The New Socialism

Remember the old saw: How do you know when a politician is lying?.… His lips are moving! There seems to be more and more truth in that. But I have a sure fire test for lying. If a story appears as “news” in the New York Times, also as the lead editorial and then as an opinion piece written by one of their hacks, well that’s proof positive that the whole thing is a lie. You’ve all seen it on topics as diverse as the health care debate, the war on terror and Sarah Palin. (God bless her!)

Monday 12/6 the Times did it again, this time on the subject of manmade global warming. The “news” story, “In Face of Skeptics, Experts Affirm Climate Peril” assured us that the circulation of several thousand e-mail messages between climate scientists urging their brethren to delete embarrassing e-mails, to keep papers by competing scientists from publication and to make “adjustments” in research data to hide the recent global cooling trend is a mere tempest in a teapot. The editorial “Beyond Copenhagen” sounds an encouraging note because the United States and China, the world’s two biggest emitters, have promised to reduce or slow their emissions. The op-ed “An Affordable Truth” by Paul Krugman warns about a likely reaction to Copenhagen. “We’ll hear cries that the whole notion of global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a vast scientific conspiracy, as demonstrated by stolen e-mail messages that show — well, actually all they show is that scientists are human.” Uh huh. He closes with hope for Copenhagen: “A deal there would save the planet at a price we can easily afford. And it would actually help us in our current economic predicament.” Krugman also has a bridge he would like to unload. Those lying Times!

The truth of the matter is that manmade global warming is perhaps the greatest hoax ever perpetrated by the science-government establishment. And our president is in a leadership role. This week his EPA declared that carbon dioxide is a threat to humans and will be regulated under the Clean Air Act. According to Obama’s hand-picked EPA head Lisa Jackson, “there are no more excuses for delaying.” Yet it is obvious to school children that carbon dioxide is actually a life-giving gas. We humans exhale it, plants gobble it up and give us food and shelter and oxygen to breath. Everything should be so harmful.

What’s more, trying to significantly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emissions will have many deleterious side effects, including skyrocketing energy prices, loss of jobs, unsafe cars, and, most of all, loss of freedom. That is because energy use is a driving force of prosperity. Consider just a few numbers.

From 2002 to 2006 the US Gross Domestic Product grew from $10 trillion to $13 trillion, a 30% increase. Over the same time frame the US emissions of carbon dioxide stayed nearly flat at 5.8 billion metric tons. Thus the US energy efficiency rose by 30% in five years. That’s what can happen in an advanced economy like ours (where the per capita GDP exceeds $47,000) when it transitions from heavy industry and manufacturing to a service and information economy and makes more efficient use of energy.

Over that same time period, the Chinese GDP grew dramatically, from $1.5 trillion to $2.25 trillion (50%), while the Chinese yearly emissions of carbon dioxide grew from 3.8 billion tons to 6.1 billion tons (60%). Relatively poor countries like China ($2000 per capita GDP) require excess energy to grow their economies. This is likely to remain the case for the foreseeable future as the Chinese try to raise another several hundred million people from poverty up to medium development levels. It is no surprise that the Chinese are building one coal-fired power plant per week and will continue doing so for the next ten years.

Worldwide there are 1.6 billion people who do not have access to electricity and 2.4 billion people -- more than a third of the world's total -- still cook and heat with traditional fuels such as firewood or dung. To raise the 2.4 billion people up to the Chinese economic level will require energy use double that of China. The UN estimates that energy use will jump by 50 percent over the next 25 years, with two-thirds of that hike expected in the developing world.

Now one might think that raising people up from abject poverty is a good thing. Except, that is, if you place the environment above people. And that is just what motivates the global warming fascists. Instead of allowing the people in poor countries to benefit from globalization, their goal is to pay those countries to curb their energy use and their economic development. Some numbers will elucidate the folly of this approach. To pay just $1 per day to the 2.4 billion poorest people in the world would cost $876 billion annually. Guess where that cash will be coming from. And that exercise assumes that the bucks get to the actual people. Fat chance! Only pennies on the dollar of foreign aid distributed through kleptocratic governments in the third world reaches the poor. Of course, the real objective of the fascists is to use the one buck a day to buy sleeping bags and K-rations so the poor won’t need to burn those pesky fossil fuels to cook or to heat their homes.

Liberals like to ask, “What would Jesus do?” It seems to me that Jesus would put the plight of the poor today above the potential temperature of the planet in 2100.

Those who predict catastrophe if the emissions of carbon-dioxide are not curbed right now have been found out. “Climategate” has emerged. The thousands of emails urging trickery, deletion of data, hiding the decline and punishing or silencing dissidents have shed the light of reason on the chicanery that has been employed by the UC climate science community in order to convince the world that “the science has been settled.” When the first UN (IPCC) report appeared in 1990 it contained a reconstruction of 1000 years of global temperature data that clearly showed the Medieval Warm Period (circa 1000 – 1300) and the Little Ice Age (circa 1350 – 1850) preceding the Modern Warming (1850 – 1990). But those very natural temperature variations that occurred before the Industrial Revolution did not fit the alarmist model of manmade global warming. Thus the MWP and the LIA had to go and, sure enough, the second UN report in 1995 used 1400 AD as its base -- effectively wiping the MWP off the radar screen. Then in the third report (2001) the MWP and LIA both simply vanished, replaced by a downward trend throughout the millennium until a sharp jump upward last century.

This 2001 reconstruction was the infamous “Hockey Stick” fabricated by Michael Mann and his cronies at Penn State. “Mike’s Nature trick,” as it has become known, involved two pieces of scientific fraud. First, a flawed filtering technique was used on the temperature data (reconstructed from proxies) effectively wiping out the MWP and the LIA and resulting in a gradual downward-trending global temperature from 1000AD until 1850. Second, the data reconstruction was abruptly terminated in 1980 when it was starting to trend downward (cooler) and replaced with actual measured temperatures which were rising. Climate scientists concluded that “the rate and duration of warming of the 20th century has been much greater than in any of the previous nine centuries.” This conclusion has been the poster child for the fraudulent Anthropogenic Global Warming movement.

The most accurate temperature reconstruction derived from tree-rings and lake and ocean sediments by Moberg et al (2005) actually emphasizes rather than hides the MWP.

Note that the MWP was warmer than the late 20th century peak. Since 1998 the global temperature has been declining. Yet the alarmists warn that catastrophe looms.

You have to wonder why the AGW movement has captured the hearts and minds of world leaders. The third worlders are sensibly looking for a handout, in the form of reparations for the “climate debt” incurred by the developed nations. But the first worlders have to be driven by something other than self interest. Charles Krauthammer nailed it: “The new socialism: A shift from red to green.” Environmentalism is becoming the new socialism, “the totemic ideal in the name of which government seizes the commanding heights of the economy and society.” God, help us.