Category: Climate Change
The world is worried about supposed rises in temperature that are well below what most of us would be able to detect if they happened and would have negligible influence on other organisms as well. They also have an exaggerated opinion of how we could measure such small changes.
From the 7th of December through to the 18th, the much publicised United Nations Climate Change Conference will be held in Copenhagen, Denmark. The main aim of the conference is to reach an agreement on a framework to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. Attending the conference on behalf of New Zealand will be the Minister for Climate Change Nick Smith, his Associate Tim Groser, and a contingent of officials. In addition, as one of the concessions to the Maori Party for their support of the emissions trading scheme, taxpayers will also fund two iwi leaders and kaumatua to travel to the Copenhagen conference.
Of all the arguments for adopting a nationwide carbon emission reduction policy such as the Emissions Trading Scheme, one of the most peculiar runs something like this: New Zealand should adopt emission reduction legislation even if it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to the climate because other countries will punish us with trade barriers if we don’t.
For more than 80% of time, Earth has been an iceless, warm, wet, greenhouse planet. Past temperate changes have been far greater and far more rapid than anything measured in modern times. We humans have adapted to live on ice, mountains, in the tropics, in deserts and at sea level.
In his book The Vision of the Anointed, economist and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, Thomas Sowell, describes how the great catastrophes of history have typically resulted not only from ill-advised policies, but from the fact that public feedback cannot get through to decision-makers. He says, “Typically, there has been an additional and crucial ingredient – some method by which feedback from reality has been prevented, so that a dangerous course of action could be blindly continued to a fatal conclusion. Much of the continent of Europe was devastated in World War II because the totalitarian regime of the Nazis did not permit those who foresaw the self-destructive consequences of Hitler’s policies to alter, or even influence, those policies.”
I am writing this article in response to Muriel's question "why is electricity so expensive"? There is a simple answer to this question. "The electricity 'market'". But explaining how and why it drives up prices and will continue to do so, is rather more complicated. I will try to do just that.
“I can assure you that the government has investigated the evidence on the science of climate change from a number of different sources and I can appreciate that there are many different perspectives on the matter. However, the government is convinced that climate change is a serious and legitimate issue and that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides the most reliable information on climate change science. In its most recent assessment, the IPCC states that the evidence for climate change is unequivocal, that humankind’s emissions are very likely the cause of these changes and that, unless action is taken to reduce emissions, dangerous changes in the climate system will result.”
Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann, it was a statistical compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick, scientists had held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making the scale of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The dramatic revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick’s publication made it the poster child of the global warming movement. It was featured prominently in a 2001 report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as government websites and countless review reports.
The current Global Warming Debate is not about temperature or CO2 levels. It is an ideological clash between those who want to change us (rather than the climate) and those who believe in freedom, markets, human ingenuity, and technical progress. The advocates of global warming alarmism ask for an almost unprecedented expansion of government intrusion, of government intervention into our lives and of government control over us. We are pushed into accepting rules about how to live, what to do, how to behave, what to consume, what to eat, how to travel. It is unacceptable.
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