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“The glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, a large number of them may disappear by 2035 because of climate change.” Such was the lede of one of countless articles about how 1.3 billion Asians were in imminent danger of first flooding and then drought. And that’s not to mention the certain extinction of the abominable snowman.

You didn’t need a Cray computer to figure that this was nonsense, that temperatures would have to more or less instantly soar to incredible heights and stay there for this to happen. (As it turns out, 18 degrees Centigrade.) But people wrote it, read it, and believed it. You’d think a magazine with the name Technology Review would know better, yet its latest issue declares: “The Himalayan glaciers that feed rivers in India, China, and other Asian countries could be gone in 25 years.”

Why did they say it? In part, because it was convenient. And in part because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it in its Fourth Assessment Report (2007). Now the IPCC is saying, “Whoopsie!”

In a statement released on Wednesday, the group admitted “poorly substantiated estimates.” More specifically, it appears to have been based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published in 1999. That story, in turn, was based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist in Delhi. And Hasnain has since admitted his assertion “speculation” unsupported by any formal research.

The IPCC says it will “probably” issue a formal correction. “Probably?”

But admit it guys, wasn’t it fun while it lasted?

Scott Brown’s decisive victory in the Massachusetts Senate race has upturned the Democrats’ Progressive agenda.  Brown, “the people’s seat” senator, had a resonant message that tapped into the electorate’s disenchantment with ever-increasing government (with the health care proposals figuring strongly), huge deficit spending, and increased taxes to pay for the trillions of dollars in new government programs. Jobs and the economy were an overarching issue.

It was a populist victory that carried many of the themes of the “Tea Party” movement, which, so far, haven’t been promoted by either party.  If the Republicans don’t latch onto those themes with an agenda of their own, they really are the “dumb Party.”

What’s a cause for concern, however, is how the Democrats are likely to embrace people’s fear and anger by taking up their own populist cudgel to even more vigorously attack capitalism, consumer choice, and any and all Big Business entities.

There indeed is fierce popular anger at bank bailouts and big bonuses – Wall Street has become a synonym for greed and arrogance that caused the financial meltdown, with little recognition that government and quasi-government entities like the Federal Reserve and Fannie and Freddie contributed to the financial problems.

Though some banks deserve much of the public disapprobrium because of their mismanagement and sellout on TARP funds, even those banks that were healthy or fought their own way back to solvency are being asked to pick up the tab for their less-responsible brethren. Expect the Democrats to exact more such retribution from banks — in the name of the people.

In addressing the big issues of jobs and the economy, the Democrats will have a hard time spending more money on stimulus packages that seem to evaporate before any jobs are created. But there will probably be an even bigger push for “green jobs.” Democratic leadership may decide that a massive and economically destructive cap-and-trade bill isn’t feasible in this political climate.  They may look to more “green jobs” and “alternative fuels” boondoggles through taxes and fees on fossil fuel industries as a better way to sell the idea of restrictions on and higher costs for energy use. Yet those subsidized jobs themselves are costly, as the Wall Street Journal noted in mid-December 2009 about the 253,000 of direct jobs created:

The 253,000 direct jobs works out to a cost of about $90,000 a head-just for one year. Clean-energy manufacturing jobs are even more expensive to create, costing about $135,000 per job.

It will be difficult to relate the Democrats’ health care proposals to jobs and the economy when the costs are projected by the Congressional Budget Office at $1 trillion in additional federal spending over the next 10 years. But that figure – while astronomical — doesn’t include the states’ mandates, which will cost $25 billion more over 10 years or the unknown costs of the mandates for individuals and employers to buy insurance. Those costs will be paid for by increased yet hidden taxes – and not just on the so-called rich.

Plus, the closed-door negotiations on the bills have resulted in deals that most people consider unfair and outrageous, for instance, Nebraska is the only state that won’t have to pay future unfunded Medicare and Medicaid mandates; Louisiana gets $300 million for agreeing to support the Senate bill; and union members don’t have to pay “Cadillac-plan” taxes on their generous health care plans. These proposals will actually hold back job creation by causing uncertainty among both small and large businesses and thus reluctance to expand jobs. And taxpayers rightly understand that they will bear the increased costs.

In the wake of Scott Brown’s election, whether the Democrats will continue their shenanigans on their health care proposals isn’t yet clear.  Right now, they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

Recently, CEI’s president Fred Smith wrote an article titled “Change we can really believe in,” which sets out a blueprint to stimulate the economy by liberating it.  Fred must have been prescient when he wrote this on January 4 — before the surge for Scott Brown:

This year holds promise for a new start for America. As 2010 begins, we may be teetering on a cliff, but Americans aren’t lemmings. Support for statist policies is dropping, and taxpayer anger is growing. There is a renewed understanding that the limitations on government of the Constitution are the best protections of our liberties. Their restoration should be the primary hopeful change advanced by all friends of liberty.

A pithy column in Foreign Policy by the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger says that ”twice-fooled” Democrats, who have been “BTUed” by two Democratic administrations, “are unlikely to sign up for more of the same in the next Congress” (cap-and-trade being the regulatory form of a BTU tax on carbon-based energy).  

The phrase “BTUed” calls to mind Paul Simon’s great ’60s cut-the-hype, get-out-of-my-face folk anthem, A Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission), and inspired me to attempt a bit of musical parody. Here it is, with apologies to Rhymin’ Simon:

I been Al Gore’d and Yvo de Boer’d.
I been Rajendra Pauchauri’d and regulatory’d.
I been UN’d and CRU’d till I’m blind.
I been Climategated and often hated
Called a skeptic ‘cause I follow the data
That’s what real science is about, well, never mind!
I been BTU’d and cap-and-traded.
I been Hockey Sticked, Hide-the-Decline-Tricked.
Well, I paid all the taxes I want to pay.
And I learned to doubt by debating these louts,
And offsets don’t mean no regrets,
So I blog about Gorethodoxy each day.

Dr. Rob Bradley, CEO of the Institute for Energy Research, documents in Political Capitalism how fraud and corruption at Enron were the inevitable consequence of a business strategy emphasizing the political pursuit of market-rigging regulations as a strategy to reap windfall profits and grow market share.

Enron, for example, was a key lobbyist for the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty calculated to increase demand for Enron’s services as a natural gas distributor, renewable energy seller, and cap-and-trade broker.

Today at MasterResource, the free-market energy blog, Bradley reveals that Enron also spearheaded the push for renewable energy mandates that made Texas the leading windpower state in the country.

Bradley worked at Enron for 16 years and frequently clashed with senior management over its infatuation with get-rich-quick green energy schemes. “Oh how sad I am that Enron purchased Zond [Corporation, a struggling wind energy company] and did so much to enable the artificial windpower boom in Texas and United States,” he writes.

The tragedy in Haiti can teach us something about the extreme policies of global warming alarmists.

The 1989 San Francisco earthquake measured a 7.1 on the Richter scale and the death toll was 62 people killed.

The recent earthquake in Haiti was measured at 7.0 on the Richter scale and the death toll could reach 50,000-100,00 people killed.

Why did Haiti suffer so many more lost lives than San Francisco?  The answer is  the country doesn’t possess the wealth necessary to build better infrastructure.

Yet, the alarmists want to push policies, such as cap and trade, which would drastically reduce our wealth.  They want countries like Haiti and other developing countries to take steps to reduce carbon emissions at the expense of their national well-being, including their health and infrastructure.

If we want to best survive the impact of natural disasters, wealth generation is the best means to do so.  Ask Haitians if they would have preferred to be in Port-Au-Prince or San Francisco when the earthquakes hit.

Assuming (for the sake of it) that global warming will lead to natural disasters, building better infrastructure and adapting to any changes is a far wiser choice than pushing policies that will have no measurable impact on global temperature while undermining any chance countries like Haiti would have to protect themselves from such disasters.

Pushing damaging policies that undermine wealth generation and having the arrogance to impose those policies on nations like Haiti is unethical, to say the least. If developing countries have to give up what we as Americans already enjoy, such as good infrastructure, the death toll for what should be relatively minor earthquakes will remain astronomical.

In early December I reported in this space that Penn State University Climategate scientist Michael Mann received $541,184 in stimulus funds, which the school claimed was creating 1.62 (presumably “green”) jobs. Today the National Center for Public Policy Research called for the return of the funds to the U.S. Treasury:

Professor Mann is currently under investigation by Penn State University because of activities related to a closed circle of climate scientists who appear to have been engaged in agenda-driven science. Emails and documents mysteriously released from the previously-prestigious Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom revealed discussions of manipulation and destruction of research data, as well as efforts to interfere with the peer review process to stifle opposing views. The motivation underlying these efforts appears to be a coordinated strategy to support the belief that mankind’s activities are causing global warming.

How about he returns all $6 million he’s received from the government over the years?

Whaddaya know — ever since Climategate and brutal cold (snap!) sawed in half the global warming illusion that the formerly mainstream media had sold as reality, all of a sudden there’s massive upheaval: dogs and cats living together; news networks hosting climate debates; CBS exposing taxpayer-funded boondoggle junkets to Copenhagen; and politicians (other than Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe) boldly denouncing fraudulent research about the “benefits” of “solutions” to global warming. Just check out last Friday’s press release from Michigan State Rep. Tom McMillin:

McMillin made the call following a plan from the global-warming advocacy group the Center for Climate Strategies that likely overstated possible job growth and will cost Michigan taxpayers millions of dollars to follow a political agenda.

“To expend taxpayer money on such a biased group as CCS was just wrong and exemplifies how Governor Granholm has run this state into the ground – by putting political agendas ahead of truth and Michigan job creation,” said McMillin, R-Rochester Hills. “There will not be a net 129,000 jobs created. To follow the recommendations of this study may actually result in net job losses for Michigan.”

McMillin noted the long history of questionable action from the Center for Climate Strategies that can be found here.

“The report is intentionally false in order to promote CCS’s radical agenda, which always conveniently leave out costs to taxpayers and job providers,” McMillin said. “The results of this so-called study is as bogus as the far left group the governor chose to stage this charade – that group, CCS, is closely aligned with scientists who hide data, delete emails and contrive to bully peer review methods in order to promote their radical, non-scientific, highly questionable agenda. In effect, Michigan now has its own version of Climategate. Let’s see if, in Michigan, they’ll come clean or hide.”

McMillin is right, of course — CCS has proven to engage in the same fudge-factoring and half-baked analysis as the Climategate cooks. The failure of Copenhagen and the poor election-year forecast for national cap-and-trade passage may mean the Greens return to the state-level, pressure-up strategy. It would help if more state lawmakers like McMillin engage to expose how this scheming has worked around the country.

This fellow from New Zealand appears to think that Climategate proves that the big money is in climate skepticism. How does that work?

Here’s my attempt to follow his argument: The US Government has spent $79 billion in the past two decades on climate science. But Big Oil and Big Coal want a piece of this. They spend heavily on lobbyists to get it. They would be well served by certain provisions in bills and international treaties. [I agree with this so far…] But “the aims of the climate change lobby groups and the large industries they represent dovetail quite nicely with the arguments put forward by the sceptics.” So [he implies] therefore the skeptics have all the money.

Huh?

Global warming skeptics don’t want carbon capture and storage. They don’t want targets for emissions reduction. They don’t want international treaties and thousand page bills that take money out of the productive class and spend it on vastly expensive ways of doing things we know how to do already. Global warming skeptics do not want “a seat at the table.” They don’t think there should be a table in the first place.

Our science blogger friend has confused skeptic with rent-seeker. We skeptics have a grudging respect for our ‘alarmist’ opponents. In most cases they have a sincere belief that there is a serious problem and want to solve it. (Part of the problem revealed by climategate was that many of them, however, want to solve the problem by any means necessary and are insincere in their methods). Rent-seekers, on the other hand, want to exploit such beliefs for personal/corporate gain*, at the expense of the rest of us. Therefore rent-seekers are a bigger problem than alarmists, because they do indeed bring the big bucks. That’s why rent-seeking businesses want carbon capture and storage, which they will be paid handsomely for. They want international treaties and thousand page bills that contains nice incentives for them, their executives and their shareholders. They want the free market distorted to their benefit. The ends they desire, however, are completely different from those desired by the skeptics. Their aims do not dovetail with the ends of the skeptics in the slightest.

That’s why the big money is with those looking to establish a regime for emissions reduction. Now those thieves have certainly fallen out, and there are still some honorable types who want no handouts to big energy companies at all, but the money is certainly on that side of the aisle.

If genuinely skeptical groups have gotten as much as $790 million total worldwide for global warming efforts since 1989 – 1 percent of that devoted to climate science – I’d be extremely surprised. A tenth of that amount is more likely in the right ballpark. You can’t change that by lumping rent-seeking industries in with skeptics. Rent-seekers really do follow the money.

* Rent-seekers are also only too happy to exploit belief in the free market, arguing for free enterprise up until they can see a benefit from government restricting market entry, and so on.