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Science/Tech See other Science/Tech Articles Title: Battle of the Nobel climate horror disaster movies Terence Corcoran, Financial Post So here's our ethical predicament for today: Is it wrong to be a shouting scaremonger in a crowded movie theatre full of shouting scaremongers? And, one might ask, what happens when a scaremonger shouts fire in a theatre full of people shouting fire? The answer to the second question is easy: Nothing. That's what happened last Saturday, when the Nobel Prizewinning United Nations panel on climate change, in another of its patented panic-inducing document dumps, told the world that the end is near. Unless we all rush for the exits and bring on a massive expansion of government planning and intervention to control carbon emissions, disaster looms. "The time for doubt has passed," said IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri. "The IPCC has unequivocally affirmed the warming of our climate system, and linked it directly to human activity." Chief fire alarmist at the meeting, in Valencia, Spain, was UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who said the latest report on climate change described scenes that "are as frightening as a science-fiction movie. But they are even more terrifying, because they are real." When it comes to science-fiction movies, the UN has an expert association: It shares the 2007 Nobel Peace prize with Al Gore, maker of the DVD horror hit An Inconvenient Truth. Maybe Mr. Ban had to say something about unreal movies, especially since the official "science" report he released on Saturday specifically identifies some of the big scary lies embedded in An Inconvenient Truth. Remember Al Gore's terrifying stuff about melting Greenland and Antarctica, leading to "sea levels rising by 18 and 20 feet" and the flooding of San Francisco and Manhattan? Can't happen, said the UN report on Saturday, unless global warming continued for thousands of years -- "millenia" -- at a very high rate. As for Antarctica, it will "remain too cold for widespread surface melting and [will] gain mass, due to increased snowfall." As for sea-level rise, the report says the science is so poorly understood that it "does not assess the likelihood ... for sea-level rise." And then there's Al Gore's portrayal of the Ocean Conveyor, also known as the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC) of the Atlantic Ocean, which he said was at risk of collapse and could plunge Europe into deep freeze this century. Not true, says the UN paper: "The MOC is very unlikely to undergo a large abrupt transition during the 21st century." In short: It's the truth battle of the Nobel winners! Who has the least inaccurate but terrifyingly real science-fiction movie story to tell? Is it Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth? Or will it be Ban Ki-moon's An Unreadable Synthesis? Mr. Ban says this new report, formally titled The Summary for Policymakers of the Synthesis Report of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, is "succinct and user-friendly." Well, maybe to some people. How friendly is the following typical clause? "Of the more than 29,000 observational data series, from 75 studies, that show significant change in many physical and biological systems, more than 89% are consistent with the direction of change expected as a response to warming. However, there is a notable lack of geographic balance in data and literature on observed changes, with marked scarcity in developing countries." This is followed by a colourcoded global graphic and severely incomprehensible details. (See page 3 of the synthesis report atwww.ipcc.ch.) Oh well, no matter. These impenetrable issues will get totally ignored next month in Bali, Indonesia, where thousands of chattering government-appointed delegates will descend to begin working on a new global climate agreement to replace the extinct Kyoto Protocol. Under the assumption that the summary of the synthesis of the IPCC reports is a coherent science document, the Bali meeting will consist of thousands of people from 130 countries screaming "fire" and pretending to have a plan to put it out. Since global carbon emissions are climbing and there's no sign anybody is actually doing anything to stop them, the UN delegates in Bali will work themselves into a frenzy of busyness. Given the gaps in national and regional perspectives, from China to India to Europe and North America, real agreement is unlikely, although they will come up with something that they will try to pass off as a big step forward. The truth is they have nowhere to go and no solutions to implement. All they have are calls for rapid and alarming expansion of state regulation. Saturday's summary report proposed government regulations throughout the world, state planning, new taxes, subsidies, standard settings, building codes, national energy policies, financial incentives, state procurement initiatives, permit regimes, demand-side management schemes, tax credits and more. (See below.) To change the global climate, we apparently need a global command economy. It won't happen. And so long as these people stay locked up in their own theatre, they can work themselves up into whatever level of hysteria they want. Just keep the rest of us out of it.
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