Coyote Blog

Check back at my post on the egregious 10:10 climate video.  Lots of updates.

I suppose one cold say that climate alarmism jumped the shark years ago.  But they have certainly moved to a new level, one for which there is not even a term, in this video.  This video has everything - the government school teacher politically indoctrinating the kids, followed by bloody gory death dealt out to the kids who refuse to toe the government line.  I am not kidding.

When I first saw it, I was sure it was a skeptic satire, ala Jonathon Swift's 'A Modest Proposal,'  and I am still afraid that this may be some elaborate put-on because the video and its message -- that skeptics need to be killed -- is so obscene.   But apparently, according to this article at the Guardian, it is totally for real and includes contributions from some fairly prominent artists, as well as funding from the UK government and the 10:10 program  (a plea to reduce carbon emissions by 10% per year, eerily with a name probably purposely similar to 9-11).

Our friends at the 10:10 climate change campaign have given us the scoop on this highly explosive short film, written by Britain's top comedy screenwriter Richard Curtis, ahead of its general release....

Had a look? Well, I'm certain you'll agree that detonating school kids, footballers and movie stars into gory pulp for ignoring their carbon footprints is attention-grabbing. It's also got a decent sprinkling of stardust "“ Peter Crouch, Gillian Anderson, Radiohead and others.  But it's pretty edgy, given 10:10's aim of asking people, businesses and organisations to take positive action against global warming by cutting their greenhouse gas emissions by 10% in a year, and thereby pressuring governments to act.

"Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody's existence on this planet? Clearly we don't really think they should be blown up, that's just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?" jokes 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid film maker Franny Armstrong.

But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: "Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that's not worth jumping up and down about, I don't know what is."

The latter claim is hilarious.  Over the next four years, CO2 levels will likely increase, if they stay on trend, from .0392% of the atmosphere to .0400% of the atmosphere.  I would love to see these so-called science-based folks demonstrate how the next .0008% shift in atmospheric concentration triggers the point-of-no return tipping point.  In actual fact, the have just latched onto the round number of 400ppm and declared, absolutely without evidence, that this number (which the Earth has crossed many times in the past) will somehow lead to a runaway chain reaction.

Anyway, I have teased it long enough,  here is the video.  Beware -- there is gore (no pun intended) here worthy of a zombie movie.

Wow, its sure good that the world has decided that skeptics are the mindless, thuggish, anti-science side of this debate, because if that had not already been made clear, we might think that key climate alarmism groups had lost their freaking minds.  It will be interesting to see if this gets any play in the US media -- my guess is it will not.  Magazines are happy to spend twenty pages dissecting the motives of the Koch family in funding skeptic and libertarian causes, but environmentalists get a free pass, even with stuff like this.

Lubos Motl is all over this, and has mirror sites for the video if (or more likely when) the video gets taken down. This is one of those propaganda offers that are the product of an echo chamber, with a group of like-minded people all patting themselves on the back only to be surprised at the inevitable public backlash.

I have mirrored the video here in case it gets a youtube takedown.

Update: As a reminder, this is not satire.  It is made by a group of true believers.  It was funded and approved and released by a climate alarmism group, which paid top dollar (including UK taxpayer funds) for a large professional team of actors, writers, and directors.  All interviewed participants, including the first little actor blown up, have stated how proud they were of the film and its contribution to educating people on the need for immediate action on global warming.

For the last hour, I have sat and tried to think if, as a skeptic, I had wanted to make a satire critiquing the excesses of global warming alarmism, could I have made a better video.  The only thing that might have made it better would have been if the final button-pusher was someone famous like James Cameron or Bono, who after then pushed the button climbed on their Gulfstream jet to fly home.  But that's just a quibble.   I have changed my opinion.  This may be the greatest skeptic video ever, and the Koch family didn't even have to pay a dime for it.  Thanks 10:10.

Update #2: This movie reminds me of nothing so much as Tarantino's Inglorious Bastards.  It is clearly not reality, but the author's fantasy.  Tarantino fantasizes about a group of jews kicking ass on the Nazi high command and ending the war early.  10:10 fantasizes about blowing up skeptics, in a video that, amazingly, is more blood-spattered than Tarantino's.

Update #3: The group pulls the video with a classic "I'm sorry you guys are so easily offended" apology.

Update #4: Unsurprisingly, Joe Romm (in the italics in this post) goes to the kindergarten argument of "he started it," arguing that the video is just the flip side of the stuff skeptics are doing all the time.  In making  his pitch, he shows the mindset that allowed this stupid film to get made.

I am not sure exactly what comparable films skeptics have produced that are similar, and the only example he can cite is Anthony Watt's blog post comments on the shooting of an eco-terrorist.  I did not even go back and look at Watt's comments, but I generally think that lots of people are too gleeful when suspected criminals, who are innocent before the law, are gunned down by police.

Never-the-less, its seems a stretch to equate  the offhand comments in real time of an independent blogger with a film involving probably a hundred people (including those who commissioned it in the 10:10 organization), commissioned in an official and thoughtful act (after all this had to be months in the works), and funded in part by the British government.  He takes the opportunity of his team's screw-up to launch this broadside on people like me (in bold no less).

None of this excuses that disgusting video.  But the difference is that those who are trying to preserve a livable climate and hence the health and well-being of our children and billions of people this century quickly denounce the few offensive over-reaches of those who claim to share our goals "” but those trying to destroy a livable climate, well, for them lies and hate speech are the modus operandi, so such behavior is not only tolerated, but encouraged.

Is anyone else getting tired of this working definition that "hate speech" is any speech by people who disagree with me, because I have the best interest of humanity in mind so clearly those who oppose me hate the human race?

Note you can see this right in his statement -- "for those trying to destroy a livable climate."  That's absurd.  Does he really think anyone is trying to destroy a livable climate?  I could say that through CO2 controls he is trying to impoverish billions of poor people in lesser developed countries by halting development, but I don't think that is really his motive.  I think that is an outcome of what he advocates, just as he thinks an unlivable climate is an outcome of what I advocate, but I can distinguish between motives and assumptions, but he apparently cannot.   This attitude is EXACTLY what causes this kind of unfortunate video to be made -- it is only a small step from believing, as he says he does, that skeptics are "trying to destroy a liveable climate" to making a movie that jokes about killing them all (or, to be frank, to feeling justified in acts of eco-terrorism).

I encourage you to watch my climate video and decide if folks like me are trying to thoughtfully decipher nature or are engaging in hate speech.

Update #5: Funny -- Gillian Anderson, actress from the 10:10 video, warning of Y2K dangers.

Update #6: I guess this was inevitable, but all the rats in the 10:10 ship are claiming that they had no idea what the video would be like and were appalled when they saw it.  Right.  An organization funds a major film production, including any number of high profile participants, and no one asked to see a script, screened the video before release, or even asked for some kind of written treatment of the concept?  Yeah, right.   No one in the 10:10 organization or who funded the video even peeked at it before it was released to the entire planet?  This is so utterly lame but will probably be enough of a fig leaf for most of the media to hide behind and allow them not to follow up on a video whose basic premises they likely agree with.

I will be on the radio today between 3-4 Arizona time (6-7pm Eastern time) talking about climate change.  Folks in Arizona can find it at 1100AM or listen streaming here.

I have stayed away from the story about Hollywood producer/director James Cameron backing out of a climate debate at the last minute, a debate he demanded and previously had thumped his chest that he would win going away.  The event in Aspen was being run and attended by folks totally sympathetic to Cameron and completely hostile to the skeptic's position.  The event's founder and producer Chip Comins is almost defamatory in how he talks about skeptic Mark Morano, who was to debate Cameron and was actually on a plane flying to the event when Cameron backed out.  Its amazing that Morano would agree to debate in such a hostile environment with a biased organizer, but in fact it was Cameron who chickened out.  This statement by Comins tells you all you need to know about Hollywood culture:

"Morano is not at James Cameron's level to debate, and that's why that didn't happen," Comins said. "Cameron should be debating someone who is similar to his stature in our society."

I have written before about carbon offset scams -- even well intentioned programs are unlikely to achieve their promised benefits because

• The projects they fund are typically not incremental -- many likely would have proceeded without the offset funds, so that the benefits are effectively double counted.
• I have never seen any of these programs submit themselves to 3rd party offset of their supposed CO2 reductions.  In most cases, these are faith-based programs where it is impolite to ask if the promised reductions actually occur.

Randal O'Toole has a good example of a program that makes all these mistakes, and compounds them with absurdly high administrative costs.  One is left to wonder whether the Oregon state-run program is actually reducing CO2 or simply making sure a number of government salaries get paid.

In 2006, Climate Trust spent about two-thirds of its funds on carbon offsets, while most of the rest went for payroll and professional fees. In 2007, the share going to carbon offsets declined to 64 percent. By 2008, as near as I can tell, none of Climate Trust's money went for carbon offsets. Instead, 73 percent of its $1.65 million budget went for salaries, fees, and other compensation. It also spent more than $120,000 on travel and conferences and $95,000 on rent and office expenses. In 2008, Climate Trust paid its executive director $154,000, not counting health insurance and other fringe benefits. At least one other staff member whose title was "director of offset programs" was paid more than $100,000 and a third one received $88,000.

Not since the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups have there been two great populist tastes that go so great together.  In an amazing bit of fact-free scare mongering gauged to panic everyone across the political spectrum, Michael Oppenheimer (embarrassingly a professor at my alma mater) manages to combine demagoguing against Mexican immigration with climate alarmism

Climbing temperatures are expected to raise sea levels and increase droughts, floods, heat waves and wildfires.

Now, scientists are predicting another consequence of climate change: mass migration to the United States.

Between 1.4 million and 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the U.S. by 2080 as climate change reduces crop yields and agricultural production in Mexico, according to a study published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The number could amount to 10% of the current population of Mexicans ages 15 to 65.

The proceedings of the NAS has become a joke of late.  Roger Pielke Jr responded:

To be blunt, the paper is guesswork piled on top of "what ifs" built on a foundation of tenuous assumptions. The authors seem to want to have things both ways -- they readily acknowledge the many and important limitations of their study, but then go on to assert that "it is nevertheless instructive to predict future migrant flows for Mexico using the estimates at hand to assess the possible magnitude of climate change"“related emigration." It can't be both -- if the paper has many important limitations, then this means that that it is not particularly instructive. With respect to predicting immigration in 2080 (!), admitting limitations is no serious flaw.

To use this paper as a prediction of anything would be a mistake. It is a tentative sensitivity study of the effects of one variable on another, where the relationship between the two is itself questionable but more importantly, dependent upon many other far more important factors. The authors admit this when they write, "It is important to note that our projections should be interpreted in a ceteris paribus manner, as many other factors besides climate could potentially influence migration from Mexico to the United States." but then right after they assert, "Our projections are informative,nevertheless, in quantifying the potential magnitude of impacts of climate change on out-migration." It is almost as if the paper is written to be misinterpreted

I thought this response was instructive

Philip Martin, an expert in agricultural economics at UC Davis, said that he hadn't read the study but that making estimates based solely on climate change was virtually impossible.

"It is just awfully hard to separate climate change from the many, many other factors that affect people's decisions whether to stay in agriculture or move," he said.

The same exact statement, by the way, could be made as to the relationship of climate change to the single variable manmade CO2 without reference to the myriad of other factors that affect the complex climate system.

In my Forbes column this week, I discuss the incredible similarity between the computer models that are used to justify the Obama stimulus and the climate models that form the basis for the proposition that manmade CO2 is causing most of the world's warming.

The climate modeling approach is so similar to that used by the CEA to score the stimulus that there is even a climate equivalent to the multiplier found in macro-economic models. In climate models, small amounts of warming from man-made CO2 are multiplied many-fold to catastrophic levels by hypothetical positive feedbacks, in the same way that the first-order effects of government spending are multiplied in Keynesian economic models. In both cases, while these multipliers are the single most important drivers of the models' results, they also tend to be the most controversial assumptions. In an odd parallel, you can find both stimulus and climate debates arguing whether their multiplier is above or below one.

Over at my climate blog, I discuss the amazing similarity between Obama's claims for the effects of the stimulus and the IPCC's claims for the effects of CO2 on past temperatures.  Both seem to reach their results by assuming that all the other variables in a complex system (climate or the economy) can be isolated and assessed and coincidentally are exactly the value necessary to prove that the variable under study (CO2 or the stimulus) had exactly the effect the studies authors thought it would.

Via Christopher Horner:

Spain's Dr. Gabriel Calzada "” the author of a damning study concluding that Spain's "green jobs" energy program has been a catastrophic economic failure "” was mailed a dismantled bomb on Tuesday by solar energy company Thermotechnic.

Says Calzada:

Before opening it, I called [Thermotechnic] to know what was inside "¦ they answered, it was their answer to my energy pieces.

Dr. Calzada contacted a terrorism expert to handle the package. The expert first performed a scan of the package, then opened it in front of a journalist, Dr. Calzada, and a private security expert.

The terrorism consultant said he had seen this before:

This time you receive unconnected pieces. Next time it can explode in your hands.

Dr. Calzada added:

[The terrorism expert] told me that this was a warning.

The bomb threat is just the latest intimidation Dr. Calzada has faced since releasing his report and following up with articles in Expansion (a Spanish paper similar to the Financial Times). A minister from Spain's Socialist government called the rector of King Juan Carlos University "” Dr. Calzada's employer "” seeking Calzada's ouster. Calzada was not fired, but he was stripped of half of his classes at the university. The school then dropped its accreditation of a summer university program with which Calzada's think tank "” Instituto Juan de Mariana "” was associated.

Additionally, the head of Spain's renewable energy association and the head of its communist trade union wrote opinion pieces in top Spanish newspapers accusing Calzada of being "unpatriotic" "” they did not charge him with being incorrect, but of undermining Spain by daring to write the report.

In the 1970's, during the Arab oil embargo, oil company presidents were dragged to Washington to defend themselves from charges that they were holding tankers offshore to drive up prices and all kinds of crazy BS.  Since that time, in every oil price spike, oil companies were vilified by the Left for destroying the American economy by driving up oil prices (artificially, I suppose).

Now, however, is seems that this was all wrong.  The fossil fuel price increases and artificial supply shortages needed to cut our CO2 emissions by 50% are enormous.  The Europeans have $9 gas and they are not near these targets, in fact in many countries their fossil fuel use has gone up.  We have been in a substantial economic slowdown, but even at these lower output and consumption levels we are far short of a 50% target.

But now the EPA says it has a computer model (stop me if you have heard that one before in the global warming debate) that says that proposed efforts to cut CO2 emissions by 50% in the next 20 years will have a negligible impact on the US economy over the next 20 years.

But there's another reason it was disappointing that Obama didn't mention carbon pricing: his own EPA had handed him a perfect excuse just one day before. In a detailed analysis of John Kerry's American Power Act, the EPA provided estimates of how it would affect carbon emissions and how much it would cost the average American. The results were remarkably reassuring.

On the emissions front, the APA would have a dramatic effect: US emissions would be cut nearly in half by 2030 compared to doing nothing. That's an enormous impact.

But how much would it cost? The answer is: almost nothing. According to EPA's models, if we do nothing, consumption of goods and services in the United States will increase 74.1% by 2030. If APA is passed, consumption will increase 73.4%.That's it. We can cut carbon emissions nearly in half, and the net cost will be a decrease in consumption of 0.7% in 2030. EPA figures this comes to an average annual cost of $146 per household. That's 40 cents a day per family.

And everyone on the Left is credulously lining up to say that this sounds about right to them.    Well, now you tell us.   And if this is true, why have you been hammering on the oil companies for 40 years if oil price increases are virtually irrelevant to the economy.

Look, the is is utter BS.  I have a wild optimism about the power of free minds to innovate and handle about anything if they are allowed, but even so there is no way that an energy price increase (or artificial shortage, take you pick of mechanisms) large enough to cut output by 50% in 20 years will have a negligible impact on the economy.  No way.

Update: I am skimming the EPA power point presentation.  I am looking at one chart that shows a shows coal with CO2 capture around 5% of US energy production about 12% of electricity production by 2030.  Absolutely no freaking way.  They are on drugs.  CO2 capture is never going to happen except when exorbitantly subsidized by the government.

And they show natural gas going way down.  Why?  Replacing coal-produced electricity with natural gas produced electricity is probably the most effective single CO2 reduction step that exists after certain conservation approaches.  But despite huge availability in the US, they show gas consumption going down by half.  If so, those are some pretty screwed up incentives in the bill.

Update #2: I found the price chart.  Apparently they project they will get all this fossil fuel reduction with an increase of electricity prices from 11 cents per Kwh in 2030 without the law to 14 cents with the law.  Gasoline prices with the law will be increased by about 25 cents a gallon in 2030 by the law.  So we are going to get a government imposed 50% reduction in CO2 output in 20 years with a price increase that is within the natural variation over a couple of months in the gasoline market?  Yeah, right.  We all will be riding unicorns to work instead.

Question:  How many years does it take for a typical government / green investment to pay off?

Example 1:

Mesa got $1 million in federal stimulus money to replace 2500 traffic lights with LED's. That's $400 a light which probably includes the cost of installation. Once they are operational, Mesa expects to save $0.028 million per year in electricity costs. At that rate, it will only take 35.7 years of savings to get the $1 million back.

Example 2:

Nine turbines from seven manufacturers, including Reno's Windspire, are being installed to test their performances in different environments. The first turbine was installed at the sewer plant in Stead and the second at Mira Loma Park.The nine turbines and several solar projects together are a $3.5 million investment, before $1.7 million in energy rebates are applied to reduce that cost. The projects are expected to save 788,932 kilowatt hours a year for an annual savings of $91,000 a year [a 38-year payback].

The latter example actually over-estimates the payback, because it ignores the substantial maintenance costs of wind turbines (what percentage have you actually seen running?) as well as the systematic over-estimation of their power output.  Incredibly, the SF Chronicle's green writer/blogger actually brags up the Reno boondoggle.

Postscript: In the comments of the wind turbine article I added, in response to the projects green credentials:

But, you say, its not about return on investment but CO2 reduction. OK, lets look at that, forgetting for a minute whether Reno taxpayers should be paying extra for electricity to reduce global temperatures by 0.00000000001C.

Let's consider an alternate investment in gas turbine electric generation, and assume it and the wind turbines are displacing coal-fired power. Per Kw-H, gas turbines are going to, even including the fuel, produce power for a fourth or less the cost of wind with these relatively small turbines. And gas is plentiful and most of it comes from the gold old USofA (or at least North America).

But it's not zero emission you say. OK, but if it is 1/4 the cost that means that it can displace four times as much coal power for the same investment. And it is as low of CO2 emissions per btu as you can get in a fossil fuel. In fact, 4X of gas generation would reduce CO2 emissions more than 1X of wind. So even in terms of CO2 emissions, wind here is a bad investment.

Do you remember the State Science Institute report on Rearden Metal?  If you were like me, you thought that this ridiculous report was an exaggeration, a literary device to make a point.  But as in so much of Atlas Shrugged, I am finding that it was no exaggeration at all.

Check out this real life example of "science."  From the real state science folks at the Interagency Working Group on Climate Change and Health.

There are potential impacts on cancer both directly from climate change and indirectly from climate change mitigation strategies. Climate change will result in higher ambient temperatures that may
increase the transfer of volatile and semi-volatile compounds from water and wastewater into the atmosphere, and alter the distribution of contaminants to places more distant from the sources, changing subsequent human exposures. Climate change is also expected to increase heavy precipitation and flooding events, which may increase the chance of toxic contamination leaks from storage facilities or runoff into water from land containing toxic pollutants. Very little is
known about how such transfers will affect people's exposure to these chemicals"”some of which are known carcinogens"”and its ultimate impact on incidence of cancer.  More research is needed to determine the likelihood of this type of contamination, the geographical areas and populations most likely to be impacted, and the health outcomes that could result.

Although the exact mechanisms of cancer in humans and animals are not completely understood for all cancers, factors in cancerdevelopment include pathogens, environmental contaminants, age, and genetics. Given the challenges of understanding the causes of cancer, the links between climate change and cancer are a mixture of fact and supposition, and research is needed to fill in the gaps in what we know.

One possible direct impact of climate change on cancer may be through increases in exposure to toxic chemicals that are known or suspected to cause cancer following heavy rainfall and by
increased volatilization of chemicals under conditions of increased temperature. In the case of heavy rainfall or flooding, there may be an increase in leaching of toxic chemicals and heavy metals
from storage sites and increased contamination of water with runoff containing persistent chemicals that are already in the environment. Marine animals, including mammals, also may suffer
direct effects of cancer linked to sustained or chronic exposure to chemical contaminants in the marine environment, and thereby serve as indicators of similar risks to humans.64 Climate impact
studies on such model cancer populations may provide added dimensions to our understanding of the human impacts.

Remember, the point of this all is not science, but funding.  This is basically a glossy budget presentation, probably cranked out by some grad students over some beers, tasked to come up with scary but marginally plausible links between health issues and climate change.   Obama has said that climate is really, really important to him.  He has frozen a lot of agency budgets, and told them new money is only for programs that supports his major initiatives, like climate change.  So, every agency says that their every problem is due to climate change, just as every agency under Bush said that they were critical to fighting terrorism.  This document is the NIH salvo to get climate change money, not actual science.

I will be making a presentation on the science of the climate skeptic's position on April 12 from 5-7PM at the University of Colorado "“ Colorado Springs (UCCS) in the UC 302 theater  (campus map).  I hope folks who are interested in the Denver / Colorado Springs area will attend.

Every study I have ever seen has said that corn ethanol is only marginally energy-positive when its growing and production costs are considered and barely breakeven on CO2.  In other words, it costs a lot and does nothing, even before one considers negative effects to food prices and land use.

So of course, the Obama administration may soon demand that we subsidize more of it

Burdened by falling gasoline consumption and excess production capacity, ethanol producers appealed to the government on Friday to raise the 10 percent limit on ethanol in most gasoline blends to as high as 15 percent.

Ethanol plants are closing across the country and some ethanol producers are declaring bankruptcy. The appeal will require the Obama administration to decide whether to increase federal support for the industry, which has already benefited from an array of subsidies, tax credits and Congressional production mandates.

"Approving the use of ethanol blends up to 15 percent is a necessary and positive step," said Bob Dinneen, president of the Renewable Fuels Association, an industry lobbying group, "to ensure the full potential of a robust domestic ethanol industry."

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department have been testing higher ethanol blends. The E.P.A. has nine months to review the request, but it could decide before that to increase the blend cap slightly, to 12 or 13 percent.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu has indicated that he would favor at least a small increase in ethanol levels unless auto companies said there was a risk the change would damage their products.

At least the article is marginally honest - its starts with the true reason for the mandate - improving the bottom line of favored businesses, not energy or environmental policy.  Chu seems to be joining Krugman as another Nobel prize winner turned political hack.  In the past I have had Chu's supposed gravitas thrown at me in climate debates -- I think this should settle just how Chu makes choices between what science tells him vs. what politcal pressures are demanding.

James Lovelock in the Guardian, via Bishop Hill

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

I am pretty sure Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would like to put democracy on hold for a while.

I will be making a presentation on the science of the climate skeptic's position on April 12 from 5-7PM at the University of Colorado "“ Colorado Springs (UCCS) in the UC 302 theater  (campus map).  I hope folks who are interested in the Denver / Colorado Springs area will attend.

No, today's post is not on health care, but CO2 abatement.  Marlo Lewis looks at a new Harvard study, and concludes what I have been saying for years -- gas prices are going to have to be forced to $10 or more in this country before we even start making a dent in the Administrations or UN's CO2 abatement targets.   I obviously don't think it is justified based on my views on the climate sensitivity to CO2, but even if it were, let's not pretend it is somehow free.

I have to tell one of my favorite stories of chutzpah.  In the 1940's and 1950's, railroads were making the transition from steam engines to diesel engines.  One of the changes was that a diesel engine only needed a driver, it did not need a fireman as steam engines did to shovel coal and keep the boiler running well.   The unions of course saw this coming.  So what did they do?  They preemptively made the demand that diesel engines should have to have TWO fireman.  Railroads spent so much time fighting this insane proposal that it took them years to get the firemen per locomotive to the correct number (ie zero).

I am reminded of this story when I think of how the Obama administration has handled the issue of CO2 abatement.  Reasonable people understand that CO2 abatement will be horrifically expensive - it just will not be cheap in terms of cost or lost economic output and lost personal liberties to take the country back to a CO2 per capita it last had in the 19th century.     But rather than taking this on, the Obama administration preemtively attacked, saying that in fact Co2 abatement would lead to economic growth and job creation.  This was the broken windows fallacy on steroids, but the usual progressive illiterates and consumers of party talking points have run with it.

We are finally getting folks to start to address the true costs of CO2 abatement, and they are enormous.  People who push the precautionary principle try to say that even a small risk of climate catastrophe outweighs some minor abatement costs.  But does a small change of manmade warming outweigh a near certainty of enormous economic costs?

I have said for years that to really get to an 80% reduction target, gas prices would have to rise over $20 a gallon  (they are at $10 already in Europe and they are no where near the targets).  Some researchers looked at the gas price implications of more modest CO2 targets:

To meet the Obama administration's targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, some researchers say, Americans may have to experience a sobering reality: gas at $7 a gallon.

To reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the transportation sector 14 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, the cost of driving must simply increase, according to a forthcoming report by researchers at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.

And this is with a straight tax, probably the most efficient way to hit the targets.  The study agreed that other intervenist approaches didn't seem to work as well as a straight tax:

In the modeling, it turned out that issuing tax credits could backfire, while taxes on fuel proved beneficial.

I fixed the links on the powerpoint and pdf dowloads in this post.  Here are the correct links:

Powerpoint presentation with notes pages (.ppt)

Adobe Acrobat .pdf file

The video links are still here.

Once upon a time, Al Gore had a PowerPoint deck. Several years ago, I came to the conclusion that Gore's presentation was deeply flawed, so I made my own PowerPoint deck in response, and have been updating it ever since. Here is the most recent version (UPDATE: Links Fixed)

Powerpoint presentation with notes pages (.ppt)

Adobe Acrobat .pdf file

Then, Al Gore made a movie from his PowerPoint deck. He won an Oscar and a Nobel prize for his movie. Those are a bit out of my reach, so I will have to settle for actually being right. My previous movie showed my PowerPoint deck presented to a live audience, and can still be found online here. I felt the sound quality could be improved and the narration could be tighter, so I went into the "studio" to create a tighter version. The product of this is what I believe to be my best effort yet at explaining, in a comprehensive but simple manner, the science of the skeptic's position to laymen.

I have become a big fan of Vimeo because I don't have to break videos up into 10-minute chunks as on YouTube. The Vimeo version is here and is embedded below:

Other Viewing Options

When I get the time to break this into 9(!) parts, I will post a link here to YouTube.

You can download the 212MB .wmv file here (link on the lower right). Alternatively, it can also be found here. The .wmv is also available via BitTorrent: You can find its page at or the torrent directly .

Download the .iso file (DVD disk image) to make you own playable DVD here (beware: 1.6GB). A free tool to burn the DVD from the image is ImgBurn

The .iso file is also available via BitTorrent: you can find its page at with the torrent .

Finally, you can buy the DVD at cost, here, for $7.50 plus shipping.

I stole this post title from Ayn Rand, but it seems appropriate to this story by James Delingpole.  Apparently James Hansen, leader of NASA's GISS, which does most of its climate research, wants to turn back the clock on industrialized civilization.    A new book by Keith Farnish writes:

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization.

And continues:

I'm rarely afraid of stating the truth, but some truths are far harder to give than others; one of them is that people will die in huge numbers when civilization collapses. Step outside of civilization and you stand a pretty good chance of surviving the inevitable; stay inside and when the crash happens there may be nothing at all you can do to save yourself. The speed and intensity of the crash will depend an awful lot on the number of people who are caught up in it: greater numbers of people have more structural needs "“ such as food production, power generation and healthcare "“ which need to be provided by the collapsing civilization; greater numbers of people create more social tension and more opportunity for extremism and violence; greater numbers of people create more sewage, more waste, more bodies "“ all of which cause further illness and death.

I wonder what Mr. Farnish thinks the average life expectancy was before the industrial revolution, or even "civilization?"  But my intention here is not to shoot fish in Mr. Farnish's barrel.  What is interesting is who approached Farnish and offered, unsolicited, to blurb his book:  James Hansen.  Here is Hansen's endorsement:

Keith Farnish has it right: time has practically run out, and the 'system' is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests "“ they will not look after our and the planet's well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort.

Does anyone believe that a person who believes this wouldn't misrepresent the science or fudge his temperature metrics to support his cause.  If he expects civilization to crash, why do we expect him to operate by the rules of civilized society?

I have cleaned up my Powerpoint presentation and added my narration on the notes pages. I have this available both as a .ppt file as well as a pdf. The pdf, I think, works particularly well -- it looks and reads more like a book. This is my best current cut at presenting the science of the skeptic's position and mostly supersedes my earlier book. Right click either to download. You are welcome to use the presentation with your own local groups.

Powerpoint presentation with notes pages (.ppt)

Adobe Acrobat .pdf file

Some example pages:

From a reader:

One contentious comma inserted two years ago into the United Nations road map for a new deal to fight global warming is again causing squabbles among delegates from the 193 nations in Copenhagen devising the pact.The comma was inserted on the first page, section 1 b (ii), of the so-called Bali Action Plan at the meeting on the Indonesian island in 2007 at the insistence of the U.S. It caused a debate that ran for two hours as the punctuation mark left open to interpretation the responsibilities of rich and poor nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions....

Delegates from the U.S. argued for the comma to be inserted so that "actions" by developing countries and not just support from industrialized nations, would be measurable, reportable and verifiable, or MRV in UN jargon.

"It took almost two hours to debate the comma," Quamrul Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi envoy who's negotiated climate issues since before the Rio Earth summit in 1992, said in an interview in Copenhagen. "One comma creates a lot of trouble."

Even with the comma, the clause is still argued over....

"The comma is a manifestation of a massive area of disagreement still among the parties," Havercamp of the Environmental Defense Fund said.

Try to listen without any sharp instruments at hand.

I am slammed here at work, but I will give you a couple of nice articles on this topic.  First from IBD:

The United Nations' Copenhagen Climate Conference is going fast into meltdown. It may be because it's not about climate anymore, but fitting a noose on the world's productive economies and extracting wealth transfers.

Poor countries have gone from defending their right to economic development as a reason for exemptions to emissions cuts to claiming a "legitimate" right to vast wealth transfers from the West to prevent emissions. They call it "climate justice."

Monday, the Group of 77, led by African states, shut down the conference for the second time, saying they would pick up their marbles and go home if the West didn't agree to their formula for emissions cutbacks and send them more than the $10 billion promised by the West....

Having manipulated the foreign aid racket for decades, the African officials knew just what buttons to push with Western Europeans. Not surprisingly, they won concessions. No doubt they'll do it again to get more, and the Danes and other one-worlders will give them what they want.

The second is from Charles Krauthammer

The idea of essentially taxing hardworking citizens of the democracies to fill the treasuries of Third World kleptocracies went nowhere, thanks mainly to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (and the debt crisis of the early '80s). They put a stake through the enterprise.

But such dreams never die. The raid on the Western treasuries is on again, but today with a new rationale to fit current ideological fashion. With socialism dead, the gigantic heist is now proposed as a sacred service of the newest religion: environmentalism.

One of the major goals of the Copenhagen climate summit is another NIEO shakedown: the transfer of hundreds of billions from the industrial West to the Third World to save the planet by, for example, planting green industries in the tristes tropiques....

Socialism having failed so spectacularly, the left was adrift until it struck upon a brilliant gambit: metamorphosis from red to green. The cultural elites went straight from the memorial service for socialism to the altar of the environment. The objective is the same: highly centralized power given to the best and the brightest, the new class of experts, managers and technocrats. This time, however, the alleged justification is not abolishing oppression and inequality but saving the planet.

Update:

Leaders of fifty African nations came to Copenhagen asking $400 billion for the next three years to "offset" carbon credit "damages" which they claim to suffer. Inexplicably, two days ago, that demand was increased to an eye-goggling 5% of GDP (gross domestic product), estimated at $722 billion from the United States alone. There never was a response from the industrialized world.

The London Guardian reports today that the disgruntled Africans may boycott the rest of the climate summit. The conference's own web page quotes the Ethiopian prime minister as saying he will "scuttle" talks unless there is discussion of "real money" and "not an illusion."