Green Is the New Red: Global-warming hysteria was made to order for anti-capitalist militants.

Colossal spending and regulatory programs impend, based on the Al Gore conventional hysteria that unreduced carbon emissions will destroy the earth. This will eventually be seen as one of the modern world’s most inexplicable descents into public-policy madness. The basic relevant facts are that carbon emissions are not the principal, nor even a measurable, factor in global warming, and despite dire forecasts and ever-increasing carbon emissions in the world — especially as the economies of China and India, representing 40 percent of the world’s population, expand by 6 to 10 percent each year — the world has not grown a millidegree warmer since the start of this millennium. And the mean temperature rose by only 1 degree Celsius in the 25 years before that.

The greenhouse effect of carbon-dioxide emissions does produce gentle warming if it is not counteracted by unpredictable natural phenomena, but it cannot be measured directly against the volume of such emissions.

The chief source of apparently informed hysteria on this subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has estimated that the mean world temperature will increase by between 1.8 degrees C. (3.2 degrees F.) and 4 degrees C. (7.2 degrees F.) over the course of this century, although the first tenth of that warming has already failed to occur in the last decade. But even if it had occurred, no such fate would remotely justify all the cant and hype that the end of the world is nigh.

Even the IPCC admits that the upper end of its forecast would, in fact, substantially increase world food production. There is no chance of achieving stated, or even (by some countries) committed, emission-reduction targets, nor any reason to believe that the attainment of these targets would accomplish anything useful. Yet the president of the United States has been promising radical progress toward an international covenant in Copenhagen this month to spend trillions of dollars in pursuit of this unattainable, undesirable target.

It would be infinitely more sensible to intensify research and invest, where necessary or advisable, in mitigation, adaptation, and geostrategy, such as the infusion of sulphates into the stratosphere, as happens naturally with volcanic eruptions, to reduce the intensity of the sun and provide countervailing cooling influences without thinning the ozone layer.

We should keep in mind that the IPCC’s worst case in its preferred (very negative) scenario is that, in the next hundred years, living standards in what is now the developing or underdeveloped world will improve by only 750 percent, instead of the 850 percent improvement that would allegedly occur if the world’s temperature remained constant.

All responsible people want to assist the disadvantaged parts of the world and do what we reasonably can for our own descendants, but not to the point of self-impoverishment now for the sake of a marginal gain against a wildly unproved prognosis a century from now. This is the flimsiest justification imaginable for the mad slogan parroted endlessly by the eco-Zouaves, from Hollywood to the UN to Ducks Unlimited — “Save the Planet!” — as they try to force-march the world into biodegradable pastoralism.

Nor is this the grim “tipping point” Al Gore has made scores of millions of dollars and won a Nobel Peace Prize for decrying as the imminent Apocalypse. Gore’s scurrilous film, An Inconvenient Truth, is based on no original research and is a teeming rain forest of false and irrelevant claims, such as that the Pacific island country of Tuvalu is losing population because the sea level around it is rising under the relentless pressures of global warming on the polar ice caps; and that, for the same reason, mosquitoes have afflicted Nairobi, Kenya, with a constant epidemic of malaria.

The inconvenience of the truth falls on Gore, not his opponents. Water levels have in fact declined slightly at Tuvalu, and the country’s modest population shrinkage is due to economic migration. Malaria was much more prevalent in Nairobi a century ago, and has risen slightly in recent years only because of the ecologists’ attack on the use of insecticides. The polar ice caps aren’t melting at all; the ice sheets over the oceans are, but the ice over land is actually thickening, so water levels are not being affected.

The much-vaunted British Stern Report is in fact largely rubbish, devised to give the environmental baton to Tony Blair, so he could wave it like a magic wand to placate the Left of the British Labour Party, for whom he delivered nothing else but an indiscriminate increase in public spending. That report warns of a 70 percent decline in world food production this century if its temperature forecasts are met. To get that number, the Stern Report relied exclusively on a study predicting such a decline in the harvest of northern-Indian groundnuts only, not the world’s food supply. Stern purported to forecast 200, 300, or 1,000 years ahead, which is nonsense, and warns of the “deaths of hundreds of millions, social upheaval, large-scale conflicts,” if $25 trillion is not spent in the next 15 years to reduce carbon emissions by 70 percent (and disemploy scores of millions of people).

This leads directly to the farce of the Kyoto agreement, which was supposed to be escalated at the Copenhagen discussions next week. Bill Clinton, who was president when Kyoto was negotiated, pledged to support that mad enterprise, as well as the monstrous racket of international trafficking in unused permissible emission balances. The U.S. Senate repudiated any such adherence, 95 to 0, in one of its few unanimous acts on a serious subject since Pearl Harbor.

President Obama is trying to replicate this poker game domestically in the trade part of cap-and-trade, which as passed by the House of Representatives would neither reduce carbon emissions nor raise government revenues, but would impose a heavy burden of cost increases for heating and air conditioning on the families and employers of America. One of the more absurd after-effects of the great Green immersion is eco-neutrality — corporate and even personal claims to expiate and atone for formerly non-soul-destroying indulgences such as jet travel, by installing solar panels or planting trees. News footage from the 1950s of families scrambling under their kitchen tables to take shelter from a Soviet nuclear attack seems the very essence of common sense compared to some current eco-posturing.

The Canadian environmental economist Ross McKitrick and statistical minerologist Stephen McIntyre, by their tireless research in the teeth of the entire ecological establishment, proved the former IPCC claim of drastically accelerated global warming was a fraud, and forced its withdrawal. These men have been prominently mentioned in the hacked e-mails that have just revealed the outrageous lengths to which the scientific propagators of the Great Green Fraud have gone to suppress the facts.

To some extent, as the immensely respected former British chancellor of the exchequer and energy secretary, Nigel Lawson, has written, Green is the new Red. Marxism has been debunked, and the militant anti-capitalists and oppositionists — too militant to be easily accommodated in conventional oppositions — have decamped to environmentalism, and have taken over the inoffensive tandem bicycle of the naturalists, with their pith helmets and butterfly nets. They have turned it into a nihilist juggernaut seeking an end to capitalist and bourgeois society in the name of earthly salvation and redemption. It is not surprising that this quasi-religious movement is strongest in the parts of Europe where traditional (Christian) religion is weakest. The eco-extremists allow the conservationists and Sierra Clubs to front for their activities, just as the peace movement became a seamless melange of Communists, fellow-travelers, and pacifist naïfs who filled the critical role of Lenin’s “useful idiots.”

As Lord Lawson wrote in his book An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, those concerned about imminent environmental catastrophe — as compared, for example, to the real danger of nuclear terrorism — “need not worry about saving this planet. They are already living on another one. . . . We appear to have entered a new age of unreason. . . . It is from this, above all, that we really need to save the planet.”

What makes this challenge especially daunting is that the forces of unreason are being led by the president of the United States. For 70 years, U.S. presidents led the battles against Nazism, Fascism, Japanese imperialism, Soviet and Far Eastern Communism, and Islamo-terrorism. After some waffling, President Obama seems to be taking up the cudgels against the terrorists, but he is also crusading for objectives that all other leaders of serious countries know to be nonsense — self-deindustrialization and nuclear disarmament — while spending trillions of dollars the U.S. does not have and cannot borrow.

If the president of the United States is leading the struggle against civilization’s enemies while trying to pursue policies that, however well-intentioned, would undermine that civilization bloodlessly from within, the way forward will be desperately complicated. Mr. Obama seems to think that the world is waiting for him to enact radical change. In fact, it is waiting for him to come to his senses. So, now, are a majority of his countrymen.

-- Conrad Black is the author of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom and Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full. He can be reached at cbletters@gmail.com.

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