Carte Blanche: Global Warming - A New Religion.

GLOBAL warming might yet be revealed as the biggest and most expensive myth since the dreaded Y2K bug.

Remember the horror stories at the end of 1999 - planes would fall out of the sky and Eskom would seize all because computers would be confused by the date 2000 in their internal clocks. Factories would stop working. Shop shelves would be emptied. Paranoid people actually stocked up on baked beans and candles in case.

Even the respectable media was saturated with a looming catastrophe that turned out to be a big hoax. That time the world's hardware and software makers and their consultants made billions of dollars.

Now once again the media is full of crisis. The ice caps and the glaciers are melting. The polar bears are dying. The weather has turned hot and cold and violent. It's all because we burn too much carbon.

The current hysteria has changed behaviour radically. It has cost billions, if not trillions and the spending has just started. Tens of thousands of expensive and not very efficient wind turbines have been erected in dozens of countries. Soon you won't see the desert sand for a sea of solar panels.

Crops are being diverted into ethanol production. The world's biggest companies have been forced into trading carbon credits and if they are not green enough - horror - they are excluded from socially responsible investment portfolios.

Once again there are many vested interests - NGOs, advisers, consultants, alternative energy purveyors, politicians and control freaks - who do well on all the excitement. [...]

Economics is about alternatives. Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish economist, who first questioned environmental hysteria in "The Skeptical Environmentalist", asks: if you had $50bn to spend, would you spend it on combating global warming, or on fighting HIV/Aids, hunger and malaria and freeing world trade? He would prefer that latter four priorities.

Richard Linzen, professor of meteorology as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says there is little hard evidence backing up the sweeping claims of the Stern Report.

"He [Stern] is guilty of misreading the data, of distorting the evidence to suit his political masters' dogma, of throwing numbers about with reckless abandon, or promoting alarmism in place of rational discussion, and of reinventing climate history...

Linzen wrote in London Daily Mail: "Stern states quite boldly that the scale of global warming has been unprecedented for at least the past 1000 years but he cannot possibly be sure on this point because the data from previous centuries is unreliable...At most we have a 50-year span of accurate measurements. The only genuine global records of temperature come from weather balloons, since 1958, and from microwave sounding units, since 1978. What they indicate is a very gently warming trend, nothing approaching the apocalyptic vision of Sir Nicholas."

Linzen says that according to a host of historical accounts, Europe was far warmer in the Middle Ages than it is today, or that the 17th century was much colder. He adds that polar bears are doing quite well. There are now 22000, compared to 5000 in 1940.

Nor can we be sure that any change is due to mankind. There are many other possibilities, including the sun's radiation. He accuses Stern of wanting to blame western capitalism for every drought or famine.

"What is so tragic is the way this dubious ideology has achieved such dominance in our public life. Politicians love the green agenda, of course, because it means more control, more regulation, more taxes, more summits and more opportunities for displays of self-important zeal. The tragedy is that the likes of Sir Nicholas Stern are using bogus science to push forward this agenda."

When people stop critically thinking about the issues at hand, and start arguing in a completely emotional and irrational fashion, it's safe to say that Global Warming is becoming very similar to a religion. When people start mindlessly throwing money to the cause, it becomes more like a cult.

Labels: Capitalism, Environment, Y2Kyoto