Orange County Register

 4 Comments

• Mark says:

  November 9, 2009 at 9:50 pm

  Here’s an excerpt from a recent NYTimes article that indicates there are two expenses in store for us, one for building infrastructure (for economic growth), and one for “girding” (securing) it against the extreme weather of climate change:

  “Eliminating that infrastructure deficit for low- and middle-income countries will, by itself, cost on the order of $315 billion annually over the next 20 years, the authors argue. Girding that updated infrastructure to meet the demands of a changing climate will require $16 billion to $63 billion in additional financing each year.”
  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/31/business/energy-environment/31iht-green31.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print

  What I’ve figured out is that the leftists are using AGW as a way to bring Least Developed and developing countries out of poverty and into the modern world. Most of those countries are lacking in economic infrastructures needed to support a modern economy (electricity, water, telecommunications, ports, roads, sewers, etc.). Once these countries are ready to support jobs, guess how’ll the’ll get most of them? From the offshoring of more of our jobs. These people will then build things to sell to us after we paid to build up their economic infrastructure.

  What I’ve also come across is brief mentions of convergences of incomes and GDPs across the globe from climate change solutions. For example, from a paper from the IPCC:

  “Working with a fifty year time horizon, Yohe and Van Engel (2004) have suggested that the trade off need not be quite so stark over the long term. They observe that the very transfers of international capital that would promote convergence over the near term between low and high income countries could also work to spread the incidence of achieving any sustainability-motivated climate target more evenly across both types of countries over the long term. However, Manne and Richels (1992 and 1997) added even more complication to the mix by showing that certain emissions and concentrations targets would be impossible to achieve in their modelling framework (which is calibrated to achieve significant convergence in terms of per capita income across regions with minimal contraction for the developed countries) even if enormously stringent mitigation were undertaken immediately. Other modelling frameworks, like the Nordhaus and Boyer (2001) RICE model, can achieve these targets more easily, but their baseline trajectories of economic growth worldwide are far less robust and their underlying rates of convergence are less compelling. ”

  Here are the key quotes from the above excerpt:
  “They observe that the very transfers of international capital that would promote convergence over the near term between low and high income countries ”

  “certain emissions and concentrations targets would be impossible to achieve in their modelling framework (which is calibrated to achieve significant convergence in terms of per capita income across regions with minimal contraction for the developed countries)”

  http://www.ipcc-wg2.gov/AR4/FOD/Ch20_FOD.pdf

  Here’s another mention of GDP convergence:
  “Weyant concluded that the SRES scenarios are probably correct when climate change or its impacts are of interest, whether PPP or MER was used. However there could be significant differences for mitigation cost projections depending on the method of GDP convergence.”

  http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/supporting-material/expert-meeting-2005-01.pdf

  Finally, here’s a UN paper co-authored by John P. Holdren that talks about reducing the dispairity in incomes in developed to developing countries over the next 100 years:

  “Box 1.1. Description of IPCC Scenario B2

  The IPCCâ��s B2 scenario family is based on projections from 1990 to 2100 of moderate population growth (growing from 5.3 billion to 10.4 billion people), intermediate levels of economic development (world gross domestic product (GDP) grows by a factor of 11), and moderate, but relatively diverse, technological change. The B2 storyline is oriented toward environmental protection and social equity (that is, assuming a tendency to a more even distribution of per capita income, quantified by dropping the ratio of income in developed to developing countries from 16 to 3 over the 21st century), and emphasizes â��local solutions to economic, social, and environmental sustainabilityâ�� (Nakicenovic and Swart, 2000).”"

  All in all, I see AGW as a socialist’s wet dream come true. It has the potential to transfer unprecedented sums of wealth from rich countries (in particular, the US) to poor countries, it’s going to reduce our standard of living and power and influence in the world, it’s going to enrich the oppressed and downtrodden, it’s going to result in a global governance type entity in charge of the fair distribution of natural resources and carbon policing, and when it’s all said and done, every nation will have similar per-captia GDPs and mostly everybody will be making similar incomes (except the elites in power).

  It’s also obvious to me that the DNC is run or heavily influenced by foreign interests and foreign operatives. International socialist George Soros is one of them. What I wonder is what the American people would do if they realized that the democrat party is working for the interests of foreign nations at the expense of America?

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• Professor W says:

  November 10, 2009 at 7:16 am

  It was finally an interesting libertarian discussion until Landsbaum glibly tosses in “imagine if the climate actually had heated up more than the 1 degree (actually even less) it has” as if this was insignificant.

  You would think by now with his hunndreds of ramblings on this he would be more familiar with global temperatures. The heating was actually more than one degree above average for 2005 and .9 above average for 2008. This is above average – not total warming which would be much greater than that.

  In addition, this is enough to cause the global impacts on ice, vegetation and wildlife – all of which have been widely and recently reported on. Just this year have been reports on rising tree deaths in Colorado due to warming temperatures; declining moose populations in Minnesota; decline of glacial ice on Kilamanjaro; all latitudes of the Greenland ice sheet are thinning; Ilulissat, Greenland, is shedding ice into the sea faster than ever before; and algae blooms in the Pacific are but just a few examples.

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  • Mark says:

    November 10, 2009 at 5:21 pm

    Professor W,

    Here ya go…

    “I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”

    The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of unusually warm weather that began around 1000 AD and persisted until a cold period known as the “Little Ice Age” took hold in the 14th century. Warmer climate brought a remarkable flowering of prosperity, knowledge, and art to Europe during the High Middle Ages.

    The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. It had to be “gotten rid of.”

    http://epw.senate.gov/hearing_statements.cfm?id=266543

    “We have to GET RID of the Medieval Warm Period?” WTF is going on within the science of AGW? We’ve had Mann’s first bogus hockey stick, Briffa’s hockey stick using just one tree, and Hansen adjusting data so that older data looked colder and newer data is warmer. Now I find out that your side is talking about getting rid of the MWP?

    Apparently, there is a lot of dishonest shenanigans going on within the science community of AGW. Perhaps it has to do with their leftist zeal to redistribute our wealth to the world and “equalize” everybody’s lives. It’s also apparent that scientists can be non-objective.

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• IronBalls says:

  November 10, 2009 at 2:41 pm

  Sure Landsbaum may be ‘glib’ about temperature variances from a century ago. But, so what? African leaders are known to be among the most corrupt in the world (including the US!) and have run their countries into the ground. I have the fortune to be born an American but that doesn’t mean I have to pay them to atone for global warming that may or may not exist (man made anyway) because their countries may or may not be negatively affected.

  Besides, do you really think sending money to Africa would really go toward the common good of the continent or to the personal accounts of the leaders?

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