In another attempt to finally become relevant, the United Nations has once again unleashed its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Communism (IPCC) on an unquestioning public. Get ready for all the Gorebots to ratchet up the Chicken Little dance again.
The IPCC is the main weapon for the Eco-Stalins. Its members somehow manage to keep straight faces while claiming that the scientific method, speculative projections and unquestioned claims of consensus can coexist logically. The main mission of the IPCC is to run a kazillion computer models about what might happen then choose the most extreme outcomes to focus on. They then distill all the data and put it in a report called The Summary Of Stuff You Don't Need To Take A Closer Look At (a.k.a. "The Summary for Policy Makers").
What follows each issuance of a report is this: The MSM jumps all over it, swoons like a teenage girl who has just been told she gets to spend the night with Justin Timberlake and tells the world that it will be ending soon if Mother UN isn't allowed to become a supranational nanny.
Emboldened by the fact that Nobel committee has no criteria whatsoever for awarding its prizes and has given it one, the IPCC just issued a report that is meant to induce War of the Worlds type hysteria.
Here are the "key findings" in the report. I'm not planning on waging the battle against Global Speculation all at once today. Plenty of my rantings on the subject can be found here, here and here. I'll go over just a few of my favorites. Any italics are mine.
Global warming is "unequivocal." Temperatures have risen 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years. Whoop-dee-la-dee-do. Yes, even right wing nuts like myself can acknowledge that the temperature has gone up. Just as it has in the past. It's where we proceed from that premise that is the cause for division.
Extreme weather conditions will be more common. This from the same people who promised us a plague of hurricanes immediately following Katrina. What ensued was one of the quietest hurricane seasons on record. If you need me, I'll be hanging out at the corner of Skeptical and Underwhelmed.
Even if greenhouse gases are stabilized, the Earth will keep warming and sea levels rising. More pollution could bring "abrupt and irreversible" changes. Or "Fixing it doesn't really fix it but if we don't fix it might be worse." Well, let's get right on that, then.
Human activity is largely responsible for warming. Global emissions of greenhouse gases grew 70 percent from 1970 to 2004. Yet 1934 is the hottest year on record. What kind of cars were they driving then? Here's the real dilemma: you can't accomplish much of what the Eco-Stalins want to accomplish without finding some way to cease all of that meddlesome "human activity."
A wide array of tools exist, or will soon be available, to adapt to climate change and reduce its potential effects. One is to put a price on carbon emissions. Ah, we've waded through the computer projected hysterical fluff and finally arrived at the heart of the mission. We start charging the developed countries for carbon emissions. It's working so well in Europe that the utility companies are becoming wealthier but the dreaded human activity continues unabated. Carbon emissions are up in most of Europe since signing on to Kyoto and people still seem to be driving, using lights and heat in their homes and going online to read about us bastards in the U.S. who won't take this crap seriously. New motto for the IPCC (paraphrasing John Candy in "Splash"): When something doesn't work for me, I stick with it. Hey kids, guess whose carbon emissions did drop last year? Anyone? That's right, the non-Kyoto heathens in the good old U.S. of A.
By 2050, stabilizing emissions would slow the average annual global economic growth by less than 0.12 percent. The longer action is delayed, the more it will cost. Tricky. Let's look at the impact on average global economic growth instead of the projected (since the Climate Commies are such fans of the speculation-as-gospel approach) impact on U.S. economic growth. I'm sure that the percentage growth reduction in poor countries balances that out quite nicely. Looks like the IPCC has brought David Blaine and Criss Angel on board.
There may be some very real consequences to climate change. That most of them are speculative but treated as fact is what should be of greatest concern. Can anyone say United Nations power grab?
Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, is from India, which is a major carbon emitter. He's willing to lead a panel that advocates panic-filled solutions from which his country is exempt. The two largest carbon emitters are the U.S. and China. Recommendations to date have involved attempts to coerce the U.S. to legally bind itself to a potential economic disaster. China? Well, lets just ask them nicely to try. You know how responsive they are to what the world wants them to do.
Beware of anything that hints of international control over the U.S. economy. Beware of anyone who calls a prediction a fact.
Lastly, communism may continually fail in practice but in theory it continues to inspire ideologues who resent the United States. Since it can't stand on its merits it has to be repackaged. Peel back the layers covering the Global Warming hype. You can wrap a turd in scented paper but it's still a turd.
You have to wonder why the default position is to let the UN and the Kyoto-philes get their grubby little hands on our economy. We're resented for the wealth that a successful free market economy has created but the efficacy of a free market approach to mitigating climate change seems to be dismissed out of hand. Instead, bureaucratic approaches that have done little more than drive up energy prices in Europe without producing the desired effects are touted as the serious solution.
Pretty paper, but that turd still stinks.
Cross posted at Grizzly Groundswell and Real Clear Politics (Vote for it!)
