Resurrect Capitalism!

Politicians and socialist CEOs are busy pressing the economic panic button.  Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmists are getting concerned that their cause is getting washed out by the deafening financial panic screams.  As a result AGW folks are cranking up the volume on their own noise machine.

It seems the dire warnings about the oncoming devastation wrought by global warming were not dire enough, a top climate scientist warned Saturday.

It has been just over a year since the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a landmark report warning of rising sea levels, expanding deserts, more intense storms and the extinction of up to 30 percent of plant and animal species.

But recent climate studies suggest that report significantly underestimates the potential severity of global warming over the next 100 years, a senior member of the panel warned.

“We now have data showing that from 2000 to 2007, greenhouse gas emissions increased far more rapidly than we expected,” said Chris Field, who was a coordinating lead author of the report.

This is “primarily because developing countries like China and India saw a huge upsurge in electric power generation, almost all of it based on coal,” Field said in a statement ahead of a presentation to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Without decisive action to slow global warming, higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and thaw the Arctic tundra, potentially releasing billions of tons of carbon dioxide that has been stored for thousands of years.

That could raise temperatures even more and create “a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control by the end of the century.”

“We don’t want to cross a critical threshold where this massive release of carbon starts to run on autopilot,” said Field, a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science at Stanford University.

This warning of catastrophe sounds strange to me as everything else I have read suggests stable global temperatures since the el nino heated year of 1998.  A quick plot from UAH (University of Alabama Huntsville) satellite temperature data: the dark blue line is the global mean lower troposphere temperature and the light blue trace is the atmospheric CO2 concentration.

So CO2 emissions have been increasingly steadily for the past few decades but warming has stalled / declined.  This does NOT prove that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are not making the earth hotter than it otherwise would be.  But it shows that with increasing CO2 emissions the temperature isn’t going haywire.  It’s not even getting hotter. There is no cause for panic.

This suggests an obvious problem with AGW climate models which have predicted unceasing warming with increased CO2 concentrations.  AGW alarmists know there is a problem and they are trying to preclude scientific debate with emotion.

AGW alarmists often label anyone skeptical of their theories as people who get funding from “Big Oil”, “Big Coal”, etc.  In other words, people who don’t agree with AGW models have a financial incentive in having the public believe that AGW isn’t real or isn’t a problem if it is real.

But one must keep in mind the financial incentives for AGW alarmists.  Many climate scientists and modellers will be out of work if you don’t think that AGW is a problem.  Many scientists have staked their reputations on AGW and will defend it no matter what.  People like Al Gore have become extremely wealthy ( > $100M!) by promoting AGW and have every incentive in the world to try to have you believe that we need their wisdom.

With our economy reeling the worst action our government could take would be to impose draconian global warming taxes on industry.