On thing you can guarantee... whatever the scenario, someone will be in there to make money out of it. That is the system and that is human nature. So when the eco-speakers and the warmistas, who are generally, although not always, left-inclined, tell us that because of Global Warming, or Climate Change, we need to have wind turbines and biofuels and solar panels de blah one thing is for sure. Just as the oil companies sell oil and the coal companies sell coal, so there are people selling wind turbines, biofuels, solar panels.. at huge cost and without people also being told how long it will take their purchases, made in good faith, to pay off.
There is worse. Insurance companies are putting up their premiums in the USA on the grounds that GW is causing more hurricanes and tornadoes and so on. There have been hurricanes and tornadoes in parts of the USA since time began. Ah, you have heard that the hurricanes are getting more and worse. How do you account for the fact that last year was one of the quietest hurricane seasons for some time ? Just a blip ? Fine. But no one has a crystal ball, not even climatologists and certainly not insurance companies. But you can bet your bottom dollar that now they have spotted a good money-making wheeze they are not going to let it go, they are going to terrify americans into believing their premiums have go up so that they will then be insured against Armageddon. If insurance premiums go up in the USA you can bet it won`t be long before we have a bit of rain or a bad few thunderstorms and the companies here will scream 'Global Warming' and raise our premiums.
Meanwhile, here is an extremely sane extract from one of the most balanced and sensible pieces about GW for a while. It is up on Philip Stott`s important blog Global Warming Politics (http://web.mac.com/sinfonia1/Global_Warming_Politics/A_Hot_Topic_Blog/A_Hot_Topic_Blog.html
Best go there and read the whole of it but if you haven`t time or don`t like to desert me for too long, at least please read these paragraphs. They are by a guest on Philip`s site, Ruth Lea, who was Director of the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) for four years until November 2007. She is now Director of Global Vision, and a Non-Executive Director and Economic Advisor to the Arbuthnot Banking Group. Ruth is perhaps best known for having been the Head of the Policy Unit at the Institute of Directors (IoD), a key post which she held between 1995 and 2003....
Here is the extract from her eminently sane and sensible post.
Britain’s Climate Change Bill: Economic Madness
As already mentioned, the EU has a 20% target for cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, compared with 1990. British legislators, however, seem to regard this self-flagellation as insufficiently painful. The Climate Change Bill, currently going through Parliament, includes legally-binding targets of a 60% reduction by 2050, and a 26 to 32% reduction by 2020, compared with 1990.
The Bill is predicated first on the assumptions that ‘global warming’ is “dangerous” and is unquestionably mainly caused by anthropogenic carbon emissions. These assumptions are, of course, inherent in the work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which provided the quasi-scientific background for the path-breaking Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Secondly, they rely on Lord Nicholas Stern’s report, based on the IPCC’s apocalyptic projections of a frizzling planet, exhorting us to spend now to prevent this fate, or to fry and/or drown later.(4) Woe betide any foolish soul who dares to speak out against this orthodoxy.
But the notion that there is a scientific consensus on this matter is simply not true. Many scientists, though they risk their funding and the wrath of the Royal Society, are prepared to acknowledge that the sun has an infinitely greater role to play than humankind in climate change. Moreover, climate change in the form of modest warming is likely to be, on balance, economically beneficial. And, inconveniently for the doomsayers, there has been no ‘global warming’ for a decade.
Secondly, the Bill simplistically assumes that climate change can be combated by cutting anthropogenic carbon emissions, as if there were a straightforward, bivariate and uni-causal relationship between carbon dioxide emissions (and concentrations) and temperature. Nothing, I am reliably informed, could be further from the truth.
Thirdly, the Bill chooses to ignore the fact that, whilst Britain attempts to decarbonise her economy, much of the rest of the world will not. Britain accounts for less than 2% of world anthropogenic carbon emissions, whilst China’s emissions probably increase by more than our total every 1 to 2 years. We could, however, make our economy uncompetitive and curtail British people’s economic freedoms and prosperity, satisfyingly so for the many critics of modern developed economies, by pursuing this policy. But where we lead, others will not follow - not even the other EU member states, if it suits them. It is economic madness.(5)
The Future
The Climate Change Bill will, however, be enacted. All the major political parties are supporting it. But, apart from its unfounded scientific assumptions and economic irresponsibility, it is already looking old-fashioned (there’s nothing so old-fashioned as last year’s fashions that have ceased to be fashionable) and irrelevant.
Two things are changing the debate. The first is the, already noted, absence of ‘global warming’ since the end of the 20th century. People understand this. The second is the economy. Bill Clinton was right: “it’s the economy, stupid”. British living standards for many are now falling, and this changes people’s priorities. Recent polls show that, first, the British people are sceptical about human-caused ‘global warming’ despite all of the propaganda thrust at them and, secondly, they regard ‘green taxes’ as little more than yet another excuse for Governments to tax them harder.(6),(7)
The mood is changing. Politicians please take note.