Morano on consensus and climate insurance

An interesting exchange of emails between Bill Houck and Marc Morano of the Inhofe EPW Press Blog posted as Marc Morano uses facts to answer an "ad hominem" attack from an alleged scientist at Greenie Watch:

One would have hoped that a scientist would have put scientific points to Morano but it was not so. Bill Houck [billhouck@bellsouth.net] (the Bill Houck of the EPA, I assume) wrote rather condescendingly to Marc Morano (of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee) as follows:

Assuming you are sincere in your beliefs about the lack of evidence proving `global warming', I would encourage you to look back 45 - 50 years ago and consider the (400 or so) "prominent scientists" or doctors the tobacco companies would parade around who would insist that cigarette smoking was not proven to be seriously harmful to your health. Perhaps 400 said no while many thousands accepted the obvious about smoking without feeling compelled to write or make public statements about it. After all, it was obvious.

Even if the warming/dimming concerns are exaggerated, there's no great down side to halting excessive and unnecessary pollution. Certainly everyone would want an environment that is as clean as possible.

Morano replied politely as follows:

Thank you for writing. You may have a good point with your tobacco analogy. Please read this article, I do tend to agree with the comparison.

As for the "thousands" of scientists who believe we face a "climate crisis," where are they? The UN IPCC had only 52 scientists write the alarmist Summary for Policymakers in 2007. There are no "thousands" of UN scientists. Even the UN says "hundreds" but they are not involved in the media hyped summary. Many of the "hundreds" of UN scientists are skeptical of the alarmist summary written by the 52 scientists. Many of the skeptics are profiled in our report.

Even the National Academy of Sciences and American Meteorological Society's "consensus" statement was only voted on by two dozen or so governing board members, rank and file scientists never had a say. Take a look at this post, an environmental scientist admits he never looked at evidence of man-made climate fears, he just parroted the UN's line. Because of the new Senate report of over 400, he is now reconsidering his views. See here

Finally, as for your "no great downside" to halting pollution. Of course that statement is true. But that is not what we are facing. Because of fears of a "tipping point" and we "must act now" and "it's cheaper to act now than wait" the US and other nations are being rushed into meaningless and ineffective international treaties and complete climate symbolism for huge costs domestically.

In over three decades of global warming fears, there has been no single proposal that would have a detectable impact on temperatures if fully enacted and the alarmists are correct about the science. Even if Kyoto, the grandaddy of all climate agreements were being complied with, it would not have a detectable impact on temps 50 or 100 years from now. (this is not in dispute, Gore's own scientist Tom Wigley has said this).

There is no such thing as an "insurance" policy against warming when it comes to current proposals. The upcoming cap-and-trade LIeberman-Warner bill in the Senate would not have a detectable impact on global temps, but will cost poor and middle class Americans huge amounts in higher energy bills. All economic pain for no climate gain.

Would you buy and insurance policy that had a huge up front premium for absolutely no payout at the end of the term? If you would, then by all means support all of the current climate bills. But if they were "insurance policies" they would be shut down for insurance fraud for taking money and not paying any benefits.

Cleaner burning technology and wealth creation go hand and hand. Saddling our economy with UN mandates and new layers of federal bureaucracy will only make us poorer and not 'solve' the "climate crisis."

After attending the last four UN climate conferences in a row, I can tell you unequivocally that if we were facing a man-made climate "crisis' and the UN were our only hope to "solve" it, we would all be doomed.

Please read this very long speech to understand the scientific and economic and technological issues.

Please do not continue parroting the meaningless line about "insurance" policies or how "thousands" of scientists endorse a mythical "consensus" unless you can show a shred of evidence for your claims.

Above exchange received by email from Marc Morano [marcmorano@gmail.com]

Emphasis added.

Even in France, it seems, there are those who doubt the gospel according to Gore:

The most conspicuous doubter in France is Claude Allegre, a former education minister and a physicist by profession. His new book, ``Ma Verite Sur la Planete'' (``My Truth About the Planet''), doesn't mince words.

He calls Gore a ``crook'' presiding over an eco-business that pumps out cash. As for Gore's French followers, the author likens them to religious zealots who, far from saving humanity, are endangering it. Driven by a Judeo-Christian guilt complex, he says, French greens paint worst-case scenarios and attribute little-understood cycles to human misbehavior.

Allegre doesn't deny that the climate has changed or that extreme weather has become more common. He instead emphasizes the local character of these phenomena.

While the icecap of the North Pole is shrinking, the one covering Antarctica -- or 92 percent of the Earth's ice -- is not, he says. Nor have Scandinavian glaciers receded, he says. To play down these differences by basing forecasts on a global average makes no sense to Allegre.

He dismisses talk of renewable energies, such as wind or solar power, saying it would take a century for them to become a serious factor in meeting the world's energy demands.

Let Us Eat Cake

To his relief, France has taken another path: Almost 80 percent of its electricity comes from nuclear reactors. What's more, France has a talent for eating its cake and having it, too: Although it signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, the country is nowhere near meeting the agreed targets.

What? France is not even close to meeting its Kyoto targets! Where is the outcry from our climate obsessed media?

Global Warming will save America

There are moonbats and then there's... well, Dave Lindorff (photo) - who wrote this in the Baltimore Chronicle on Saturday:

Say what you will about the looming catastrophe facing the world as the pace of global heating and polar melting accelerates. There is a silver lining.

What kind of "silver lining", you ask, could a left wing moonbat possibly find in the coming "catastrophe" of global warming?

So what we see is that huge swaths of conservative America are set to face a biblical deluge in a few more presidential cycles.

Ha! Global warming is the left's secret weapon to wipe out all those right-wing eeevilll conservatives! Heck, the article is even titled Global Warming Will Save America from the Right...Eventually

Good old Dave predicts an environmental disaster for the midwest - but that's OK in his books:

So again, we will see the decline and depopulation of the nation’s vast midsection—noted for its consistent conservatism.

But ol' Dave's not done yet. Hell, he's just gettin' warmed up:

Finally, in the Southwest, already parched and stiflingly hot, the rise in energy costs and the soaring temperatures will put an end to right-wing retirement communities like Phoenix, Tucson and Palm Springs. Already the Salton Sea is fading away and putting Palm Springs on notice that the good times are coming to an end. Another right-wing haven soon to be gone.

So the future political map of America is likely to look as different as the much shrunken geographical map, with much of the so-called “red” state region either gone or depopulated.

Is this guy full of hate and venom? I don't know - it's hard to tell:

The important thing is that we, on the higher ground both actually and figuratively, need to remember that, when they begin their historic migration from their doomed regions, we not give them the keys to the city. They certainly should be offered assistance in their time of need, but we need to keep a firm grip on our political systems, making sure that these guilty throngs who allowed the world to go to hell are gerrymandered into political impotence in their new homes.

Editor's note: Dave needs to get a firm grip on something called reality.

There will be much work to be done to help the earth and its residents—human and non-human—survive this man-made catastrophe, and we can’t have these future refugee troglodytes, should their personal disasters still fail to make them recognize reality, mucking things up again.

It should be considered acceptable, in this stifling new world, to say, “Shut up. We told you this would happen.”

I think Dave's on higher ground all right. But I don't think climbing was involved in his getting there.

So sad about old Dave. His dreams of wiping out conservatives just ain't gonna happen.

PS: If you want to see more of what good ol' Dave is up to, just click here.

Make Global Warming a priority

Brrrr.... Link. h/t: SDA

Also: while we're at it, how about a prediction for 2008?

2008 will be the year when Al Gore and his forecasts of an approaching inferno will be thoroughly discredited, not by the constantly growing legion of global warming skeptics, but by none other than Mother Nature herself.

via NewsMax

The hot air cult

Cal Thomas comments at the Washington Times on a theme that's been observed here in the past: that global warming alarmists are in fact followers of a pseudo-religion:

You don't have to be religious to qualify as a fundamentalist. You can be Al Gore, the messiah figure for the global warming cult, whose followers truly believe their gospel of imminent extermination in a Noah-like flood, if we don't immediately change our carbon-polluting ways.

One of the traits of a cult is its refusal to consider any evidence that might disprove the faith. So it is doubtful the global warming cultists will be moved by 400 scientists, many of whom, says The Washington Times, "are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis." In a report by Republican staff of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, these scientists cast doubt on a "scientific consensus" that human-caused global warming endangers the planet.

Like most cultists, the true believers struck back, not by debating science, but by charging that a small number of the scientists mentioned in the report have taken money from the oil industry.

And Exxon has dismissed the claim as just so much hot air. But we should take a look at the dollars for some startling information:

The pro-global warming cultists enjoy a huge money advantage. Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, noted in an EPW report how much money has been spent researching and promoting climate fears and so-called solutions: "In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $50 billion on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one," he wrote on June 18, 2007. The $19 million spent on research that debunks the global warming faith pales in comparison.

Mr. Thomas doesn't pull any punches when it comes to the Goracle and his followers:

Mr. Gore and his disciples will still be living in their big houses, driving gas-guzzling cars and flying in private jets that leave carbon footprints as large as Bigfoot's, while most of us will be forced to drive tiny automobiles and live in huts resembling the Third World. But hypocrisy is just one of many traits displayed by secular fundamentalists like Mr. Gore.

Before adopting any faith, the agendas of the people attempting to impose it, along with the beliefs held by them and their disciples, should be considered. Al Gore and company are big government liberals who think government is the answer to all our problems, including those they create. As Ronald Reagan often said, in too many cases government is the problem.

That last paragraph sums it up rather nicely.

h/t: the Strong Conservative

Senate: Number of AGW skeptics growing

From Senator Jim Inhofe's EPW Press Blog:

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

The new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s office of the GOP Ranking Member details the views of the scientists, the overwhelming majority of whom spoke out in 2007.

Even some in the establishment media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists. In October, the Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that climate skeptics "appear to be expanding rather than shrinking." Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears “bite the dust.” (LINK) In addition, many scientists who are also progressive environmentalists believe climate fear promotion has "co-opted" the green movement. (LINK)

h/t SDA

Consider this little bit of detective work by Tom Harris of the NRSP into the IPCC's Working Group I (WG I) report on the extent and possible causes of past climate change including future ‘projections’ and the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) published recently by Canada Free Press:

An examination of reviewers’ comments on the last draft of the WG I report before final report assembly (i.e. the ‘Second Order Revision’ or SOR) completely debunks the illusion of hundreds of experts diligently poring over all the chapters of the report and providing extensive feedback to the editing teams. Here’s the reality.

A total of 308 reviewers commented on the SOR, but only 32 reviewers commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented on all 11 chapters of the report. Only about half the reviewers commented more than one chapter. It is logical that reviewers would generally limit their comments to their areas of expertise but it’s a far cry from the idea of thousands of scientists agreeing to anything.

Compounding this is the fact that IPCC editors could, and often did, ignore reviewers’ comments. [...]

An example of rampant misrepresentation of IPCC reports is the frequent assertion that ‘hundreds of IPCC scientists’ are known to support the following statement, arguably the most important of the WG I report, namely “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.”

In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”. Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert reviewers who appear impartial.

So at best, not 2,500 but just 62 scientists reviewed the IPCC's critical chapter that concludes the greenhouse gases are causing climate change. Compare that to the 400+ scientists above and it's pretty clear that there's no consensus on this theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Bolton: It's not unusual for Gore to be wrong

Ambassador John Bolton talks with Fox News' Megyn Kelly about Al Gore, the United Nations and the climate change conference in Bali (click image to watch video):

Well, it's not unusual for Vice President Gore to be wrong, either, as he is in this case. You know, of the G-8 industrialized democracies, four - the United States, Japan, Canada, and Russia - share our view that we don't want numerical targets in this agreement. Four others, the four European countries, disagree. But, within the G-8, it's a four-four split. If you look at the developing countries, Brazil, India, and China all oppose these targets as well. So, the notion that this is the fault of the U.S. is wrong. If anybody's isolated here, I think it's the Europeans and Al Gore.

Via Newsbusters. h/t: Jack's Newswatch

What really happened at Bali

While the liberal media are trumpeting the "deal" reached at the UN conference on climate change in Bali as a "cave in" by both the United States and Canada, the truth is not quite so simple.

Noel Sheppard writes in Manic Misinterpretations of Climate Change Capitulation by US in Bali:

Readers should understand that this was a huge victory for the U.S., and what was indeed missing from the Kyoto Protocol the Clinton administration, with support from then Vice President Al Gore and 95 senators, refused to ratify in 1997. Now, ten years later, developing nations are the ones that have capitulated and agreed to participate in emissions cuts.

Though most media will downplay this, it was indeed a win for the Bush administration and America, as it establishes that any agreement to emissions cuts in the future - assuming such occur - will include developing nations like China and India. This potentially assures that any climate change agreement the U.S. enters into in the future will not give such nations an unfair economic advantage.

Again, this was a HUGE win for the Bush administration that will likely be downplayed by the press.

Downplayed by the press is an understatement. This "deal" sets no hard emissions targets as sought by the Europeans and it effectively ends the exemption enjoyed until now by so-called "developing" nations like China and India. As Sheppard says, "the White House got exactly what it wanted from this conference, and the alarmists got virtually nothing."

The UN's Climate Change Numbers Hoax

Tom Harris writes that that the IPCC must come clean on the real numbers of scientist supporters of their position on anthropogenic global warming:

It’s an assertion repeated by politicians and climate campaigners the world over – ‘2,500 scientists of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agree that humans are causing a climate crisis’.

But it’s not true. And, for the first time ever, the public can now see the extent to which they have been misled. As lies go, it’s a whopper. Here’s the real situation.

It really is startling. You can read the rest at Canada Free Press.

We should give up futile attempts to combat climate change

A group of over 100 scientists has written an open letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations stating the UN climate conference is taking the World in entirely the wrong direction.

Snowjob

A new video from the Heartland.org disputes the common misconceptions about anthropogenic global warming using clips from An Inconvenient Truth and the Great Global Warming Swindle.



The video concludes with this statement:

Learning the facts is the best way to understand that global warming is occurring but is not a crisis. It is better to trust scientists than politicians. Don't let fear ruin your day. Learn the facts.

How inconvenient for the Goracle.

More here.

January 2008 Environment & Climate News

Three respected scientists, Arthur B. Robinson, Noah E. Robinson, and Willie Soon, have written a review article on climate change that is generating considerable “buzz” in the scientific community. The essay, published originally in the peer-reviewed Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, could fundamentally change the world-wide debate on global warming and appears in full in this special edition of ECN. We are thankful to the authors and Dr. Jane Orient, president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons, for permission to reprint it.

via Heartland.org

Download the full review article in the January 2008 issue of Environment & Climate News

UN censors dissenting scientists

From Heartland.org:

Lone voice of dissent censored by United Nations
Written By: Tom Swiss
Published In: News Releases
Publication Date: December 13, 2007
Publisher: The Heartland Institute


(CHICAGO, Illinois - December 13, 2007) -- For the second time this week, the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) was kicked off the press schedule for the United Nations' climate conference in Bali, Indonesia.

The ICSC is a group of scientists from Africa, Australia, Europe, India, New Zealand, and the U.S. who contend sound science does not support the outrageous claims and draconian regulations proposed in Bali.

The ICSC team leader, Bryan Leyland, an expert in carbon and energy trading, reported, "This morning I confirmed we had the main conference hall for 9:00 AM tomorrow. At 4:30 PM today, I found that Barbara Black bumped us off the schedule and closed further bookings. I'm fuming."

Black is NGO liaison officer for the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Bali.

Earlier in the week, UN officials in Bali closed down the ICSC's first press conference there. Black interrupted the press conference and demanded the scientists immediately cease. She threatened to have the police physically remove them from the premises.

Black's efforts are part of the United Nations' ongoing censorship of dissenting voices at Bali. ICSC scientists have been prevented from participating in panel discussions, side events, and exhibits.

For further information:

Bryan Leyland
+64 21 978 996
bryanleyland@mac.com
Christopher Monckton
+44 7980 634784
monckton@mail.com

Study: Part of Global-Warming Model May Be Wrong

via Fox News:

Part of the scientific consensus on global warming may be flawed, a new study asserts.

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate "models" — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth's surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions.

"Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? It seems that the answer is no," said lead study author David H. Douglass, a physicist specializing in climate at the University of Rochester.

Douglass and his co-authors S. Fred Singer, a physicist at the University of Virginia, and John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, are noted global-warming skeptics.

Kyoto Double talk

via today's National Post:

Is it just our imagination, or is there something about global warming that makes Liberals especially unbearable?

(...)

First, there is Stephane Dion, who served as environment minister from 2004 to 2006. He is in Bali this week, spreading the same climate change gospel he refused to implement when he was actually in a position to do so. He calls Mr. Harper's approach "a recipe for failure." Perhaps. But we would prefer Mr. Harper's "recipe" to the equally failed approach Mr. Dion's Liberals advocated while in power -- which consisted in large part of shipping off hundreds of millions of dollars to Vladimir Putin's Russia to purchase carbon credits. Under both the Liberals and the Conservatives, Canada has badly missed its Kyoto targets. At least under Mr. Harper, we don't have to prop up Russia's quasi-dictatorship for the privilege.

Full article.

While Greenies Gab, Science Strides Forward

Marc Sheppard asks, How Green Was My Bali? and explains that the scientific evidence continues to contradict the carbon-minded global warming alarmists gathered at the latest UN climate fest. From today's American Thinker:

Without exception, everything discussed at UNFCC, indeed the very temporary greening of Bali itself, is predicated on the specious argument that GHG, and no other forces, might be driving global temperatures.

But the science on which the U.N's hysteria-engendered flock base their planet-saving plans is settled only in their minds and the reams of hyped reports from the IPCC, which they foolishly expect to dictate global climate policies.

Readers are all too aware of the endless tricks, deceptions, outright lies, and more tricks used to divert attention from any driver not Carbon (and, therefore, not industry) related. Those same readers are well aware that this author believes the factor most irresponsibly ignored by alarmists to be Solar, as I have opined many times, including here , here, and here.

As it happens, last week also saw astronomer and Sun expert Dr David Whitehouse further the case for Solar forcing's majority influence. Whitehouse reported that it's been months since any sunspots have been observed:

"After a period of exceptionally high activity in the 20th century, our Sun has suddenly gone exceptionally quiet."

The significance of which might become quite evident quite quickly. You see, whenever presented with the obvious (and logical) correlations between solar activity and Terran climate in the past, Solar Deniers claimed that continued elevations in global temperatures after 1998 somehow disproved any direct connection. While insignificant in long-term analysis, Whitehouse nonetheless attributed this to the rapid increase between 1978 and 1998, after which average temps have held their high, but steady, level:

"Almost everyone agrees that throughout most of the last century the solar influence was significant. Studies show that by the end of the 20th century the Sun's activity may have been at its highest for more than 8,000 years."

He suggests we're actually in a period of solar activity low enough to not only counteract any GHG increases, but, as proposed by Russian Academy of Sciences members, actually cause temperatures to drop 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2020. Whitehouse dubs this new Solar season, which may even usher in another Little Ice Age, the Modern Solar Minimum. The good doctor also lists it with previously correlative periods the greenies completely ignore.

Solar Deniers? I like that term.

The greening of Al Gore

The Goracle has received a bit of criticism in the press prior to receiving his Nobel Prize.
From the Times Online:

WHO would have thought that saving the planet could be such a lucrative business? Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned environmental campaigner, has made more than £50m in just seven years from his books, speeches and shrewd investments in technology and green ventures.

and from the Daily Mail:

Al Gore is criticised for lining his own pockets after £3,300-per-minute green speech

But at least he's saving the world from CO2 right?
Well, not exactly: Gore Takes Train From Oslo Airport, Luggage Takes Mercedes

Update: scientists in Australia are investigating eco-friendly flatulence.

Lord Monckton: Dishonest political tampering with the science on global warming

Christopher (Lord) Monckton takes a blast at the hypocrisy now playing out at the UN's climate change conference in Bali.

As a contributor to the IPCC's 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate's alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year's Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.

Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.

He doesn't mince his words, does he? He goes on to explain the devastating effects of following the folly of the IPCC and the global warming alarmists:

If we take the heroically stupid decisions now on the table at Bali, it will once again be the world's poorest people who will die unheeded in their tens of millions, this time for lack of the heat and light and power and medical attention which we in the West have long been fortunate enough to take for granted.

If we deny them the fossil-fuelled growth we have enjoyed, they will remain poor and, paradoxically, their populations will continue to increase, making the world's carbon footprint very much larger in the long run.

As they die, and as global temperature continues to fail to rise in accordance with the IPCC's laughably-exaggerated predictions, the self-congratulatory rhetoric that is the hallmark of the now-useless, costly, corrupt UN will again be near-unanimously parroted by lazy, unthinking politicians and journalists who ought to have done their duty by the poor but are now - for the third time in three decades - failing to speak up for those who are about to die.

My fellow-participants, there is no climate crisis. The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Take courage! Do nothing, and save the world's poor from yet another careless, UN-driven slaughter.

Full article via the Jakarta Post

h/t: Bourque

CO2 cannot be blamed for Global warming

"The notion that carbon emissions cause global warming is not scientifically defensible on today's evidence." "It's not science, it's politics"

via Bushvision:

David Evans worked for the Aust[tralian] Greenhouse office as a modeller and established the worlds best method of carbon accounting. He also started to realise CO2 is not the cause of dangerous global warming. Here he explains why.

Save the World: Dump Kyoto

Is implementing the Kyoto Protocol the best way to "save the world" from global warming? If you believe so, then you better read this article by Jonathan Kay, writing in Tuesday's National Post:

You rarely see anyone actually crunch the numbers and prove Kyoto's worth on a cost-benefit basis.

That's because, as world-renowned Danish thinker Bjorn Lomborg demonstrates in a new book, you can't.

Lomborg's book -- excerpted in a three-part series that appeared on these pages a month ago -- is built around the (surprisingly) rich body of peer-reviewed studies that measure the aggregate social cost of climate change on human societies -- including its impacts on agriculture, fisheries, fresh water supplies, hurricanes and land loss... For every dollar we spend on Kyoto, we get back 34¢.

And even this analysis is optimistic -- because it assumes the most efficient carbon-abatement policies available. In practice, many nations have opted instead for inefficient, but optically attractive, solutions such as windmills.

Schemes that are even more ambitious than Kyoto result in even greater economic inefficiencies.

That's because of the law of diminishing marginal returns. Our first carbon cuts are always going to be the easy ones -- dropping the house thermostat when we go away for the weekend, screwing in a few CFL light bulbs, buying a slightly smaller SUV, etc. But the deeper you cut carbon emissions, the more painful and difficult the cuts become.

But here's where Lomborg's analysis is especially trenchant. While his methods are ruthlessly utilitarian, he shares the same humanitarian goals ostensibly championed by climate change activists. Indeed, there's nothing he'd like more for the $180-billion a year demanded by Kyoto to be shovelled into other programs that address human misery more directly. If we did so, he shows, we'd save millions more lives.

h/t: Global Warming Hyperbole

Dion's smear campaign

Check this video by Richard Madan of CityNews on the Mulroney-Schreiber inquisition, where right at the end Madan reports:

"But Liberals are going to keep this pressure up - if not to smear the government, but to smear the Conservative brand."

Stephane Dion, the current leader of the Liberal Party has apparently concluded that a good old fashioned smear campaign will accomplish for him what his lack of leadership on real issues will not.