This morning I read a great article on the religion of global warming.  It was in the Wall Street Journal and therefore copyrighted so I am not going to produce it in entirety here.  I will point out some worthwhile paragraphs though.

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don’t oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit.

This week, the conclave of global warming’s cardinals are meeting in Durban, South Africa, for their 17th conference in as many years. The idea is to come up with a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which is set to expire next year, and to require rich countries to pony up $100 billion a year to help poor countries cope with the alleged effects of climate change. This is said to be essential because in 2017 global warming becomes "catastrophic and irreversible," according to a recent report by the International Energy Agency.

Yet a funny thing happened on the way to the climate apocalypse. Namely, the financial apocalypse.

The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won’t be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won’t make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they’ve spent it all on Greece.

Cap and trade is a dead letter in the U.S. Even Europe is having second thoughts about carbon-reduction targets that are decimating the continent’s heavy industries and cost an estimated $67 billion a year. "Green" technologies have all proved expensive, environmentally hazardous and wildly unpopular duds.

That’s where the Climategate emails come in. First released on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit two years ago and recently updated by a fresh batch, the "hide the decline" emails were an endless source of fun and lurid fascination for those of us who had never been convinced by the global-warming thesis in the first place.

But the real reason they mattered is that they introduced a note of caution into an enterprise whose motivating appeal resided in its increasingly frantic forecasts of catastrophe. Papers were withdrawn; source material re-examined. The Himalayan glaciers, it turned out, weren’t going to melt in 30 years. Nobody can say for sure how high the seas are likely to rise—if much at all. Greenland isn’t turning green. Florida isn’t going anywhere.

The reply global warming alarmists have made to these dislosures is that they did nothing to change the underlying science, and only improved it in particulars. So what to make of the U.N.’s latest supposedly authoritative report on extreme weather events, which is tinged with admissions of doubt and uncertainty? Oddly, the report has left climate activists stuttering with rage at what they call its "watered down" predictions. If nothing else, they understand that any belief system, particularly ones as young as global warming, cannot easily survive more than a few ounces of self-doubt.

Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn’t end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.

Now if only we could convince both sides of this issue to have a logical and scientific conversation about the issues.

Predicting the weather is really tough.  While you may rely on the prediction of weather for the following day, have you ever heard of a baseball game being cancelled on that prediction?  Would you cancel your family plans for next weekend based on the 7 day outlook?  Of course not. 

So why would an expert predict an event a decade away? I have no idea. The chances of being correct seem impossibly small and it will simply ruin your credibility. So why did the UNES (a body within the UN) predict that 50M people would be made by refugees by global warming?  I have no idea.

I like James Taranto’s treatment of the information:

Ministry of Truth
On Thursday we noted that the website of the U.N. Environment Programme featured a prediction "that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010" and featuring a map to show where they’d come from. It’s 2011 now, the refugees never materialized, and, as blogger Aaron Worthing notes, the map had disappeared by Friday morning–though Worthing reproduces it and Anthony Watts of the Daily Caller has a high-res copy.

Watts also links to a February 2011 Agence France-Presse story titled "50 Million ‘Environmental Refugees’ by 2020, Experts Say." The experts attribute the warning to the U.N. It’s a good bet that in 2021 the 50 million climate refugees will be by 2030.

You may recognize Anthony Watts name from the most visited blog on climate science in the world, www.wattsupwiththat.com.

Of course, Taranto is making another prediction in his last sentence but he is obviously doing it with some level of humor. Mr. Taranto is not much of a humorist – he should just read my favorite sites for humor (College Humor and Politically Incorrect Humor) instead.

“It is not a good policy to have these massive subsidies for (U.S.) first generation ethanol,” said Gore, speaking at a green energy business conference in Athens sponsored by Marfin Popular Bank.

“First generation ethanol I think was a mistake. The energy conversion ratios are at best very small.

“It’s hard once such a program is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going.”

He explained his own support for the original program on his presidential ambitions.

“One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president.”

Mr. Gore is “implying” that he only supported corn ethanol for political purposes and his own personal gain. I guess that no one should be shocked that he was lying then. He was a politician and we all know when politicians are lying (Hint: when their lips are moving).

It appears that Mr. Gore never stopped being a politician or at least never stopped lying. He supposedly stopped running for office and dedicated his efforts to saving the planet from an overdose of carbon dioxide. He continued to encourage the swapping of food for ethanol as late as his award winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth.  Check out this clip of the credits and go to about 2:25 – you will see that he is encouraging farmers to grow ethanol and not food.

That said, I think we can all get behind this GREEN claim. I picked this up over at Politically Incorrect Humor.  Jump over there to see more.

I found this on Portfolio.com.

President Barack Obama today bet $8.3 billion on nuclear energy by offering loan guarantees for two nuclear reactors in Georgia.

The units, which will be constructed by Georgia Power at its existing Plant Vogtle nuclear power facility, will be the first nuclear energy project to break ground in 30 years.

More will follow, if the president has his way. He proposes tripling the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee authority for new nuclear reactors next year to $54.5 billion, enough to build seven to 10 new nukes.

Nuclear energy makes sense to Obama because it is a nearly carbon-free source of electricity.

“To meet our growing energy needs and prevent the worst consequences of climate change, we’ll need to increase our supply of nuclear power,” the president said today, during remarks at a International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union hall in Lanham, Maryland.

“This one plant, for example, will cut carbon pollution by 16 million tons each year when compared to a similar coal plant,” he said. “That’s like taking 3.5 million cars off the road.”

The new nukes at Plant Vogtle also will create jobs—about 3,500 during construction and 800 permanent jobs when the units are up and running.

Encouraging utilities to build new nuclear power plants also will help the U.S. catch up with the rest of the world in development of advanced nuclear technologies, according to the president.

“There are 56 nuclear reactors under construction around the world: 21 in China alone; six in South Korea; five in India,” Obama said. “And the commitment of these countries is not just generating the jobs in those plants; it’s generating demand for expertise and new technologies.

“Whether it’s nuclear energy, or solar, or wind energy, if we fail to invest in the technologies of tomorrow, then we’re going to be importing those technologies instead of exporting them,” he said.

Secretary of Energy Steven Chu made a similar point: “We’ve been sitting on the sidelines in the nuclear technology race for far too long.”

The Department of Energy has been authorized to grant loan guarantees for nuclear power projects since 2005. Now that it has finally done so, more projects could get off the ground.

“This is a great start,” said David Ratcliffe, chairman and CEO of Southern Co., the parent company of Georgia Power. “There will be others that follow.”

Marvin Fertel, president and CEO of the Nuclear Energy Institute, said the loan guarantees will make it easier for electric utilities to access capital markets for new nuclear reactors. They also “send a strong signal to companies throughout the nuclear supply chain to expand their manufacturing capacity for growing domestic, as well as overseas, markets,” he said.

The National Association of Manufacturers likes nuclear power “because it is a reliable, low-cost, clean energy that supports a sustainable growth agenda and helps manufacturers compete globally,” said NAM president John Engler.

Not everyone, however, speaks of nuclear power in such glowing terms.

Conservative groups like the National Taxpayers Union contend the government could lose billions of dollars if Georgia Power or other future recipients of these loan guarantees default on their loans. If nuclear power makes sense economically, it shouldn’t need government subsidies, they contend.

Many environmental groups, meanwhile, remain opposed to nuclear power despite its low carbon emissions. They still don’t think it’s safe.

Obama, meanwhile, cautioned nuclear power advocates that loan guarantees by themselves won’t be enough “to achieve a big boost in nuclear capacity.” That will depend on the same thing that major gains in solar and wind power depend on: “a system of incentives to make clean energy profitable,” Obama said.

“As long as producing carbon pollution carries no cost, traditional plants that use fossil fuels will be more cost-effective than plants that use nuclear fuel,” he said.

In other words, we won’t see a nuclear renaissance unless Congress makes coal-produced electricity really expensive.

Nye also said that he felt from his experience that global warming denial could be attributed to generational factors, like his personal observations that older people have a much harder time grasping how billions of people could affect the thin atmosphere. He felt that younger generations are more accepting of this possibility.

Probably the weakest argument that Nye made was that the IPCC (and the non-mentioned Al Gore) received a Nobel Peace Prize from their scientific ‘discovery.’ This is almost certainly not true – the IPCC did not claim to make any discoveries and, in fact, were only charged with understanding the currently accepted science. These same winners include those involved in the CRU ClimateGate scandal, the shrinking glaciers of the Himalayas, and the Netherlands being below sea level. A similar body of Nobel prize awarders also awarded a prize to President Barack Husein Obama for making the world a safer place.

You can watch the short version of the interview here courtesy of YouTube.

This report is from Breitbart, you can read the full article there.

The Netherlands has asked the UN climate change panel to explain an inaccurate claim in a landmark 2007 report that more than half the country was below sea level, the Dutch government said Friday.

According to the Dutch authorities, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will be asked to account for its figures, environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart told AFP.

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IPCC experts calculated that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level by adding the area below sea level — 26 percent — to the area threatened by river flooding — 29 percent — Vallaart said.

“They should have been clearer,” Vallaart said, adding that the Dutch office for environmental planning, an IPCC partner, had exact figures.

Correcting the error had been “on the agenda several times” but had never actually happened, Vallaart said.

The spokesman said he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed and said it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC’s numbers.

The Dutch environment ministry will order a review of the report to see if it contains any more errors, Vallaart said.

Now that the IPCC has admitted one problem, it is obvious that everyone is going to go through every claim with a fine-tooth comb. For the sake of the IPCC, I hope that there aren’t more problems discovered. If there are, then the entire global warming conversation will take a significant move towards skepticism.  It is interesting that this is almost precisely the problem that Michael Crichton described in his novel on global warming “A State of Fear” and why he spoke out about the issue of bad scientific discover.

The United Nations climate change panel based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain peaks on a student essay and an article in a mountaineering magazine, a British newspaper reported.

In a recent report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa were caused by global warming.

The report referred to two papers as the source of the information, but the Sunday Telegraph says one of the sources quoted was actually an article published in a magazine for mountaineers.

The article was based on anecdotal evidence about the changes the authors were witnessing during climbs.

The newspaper says the other source was a dissertation written by a geography student who was studying for a master’s degree at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

The dissertation reportedly quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.

The claims risk causing fresh embarrassment for the IPCC, which had to apologise earlier this month over inaccurate forecasts about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

The IPCC claimed in the 938-page Fourth Assessment Report that the glaciers in the Himalayas could vanish in 30 years.

Though the report spurred politicians around the world to vow action against climate change, it emerged the claim was based on a conversation between a journalist and a single Indian scientist a decade ago.

The IPCC has acknowledged the grim prediction on the fate of the glaciers had been “poorly substantiated” and was a lapse in standards.

From Times Online:

The Indian head of the UN climate change panel defended his position yesterday even as further errors were identified in the panel’s assessment of Himalayan glaciers.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri dismissed calls for him to resign over the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change’s retraction of a prediction that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

But he admitted that there may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and said that he was considering whether to take action against those responsible.

“I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them,” he told The Times in an interview. “It was a collective failure by a number of people,” he said. “I need to consider what action to take, but that will take several weeks. It’s best to think with a cool head, rather than shoot from the hip.”

The IPCC’s 2007 report, which won it the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”.

But it emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999.

The IPCC admitted on Thursday that the prediction was “poorly substantiated” in the latest of a series of blows to the panel’s credibility.

Dr Pachauri said that the IPCC’s report was the responsibility of the panel’s Co-Chairs at the time, both of whom have since moved on.

They were Dr Martin Parry, a British scientist now at Imperial College London, and Dr Osvaldo Canziani , an Argentine meteorologist. Neither was immediately available for comment.

“I don’t want to blame them, but typically the working group reports are managed by the Co-Chairs,” Dr Pachauri said. “Of course the Chair is there to facilitate things, but we have substantial amounts of delegation.”

He declined to blame the 25 authors and editors of the erroneous part of the report , who included a Filipino, a Mongolian, a Malaysian, an Indonesian, an Iranian, an Australian and two Vietnamese.

The “co-ordinating lead authors” were Rex Victor Cruz of the Philippines, Hideo Harasawa of Japan, Murari Lal of India and Wu Shaohong of China.

But Syed Hasnain, the Indian glaciologist erroneously quoted as making the 2035 prediction, said that responsibility had to lie with them. “It is the lead authors — blame goes to them,” he told The Times. “There are many mistakes in it. It is a very poorly made report.”

He and other leading glaciologists pointed out at least five glaring errors in the relevant section.

It says the total area of Himalyan glaciers “will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035”. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.

A table below says that between 1845 and 1965, the Pindari Glacier shrank by 2,840m — a rate of 135.2m a year. The actual rate is only 23.5m a year.

The section says Himalayan glaciers are “receding faster than in any other part of the world” when many glaciologists say they are melting at about the same rate.

An entire paragraph is also attributed to the World Wildlife Fund, when only one sentence came from it, and the IPCC is not supposed to use such advocacy groups as sources.

Professor Hasnain, who was not involved in drafting the IPCC report, said that he noticed some of the mistakes when he first read the relevant section in 2008.

That was also the year he joined The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is headed by Dr Pachauri.

He said he realised that the 2035 prediction was based on an interview he gave to the New Scientist magazine in 1999, although he blamed the journalist for assigning the actual date.

He said that he did not tell Dr Pachauri because he was not working for the IPCC and was busy with his own programmes at the time.

“I was keeping quiet as I was working here,” he said. “My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

Dr Pachauri also said he did not learn about the mistakes until they were reported in the media about 10 days ago, at which time he contacted other IPCC members. He denied keeping quiet about the errors to avoid disrupting the UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen, or discouraging funding for TERI’s own glacier programme.

But he too admitted that it was “really odd” that none of the world’s leading glaciologists had pointed out the mistakes to him earlier. “Frankly, it was a stupid error,” he said. “But no one brought it to my attention.”

Mr. Bernhard goes into great detail on the subject.  He discusses natural gas, wind power, and nuclear.  Please click through and read the entire article but my version will only focus on the first part. In this sampling he discusses Sen. Diane Feinstein and her efforts to block solar energy from the desert.

Forget about developing massive solar projects in one of the sunniest places on earth.

Senator Dianne Feinstein has put the kibosh on such development on a million acres of the Mojave Desert, freezing numerous planned projects in their tracks and making it tougher for her home state to meet its goals of getting more of its electricity from renewable power.

Now why would a good liberal—a likely supporter of legislation to cut greenhouse gases—want to do a thing like that? Of course, it’s not like that’s anything new; the now-canonized liberal lion of the Senate, Edward Kennedy, helped block the development of a wind farm off his beloved Cape Cod for years. So liberals are every bit as NIMBY inclined as anyone else it seems, even when it comes to saving the earth.

But to be fair, Feinstein’s opposition to solar plants in the desert isn’t just knee-jerk opposition to unsightly industrial-scale development. It comes down to a promise made when the federal government got its hands on that land a decade ago. The feds said they would preserve the desert.

And a bunch of mirrors disturbing the vista and disrupting the delicate desert ecosystem doesn’t exactly amount to preservation.

So California companies will have to look elsewhere for their utility-scale solar plants.

But the case of the California solar plants brings up an interesting question as the United States and other countries move to lower their carbon emissions in an attempt to mitigate the worst affects of global warming caused by greenhouse gas. Is there really such a thing as clean energy, at least when it comes to energy produced on the massive scale needed to make a dent in use by a modern economy like that of the United States?

Feinstein is right, for instance, that solar farms and solar thermal plants capable of generating the gigawatts of power California needs to replace the power it gets now from fossil fuel could damage or destroy some of the most scenic and ecologically delicate land in the West. And that goes not just for the Mojave, but for solar plants planned for the deserts throughout the Southwest.

You’re talking giant construction projects that will alter the landscape forever when you talk about solar plants capable of producing big wattage numbers.

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Now remember, we have a president who pledged to cut emissions when he campaigned for office, and who has since brokered an incomplete climate deal on the international stage in Copenhagen. We have a House of Representatives that has passed legislation capping carbon emissions and a Senate considering similar caps. Our Environmental Protection Agency has determined that it can issue regulations limiting greenhouse-gas emissions.

And all of that may be a good and necessary thing, and it may help lead the world away from the precipice of disastrous climate change. But let’s not pretend the energy we get in any large amounts is “clean.”

About the best we can hope for is “cleaner.”

Lord Lawson was U.K. chancellor of the exchequer in the Thatcher government from 1983 to 1989. He is the author of “An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming” (Overlook Duckworth, paperback 2009), and is chairman of the recently formed Global Warming Policy Foundation (www.thegwpf.org).

The world’s political leaders, not least President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Gordon Brown, are in a state of severe, almost clinical, denial. While acknowledging that the outcome of the United Nations climate-change conference in Copenhagen fell short of their demand for a legally binding, enforceable and verifiable global agreement on emissions reductions by developed and developing countries alike, they insist that what has been achieved is a breakthrough and a decisive step forward.

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Far from achieving a major step forward, Copenhagen—predictably—achieved precisely nothing. The nearest thing to a commitment was the promise by the developed world to pay the developing world $30 billion of “climate aid” over the next three years, rising to $100 billion a year from 2020. Not only is that (perhaps fortunately) not legally binding, but there is no agreement whatsoever about which countries it will go to, in which amounts, and on what conditions.

The reasons for the complete and utter failure of Copenhagen are both fundamental and irresolvable. The first is that the economic cost of decarbonizing the world’s economies is massive, and of at least the same order of magnitude as any benefits it may conceivably bring in terms of a cooler world in the next century.

The reason we use carbon-based energy is not the political power of the oil lobby or the coal industry. It is because it is far and away the cheapest source of energy at the present time and is likely to remain so, not forever, but for the foreseeable future.

Switching to much more expensive energy may be acceptable to us in the developed world (although I see no present evidence of this). But in the developing world, including the rapidly developing nations such as China and India, there are still tens if not hundreds of millions of people suffering from acute poverty, and from the consequences of such poverty, in the shape of malnutrition, preventable disease and premature death.

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Moreover, the argument that they should make this economic and human sacrifice to benefit future generations 100 years and more hence is all the less compelling, given that these future generations will, despite any problems caused by warming, be many times better off than the people of the developing world are today.

Or, at least, that is the assumption on which the climate scientists’ warming projections are based. It is projected economic growth that determines projected carbon emissions, and projected carbon emissions that (according to the somewhat conjectural computer models on which they rely) determine projected warming (according to the same models).

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Moreover, any assessment of the impact of any future warming that may occur is inevitably highly conjectural, depending as it does not only on the uncertainties of climate science but also on the uncertainties of future technological development. So what we are talking about is risk.
OpinionJournal Related Stories:

Not that the risk is all one way. The risk of a 1930s-style outbreak of protectionism—if the developed world were to abjure cheap energy and faced enhanced competition from China and other rapidly industrializing countries that declined to do so—is probably greater than any risk from warming.

But even without that, there is not even a theoretical (let alone a practical) basis for a global agreement on burden-sharing, since, so far as the risk of global warming is concerned (and probably in other areas too) risk aversion is not uniform throughout the world. Not only do different cultures embody very different degrees of risk aversion, but in general the richer countries will tend to be more risk-averse than the poorer countries, if only because we have more to lose.

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And the outlines of a credible plan B are clear. First and foremost, we must do what mankind has always done, and adapt to whatever changes in temperature may in the future arise.

This enables us to pocket the benefits of any warming (and there are many) while reducing the costs. None of the projected costs are new phenomena, but the possible exacerbation of problems our climate already throws at us. Addressing these problems directly is many times more cost-effective than anything discussed at Copenhagen. And adaptation does not require a global agreement, although we may well need to help the very poorest countries (not China) to adapt.

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Despite the overwhelming evidence of the Copenhagen debacle, it is not going to be easy to get our leaders to move to plan B. There is no doubt that calling a halt to the high-profile climate-change traveling circus risks causing a severe conference-deprivation trauma among the participants. If there has to be a small public investment in counseling, it would be money well spent.

Much recent attention has been paid to the email about the “trick” and the effort to “hide the decline”. Climate scientists have complained that this email has been taken “out of context”. In this case, I’m not sure that it’s in their interests that this email be placed in context because the context leads right back to a meeting of IPCC authors in Tanzania, raising serious questions about the role of IPCC itself in “hiding the decline” in the Briffa reconstruction.

Relevant Climategate correspondence in the period (September-October 1999) leading up to the trick email is incomplete, but, in context, is highly revealing. There was a meeting of IPCC lead authors between Sept 1-3, 1999 to consider the “zero-order draft” of the Third Assessment Report. The emails provide clear evidence that IPCC had already decided to include a proxy diagram reconstructing temperature for the past 1000 years and that a version of the proxy diagram was presented at the Tanzania meeting showing the late twentieth century decline. I now have a copy of the proxy diagram presented at this meeting (see below).

The emails show that the late 20th century decline in the Briffa reconstruction was perceived by IPCC as “diluting the message”, that “everyone in the room at IPCC” thought that the Briffa decline was a “problem” and a “potential distraction/detraction”, that this was then the “most important issue” in chapter 2 of the IPCC report and that there was “pressure” on Briffa and other authors to show a “nice tidy story” of “unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more”. [Update Dec 11 - see note at bottom on the chronology. Comments from readers have clarified that the issue at the Arusha meeting was that the Briffa reconstruction "diluted the message" more through its overall inconsistency as opposed to the decline, which was still relatively attenuated in the Arusha version. After the Arusha meeting, Briffa hastily re-calculated his reconstruction sending a new version to Mann on Oct 5, 1999 and it was this hastily re-done version that introduced the very severe decline that was hidden in the First Order Draft and Jones WMO Report]

The chronology in today’s posts show that the version of the Briffa reconstruction shown in the subsequent proxy diagram in the IPCC “First Order Draft” (October 27, 1999), presumably prepared under the direction of IPCC section author Mann, deleted the inconvenient portion (post-1960) of the Briffa reconstruction, together with other modifications that had the effect of not “diluting the message”.

I especially like the realism in his comments about the exporting of carbon usage to China (or other less developed countries) and then blaming those countries for their dramatic increase. This is an issue that is often overlooked in the discussion of curtailing carbon output in any individual country.

Lord Turnbull: My Lords, on first reading the Committee on Climate Change’s latest progress report, I found it an impressive document. It was broad in

8 Dec 2009 : Column 1051

scope and very detailed. But the more I dug into it the more troubled I became. Below the surface there are serious questions about the foundations on which it has been constructed. There are questions in four areas-the framework created by the Climate Change Act 2008, the policy responses at EU and UK level, the estimate of costs and finally the scientific basis on which the whole scheme of things rests. I will consider each in turn.

Unlike many of those involved in the climate change field, I have no pecuniary interest to declare, but I am a founder trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which seeks to bring rationality, objectivity and, above all, tolerance to the debate.

I have long been in the camp of what might be called the semi-sceptics. I have taken the science on trust, while becoming increasingly critical of the policy responses being made to achieve a given CO2 or global warming constraint. First, let us look at the Climate Change Act, which has been highly praised, even today, as the most comprehensive and ambitious framework anywhere in the world-a real pioneering first for the UK. However, it has serious flaws. It starts by imposing a completely unworkable duty on the Secretary of State to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, even though many of the actions required lie outside his control. It would have been better, as the noble Lord, Lord Crickhowell, and I argued, for the duty to be connected to what the Secretary of State can control, such as his own actions and policies, and not the outcome, which he cannot.

In the Act’s passage through Parliament, the target was raised from 60 per cent to 80 per cent, with little discussion of its costs or feasibility. It is a simple arithmetic calculation to show that if the UK economy continues to grow at its historic trend rate, we will need, only 40 years from now, to produce each £1,000 of GDP with only 8 per cent of the carbon we use today. That is a cut of 90 per cent. Many observers think that this is implausible. A recent report by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers reported that the rate of improvement in carbon intensity/productivity would need to quadruple from the 1.3 per cent achieved in the five years up to the recession to around 5.5 per cent. It would need to be even higher at the end of the period to make up for what the noble Lord, Lord May, calls falling behind the run rate.

Professor Dieter Helm has pointed out that the measurement system used in the Kyoto framework and in the UK’s carbon accounts is a misleading guide to what is really being achieved. The carbon accounts use the territorial method-that is, the emissions from UK territory. In this way, the UK is able to claim that CO2 emissions have been reduced, but that is a misleading way of measuring a nation’s carbon footprint and its impact on the world. It should include the carbon in its imports. If this was done it would show that we are going backwards, since we would be forced to take responsibility for the manufacturing that we have outsourced to such countries as China but are still consuming. The current method is, of course, politically very convenient as it allows us to label China as the world’s largest emitter. The embedded carbon calculation is, I accept, far more complicated, but it is far more honest.

8 Dec 2009 : Column 1052

Another flaw in the framework is that the targets are unconditional. It is a legal duty, irrespective of what other countries achieve. Some, including me, argue that there should be two targets: one of which is a commitment, and a higher one which we will argue for internationally but only undertake as part of an agreement. Ironically, this is precisely the approach that the EU is taking with its 20 per cent reduction target by 2020, which would be raised to 30 per cent as part of an international agreement. The danger is that by going it alone we could face a double whammy, paying for decarbonising our own economy, yet still having to pay for the costs of raising our sea defences if others do not follow suit.

Secondly, let us consider the specific policies that have been adopted. Current EU policy follows two inconsistent paths. On the one hand, the ETS seeks to establish a common price for CO2, against which various competing technologies can be measured. The market share of each is determined by the relative costs. This is attractive to economists, since it allows the cost per tonne of CO2 abated to be equalised at the margin, thereby ensuring that the cost of achieving any CO2 target is minimised. The problem is that, despite its theoretical attractions, the ETS is failing. It provides no clear signal on the price of carbon on which investors can base their decisions. The committee, in this report, estimates that the ETS CO2 price in 2020 will be around €22 per tonne. The committee has rightly identified the central contradiction in its own report: the carbon price will be too low and too uncertain to stimulate the low-carbon investments needed to validate the committee’s projections.

At the same time, the EU is following a different approach under its 20:20:20 plan-to achieve a 20 per cent reduction in CO2 by 2020, with 20 per cent of energy coming from renewables. In this way, it predetermines a market share for a technology-renewables-rather than letting the merit order decide. The danger is that in pressing to achieve this target, which implies that over 30 per cent of electricity generation will come from renewables, some renewables capacity will be created which will be more expensive than other responses.

There is also a lack of clarity about the true cost of wind power, once we factor in the cost of retaining a large amount of underutilised conventional capacity, and the extension of the grid. The noble Lord, Lord Reay, has said more than enough on that so I do not need to follow that line of argument.

There is illogicality in the treatment of nuclear energy in the climate change levy. It is ridiculous that nuclear power, as a low-carbon source, is still in the taxable box. For 50 years, a major experiment has been conducted just 20 miles off our coast. France has generated three-quarters of its electricity from nuclear power. The French believe that it has been a huge success, delivering electricity which is secure, cheap and stable in price. France’s carbon intensity is 0.3 of a tonne per $1,000 of GDP, compared to 0.42 in the UK, 0.51 in Germany-so much for it being a market leader-and 0.63 in the US. However, the French option has barely been considered in this country.

As part of the EU plan, 10 per cent of road fuel is mandated to come from biofuels, but by the time this

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was enacted the credibility of first-generation biofuels had collapsed. Finally, our policy framework lacks balance. It is almost exclusively focused on mitigation through CO2 reduction, The Institution of Mechanical Engineers has argued for what it calls a MAG approach, with effort being committed not just to mitigation but to adaptation and geo-engineering.

Thirdly, there is the issue of cost. All we had to go on at the time when the target was set more ambitiously was the estimate by the noble Lord, Lord Stern, of 1 per cent of GDP. Many people were sceptical at the time and probably even more are now, including, it seems, the noble Lord, Lord Stern, himself. It was reported in the press last week that he now thinks that it might be 2 per cent, but could rise to 5 per cent. I hope he will clarify this when he speaks to us shortly.

In the document that we have before us, the committee says that it previously estimated that costs in 2020 would be about 1 per cent of GDP. That is consistent with its view that it might get to 2 per cent by 2050. In the new report it simply reaffirms the 1 per cent figure in just one paragraph in 250 pages. That is it. I have to say to the noble Lords, Lord Krebs and Lord May, that I do not think that that is adequate. It is difficult to relate these figures to what we are observing on the ground about the difficulties and costs of bringing on stream different technologies such as offshore wind and CCS.

One of the problems bedevilling the debate is the lack of transparency over the huge cross-subsidies that are being created by the renewables obligation and the regime for feed-in tariffs. There is no assurance that their extent is commensurate with the benefits in CO2 abated. My electricity costs me 11p per kilowatt hour. If I erected a wind turbine, I could sell the power I produced to the grid for a whopping 23p. I think I would go out and buy a gizmo which linked my inward meter to my outward meter. That excess cost is averaged over the bills of consumers as a whole, but how much is it in total, or for individual consumers? Here I differ from the noble Lord, Lord May. The whole issue of cost must be given far more attention. The Government cannot ask people to make radical changes to their lifestyle without being more open about the costs that they are being asked to bear.

I accept that “do nothing” is not the right option. Some measures, such as energy efficiency, heat recovery from waste and biomass, and stopping deforestation are probably justified on their own merits. More nuclear power which, in turn, would open the way for electrification of our transport fleet would enhance security of supply. Other measures may be justified as pure insurance, given the uncertainty that we face. But what is badly needed is a consistent metric that allows us to judge whether any given objective is being achieved at minimum cost. The recent book by Professor MacKay, the newly appointed scientific adviser at DECC, provides an excellent starting point. I also very much welcome the intervention by the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, debunking the waste hierarchy and the act of faith that that embodies.

There is the issue of the science, which I had previously taken as given; but many people’s faith is being tested. We are often told that the science is

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settled. I suppose that is what the Inquisition said to Galileo. If so, why are we spending millions of pounds on research? The science is far from settled. There are major controversies not just about the contribution of CO2, on which most of the debate is focused, but about the influence of other factors such as water vapour, or clouds-the most powerful greenhouse gas-ocean currents and the sun, together with feedback effects which can be negative as well as positive.

Worse still, there are even controversies about the basic data on temperature. The series going back one, 10 or 100,000 years are, in the genuine sense of the word, synthetic. They are not direct observations but are melded together from proxies such as ice cores, ocean sediments and tree rings.

Given the extent to which the outcome is affected by the statistical techniques and the weightings applied by individual researchers, it is essential that the work is done as transparently as possible, with the greatest scope for challenge. That is why the disclosure of documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit is so disturbing. Instead of an open debate, a picture is emerging of selective use of data, efforts to silence critics, and particularly a refusal to share data and methodologies.

In ClimateGate, really smart researchers on the climate took a bunch of data and made some conclusions. They didn’t think their pointy-haired constituents that paid their salaries deserved to have all of the data – instead they gave us a thimble of the data. Of course, in their case they didn’t tell us to wear the thimble like a hat – they just said that we should trust them since they are scientists and know what is good for us. In fact that big pile of paper that Dilbert is carrying doesn’t exist from Paul Jones and his friends – they threw the pile of paper away and just left the thimble!

This is one of the few times that I have sympathized with pointy-haired boss!

PS I do want to do a quick side note on Dilbert and Scott Adams.  I enjoy the humor of this strip very much. To Mr. Adams credit, he makes it possible to embed his strips into blogs very easily from his site.  I wish more political cartoonists were as aware as Mr. Adams and let us use their wit to help us make a point.

If you are not familiar with the work of Mr. Murphy, I suggest you jump over to his written commentaries that appear on the Globe and Mail.

Rex Murphy on Climategate

Who knows? In the long run, global warming skeptics may be wrong, but the importance of healthy skepticism in the face of conventional thinking is, once again, validated.

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We found out that respected men discussed the manipulation of science, the blocking of Freedom of Information requests, the exclusion of dissenting scientists from debate, the removal of dissent from the peer-reviewed publications, and the discarding of historical temperature data and e-mail evidence.

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To many of these folks, the science of global warming is only a tool of ideology. To step back and re-examine their thinking would also mean — at least temporarily — ceding a foothold on policy that allows government to control behavior. It would mean putting the brakes on the billions of dollars allocated to force fundamental economic and societal manipulations through cap-and-trade schemes and fabricated “new energy economies,” among many other intrusive policies.

We have little choice but to place a certain level of trust in scientists — even when it comes to the model-driven speculative discipline of climate change. And, need it be said, most scientists take great care in being honest, principled and precise.

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Now, I do not, on any level, possess the expertise to argue about the science of anthropological global warming. Nor do you, most likely. This certainly doesn’t mean an average citizen has the duty to do the lock step.

Yes, you apostates will be tagged “denialists” — because skepticism is synonymous with the Holocaust denial, don’t you know — or some other equally unfriendly moniker.

Don’t worry; you won’t be alone. Gallup recently found that 41 percent of Americans now believe global warming news reports are exaggerated — the highest number in more than a decade despite the fact that this time frame has coincided with concentrated and highly funded scaremongering. That number is sure to rise as soon as word of this scandal spreads.

The uglier the names get, the more anger you see, the more that science-challenged politicians push invasive legislation, the more skeptics will join you. True believers will question your intelligence, your sanity and your intentions.

But as ClimateGate proves, a bit of skepticism rarely steers you wrong. In fact, it’s one of the key elements of rational thinking.

Jon Stewart Talks Climategate

Professor Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review resulting from allegations following the hacking and publication of emails from the Unit.

Professor Jones said: “What is most important is that CRU continues its world leading research with as little interruption and diversion as possible.  After a good deal of consideration I have decided that the best way to achieve this is by stepping aside from the Director’s role during the course of the independent review and am grateful to the University for agreeing to this.  The Review process will have my full  support.”

Vice-Chancellor Professor Edward Acton said: “I have accepted Professor Jones’s offer to stand aside during this period. It is an important step to ensure that CRU can continue to operate normally and the independent review can conduct its work into the allegations.

“We will announce details of the Independent Review, including its terms of reference, timescale and the chair, within days. I am delighted that Professor Peter Liss, FRS, CBE, will become acting director.”

Let us hope that this investigation is fair, complete, and unbiased. Anyone taking bets?

MagicJavaTV put out a slide show in the form of a YouTube video.  It is a great overview of the people involved in this recent revelation.

ClimateGate Who’s Who

When I first saw the release for this investigation, it seemed a bit suspicious. It did not contain any formatting, contact information, or logos.  However, I have confirmed that, as of this writing, the link to the announcement is live on the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences website (see Climate Change issue in the right column).

I am a bit skeptical that this investigation will be fair and complete but at least it is a first step to getting to the bottom of the issue.

University Reviewing Recent Reports on Climate Information

        Professor Michael Mann is a highly regarded member of the Penn State faculty conducting research on climate change. Professor Mann’s research papers have been published in well respected peer-reviewed scientific journals. In November 2005, Representative Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) requested that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) convene a panel of independent experts to investigate Professor Mann’s seminal 1999 reconstruction of the global surface temperature over the past 1,000 years. The resulting 2006 report of the NAS panel (http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11676) concluded that Mann’s results were sound and has been subsequently supported by an array of evidence that includes additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions.

        In recent days a lengthy file of emails has been made public. Some of the questions raised through those emails may have been addressed already by the NAS investigation but others may not have been considered. The University is looking into this matter further, following a well defined policy used in such cases. No public discussion of the matter will occur while the University is reviewing the concerns that have been raised.