Answer to 'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment'

So 56 newspapers are putting up a common editorial pushing the climate hoax. Are these editors: (1) too lazy to investigate the facts for themselves, and/or (2) too incompetent to do so and see the dripping evidence of fraud and political and financial manipulation cloying to this issue like thick red mud, and/or (3) one of the hoaxsters, who knows that the truth is that reducing CO2 emissions will cost lives in reduced food production as well as put endangered species in peril as their wild areas are converted to foodmaking by famished human beings? In other words, are they lazy, stupid, or evil? There is one other possibility, which I'll get to at the end, so without further ado, here is the entirety of their nonsense, with a few comments from me to the 56 editors.

'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial.

Newsflash: Truth is not decided by majority rule, nor by authority.

We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Yes. The proposed Copenhagen treaty establishes an unelected, socialist government in all but name, with the power to tax every transaction in the western democracies. It will reduce the output of carbon dioxide plantfood, thereby starving humans and animals. This treaty must be defeated. From Lord Monckton's speech about the treaty:

"I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfaction of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” – because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

"How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it – Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything."

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

A generation ago the lamestream media were telling us that there would be an ice age. Actually that was closer to the truth than your current alarmism, but in neither case was the lamestream opinion based on sound science. The Arctic icecap is actually freezing rapidly as we head into the northern winter, but taking the above misleading remark as a reference to the yearly meltback, the Arctic icecap is almost all the way back to the mean, having increased dramatically for each of the past two years [and notice, readers, how the Antarctic, doing well, is neatly forgotten]. So in what sense is it "melting"? It isn't melting right now, it is freezing. It isn't melting compared to last year, it is growing: 2008 was 10.6% more than 2007, and 2009 was 23.4% more than 2007. Editors, your statement is a lie pure and simple. Nextly, inflamed food prices can be directly traced to conversion of food crops to biofuel. What do you fools editors think will happen when you take a great chunk of the world's food off the food market? And we now know, thanks to climategate, that the insiders have been 'fixing' the peer-reviewed literature, thus making the record found in 'scientific' journals worthless from the point of view of a lay person simply looking for something to trust. It cannot be trusted, period!

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

Guess what - almost all the human-emitted greenhouse gases have come in the last fifty years. But climate indicators change at quite different rates. The long-term rate of sea level rise hasn't changed for hundreds of years. CO2 is increasing at a constant rate independently of human emissions. Temperatures are now decreasing (even assuming one can know what the temperature increase actually is, as we now know that even the base data, the elementary raw facts of the matter, have been fiddled). So whatever humans are doing, it isn't changing the world's temperature by any measureable amount. But even if it did so, that would be, on the whole, a good thing. And furthermore, you 56 climate change deniers, the world's climate has always changed and it always will, and (human hubris notwithstanding) we do not have a sufficient understanding to predict it nor to reliably change it. For a fraction of the cost of taking the evil course of savaging the biosphere's capacity to produce food through reducing the CO2 plant food content of the atmosphere, we could educate and feed the entire population of the world.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea.

Two Points: (1) there is no evidence of dangerous human-caused global warming - none whatever. Repeating the allegation ad nauseum doesn't change that simple fact. And presenting lots of alarms, as you are wont to do, based on the fact that on an entire planet, strange, threatening, and unusual things happen daily, might scare heaps of shallow thinkers, but none of it is evidence. (2) The entire case is based solely of computer models. About these models, two things: (2a) They reflect the assumptions programmed into them; they are not coming up with 'findings', they are merely attempting to show the consequences of the prior assumption (guesses), and those guesses are no better than yours or mine. (2b) The models are wrong anyway. This has been proved and the proof is so simple even 56 newspaper editors should be able to follow it.

The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

When the key researchers on whom you rely resort to suppression of evidence, then nothing they say can be relied upon. Nothing.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

Let's rewrite it correctly: Luckily the climate hoaxsters in Copenhagen will probably not carry the day because saner people than the present US president demanded evidence before acting. The evidence will never be forthcoming and the hoaxsters are getting desperate, so they are hurling ad hominems at anyone who dares to contradict their ratbaggery, in the hope of cowing some of the weaker ones into falling in line.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

Once the base and hateful reality of this hoax in understood, the true evil of this kind of remark becomes apparent. CO2 is plant food, it is not causing significant warming, warming has always been good for the planet anyway whilst cold is deadly, So this paragraph amounts to saying: "We must hurry to wreck the planet faster."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

It is proven that CO2 follows temperature, temperature does not follow CO2. If we burn all the fossil fuel there is, we can just about double the atmospheric CO2. As the CO2 level returns from that blip and starts tracking temperature again, the effects will be unnoticeable. (CO2 has a very short half life in the atmosphere, huge estimates to the contrary have no scientific basis.) How do you imagine we will feed the world's people whilst starving the atmosphere of plant food? Below about 200ppm, photosynthesis stops and all the world's plants and then the animals die. Is that the future we want for ourselves? Human CO2 emissions are a tiny fraction of natural emissions. A significant change in natural emissions for whatever reason could easily change the balance. Since we are so close to the catastrophic minimum, is it sane or prudent to risk pushing the CO2 rise into reverse?

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

"Rich nations" don't "like to" anything - "Rich nations" are made of millions of people with divergent views (forgotten about multiculturalism?). The Earth is close to the minimum level of CO2 ever in its entire geological history - life has flourished when it was twenty or more times the current level. And of course, once you re-learn the proven truth that CO2 is plant food [sorry, dear reader, if this is getting monotonous, but these 56 editors are of a stupidity quite remarkable] and warming has always produced flourishing life whilst cold produced death and misery, it is clear that the developed nations have done a very great deal of good by replenishing the atmosphere's depleted stock of nutrient.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

The only "problem" here is that human society is obviously poised to enter a new dark age of anti-scientific obscurantism in which political objectives completely obscure genuine scientific research. (And that is "plant fertilisers", not "polluters", thank you very much.)

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

This point would be better written: "Notwithstanding the benefit for poorer nations and the world's wildlife from emission of plant nutrient by industrialised countries, more could be done by financing education and development, especially provision of electricity and clean water, that would free the poor from worry about losing children to poverty-based diseases and other hazards, thereby allowing them to have confidence that two children (rather than ten or more) is enough, thereby stabilising their population and reducing the strain upon the world's environmental systems."

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

“Economist Ross Garnaut [Australia's official global warming investigator] tells us that, by the year 2100, all the normal measures of Australian standard of living (real wages and per capita consumption and so on) will be somewhere between five and ten percent below what they would be if humans were not filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. He also tells us that, by 2100, and in the absence of global warming, the Australian economic output per person would increase by about 400 percent.

"Provided the government didn’t waste it, most of that would come back to us in the form of increased standard of living. Therefore the average Australian of 2100 should be something of the order of 360 percent better off than ourselves even when he or she has been devastated by climate change.

"In other words Professor Garnaut is asking for lots of our money so that he can give it to people of the future who will be at least three-and-a-half times wealthier than we are.

"The guy must be nuts.”

Letter to the Australian Financial Review, July 2008

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

Let's get one thing straight: The only point in using less coal and oil is to conserve non-renewable resources. That is an estimable goal and the only goal other than fictitious ones based on fairy tales, but it is entirely divorced from concern about a changing climate. Conserving resources is not served by changing to a "low carbon" society with monstrosities like "clean coal" (dig up 40% more coal to fuel the plantfood sequestration apparatus - better call it "anti-life coal"). Furthermore, it is distortion of the free market (you know, trickery like trading in nonexistent commodities such as 'carbon credits') of the kind you are recommending that allows the taxi ride to cost more than the air trip.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Hang on a mo'. More jobs, if the extra are needed to do what could otherwise be done without them, is not a good thing. Getting more done with less manpower is the reason the industrial revolution dragged us out of poverty. "New green jobs" is a euphemism for falling back into poverty because we need more labour to do the same stuff. And investment (especially by idiots) means only one thing: money spent; it doesn't mean any useful return will ever be gotten from it.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Reality check: Renewable energy sources aren't up to the job of replacing coal and oil:

• Tidal power is not renewable (it pushes the Moon further from the Earth, risking unknown irreversible consequences in the far future - is killing OK if we don't see it happen?)
• Wind power is unworkable on a large scale and the turbines kill millions of birds and bats. The world's most pristine areas are already being wrecked by these obscene monsters of death. America's Altamont Pass is a black hole for the country's raptors - the youngsters leave home, see the nice wild area free of other eagles, move in, get killed, and then next year's younger siblings repeat the tragedy. (But I am sure you 56 editors will point out, we should not let a few cruel and pointless animal deaths stop millions of "environmentalists" from feeling all warm and fuzzy at the sight of a beautiful wind farm.)
• Solar power might be workable for a part of the energy needs- but the energy density is nevertheless low and irregular, requires a lot of land, and making the panels uses huge amounts of energy.
• Geothermal and hydroelectric power only work where the luck of the draw is in our favour.

What will work?

• Nuclear (fission) power has known problems, is non-renewable, but on a longer timescale, and information about it has been subject to much the same kinds of political and self-interested manipulation as the world's temperature, so this must be put into the question mark basket.
• Nuclear (fusion) power, however, is clean, renewable, and all that is lacking is the research to make it work with sufficient efficiency to be a net exporter of power. But the same governments that can throw "stimulus" money at their populations to waste on unnecessary pollution-creating televisions and other wasteful appliances or jetting off on carbon-intensive holidays whilst (in contradiction) demanding that their populations become poor to do the exact opposite, these schizophrenic governments cannot provide the relatively small research money needed to get fusion working and thereby solve the energy crisis (and the carbon crisis, if you are still fool enough to believe in it) once and for all. The Australian government alone could have financed a complete fusion energy research program four times over with the money they threw away. Don't insult us by talking about kicking habits. Readily available energy allowed us to build a modern civilisation; without it the world would still be like Zimbabwe and the population would be about a billion. Are you 56 losers going to volunteer to be the amongst the 5.8 billion who will go without food?

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".

Whose optimism? Whose pessimism? You are telling us the sky is falling; we are telling you to get fusion power working so the entire world can at last get electricity "too cheap to bother metering."

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

Sorry, you 56 are all politically biased suppressors of genuine science and supporters of obscurantism and a return to pre-industrial poverty, and therefore are all just peas in a pod. Hopefully the peoples of all the world's nations haven't been so spectacularly stupid as to elect leaders like you. (But you might be right, perhaps they have.)

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

There is one thing that history has certainly taught us: that the human race has the capacity to be deluded in mass by an obviously false, scary idea. We ridicule early Salem for the witch trials; we are horrified by bloody queen Mary burning heretics, we are mystified by the sudden viciousness of the French reign of terror or the Nazi idea that all the world's troubles were caused by one single race. All of these ideas were false and the evidence that disproved them was staring everyone in the face, yet millions went along with them. What about our own mass delusion?

Walk outside on a hot sunny day; when a cloud passes over the temperature instantly drops. There is proof for everyone, which you can feel on your own skin, that heat dissipates immediately. Watch an eagle soaring upwards on a thermal (hot air rising) and you can see with your own eyes that heat is taken upwards by convection on columns only a few hundreds of meters across; it does not rely solely on radiation, nor can a computer model with cells a few kilometres in size possibly model the fine-scale processes that any person with their wits about them can see for themselves. So we can all see, if we choose to simply go outside and look, that the climate models cannot possibly give an accurate account of reality. Add to that the known fact that they have already failed to reproduce the last decade's static or falling temperatures and that the hotspot they predict isn't there. How can you possibly say that we "saw calamity coming"? The only calamity is that we are in the midst of another murderous mass delusion, this one much more dangerous than any that has gone before, threatening our entire civilisation. You 56 editors, if you are not lazy, stupid, or evil, have fallen prey to this delusion. Every well-meaning person should make resisting this delusion their top priority.