Global warming

Monday

Daniel Korski

A flooded world

It looks like the opening of a Hollywood disaster film. The South African government has declared parts of the country disaster areas, after 40 people died in floods in a month. At the same time, the UN is to launch an appeal for emergency flood aid for Sri Lanka, where at least 32 people have died and more than 300,000 have been displaced. Meanwhile flood waters in Australia have left a trail of destruction, at least 18 dead and a billion dollar bill for reconstruction. And in Brazil, survivors of the floods that have killed more than 600 people are frustrated by the lack of government help. Are these floods

Saturday

Rod Liddle

I told you so

It’s jolly nice to be proved right about everything The most important, and comforting, thing to emerge from all that Wiki-Leaks business was that, by and large, we were right. All the things we suspected, or knew either instinctively or through common sense, were proved to be correct. Prince Andrew — arrogant, rude and with the IQ of a corgi? Yep. The oil company Shell effectively runs Nigeria? Sure thing. Gulf state Arab leaders are a tad duplicitous? No kidding, bub. It is always uplifting to discover that you were right all along, and that, in secret at least, the establishment agrees with you. It may well be that by

Monday

Simon Less

Carbon omissions

With the latest round of international climate change negotiations at Cancun less than a week away, Policy Exchange has published research showing that the UK’s and EU’s performance in reducing carbon emissions is not quite what it seems.   According to the official measure, used to determine performance against the Kyoto agreement, the UK’s emissions have fallen.  The UK is set to exceed its Kyoto target of 12.5 percent reduction from 1990 levels.  But, in our new report Carbon Omissions, Policy Exchange has estimated that total UK carbon consumption emissions in fact rose by 30 percent between 1990 and 2006.   The reason is that we import and consume a

Wednesday

Alex Massie

King Coal Will Reign For Years Yet

Like Andrew says, James Fallows’ Atlantic article on clean coal – and China’s advances in developing the stuff – deserves to be read in full. But it’s also a useful corrective to the notion that “alternative energy” sources (with the exception of nuclear power) can come at all close to meeting our energy needs either now or in the foreseeable future. For all that relatively few people talk about coal anymore (and of course we no longer mine the stuff ourselves) it’s still the King of Energy: “Emotionally, we would all like to think that wind, solar, and conservation will solve the problem for us,” David Mohler of Duke Energy

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Hunt the heretic

Eureka, the science magazine from The Times, is in many ways a brilliant accomplishment. Advertising is following readers in an online migration – but James Harding, the editor, personally persuaded advertisers that a new magazine, in a newspaper, devoted to science would work. And here it is: giving the New Scientist a run for its money every month. That’s why it’s such a shame that today’s magazine opens on an anti-scientific piece denouncing those who disagree with the climate consensus. My former colleague Ben Webster, now the paper’s environment correspondent, is an energetic and original journalist – so it’s depressing to see his skills deployed in a game of hunt-the-heretic.

Friday

Alex Massie

Global Warming Fail

Long-time and recent readers alike will have noticed that I almost never write about climate-change or global warming or whatever you want to call it. That’s because I think it an unusually tedious subject about which I lack both the ability and the interest to either care or make an informed judgement. Like many people, then, I take the view that it may well be a biggish problem but, as that wise man Mr Micawber nearly said, something may turn up to help us out of the jam. It is the Iran-Iraq War of policy debates in which one wishes that the most passionate advocates on either side could, well,

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

Why we shouldn’t worry about overpopulation

Perhaps the most sinister side of the environmentalist movement is the idea of an “optimal population,” where human life is seen as a menace. The Optimal Population Trust has today said that there are 45 million too many people living in Britain – which, for a country of 60 million, is quite some statement. The peculiar thing is that this “problem” may well have a solution in the form of the human race failing to reproduce. The hands of the world population clock are slowing. The natural population replacement level, 2.1 kids per woman, is achieved by no European country (pdf here). England stands at a respectable 1.75, Scotland at

Wednesday

Fraser Nelson

Countdown to Copenhagen

How seriously are we to take Lord Stern on the economics of climate change? At the LSE yesterday, he rather hysterically claimed that the Copenhagen summit will be “the most important international gathering since the Second World War”. Crucially, he added that the cost of dealing with the problem may reach 5 percent of GDP. Even so, “it would still be a good deal,” he said. Really? Losing world economic growth condemns millions in the Third World to poverty: the globalisation of the last 15 years has been the greatest anti-poverty tool ever invented. So we should not be blasé about sacrificing growth, as if all it means is smaller

Tuesday

Alex Massie

What about Climategate?

A reader writes to complain that I haven’t written anything about “Climategate” (please, can we stop the use of the suffix “gate”?). Well, the main reason I haven’t is that climate change is even more crushingly tedious than health policy, the European Union or, for that matter, just about anything else. Worse, the bad faith of the participants, on both sides, and their certainty on matters about which we cannot possibly or plausibly be certain is dispiriting. That being the case, Megan McArdle writes my reaction to this “scandal” for me: Scientists are human beings.  They react to pressure to “clean up” their graphs and data for publication, and they

Monday

Daniel Korski

Is the world cooling or not – and what is to blame?

The Financial Times supplement this weekend contained profiles of the world’s leading climate experts, including – the magazine promised – the world’s leading sceptic. I quickly leafed through the pages to see who had been picked as the whipping boy, expecting to see a Danish name. No, not that of Bjørn Lomborg, who became (in)famous for his book The Sceptical Environmentalist, but that of Professor Henrik Svensmark. In the end, it was Richard Lindzen. But it is Svensmark’s research that may prove the greatest challenge to the prevailing consensus on climate dynamics. The Danish scientist, author of The Chilling Stars, become noted because of his research into cosmic rays and

Wednesday

Rodney Leach

A wild goose chase

The conventional view of global warming originates in the environmentalism of the Sixties. Alone, the Green movement might have done little more than raise awareness among consumers and legislators of the need to limit pollution and conserve natural resources. But in the Seventies environmentalism joined forces with the continuing backroom campaign of international bureaucrats for world government. At the time, temperatures had been falling, sparking fears of a new Ice Age. By the Eighties the trend had reversed. Runaway warming and cities submerged by rising seas replaced the spectre of Chicago and Rome buried under miles of ice. No matter. Either prediction would suffice to justify demands for a supranational

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Arabian Chutzpah

No matter what you think of global warming, I think this qualifies as chutzpah: Saudi Arabia is trying to enlist other oil-producing countries to support a provocative idea: if wealthy countries reduce their oil consumption to combat global warming, they should pay compensation to oil producers. Good luck with that.