The climate has changed in the past, as can be seen from both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age in recent climate history.
It is perfectly reasonable to believe there will be continuing fluctuations in the climate.
The sensible approach in the face of a changing climate is to adapt our technologies and practices to suit rather than attempting to change the impossible.
Human production of ‘greenhouse gases’ has a minimal effect on the world’s climate.
The cost of an ETS is unsustainable in the long term.
The introduction of an ETS in Australia may attempt to make us look good to our export markets but it will have no effect whatsoever on the climate.
There is no scientific answer to this question of what Australia’s target should be.
For relatively Australia is a small emitter by world standards – only emitting some 1% of global greenhouse gases.
Anything we do as a nation will in itself have little impact on the climate – our impact will be symbolic, moral and political – but at what cost?
Follow The (Climate Change) Money by Stephen Moore
The first iron rule of American politics is: Follow the money. This explains, oh, about 80 percent of what goes on in Washington. Shortly after the latest Chicken Little** climate change report was published last month, I noted on CNN that one reason so many hundreds of scientists are persuaded that the sky is falling is that they are paid handsomely to do so.
**Chicken Little: According to Wikipedia, Henny Penny, more commonly known in the United States as Chicken Little and sometimes as Chicken Licken, is a European folk tale with a moral about a chicken who believes the world is coming to an end.**
I noted that “In America and around the globe governments have created a multi-billion dollar Climate Change Industrial Complex.” And then I added: “A lot of people are getting really, really rich off of the climate change industry.” According to a recent report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Federal funding for climate change research, technology, international assistance, and adaptation has increased from $2.4 billion in 1993 to $11.6 billion in 2014, with an additional $26.1 billion for climate change programs and activities provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009.”
This doesn’t mean that the planet isn’t warming. But the tidal wave of funding does reveal a powerful financial motive for scientists to conclude that the apocalypse is upon us. No one hires a fireman if there are no fires. No one hires a climate scientist (there are thousands of them now) if there is no catastrophic change in the weather. Why doesn’t anyone in the media ever mention this?
But when I lifted this hood, it incited more hate mail than from anything I’ve said on TV or written. Could it be that this rhetorical missile hit way too close to home? How dare I impugn the integrity of scientists and left-wing think-tanks by suggesting that their research findings are perverted by hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer handouts. The irony of this indignation is that any academic whose research dares question the “settled science” of the climate change complex is instantly accused of being a shill for the oil and gas industry or the Koch brothers.
Apparently, if you take money from the private sector to fund research, your work is inherently biased, but if you get multimillion-dollar grants from Uncle Sam, you are as pure as the freshly fallen snow.
How big is the Climate Change Industrial Complex today? Surprisingly, no one seems to be keeping track of all the channels of funding. A few years ago Forbes magazine went through the federal budget and estimated about $150 billion in spending on climate change and green energy subsidies during President Obama’s first term. That didn’t include the tax subsidies that provide a 30 percent tax credit for wind and solar power — so add to those numbers about $8 billion to $10 billion a year. Then add billions more in costs attributable to the 29 states with renewable energy mandates that require utilities to buy expensive “green” energy. Worldwide the numbers are gargantuan. Five years ago, a leftist group called the Climate Policy Initiative issued a study which found that “Global investment in climate change” reached $359 billion that year. Then to give you a sense of how money-hungry these planet-saviors are, the CPI moaned that this spending “falls far short of what’s needed” a number estimated at $5 trillion.
For $5 trillion we could feed everyone on the planet, end malaria, and provide clean water and reliable electricity to every remote village in Africa. And we would probably have enough money left over to find a cure for cancer and Alzheimers.
The entire Apollo project to put a man on the moon cost less than $200 billion. We are spending twice that much every year on climate change. This tsunami of government money distorts science in hidden ways that even the scientists who are corrupted often don’t appreciate. If you are a young eager-beaver researcher who decides to devote your life to the study of global warming, you’re probably not going to do your career any good or get famous by publishing research that the crisis isn’t happening. But if you’ve built bogus models that predict the crisis is getting worse by the day, then step right up and get a multimillion dollar grant. Now here’s the real scandal of the near trillion dollars that governments have stolen from taxpayers to fund climate change hysteria and research. By the industry’s own admission there has been almost no progress worldwide in actually combatting climate change. The latest reports by the U.S. government and the United Nations say the problem is getting worse not better and we have not delayed the apocalypse by a single day.
Has there ever been such a massive government expenditure that has had such miniscule returns on investment? After three decades of “research” the only “solution” is for the world to stop using fossil fuels, which is like saying that we should stop growing food.
Really? The greatest minds of the world entrusted with hundreds of billions of dollars can only come up with a solution that would entail the largest government power grab in world history, shutting down industrial production (just look at the catastrophe in Germany when they went all in for green energy), and throwing perhaps billions of human beings into poverty? If that’s the remedy, I will take my chances on a warming planet.
The Goal Is Power: The Global Warming Conspiracy by Charles Kadlec
In Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors, British journalist/blogger James Delingpole promises to show that the man-made global warming is a fraud, one that has already cost billions of dollars and is a clear and present danger to our liberty and democratic traditions — and, ironically, to the environment itself.
He largely accomplishes this task and does so without sounding hysterical or radical. This alone would recommend this book to all who care about the environment, the human condition, and the foundations of our way of life.
Delingpole was among the leading journalists who reported the Climategate scandal, in which he analyzed e-mails among leading climate scientists that had been hacked and posted on the web. What he discovered was a pattern of purposeful and coordinated efforts to:
Manipulate the data supporting the claims of a sudden and dangerous increase in the earth’s temperature;
Not disclose private doubts about whether the world was actually heating up;
Suppress evidence that contradicted the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming (AGW);
Disguise the facts around the Medieval Warm Period, when the earth was warmer that it is today;
Suppress opposition by squeezing dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.
All of this and more supports one of Delingpole’s more provocative claims, that AGW has become a formidable secular religion led by zealots and supported by true believers. What makes it sinister is that it circumvents the First Amendment prohibition against a state-sponsored religion. As a consequence, AGW is provided lavish support by government and taught as scientific fact in our schools. Like all state religions, its tenets are imposed on believers and non-believers alike.
Already, billions of dollars have been wasted, resources squandered, and the environment put at risk by the policies of the warming alarmists. Spain has been lauded for creating 50,000 green jobs. What goes unsaid is the cost of the subsidy, $756,000 per job, likely destroyed 110,000 jobs. And Spain now is shackled with high cost “green” electricity that hobbles its economy, burdensome debt and high unemployment.
In the aftermath of terrible floods in 1974 the government of Queensland, Australia promised to build dams and other flood control systems. Instead, persuaded by green activists that drought caused by global warming was now the real threat, the government diverted the money into a $13 billion water desalinisation plant program. When heavy rains returned earlier this year, the terrible flooding killed dozens of people and caused billions in property losses.
The American Bird Conservancy estimates 100,000 to 300,000 birds are killed by wind farms in the U.S. each year – roughly equal to the estimated 250,000 birds killed in 1989 by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Yet, environmentalists fail to speak out, instead averting their eyes to the slaughter as unsightly windmills destroy vistas. And they remain strangely silent on the deployment of solar farms that will cover acres of ecologically sensitive desserts.
Delingpole has provided documented insight into a powerful political-scientific complex. This complex is led and supported by “Watermelons,” those whose rhetoric is green, but whose tactics and political ambitions he traces back to the national socialists and communists of earlier eras. Their goal is to control the economy and impose their vision of human society through the coercive power of government. All who cherish liberty, treasure the environment and aspire to a better life should take note.
