Among the candidates for the biggest cock-and-bull story in 2007 must be NASA’s James Hansen with his work of creative genius on Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice sheets and his wannabes, who subsequently copied his imaginative tour de force.
Even the facts are no match for James Hansen and his incredible modeling machine! Though Greenland’s and Antarctica’s ice rests in deep bowls, Hansen declares them inclined planes. Then despite ice cores that show little to no movement for the past 400,000 years (including the warm periods), he shamelessly states that these gigantic ice sheets are slip, slidin’ away and the world will be flooded.
The idea of “meltwater lakes on the surface finding their way down through cracks in the ice and lubricating the bottom of the glacier is not compatible with accumulation of undisturbed snow layers. It might conceivably work on valley glaciers but it tells us nothing of the ‘collapse’ of ice sheets,” according to Cliff Ollier, School of Earth and Geographical Science at the University of Western Australia, “Indeed ‘collapse’ is impossible.”
Alarmists have to be thrilled with the successfulness of Hansen’s 2007 con—without this lie there is no catastrophic flooding, and all they are left with is the IPCC’s non-eventful one-foot-in-a-century sea level rise.
I wonder if Hansen’s modeler can also make Everlasting Gobstoppers!
The Wall Street Journal’s Brian Carney takes on the energy bill’s de facto ban on incandescent light bulbs, especially its rent- seeking potential for manufacturers of fluorescent bulbs. (Brian’s bro Tim tackled the issue in his DC Examiner column last Friday.)
Whether it’s next week or next decade, you will one day walk into a hardware store looking for a 100-watt bulb–and there won’t be any. By 2014, the new efficiency standards [which traditional incandescent bulbs cannot meet] will apply to 75-watt, 60-watt and 40-watt bulbs too…
Representatives of Philips and General Electric, two of the biggest lightbulb makers, say there’s nothing to be concerned about.
Well, maybe not for them.
[I]f you’re GE or Philips or Sylvania, the demise of the plain vanilla lightbulb is less a threat than an opportunity–an opportunity, in particular, to replace a product that you can sell for 50 cents with one that sells for $3 or more…
Now it may be that those bulbs are worth more–because they last longer, etc. But some of those bulbs, like compact fluorescents and Philips’ new “Halogena-IR” bulb, are already available. Currently they command all of 5% of the lightbulb market. That means that, whatever value proposition GE and Philips are selling, consumers aren’t buying.
What we bulb buyers needed, it seemed, was a little nudge. Or, if you want to be cynical about it, the bulb business decided to migrate its customers to more-expensive–and presumably higher-margin–products by banning the low-cost competition.
The proposition of sextupling the price of a common household item is one that consumers should naturally resist. Some environmental activists may well argue that such a price is worth paying towards their vision of planetary salvation. Fine. But what they cannot then honestly say is that the costs of such enforced “green” consumption are minimal. (Why hurt your standard of living when all you need is a trip to Lowe’s?) Imagine what we’d end up paying when mandates like this are extended to other things we need at home.
Some journalists are so confident that we're already cooked by global warming that they're scolding ignorant Americans in advance for all the now-unpreventable doom that's coming our way. Newsweek's Sharon Begley rings in the new year by shaking her head at the Stupid, Soon to Be Overheated Majority and how we'll have to adapt to being cooked:
When Al Gore ran for U.S. senator from Tennessee he debated – repeatedly.
When he ran for president he once more debated frequently.
Why is it that as a recipient of the Nobel Prize for his theorizing about global warming Mr. Gore has refused repeated and prominently published challenges to debate this issue with scientists?
I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.
You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet.
Growing numbers of global warming science skeptics are making their opposition known. They include experts in climatology, oceanography, geology, biology, environmental sciences and physics, among others. They are affiliated with prestigious institutions worldwide, including Harvard, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, MIT, the International Arctic Research Center, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and many others.
So-called Global Warming has the potential to destroy 300 years worth of scientific progress and our advanced western civilization along with it. From an economist’s position, it is pure folly. And our worst enemies’ dream come true.
If a scientific paper appeared in a major journal saying that the planet has warmed twice as much as previously thought, that would be front-page news in every major paper around the planet. But what would happen if a paper was published demonstrating that the planet may have warmed up only half as much as previously thought?
According to Bill McKibben in an op-ed in The Washington Post, the biggest news of the year is that Jim Hansen has spoken. According to Hansen, who has risen in recent years from astronomer to wizard and now to high priest of a doomsday cult, the safe level for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be no more than 350 parts per million. So since it’s now 380 or 390 ppm, we’re already doomed and can stop worrying about it.
Oh, no, sorry, we can’t stop worrying about it. True, we’re just about cooked (like Hansel and Gretel in the oven), but there’s still barely time to save life on Earth if we turn off the lights and throw away the car keys this instant. The alternative, I guess, is to party now for tomorrow we die. Hmm, I can’t decide. What if there’s just a tiny chance that Hansen could be wrong? Wouldn’t drastically reducing our energy consumption cause colossal increases in human mortality and suffering?
The course of apocalyptic movements is generally similar. In order to keep the enthusiasm of its followers at a fever pitch and to attract new followers, it is necessary to keep stoking the fires with more and more outlandish claims. The hysteria peaks as doomsday is moved closer and closer to the present, and then — poof — it collapses. It appears to me that the global warming bubble has gone about as far as it can go before it descends into ranting and writhing on the ground or random outbreaks of mob violence.
Unfortunately for Hansen and McKibben as with so many previous prophets of the end of the world, reality isn’t cooperating with their chiliastic fantasies. Atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have increased by 4 per cent since the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997, but the global mean temperature has been flat since 1999. What they must have are some big disasters — and soon.
Scientists like money. (It's true — be still, my heart.) Big Science is a Big Business, supporting nearly half the budgets of our major universities. Science professors are only hired if they can swing enough Federal grant money to pay for their labs, hire a gaggle of graduate assistants, and let the universities skim up to forty percent off the top for overhead.
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