
As for the IPCC claims about CO2, Dr. Gray points out that “they have suppressed no less than 90,000 measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide made in the last 150 years. Some of these were made by Nobel Prize-winners and all were published in the best scientific journals.”
The IPCC has depended on computer climate models for its claims and there is now a volume of papers demonstrating how they have repeatedly been proven to be inaccurate. As Dr. Gray points out, if you cannot validate these models as actually capable of making predictions, “no self-respecting computer engineer would dare to make use of a model for prediction.” Anyway, “No computer climate model has ever been tested in this way, so none should be used to prediction.”
“The most elaborate of all their ‘evaluation’ techniques is far more dubious,” said Dr. Gray. “Since they have failed to show that any models are actually capable of prediction, they have decided to ‘evaluate’ them by asking the opinions of those who originate them, people with a financial interest in their success.” (Emphasis added.)
“Sooner or later all of us will come to realize,” Dr. Gray concluded, “that this organization, and the thinking behind it, is phony. Unfortunately severe economic damage is likely to be done by its influence before that happens.”
But that’s the point of the IPCC!
If you can require that ethanol be substituted or just added to gasoline, you drive up the cost of corn to where the cost of everything else—like food—dependent on it costs more. Moreover, requiring the addition of ethanol increases refinery costs that are, in turn, passed on to consumers.
If you mandate that wind and solar energy be substituted to provide electricity for that provided by coal (over 50% in the USA) and other sources, then you assure that these two totally inadequate energy producers will drive up the cost to consumers.
If every kind of industry contributes to CO2, then you can create an elaborate “cap-and-trade” scam to sell “credits” for the permission to continue in business. The consumers will pick up the costs involved.
On the chance that Dr. Gray is not some crazy, old New Zealander, maybe we should all be in the streets calling for the abolition of the IPCC? And, while we’re out there, let’s get rid of the United Nations too.
Editor’s Note: The full text of the letter is available at http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=155&Itemid=1
© Alan Caruba, October 2007 - http://alancaruba.com/
Visit his blog at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/
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