The Hysteria Mounts

Duplicity and Its Friends

Readers of this blog will know that towards the end of this year the big and the bright and the powerful will gather in Copenhagen under the auspices of the UN in an attempt to get a world treaty or agreement on actions to stop the world "warming."

This is a quite critical meeting for the global warming movement, because the infamous Kyoto protocol is about to expire. Well, if truth be told, Kyoto expired years ago--as soon as it was promulgated. No nation, except those permitted to "pollute" has met its carbon output targets. The whole shenanigan has been risible.

So the matter becomes more urgent. Things have got worse. Which means that because Kyoto has failed, things have got warmer. Yes, we know that there is no evidence to support that, but trust us. We know that the earth is actually getting warmer underneath it all. It is like a subterranean cancer, growing all the time, no matter how much we might be freezing on the surface.

We have to take some really big actions now, which will mean pain, mostly for the poorest and most vulnerable of the earth. But the elites will respond. They will say, "this is good for you, this degradation we are making you suffer. It's hurting us more than it's hurting you." And the elites will feel good about it.

At least, that's the plan. But the global warming crusade is in a spot of bother. It's harder to get traction amidst a global economic crisis. So, in order to re-energize the troops, the cheer leaders and the crowd manipulators have been very active over recent months, putting out dire prediction after dire prediction. Scaremongering worked in getting Kyoto "through"; they believe it will work again.

The latest example of the dubious craft is documented in the Wall Street Journal. The protagonists are none other than the most revered and esteemed former UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, and a pesky academic, who was one of the contributors to the now thoroughly discredited IPCC report, which was, of course, intrinsic to Kyoto.

Firstly, the scary stuff.

Global warming alarmists are fond of invoking the authority of experts against the skepticism of supposedly amateur detractors -- a.k.a. "deniers." So when one of those experts says that a recent report on the effects of climate change is "worse than fiction, it is a lie," the alarmists should, well, be alarmed.

The latest contretemps pits former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, now president of the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, against Roger Pielke, Jr., an expert in disaster trends at the University of Colorado. Mr. Annan's outfit issued a lengthy report late last month warning that climate change-induced disasters, such as droughts and floods, kill 315,000 each year and cost $125 billion, numbers it says will rise to 500,000 dead and $340 billion by 2030. Adding to the gloom, Mr. Annan predicts "mass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness" unless countries agree to "the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated" at a meeting this year in Copenhagen.

Ok, so let's sit up and pay attention. Mass starvation, migration, and sickness. It's obviously going to be considerably worse than swine-flu, this global warming stuff. Kofi has got our attention. We are ready to line up behind that Copenhagen treaty, no matter what it says. Sign? Of course we will. Just tell us where. Our pens are out and quivering.

But wait. Hold on. Let's talk about context, shall we?

Even on its own terms, the numbers here are a lot less scary when put into context. Malaria kills an estimated one million people a year, while AIDS claims an estimated two million. As for the economic costs, $125 billion is slightly less than the GDP of New Zealand. Question: Are targeted campaigns using proven methods to spare the world three million AIDS and malaria deaths a year a better use of scarce resources than a multitrillion-dollar attempt to re-engineer the global economy and save, at most, a tenth that number? We'd say yes.

Good one. That's better. The heart has stopped palpitating. The economic costs of global warming are slightly less than the GDP of New Zealand! And that is getting less by the day. Whew. We can slip the pen back into the pocket, with a rueful chuckle over our ready gullibility. You had us going there for a moment. But wait, there is more . . . .

But the Annan report deserves even closer scrutiny as an example of the sleight of hand that so often goes with the politics of global warming. Unlike starvation, climate change does not usually kill anyone directly. Instead, the study's authors assume a four-step chain of causation, beginning with increased emissions, moving to climate-change effects, thence to physical changes like melting glaciers and desertification, and finally arriving at human effects like malnutrition and "risk of instability and armed conflicts."

This is a heroic set of assumptions, even if you agree that emissions are causing adverse changes in climate. Take the supposedly heightened risk of conflict: The authors suggest that "inter-clan fighting in Somalia" is a product of climate change. A likelier explanation is the collapse of a functioning Somali government and the rise of jihadists in the region.

Mmmm. A four-step chain of causation. It would seem that Kofi has been fiddling with a rather long bow. If he does not watch out, the hysteria he wants to drum up may eventuate, but in the form of hysterics. It would not be seemly for Nero to be laughed at while Rome burns, even if he did have a very, very long bow. So, watch it, Kofi. Eggs on faces, and all that.

But then, the WSJ brings in the second protagonist.

Enter Mr. Pielke, who, we hasten to add, does not speak for us (nor we for him). But given the headlines the Annan report has garnered, his views deserve amplification. Writing in the Prometheus science policy blog, Mr. Pielke calls the report a "methodological embarrassment" and a "poster child for how to lie with statistics" that "does a disservice" to those who take climate change issues seriously.

Mr. Pielke's critique begins by citing a recent peer-reviewed paper by three German researchers that "it is generally difficult to obtain valid quantitative findings about the role of socioeconomics and climate change in loss increases." Reasons for this, the researchers explain, include "the stochastic [random] nature of weather extremes, a shortage of quality data, and the role of various other potential factors that act in parallel and interact."

The report does admit to a "significant margin of error," but this hardly excuses the sloppiness of its methodology. "To get around the fact that there has been no attribution of the relationship of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions and disasters," Mr. Pielke notes, the Annan "report engages in a very strange comparison of earthquake and weather disasters in 1980 and 2005. The first question that comes to mind is, why? They are comparing phenomena with many 'moving parts' over a short time frame, and attributing 100% of the resulting difference to human-caused climate change. This boggles the mind."

Kofi's report is a "poster child on how to lie with statistics." It would seem that Kofi has form. Well, yes, of course he does. You do not get to run the UN without having form. Lying is an intrinsic and absolutely necessary part of the job.

Note that Pielke--who believes in global warming, remember--is effectively accusing Kofi and his coterie of throwing all caution to the wind and coming up with something blatantly and overtly deceptive and misleading. Talk about the syndrome of the embarrassing advocate. Either they must think that the whole world thinks as they think, so that anything claimed or said in favour of the global warming threat is believable, or they are becoming increasingly desperate. This is the very point the WSJ raises:

It gets worse. The Annan report cites Hurricane Katrina as a case study in the economic consequences of climate change. Yet there's not even remotely conclusive evidence that temperature increases have any effect on the intensity or frequency of hurricanes. The authors also claim that global warming is aggravating the El Niño effect, which has "ruined livelihoods, led to lost lives and impaired national economies." Yet new research "questions the notion that El Niños have been getting stronger because of global warming," according to Ben Giese of Texas A&M.

We could go on, except we're worried about the blood pressure of readers who are climate-change true believers. Our only question is, if the case for global warming is so open and shut, why the need for a report as disingenuous as Mr. Annan's?

It has long been said that laughter is the best medicine. But when confronted with desperate liars, or the naively credulous, it is also the best disinfectant.