Climate Conversation Group

Prague Castle, part of the Czech Republic’s proud legacy.

The Czech Republic, led by courageous President Vaclav Klaus, resists the latest European efforts to deepen the climate crisis. For the crisis is man-made, just as it is in New Zealand, consisting entirely of increasing the financial pressure on families and depriving them of modern conveniences in order to “save” the world’s climate, using expensive mechanisms that can’t affect the climate. Even though the climate continues to regulate itself within ancient, well-known thresholds entirely suitable for life. Read more… »

Scenarios are not science

Guest post by Barry Brill

December 21, 2009

Pity the politician in 2010: climate change policies pose an unknown but potentially strong temptation to cross party lines — a bit like abortion brought out single-issue voters a few decades ago.

Some political leaders have a messianic urge to save the planet; others have an ideological aversion to intrusive state controls. A few (perhaps) have studied the science in depth, and all have glanced regularly at fickle opinion surveys. But most are stuck with the muddle in the middle, anxious to do whatever will deliver the best outcomes for the country and their constituents.

Many would begin with the risk-averse approach …”we have to rely on the relevant experts in dealing with highly complex issues. Our official advisers tell us there is a significant risk that human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to the recent global warming trend.”

Obvious policy implications of this ‘luke-warm’ stance are solid efforts to improve energy efficiency and to encourage promising new technology — perhaps low-emission fuels. A key consideration for any such programmes is that they are likely to deliver net benefits in any event — even if the warming stops or the causation becomes suspect. Read more… »

Steve O’connor is a senior geologist who has studied paleoclimate for 40 years. He lives in the circulation area of the Taranaki Daily News, which today published some astonishing comments from one Trotter. I am, unfortunately, unable yet to confirm the Taranaki Daily News item or give a link to it, but I am re-publishing Steve’s letter anyway, because it is the best summary I have read of the central anxieties arising from the global warming scam.

UPDATE 14 Dec 8:30 am: To give you just an outline of Trotter’s complete abandonment of evidence-based science, his denial of the right to free speech and his denial of evidence-based doubts of man-made global warming, here are the concluding comments from his Dominion article, titled “In the war for nature, the deniers are traitors”:
“There will, of course, be people who whisper that the enemy isn’t really our enemy … In 1940, England was full of such whisperers. The British ruling class, in particular, was riddled with defeatists, Nazi sympathisers and traitors. Back then people called them “Quislings” and “Fifth Columnists”. If, therefore, the battle against climate change has to become the moral equivalent of war, with all the sacrifice that war entails, then climate change denial must become the moral equivalent of treason. Over the top? No. The stakes really are that high.”

It is sobering to reflect that, a mere 65 years after World War II, which killed so many of our finest young men as they defended the freedom we still live in against the oppression from without of the advancing fascist barbarians, we are about to subjugate ourselves from within. For the remaining vestiges of that freedom are about to be crumpled in the unelected fists of the most devoted, socialist, totalitarian, “environmentalist” bureaucrats the world has ever produced, justified solely on the grounds of non-existent evidence of man-made climate control.

A menacing interpretation

When I first encountered, a couple of years ago, this menacing interpretation of the approaching “carbon crisis” I scoffed. It was alarmist nonsense; outlandish that anybody would do such a thing; an imaginary conspiracy from the paranoid—surely the movement is based on the science of the enhanced greenhouse effect? Read more… »