GREENIE CORNER

A good summary of Bjorn Lomborg's findings (PDF): "Professor Lomborg does believe that global warming is taking place. However, he says: "The cure is worse than the ailment. Let's not focus on phantom problems at the expense of real problems." All the Kyoto treaty on global warming would achieve is to postpone warming for six years, he argues. For a bill of $4 trillion, a 2 degree rise in temperature would arrive in 2106 instead of 2100."

In contrast, a recent BBC "Horizon" program presents a variety of scientific data showing that Britain is headed for a new ice age!!! -- possibly with 20 years. Ahh!! How lovely to have such scientific certainty about these things. It is certainly true geologically that we are living at the end of a warm interglacial period so I have always said that we might one day need all the global warming we can get. Geology is not a very precise clock, however, so whether the next ice age will start in 20 years or in 1,000 years time, nobody can say -- though the start does already seem to be overdue. When it does start, however, Canada will rapidly cease to exist. Canada should be laughing the Kyoto treaty to death, not supporting it.

Don't mention the Sun! "The Sun is more active now than it has been for a millennium. The realisation, which comes from a reconstruction of sunspots stretching back 1150 years, comes just as the Sun has thrown a tantrum. Over the last week, giant plumes of have material burst out from our star's surface and streamed into space, causing geomagnetic storms on Earth."

The air gets cleaner, while environmental politics gets dirtier "The way the administration's environmental critics tell it, you can't see your hand in front of your face anymore because of all the pollution Bush has allowed his big business buddies to emit. That's certainly the theme of every green activist group, Democratic presidential hopeful, and far too many environmental journalists. But there is one big problem with this scenario -- it's the exact opposite of reality, according to a 2003 report by the Environmental Protection Agency."

Disease doesn't have much to do with climate change one way or the other: "Every year, according to a new report by the World Health Organisation, 150,000 people succumb to the effects of global warming... But what about all the elderly and infirm people who would have died had this winter been as cold as those frequently experienced in Europe during the 19th century? Strangely, these non-deaths do not appear to feature in the World Health Organisation's one-sided ledger"

Alarmism sells papers: "It seems that virtually every news organ in the English language has carried the story of new scientific claims published in Nature magazine that by 2050 over a million species will be doomed to extinction owing to the effects of global warming. Yet few of them realized how flimsy the story actually is."

John Daly also takes apart recent claims of greenhouse species extinction.

And another article that says the mass extinction is more like a mass exaggeration

Carbon dioxide is beneficial, not harmful: "The results of this impressive study of real-world agricultural operations in a significantly CO2-enriched atmosphere -- which is the only environmental change we can be confident will occur in the foreseeable future -- bodes well indeed for the financial well-being of Western Australian wheat farmers and the land that supports them."

The green machine "Twenty EU member and accession states labour under a cadre of panels collectively known as the European Environmental Advisory Council (EEAC). Styling itself as a body 'to provide independent, scientifically based advice on the environment and sustainable development,' this so-called 'network' is actually a series of organisations funded by the European Commission to lobby for their interests locally."

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