President Václav Klaus: Inaugural Annual GWPF Lecture

Global warming may just be statistical fluctuations

By Václav Klaus

The global warming dispute starts with a doctrine which claims that the rough coexistence of climate changes, of growing temperatures and of man-made increments of CO2 in the atmosphere — and what is more, only in a relatively short period of time — is a proof of a causal relationship between these phenomena. To the best of my knowledge there is no such relationship between them. It is, nevertheless, this claim that forms the basis for the doctrine of environmentalism.

It is not a new doctrine. It has existed under various headings and in various forms and manifestations for centuries, always based on the idea that the starting point of our thinking should be the Earth, the planet or nature, not man or mankind. It has always been accompanied by the plan that we have to come back to the original state of the Earth, unspoiled by us, humans. The adherents of this doctrine have always considered us, the people, a foreign element. They forget that it doesn’t make sense to speak about the world without people because there would be no one to speak. If we take the reasoning of the environmentalists seriously, we find that theirs is an anti-human ideology.

To reduce the interpretation of the causality of all kinds of climate changes and of global warming to one variable, CO2, or to a small proportion of one variable — human-induced CO2 — is impossible to accept. Elementary rationality and my decades-long experience with econometric modelling and statistical testing of scientific hypotheses tell me that it is impossible to make strong conclusions based on mere correlation of two (or more) time series.

In addition to this, it is relevant that in this case such a simple correlation does not exist. The rise of global temperature started approximately 150 years ago, but man-made CO2 emissions did not start to grow visibly before the 1940s. Temperature changes also repeatedly moved in the opposite direction than the CO2 emissions trend suggests.

Theory is crucial and in this case it is missing. Pure statistical analysis does not explain or confirm anything. Two Chinese scientists, Guang Wu and Shaomin Yan, published a study in which they used the random walk model to ­analyze the global temperature fluctuations in the last 160 years. Their results — rather unpleasantly for the global-warming alarmists — show that the random walk model perfectly fits the temperature changes. Because “the random walk model has a perfect fit for the recorded temperature … there is no need to include various man-made factors such as CO2, and non-human factors, such as the Sun” to improve the quality of the model fit, they say. It is an important result. Do other models give a better fit? I have not seen any.

The untenable argument that there exists a simple causal nexus, a simple functional relationship, between temperature and man-made CO2 is only one part of the whole story and only one tenet of environmentalism. The other, not less important aspect of this doctrine is the claim that there is a very strong and exclusively damaging relationship between temperature and its impact upon nature, upon the Earth and upon the planet.

The original ambition probably used to be saving the planet for human beings, but we see now that this target has gradually become less and less important. Many environmentalists want to save the planet, not mankind. For them, the sophisticated economic reasoning we offer is irrelevant.

Only some of them look at mankind. Only with them the debate about the intergenerational discrimination and solidarity and about the proper size of discount rates used in any intertemporal analysis comes into consideration, only here can the economists make use of some of their concepts. The unjustifiably low rate of discount used by the environmentalists was for me the original motivation to enter the discussion.

The choice of discount rate is critical in assessing which policies might make sense, and which clearly do not. With a higher discount rate, the argument for radical action over global warming collapses completely.

Many serious economists argue the same way and are in favour of using higher discount rates. University of Chicago Prof. Murphy says quite strongly: “we should use the market rate as the discount rate because it is the opportunity cost of climate mitigation.” This is what alarmists clearly do not want to do. They think in misconceived ethical terms, but it is wrong. We do not deny that if the existing trend continues, rising temperatures will have both its winners and losers. Even if the overall impact happens to be detrimental — which is something I am not convinced of — the appropriately defined discount for the future will ensure that the loss of value in the years to come will be too small for the present generation to worry about.

How is it possible that so many politicians, their huge bureaucracies, important groups in the scientific establishment, an important segment of business people and almost all journalists see it differently? The only reasonable explanation is that — without having paid sufficient attention to the arguments — they have already invested too much into global warming alarmism. Some of them are afraid that by losing this doctrine their political and professional pride would suffer. Others are earning a lot of money on it and are afraid of losing that source of income. Business people hope they will make a fortune out of it and are not ready to write it off. They all have a very tangible vested interest in it. We should say loudly: This coalition of powerful special interests is endangering us.

Our interest is, or should be, a free, democratic and prosperous society. That is the reason why we have to stand up against all attempts to undermine it. We should be prepared to adapt to all kinds of future climate changes (including cooling), but we should never accept losing our freedom.

Financial Post
Václav Klaus is President of the Czech Republic. His comments, excerpted here, were made on Tuesday at the Global Warming Policy Foundation annual ­lecture in London. The full text of his speech is available at http://thegwpf.org

Read more: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2010/10/20/vaclav-klaus-an-anti-human-ideology/#ixzz13hWT891s

USA: 30 millions unemployed

Economist Leo Hindery, Jr. took aim at the Obama Administration's lies, and Tim Geithner specifically, in the Aug. 17 Huffington Post, declaring:

• The U.S. unemployment rate is now 18.3%, not 9.5%;
• The number of real unemployed workers in all four categories of unemployment is 29.3 million, not Obama's 14.6 million figure;
• Since Obama took office, the number of real unemployed workers has increased by 4.6 million. The economy needs to add about 150,000 new jobs each month just to keep up with population growth;
• In real terms, the jobs gap is 21.3 million new jobs. Source

This is in stark contrast with what the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics officially publish

Spain’s “Green Energy” Economy Continues to Implode

Source: 

Today’s exhibit about Spain’s economic miracle — you could call it a sector-specific collapse — comes from Bloomberg, a heartbreaking tale of the gravy inevitably running out. It is a tale that, pre-collapse, President Obama expressly sought to emulate and California is still actively pursuing, as is typical for the equally bankrupt California. Obama is now silent about Spain as his model and California claims its law is, er…the “world’s first!”

As happened in Spain, California’s bill is certain to come due long before the preening political class expected. The U.K.’s Global Warming Policy Foundation has a roundup with the top six stories in today’s update being relevant, as well.

So, yes, dear, these “green economy” schemes grow the economy. Of course, then so did Mr. Ponzi’s scheme. And, naturally, the plaintiff’s bar grows the economy, too, because we need a bigger court system and people to craft the instructions on shampoo bottles. Except upon slightly more scrutiny than the statists would like, they actually kill jobs. But if you only focus on this part I’m waving my hands at over here…

And upon such scrutiny, their approach of name-calling and fabrication instead of arguing the merits begins to look pretty good.

Water Wars - A Real Danger

This movie points to a real and potentially dangerous problem world wide. The scarcity and privation of fresh water resources.

From my point of view water should by managed by the people for the people and be produced by the best technologies available.  It should be made available as any other infrastructures are made available to societies, thus paid by our taxes.

Species Extinction - A Real Problem?

When searching on the internet for species extinction, you find a lot of articles linking climate change, global warming and human activities to this issue. I will not go into the "Extinction events" that happens regularly over the ages, this is another subject altogether.


Like anything, opinions diverge a lot of the subject.  One thing I urge people to do before jumping to conclusion if to read on the other side of what the "mass media" is pushing down our easily influenced minds.


So here's a couple of nice articles and documents that give a refreshing look into this species extinction debate.

First let look at a PDF from Dona Laframboise. Here's an excerpt:

Extinction Fiction

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that 20-30% of all Earth's species are at risk of extinction relies on a research paper that has been demolished by experts in the field. It is highly debatable whether the authors of this chapter of the 2007 IPCC report comprise the 'worlds top experts'. What is not in dispute is that five out of 10 of the lead authors have documented links to the activist World Wildlife Fund. So do three of the chapter's contributing authors.

Then there is this excellent essay by Stephen Budiansky. Here's an excerpt:

The teflon doomsayers

The astonishingly wrong and repercussion-free prediction of imminent doom that first riveted my attention was the claim of the impending mass extinction of the Earth's species. In 1979, the biologist Norman Myers declared that a fifth of all species on the planet would be gone within two decades. This prediction was based upon . . . absolutely no evidence whatsoever. Myers acknowledged that the documented species extinction rate of animals was 1 per year; he then asserted that scientists had "hazarded a guess" that the actual rate was 100 per year; he then speculated that government inaction was "likely to lead" to several thousand or even tens of thousands a year, which would add up to as much as a million species over two decades. (This was when people thought there were 5 million species; the best guess now is at least 10 million.) It swiftly became conventional wisdom.

Then there is the Where Are The Corpses? essay by Willis Eschenbach

Abstract

The record of continental (as opposed to island) bird and mammal extinctions in the last five centuries was analyzed to determine if the “species-area” relationship actually works to predict extinctions. Very few continental birds or mammals are recorded as having gone extinct, and none have gone extinct from habitat reduction alone. No continental forest bird or mammal is recorded as having gone extinct from any cause. Since the species-area relationship predicts that there should have been a very large number of recorded bird and mammal extinctions from habitat reduction over the last half millennium, I show that the species-area relationship gives erroneous answers to the question of extinction rates.

A must read is the "From Genocide to Ecocide: The Rape of Rapa Nui by Benny Peiser".

ABSTRACT

The ‘decline and fall’ of Easter Island and its alleged self-destruction has become the poster child of a new environmentalist historiography, a school of thought that goes hand-in-hand with predictions of environmental disaster. Why did this exceptional civilisation crumble? What drove its population to extinction? These are some of the key questions Jared Diamond endeavours to answer in his new book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. According to Diamond, the people of Easter Island destroyed their forest, degraded the island’s topsoil, wiped out their plants and drove their animals to extinction. As a result of this selfinflicted environmental devastation, its complex society collapsed, descending into civil war, cannibalism and self-destruction. While his theory of ecocide has become almost paradigmatic in environmental circles, a dark and gory secret hangs over the premise of Easter Island’s self-destruction: an actual genocide terminated Rapa Nui’s indigenous populace and its culture. Diamond, however, ignores and fails to address the true reasons behind Rapa Nui’s collapse. Why has he turned the victims of cultural and physical extermination into the perpetrators of their own demise? This paper is a first attempt to address this disquieting quandary. It describes the foundation of Diamond’s environmental revisionism and explains why it does not hold up to scientific scrutiny.

And to finish off... You have all those new discoveries

• Scientists find 200 new species in Papua New Guinea
• Dracula fish, bald bird among strange new species
• El Niño and a Pathogen Killed Costa Rican Toad, Study Finds... Not global warming!

So as you can see, when you dig a little bit, a headline news like this:

Scientists agree world faces mass extinction

Becomes not so clear cut. Always good to be a little skeptical about what we hear and read.