The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there.
People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus on the point of collapse?
Mini update: The carbon market is being referred to as “dead”. Johannes Teyssen, chief executive of Germany’s EON, urged policymakers to make fixes. “Let’s talk real: the ETS is bust, it’s dead,” Mr Teyssen said in Brussels this week, adding: “I don’t know a single person in the world that would invest a dime based on ETS signals.” [full story: Financial Times]. Point Carbon analysts have downgraded the forecast price of carbon credits for the second time in two months as the carbon market continues to slide. What was estimated to be 12 Euros, has fallen to 9 euros for 2012, and 8 euro’s for 2013. It’s a long way below $23, set by our Australian “free-market-lovin’-Labor-Party”. (If only they knew what a free market was.)
The best known environmentalist in the German Social Democratic Party announced he had become a skeptic (see FOCUS and read about his new book). It doesn’t get much more damning than this. Fritz Vahrenholt was a chemistry professor and a leftie politician, and, could it be any more poignant… also headed up the renewable energy division of Germany’s second largest utility company. CEO of a wind farm for goodness sake. H/t to Keith and many many others.
Thanks to the GWPF I also know that Australia will probably be the last-man-standing on the deck of the burning ship called “Climate Change”. Everywhere else around the world, the only people who aren’t abandoning ship are those who never climbed aboard. Subsidies to all new wind and solar plants were outright suspended in Spain last week, which was not just bad, but described as “one of the biggest blows ever to the sector. ” The changes are predicted to kill off much of the investment in renewables there. The people selling solar power in Greece were also told the government could not afford to pay their rates, and didn’t really want more of that kind of power right now either, thanks. The U.K. government joined the rush to abandon renewables and promised to cut subsidies for solar energy (see Bloomberg). Meanwhile 101 Tory ministers in the UK government declared they want to toss the wind-farm subsidies out the window. If Julia Gillard wants to lead the way in this market she could start by buying up the solar plants, and drilling their ground for shale gas.
Why now: The perfect storm?
- Skeptics have been hammering away at this for years. The mainstream media won’t publish any skeptical science, not even a comparison of land or ocean temperatures against the model predictions (how “technical” is that?). But thanks to the Internet, people found out anyway — it just took a bit longer.
- The weather is cold or wet. The witchdoctors claim that this is what they predicted, and it’s due to global warming, but the crowd are not that dumb (and again, the Internet — their bad predictions are there for all to see).
- The money ran out. Ten years later, people have noticed.
- Shale gas.
Dr Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation says: “Shale gas is the big game changer because it has previously been argued that fossil fuels are near to running out. There could now be enough gas for 200 or 300 years”. –-Adrian Lee, Daily Express, 25 January 2012
It’s a global thing, Barack Obama is also “discovering” shale.
President Barack Obama pushed drilling for gas in shale rock and support for cleaner energy sources to boost the economy in his final State of the Union address before facing U.S. voters in November. He also pledged more oil drilling. Bloomberg, 25 January 2012
The evidence is killing even the pet-scare-lines
Somewhere, some bright spark realized that coral reefs like warm water, and in areas where corals were growing at the edge or outside the tropics, what ho, but the corals liked it when the water got warmer. (And someone needed a study to know that? Or did they just need a research grant?) Where oceans have warmed the most (because they were the coolest to start with) the corals just got happier and happier. Where the temperatures warmed the most — the corals increased their growth rate the fastest…
Over the last seven years or so the Himalayan glaciers stopped losing ice. The Guardian. [NASA] h/t [Watts Up] Only a few years ago they were saying those glaciers would be gone.
The world is rediscovering those derided “extremists”
When all is said and done, they turned out to be more mainstream than anyone knew…
We Are Winning the Debate and Greens Don’t Like It
Source: UK Express
Lord Lawson, who was Margaret Thatcher’s Chancellor from 1983 to 1989 and an MP for 28 years, is not the only one to have suffered for his views on climate change. Anyone who dares to challenge the often zealous green lobby is apparently fair game.
Entertainer and mathematician Johnny Ball has been vilified for opposing the commonly held view about global warming.
He says: “For daring to take this contrarian view I’ve lost bookings, had talks cancelled and been the subject of a sinister internet campaign that only came to an end following the intervention of the police.”
Environmental campaigner David Bellamy also claims he has been victimised for taking an alternative position. He has said: “The sad fact is that since I said I didn’t believe human beings caused global warming I’ve not been allowed to make a TV programme. The idiot fringe has accused me of being like a Holocaust denier.”
Even the Greenie groups at the leading edge know they need to move on, and call it something else…
Rio+20 or the Earth Summit, that it risks ending up as all talk and little action. In an attempt to avoid too much confrontation, the conference will focus not on climate change but on sustainable development. –Deborah Zabarenko and Nina Chestney, Reuters, 24 January 2012
General hat-tip to the excellent GWPF
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