budanski
12-02-2003, 11:56 PM
Letting the hot air out of Kyoto -
Neil Collins - The Daily Telegraph
National Post (http://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.asp?id=0373632D-2A31-4D1B-806E-BE8CC3F301FE)
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
When The Skeptical Environmentalist was published two years ago, it caused no end of trouble. Bjorn Lomborg was a statistician who was fed up with the flaky numbers that support so many of those doom-and-gloom forecasts, so he set out to try to establish the facts. His conclusions were a bitter disappointment to those who have made careers out of spooking us with tales of impending disaster.
He found that, on the whole, things are getting better. On all objective measures of health, prosperity, access to valuable technology, levels of pollution and general well-being, the proportion of the global population that is benefiting has never been higher. We are not, he decided, heading for Hell in a handcart. Fittingly for a statistician, his book made strenuous efforts to track down source material. It contains nearly 3,000 footnotes, and made Lomborg public enemy No. 1 among the environmental fascists.
It is probably too much to hope that Adapt or Die will have the same seismic impact on these sensitive souls, but it represents a long-overdue and concerted attack on the Kyoto Protocol, that far-away agreement whose true costs are only now starting to appear over the economic horizon.
Kyoto was John Prescott's first international boondoggle following his elevation to the dizzy height of Britain's Deputy Prime Minister, and he had a lovely time. He returned home having committed Britain to huge cuts in the level of emissions of carbon dioxide. And why not? After all, under New Labour at Year Zero, anything was possible, and 2010 must have seemed an impossibly long time away.
Well, it isn't now, and it's starting to dawn on tired old Labour that hitting those targets is going to be both expensive and painful. Adapt or Die argues, with almost as many source footnotes as Lomborg, that it's also pointless. A telling chapter from Martin Agerup (a Danish economist rather than a Swedish statistician) asks whether Kyoto is a good idea, and by now you won't be surprised by the answer.
The Kyoto meeting came about because of worries that human activity was raising the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide lets ultraviolet radiation through, but traps infrared -- the so-called greenhouse effect. Ergo, more of it, thanks to our profligacy with fossil fuels, must mean global warming. The consequences will be dire, and it's all our fault.
This is a potent argument for the hair-shirt brigade who secretly hope for tsunami, pestilence and mass starvation to sweep us all away, as a kind of retribution for our decadent squandering of the Earth's bounty. Such feelings underpin the directionless protests against globalization, and the Kyoto Protocol was one response from bemused governments.
Unfortunately, the science doesn't support the doomsters' thesis. Agerup points out that it's hard enough to forecast the weather a week ahead, let alone a decade hence; he then picks apart the stats on which Kyoto is based, and finds it "amazing that such sloppy practices are used as an input to a modelling exercise that involves the use of supercomputers and costs millions."
He further points out that "there is no empirical evidence that hurricanes and storms are increasing in frequency or intensity," and concludes that it's not even clear from the science whether more CO2 in the atmosphere will mean a warmer or colder planet.
There's little doubt that Kyoto gave its participants a global warming glow of self-righteousness, but nobody seems to have asked what it was all for. Global warming itself might be bad news for polar bears, penguins and very low-lying countries, but if it turns the southern Arctic regions temperate, it's a massive gain for the proportion of the land mass which will sustain comfortable human life.
It takes money to reduce pollution, educate the young and encourage changes in work patterns in backward countries. The demands of Kyoto will reduce growth in developed countries, leaving less to spend on good causes. Indeed, if only a tiny fraction of the growth forgone was used instead to help the poor, it would make far more impact than the self-denying ordinance to pump out less CO2. The principal barrier to prosperity in the Third World has nothing to do with our use, or abuse, of raw materials. In Britain, it is our old friend the Common Agricultural Policy and its American sister, farm support, helped by its cousin, Japan's barriers to food imports. Had this ugly trio been specifically designed to keep the Third World poor, it could hardly have done it better.
Free trade in agriculture would benefit both sides as surely as free trade in goods has done. If the greens and their friends could grasp this, it would do more to help everybody on the planet than all the hot air and good intentions from that hopelessly misguided boondoggle in Kyoto all those years ago.
Its seems the Russians have now taken their cue (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=753&e=1&u=/nm/20031202/sc_nm/environment_kyoto_dc) from the evil Bush Syndicate.
The EU should follow suit (http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1098635,00.html).
On target
Sweden +3.3% UK +1.4%
Off target
Germany -1.3% Luxembourg -5.6% France -9.5% Italy -10.2% Greece -10.7% Netherlands -12.1% Portugal -14% Finland -16.5% Belgium -22.9% Austria -24.5% Ireland -26.8% Spain -33.3% Denmark -37.8%
I'm shocked, shocked that the EU refuses to live up to the standards they expected of the US.
Seeing that the Sun (not the british variety) contributes 99% of the "warming" on earth, theres a simple solution to the problem. Destroy the Sun.
Neil Collins - The Daily Telegraph
National Post (http://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.asp?id=0373632D-2A31-4D1B-806E-BE8CC3F301FE)
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
When The Skeptical Environmentalist was published two years ago, it caused no end of trouble. Bjorn Lomborg was a statistician who was fed up with the flaky numbers that support so many of those doom-and-gloom forecasts, so he set out to try to establish the facts. His conclusions were a bitter disappointment to those who have made careers out of spooking us with tales of impending disaster.
He found that, on the whole, things are getting better. On all objective measures of health, prosperity, access to valuable technology, levels of pollution and general well-being, the proportion of the global population that is benefiting has never been higher. We are not, he decided, heading for Hell in a handcart. Fittingly for a statistician, his book made strenuous efforts to track down source material. It contains nearly 3,000 footnotes, and made Lomborg public enemy No. 1 among the environmental fascists.
It is probably too much to hope that Adapt or Die will have the same seismic impact on these sensitive souls, but it represents a long-overdue and concerted attack on the Kyoto Protocol, that far-away agreement whose true costs are only now starting to appear over the economic horizon.
Kyoto was John Prescott's first international boondoggle following his elevation to the dizzy height of Britain's Deputy Prime Minister, and he had a lovely time. He returned home having committed Britain to huge cuts in the level of emissions of carbon dioxide. And why not? After all, under New Labour at Year Zero, anything was possible, and 2010 must have seemed an impossibly long time away.
Well, it isn't now, and it's starting to dawn on tired old Labour that hitting those targets is going to be both expensive and painful. Adapt or Die argues, with almost as many source footnotes as Lomborg, that it's also pointless. A telling chapter from Martin Agerup (a Danish economist rather than a Swedish statistician) asks whether Kyoto is a good idea, and by now you won't be surprised by the answer.
The Kyoto meeting came about because of worries that human activity was raising the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide lets ultraviolet radiation through, but traps infrared -- the so-called greenhouse effect. Ergo, more of it, thanks to our profligacy with fossil fuels, must mean global warming. The consequences will be dire, and it's all our fault.
This is a potent argument for the hair-shirt brigade who secretly hope for tsunami, pestilence and mass starvation to sweep us all away, as a kind of retribution for our decadent squandering of the Earth's bounty. Such feelings underpin the directionless protests against globalization, and the Kyoto Protocol was one response from bemused governments.
Unfortunately, the science doesn't support the doomsters' thesis. Agerup points out that it's hard enough to forecast the weather a week ahead, let alone a decade hence; he then picks apart the stats on which Kyoto is based, and finds it "amazing that such sloppy practices are used as an input to a modelling exercise that involves the use of supercomputers and costs millions."
He further points out that "there is no empirical evidence that hurricanes and storms are increasing in frequency or intensity," and concludes that it's not even clear from the science whether more CO2 in the atmosphere will mean a warmer or colder planet.
There's little doubt that Kyoto gave its participants a global warming glow of self-righteousness, but nobody seems to have asked what it was all for. Global warming itself might be bad news for polar bears, penguins and very low-lying countries, but if it turns the southern Arctic regions temperate, it's a massive gain for the proportion of the land mass which will sustain comfortable human life.
It takes money to reduce pollution, educate the young and encourage changes in work patterns in backward countries. The demands of Kyoto will reduce growth in developed countries, leaving less to spend on good causes. Indeed, if only a tiny fraction of the growth forgone was used instead to help the poor, it would make far more impact than the self-denying ordinance to pump out less CO2. The principal barrier to prosperity in the Third World has nothing to do with our use, or abuse, of raw materials. In Britain, it is our old friend the Common Agricultural Policy and its American sister, farm support, helped by its cousin, Japan's barriers to food imports. Had this ugly trio been specifically designed to keep the Third World poor, it could hardly have done it better.
Free trade in agriculture would benefit both sides as surely as free trade in goods has done. If the greens and their friends could grasp this, it would do more to help everybody on the planet than all the hot air and good intentions from that hopelessly misguided boondoggle in Kyoto all those years ago.
Its seems the Russians have now taken their cue (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=753&e=1&u=/nm/20031202/sc_nm/environment_kyoto_dc) from the evil Bush Syndicate.
The EU should follow suit (http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1098635,00.html).
On target
Sweden +3.3% UK +1.4%
Off target
Germany -1.3% Luxembourg -5.6% France -9.5% Italy -10.2% Greece -10.7% Netherlands -12.1% Portugal -14% Finland -16.5% Belgium -22.9% Austria -24.5% Ireland -26.8% Spain -33.3% Denmark -37.8%
I'm shocked, shocked that the EU refuses to live up to the standards they expected of the US.
Seeing that the Sun (not the british variety) contributes 99% of the "warming" on earth, theres a simple solution to the problem. Destroy the Sun.