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SPPI News Search July 26, 2008 SPPI News Search July 26, 2008 Lonely voice of dissent declared valid http://www.smh.com.au/news/miranda-devine/lonely-voice-of-dissent-declared- valid/2008/07/25/1216492729369.html Miranda Devine July 26, 2008 There is something odd about the ferocious amount of energy expended suppressing any dissent from orthodoxy on climate change. After all, the climate cataclysmists have won the war of public opinion - for now, at least - with polls, business, media and Government enthusiastically on board. So, if their case is so good, why try so fervently to extinguish other points of view? There is a disturbingly religious zeal in the attempts to silence critics and portray them as the moral equivalent of holocaust deniers. Take the British Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which aired on the ABC last year with an extraordinary post-show panel of debunkers assembled to denounce it. The one program which actually questioned the consensus on man's contribution to climate change, it has been singled out for condemnation and forensic dissection in a way no other program has, least of all Al Gore's error-riddled An Inconvenient Truth. This week, the British communications regulator, Ofcom, published a long report dealing with 265 complaints about perceived inaccuracy and unfairness in Swindle. Despite crowing from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the ABC and others, Ofcom does not vindicate Swindle's attackers. In fact, while it declared itself unable to adjudicate on the finer points of climate science, it found the program did not mislead audiences "so as to cause harm or offence". Further, Ofcom defended the right of Channel 4 and the much-vilified producer Martin Durkin to "continue to explore controversial subject matter. While such programs can polarise opinion, they are essential to our understanding of the world around us and are amongst the most important content that broadcasters produce." Amen. Ofcom also noted: "Although the complainants disagreed with the points made by the contributors in the programme, they did not suggest that the overall statements about climate models were factually inaccurate." It identified one factual error - a mislabelled axis of a temperature graph - which the program had already changed in later versions and which Ofcom described as "not of such significance as to have been materially misleading so as to cause harm and offence". Ofcom nitpicked as hard as it could and Swindle emerged virtually unscathed. I wonder how a Four Corners episode would fare under such scrutiny. The two principal complainants, the oceanographer Carl Wunsch and Sir David King, Britain's former chief scientific adviser, were found to have been wronged - but only partially. King claimed to have been misquoted by the atmospheric physicist Fred Singer, who told the program: "There will still be people who believe that this is the end of the world - particularly when you have, for example, the chief scientist of the UK telling people that by the end of the century the only habitable place on the Earth will be the Antarctic. And humanity may survive thanks to some breeding couples who moved to the Antarctic." Ofcom found King had not said the Antarctic would be the "only habitable place on Earth" but "the most habitable place on Earth". Big deal. However, he had not made the "breeding couples" comment, which was the invention of another cataclysmist, Sir James Lovelock. As for Wunsch, Ofcom found the program's producers had not "sufficiently informed" him of its "polemic" nature, although they had told him their aim was to be sceptical and "to examine critically the notion that recent global warming is primarily caused by industrial emissions of [carbon dioxide]." In any case, after he complained, his interview was removed. Ofcom dismissed Wunsch's more serious complaint that his views on the "complicated" relationship between carbon dioxide and atmospheric temperature had been misrepresented. But it acknowledged "unfairness" to him in the way his comments were placed "in the context of a range of scientists who denied the scientific consensus about the anthropogenic causes of global warming". Ofcom also dismissed all complaints about impartiality in most of the program dealing with science. But it found the final section on Africa lacked impartiality when it claimed Western government policies "seek to restrain industrial development [in the Third World] to reduce the production of carbon dioxide", thus restricting the availability of electricity in Africa and causing health problems. As for the climate change panel's barrage of complaints, Ofcom found the program makers did not give the UN body adequate time to respond to allegations it was "politically driven"' and other claims, but the audience was not "materially misled so as to cause harm or offence". The Ofcom report (worth reading in full at www.ofcom.org.uk) is an embarrassment to the panel. The fact is that, regardless of the definitive pronouncements made by politicians and economists, the science on global warming is far from finalised. Dr David Evans, a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office for six years to 2005, is one of many insiders who have reversed earlier positions. "There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming," he wrote this month in The Australian. Ultimately, the integrity of the scientific community will triumph, Evans has said. "The cause of global warming is an issue that falls into the realm of science, because it is falsifiable. No amount of human posturing will affect what the cause is. The cause just physically is there, and after sufficient research and time we will know what it is." Until then, open debate is important. It is also wise to maintain a healthy suspicion of the zealots, who insist they have all the answers - and that Australia, which is responsible for 1 per cent of the world's carbon emissions, ought to wreck its economy to prove a point. 2 [email protected] This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/07/25/1216492729369.html ***** The Global Food and Water Crisis http://co2science.org/articles/V11/N30/EDIT.php In a paper published in the Biological Sciences section of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in July of 2007, Morison et al. report that "agriculture accounts for 80-90% of all freshwater used by humans," that "most of that is in crop production," and that "in many areas, this water use is unsustainable." As a result, they say that "farmers in many countries are now faced with legislative restrictions on use of water," noting that the Chinese government "has set a target of a reduction of 20% in water use in agriculture by the year 2020," such that "if food security for the region is not to be threatened, this must be achieved without a loss in production." So how is this global food and water crisis to be met and overcome? In their many pages of discussion of the subject, the four UK researchers examine the underlying relationships that connect crop carbon uptake, growth and water loss, noting that "much effort is being made to reduce water use by crops and produce 'more crop per drop'." Some of the topics they examine in the course of this discussion are designed to alter various crop characteristics that might possibly increase their water use efficiency, such as by genetic engineering, while others deal with crop management strategies, such as how and when to apply irrigation water. Clearly, all of these approaches to getting "more crop per drop" out of our agricultural enterprises should be pursued. But what if we had a magical substance we could release to the air that would automatically lead to greater crop yields? And what if it produced those greater crop yields while using less water? And what if the many processes that put this super substance into the air were incredibly useful in their own right ... or even essential, both to our individual well-being and to the security of numerous nations? Why, everyone would be clamoring for its release to the air, right? Wrong! Al Gore, for one, is adamantly against it. So is James Hansen, as are a host of climate alarmists, all of whom feel that the water-use-efficiency-enhancing carbon dioxide that is released to the air by the burning of coal, gas and oil -- which is no different from what every one of us emits to the atmosphere with every breath we exhale -- should not only not be allowed to continue to rise, but should be stopped in its tracks, all because tenuous speculations spawned by woefully inadequate computer- run climate models suggest that releasing more CO2 into the air will lead to catastrophic global warming. A tiny hint of what we will experience if Al Gore and his followers have their way with the world is already upon us. It is the soaring price of basic foodstuffs caused by farmers growing biofuels in place of food crops, as well as by the increased price of oil and gas that is needed to produce and move those foods -- and move us as well -- which is caused by a reduction in gas and oil availability that is miniscule compared to what the world's climate alarmists would force us to go without. 3 Insanity is upon us, as real catastrophes lie at the doorstep, and as they are actually made worse by those who would fight imaginary ones. Truly, the situation is as described by an astute observer of some three-plus centuries ago: The World ran Mad, and each distempered Brain, Did Strange and different Frenzies entertain.* Sherwood, Keith and Craig Idso * Mrs.
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