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From The Locker Room:

If the same category four cyclone (or "hurricane" in the Atlantic) hit an industrialized country, the storm would have been harmful but not even remotely close to the devastation that exists today in Myanmar.

This tragedy doesn't provide ammunition for global warming (category four cyclones aren't unique), but for the need for countries and their citizens to develop better infrastructure, build better buildings, have better emergency services, etc.

The only way these changes will happen is if poor countries are able to generate the wealth necessary to make the changes. The only way for the U.S. to better protect itself against hurricanes is to ensure that we continue to be a wealthy country.

Al and friends instead want to tell third world countries that the single most critical factor to develop wealth, low-cost energy, should be prohibited. They want to adopt policies that would keep the poor countries poor and put wealthy countries on a path to poverty.

The Beacon Hill Institute examined the impact that policies being considered by the Legislative Commission on Global Climate Change would have on North Carolina. Please recognize that these policies wouldn't even come close to what the zealots want in terms of reductions in carbon dioxide. Policies include a cap and trade program, taxes on driving, taxes on electricity use, etc.

From the press release: “By 2011, the state would shed more than 33,000 jobs,” according to the report from the Beacon Hill Institute, the research arm of the economics department at Boston’s Suffolk University. “Annual investment would drop by about $502.4 million, real disposable income by more than $2.2 billion, and real state Gross Domestic Product by about $4.5 billion.”

When the Beacon Hill Instutute presented this data to the Commission, there wasn't a dispute about the numbers. Those trying to argue weren't concerned with the actual loss of jobs and the devastation on the economy, but instead were pointing out that this is a price that needs to be paid.

North Carolina, the U.S. and for that matter the entire globe have to make choices. We can choose to adopt policies that would have no effect (PDF) on temperature and have devastating effects on our economy and our ability to prepare for major storms or we can choose to be sensible and do all we can to ensure that public policy doesn't undermine countries from having the wealth necessary to protect themselves from natural disasters.

I'm inclined to favor the latter option, but that's just me.

Biofuels are one of the major reasons you and I are paying more for groceries these days. For most of us, it is just an inconvenience. For many around the world, however, it is a catastrophe. Last week, United Nations Special Investigator Jean Ziegler called the use of biofuels, such as ethanol, a “crime against a great part of humanity.”

Thirty days after Steve McIntyre caught NASA cooking climate history again – this time in a feeble attempt to somehow conceal the alarmist-embarrassing  downward trend since 1998 — Al Gore shamelessly portrayed Saturday's Myanmar cyclone catastrophe as a 'consequence' of global warming. 

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind."

Let's call it Apocalypse Postponed. At least temporarily.

German climate scientists have just published a study in the respected science journal Nature suggesting global warming has stopped and will not resume until at least 2015.

In other words (my words, not theirs) contrary to the received wisdom of Al Gore's simplistic and propagandistic "An Inconvenient Truth," global temperatures aren't moving in lockstep with rising greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the science isn't settled and we don't know everything we need to know.

Much of Ken Livingstone's historic electoral success has been his ability to put himself across as a man of the people, in touch with the concerns of everyday folk.

Why, then, did he put climate change at the centre of his campaign?

Only 21% of respondents to a March Yougov poll thought that climate change should be in the top three priorities of the Mayor. Respondents considered issues like crime, transport, housing and tax to be of far greater importance.

Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch

As I mentioned in an earlier post, North Carolina's Climate Action Plan Advisory Group enlisted the Energy Center at Appalachian State University to apply its mumbo-jumbo economic analysis model (click on "Ponder presentation") to the recommendations that CAPAG produced. Undoubtedly the global warming believers wanted some public entity to tell them how all their energy tax hike and regulation ideas would improve the economy and create jobs, and the Energy Center delivered. They reported that by 2020, North Carolina would see $2.2 billion in new investment and 32,000 new jobs if all CAPAG's recommendations were implemented.

Focusing on details, the Energy Center was particularly optimistic about CAPAG's biofuel subsidy proposals. A proposal to replace 12.5 percent of the state's petroleum diesel fuel consumption with biodiesel by the year 2020 would yield 661 new jobs and $68 million in annual gross state product. Even more exciting, an ethanol subsidy of 23 cents per gallon, to replace gasoline consumption in the state with ethanol by 25 percent by the year 2025, would create more than 12,000 new jobs and increase gross state product by $4.1 billion.

Someone should have sent that memo to employees at Pilgrim's Pride, who closed a chicken processing plant in North Carolina in March, as well as six distribution sites. The reason?

Chief Executive Clint Rivers placed blame for the industry's trouble on the federal government's "deeply flawed" policy of paying subsidies for using corn to produce ethanol for fuel, which he said would cause food prices to rise further.

"American consumers are only just beginning to feel the impact of sharply higher food prices," as food producers pass along more of their higher costs, Rivers said.

Rivers said the company hasn't been able to raise prices fast enough to cover higher feed costs. He called the current situation facing poultry producers "among the most difficult I have seen during my 27 years in the business."

Apparently the science was settled, but the economics was not.