From Canada’s Financial Post:

The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world.

A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.

The world’s other species, vegetation, resources, oceans, arable land, water supplies and atmosphere are being destroyed and pushed out of existence as a result of humanity’s soaring reproduction rate.

Ironically, China, despite its dirty coal plants, is the world’s leader in terms of fashioning policy to combat environmental degradation, thanks to its one-child-only edict…

….bla bla bla

A few minor asides:

The current President of China (2003-present), Hu Jintao, has 2 sons with his wife. (Specifying “with his wife” because we’re only counting legitimate children here)

The last President (1993-2003), Jiang Zemin, had 2 sons with his wife.

The President before that (1988-1993), Yang Shangkun, had 3 children with his wife.

The current Premier of China (2003-present), Wen Jiabao, has one son and one daughter with his wife.

The last Premier (1998-2003), Zhu Rongj, had one son and one daughter with his wife.

The Premier before that (1988-1998), Li Peng, had 3 children with his wife.

The Premier before that (1983-1988), Zhao Ziyang, had 5 children with his wife.

The Premier before that (1976-1983), Hua Guofeng, had 4 children with his wife.  Hua was Premier in 1979 when the One Child Policy was instituted.

The Premier before that was Mao himself. He had at least 4 wives, one of whom is believed to have had 3 of his children and one 6, but Mao was generally such a freak no one really knows.

And, according to her own website, the author of the FP article excerpted above has a couple if kids of her own…

I left the business to stay at home with our two babies, Eric and Julie, for six years.

From the London Telegraph: 

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious “hockey stick” graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new “hotspot” in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen’s institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week’s latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen’s methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising “very much faster” than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world’s governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

Steve McIntyre is a machine - relentlessly checking data and computer code used by climate alarmists. We wrote about him last year when he discovered another data handling error (referenced in the article above) that lead GISS to overstate global warming from 1930-2006 by 43%.

You can read about how “scientists” in this case repeatedly rebuffed his efforts to get the source data behind their claims here.

A guy in this video makes a striking claim: The corn used to make 1 tank-worth of ethanol (20 gallons) could feed 1 person for 1 year.

Realistic? 1 bushel of corn makes 2.5 gallons of ethanol. 1 bushel weighs 56 lbs. So 20 gallons of ethanol takes 448 lbs of corn.

Over 1 year that would be 1.23 lbs of corn per day. Sounds about right - a standard loaf of bread takes 1 lb of flour.

Looked at differently, 1 gram of corn contains about 4 calories (metabolized). So 1.23 lbs (557 g) of corn contain 2229 calories.

A “somewhat active” 180 lb 6′2″ male needs 2555 calories a day.

It would be a boring diet, but, amazingly, it appears true.

Last week James Hansen once again testified in front of the Senate Energy Committee about climate change. Hansen, a NASA scientist, is the arguably the most prominent and vocal (and most well funded) proponent of man-made climate change theories in the world.

Hansen’s testimony this time included a call for ”CEOs of fossil energy companies” to “be tried for high crimes against humanity and against nature.”  A government bureaucrat calling for people who disagree with him to be put on trial - you can guess which end of the political spectrum Hansen calls home.

From the NYT (6/23):

Twenty years ago today, James E. Hansen testified before the Senate Energy Committee — in a room kept intentionally warm by committee staff — that the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and forests was already perceptibly influencing Earth’s climate.

Then, as now, Dr. Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was pushing beyond what many of his colleagues in climatology were willing to say — at least publicly. His supporters say that, given how science and events appear to be catching up with his projections of two decades ago, the world had better heed his new recommendations.  

Really, events are catching up to his projections? How about we look at some actual data?

Below is a black and white graph is from the last page of prepared remarks from Hansen’s 1988 testimony.

The original graph shows 4 data series. Observed surface temps from 1958 to 1987 (I’ve colored this blue so it stands out); plus three projected scenarios based on Hansen’s computer simulations.

The high end projection assumes emissions keep growing at the same rate as the preceeding 20 years; the middle projections assumes emissions continue at the level of 1987; the low end projection assumes the world, “drastically reduces trace gas emissions.”

Over this graph I have overlaid two other series. The solid red line represents observed surface temps from 1958 to 2008 (raw data here - from GISS, the group at NASA where Hansen is head). Note this series is a pretty good match for the blue line through 1987 (differences perhaps explained by this).

The red dotted line runs from 1979 to 2008, satellite measurements of mean global temperature (raw data here). Note it looks similar to the surface data, but trends slightly lower - we’ve written before about factors likely corrupting the surface data, leading to a structural upward bias over time.

(Click to enlarge)

A few observations:

First, the measurements taken since Hansen’s 1988 testimony suggest the world may or may not be warming. We can clearly see a peak around the 1998 El Niño. According to the satellite data global temperatures this year have fallen back below the level at the time of Hansen’s 1988 testimony.

Second, Hansen’s 1988 predictions for what would happen to global temperatures by 2008 are wildly wrong. He predicted (in the case where emissions continue to rise, i.e. what has actually happened) a 0.65 degree increase from 1987 to 2008. According to actual surface measurements the temp is about flat, while satellite readings show a 0.2 degree cooling. Even if we exclude 2008 as a possible outlier, the his prediction was for heating almost 3x as fast as observations through 2007.

Third, the cumulative temperature change is small compared to the volatility in the data. The standard deviation of yearly changes in the satellite measurements is 0.19 degrees, compared to a 0.2 degree cumulative decline from 1987 to 2008.

In summary, Hansen is not a serious scientist. He is a political opportunist, using his credentials as a NASA bureaucrat to call for all manner of expansions of government power. Many, including media outlets like The New York Times, find his message ideologically appealing enough to disregard the fact that his predictions have been consistently and provably false.

From American Thinker:

Just as class struggle forms the nucleus of Marxism, so does it sit at the very core of the Left’s climate alarmism.  At a glance, the regressive nature of fiscal Carbon control schemes, be they taxation or cap-and-trade, would appear to be antithetical to liberal thinking.  But beneath the veneer of both the domestic and international green agenda lies a devious wealth-redistribution plan compared to which all predecessors pale…

Read the whole thing.

From a WSJ article on the recent cap and trade bill:

…(T)he bill would put a cap on carbon emissions that gets lowered every year. But to ease the pain and allow for economic adjustment, the bill would dole out “allowances” under the cap that would stand for the right to emit greenhouse gases. Senator Barbara Boxer has introduced a package of manager’s amendments that mandates total carbon reductions of 66% by 2050, while earmarking the allowances.

When cap and trade has been used in the past, such as to reduce acid rain, the allowances were usually distributed for free. A major difference this time is that the allowances will be auctioned off to covered businesses, which means imposing an upfront tax before the trade half of cap and trade even begins. It also means a gigantic revenue windfall for Congress.

Ms. Boxer expects to scoop up auction revenues of some $3.32 trillion by 2050. Yes, that’s trillion. Her friends in Congress are already salivating over this new pot of gold. The way Congress works, the most vicious floor fights won’t be over whether this is a useful tax to create, but over who gets what portion of the spoils. In a conference call with reporters last Thursday, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry explained that he was disturbed by the effects of global warming on “crustaceans” and so would be pursuing changes to ensure that New England lobsters benefit from some of the loot…

…Ms. Boxer would only auction about half of the carbon allowances; she reserves the rest for politically favored supplicants. These groups might be Indian tribes (big campaign donors!), or states rewarded for “taking the lead” on emissions reductions like Ms. Boxer’s California. Those lucky winners would be able to sell those allowances for cash. The Senator estimates that the value of the handouts totals $3.42 trillion. For those keeping track, that’s more than $6.7 trillion in revenue handouts so far….

This is a collectivist’s dream. The government creates an entirely new commodity (carbon credits) which the private economy will require to function. Half of the new commodity is auctioned off under conditions of artificial and escalating scarcity. The other half is handed out by bureaucrats and politicians to favored constituents, putting the government in a position to select winners and losers across the economy by fiat.

From a related piece by Charles Krauthammer:

….For a century, an ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous knowledge class — social planners, scientists, intellectuals, experts and their left-wing political allies — arrogated to themselves the right to rule either in the name of the oppressed working class (communism) or, in its more benign form, by virtue of their superior expertise in achieving the highest social progress by means of state planning (socialism).

Two decades ago, however, socialism and communism died rudely, then were buried forever by the empirical demonstration of the superiority of market capitalism everywhere from Thatcher’s England to Deng’s China, where just the partial abolition of socialism lifted more people out of poverty more rapidly than ever in human history.

Just as the ash heap of history beckoned, the intellectual left was handed the ultimate salvation: environmentalism. Now the experts will regulate your life not in the name of the proletariat or Fabian socialism but — even better — in the name of Earth itself….

….Only Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There’s no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society….

George Will:

…What Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” — the idea that government can know the future’s possibilities and can and should control the future’s unfolding — is the left’s agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state’s supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left’s hostility to markets. And to automobiles — people going wherever they want whenever they want.

Today’s “green left” is the old “red left” revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict, but thought that history’s violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away.

The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitats, humans’ living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything — carbon….

It’s worth noting that alliances between “green” and “red” political parties are a very real phenomenon. The left-most mainstream parties in Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland formed the Nordic Green Left Alliance in 2004. Those parties are also joined in the European United Left / Nordic Green Left alliance in the European Parliament with The Spanish Communist Party, The French Communist Party, The Portuguese Communist Party, and The Communist Refoundation Party of Italy. For good measure, the Sinn Fein, the political arm of the terrorist Irish Republican Army, recently joined the EUL/NGL.

What are environmentalists and communists (and terrorists) doing together in political unions? Obviously, they share the same fundamental goals - repression of the individual in favor of supreme state power.

From Townhall:

…At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It’s a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. “If you look carefully,” author Michael Crichton observed, “you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.”

Environmentalism’s most renewable resources are fear, guilt and moral bullying. Its worldview casts man as a sinful creature who, through the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, abandoned our Edenic past. John Muir, who laid the philosophical foundations of modern environmentalism, described humans as “selfish, conceited creatures.” Salvation comes from shedding our sins, rejecting our addictions (to oil, consumerism, etc.) and demonstrating an all-encompassing love of Mother Earth. Quoth Al Gore: “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”…

…Whether or not it’s adopted the trappings of religion, my biggest beef with environmentalism is how comfortably irrational it is. It touts ritual over reality, symbolism over substance, while claiming to be so much more rational and scientific than those silly sky-God worshipers and deranged oil addicts.

It often seems that displaying faith in the green cause is more important than advancing the green cause. The U.S. government just put polar bears on the threatened species list because climate change is shrinking the Arctic ice where they live. Never mind that polar bears are in fact thriving - their numbers have quadrupled in the last 50 years…. Plastic grocery bags are being banned, even though they require less energy to make and recycle than paper ones. The country is being forced to subscribe to a modern version of transubstantiation, whereby corn is miraculously transformed into sinless energy even as it does worse damage than oil…

I’ve argued before - the best defense against Gore-style environmental laws, taxes, treaties, &c may be in the first part of the First Amendment.