It looks like Great Britain has decided to commit suicide in order to do their part to save the planet from Global Warming, despite their almost insignificant contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide. Here is an article by the excellent English commentator, Melanie Phillips:

From economics to airconomics
Daily Mail, 30 October 2006

Not since Nostradamus penned his obscure 16th-century verses prophesying the end of the world has a publishing event had the anticipated impact of today’s report by Sir Nicholas Stern, about the threat to the planet posed by man-made global warming.

If the leaks are correct, Sir Nicholas is saying that unless the world takes immediate drastic action, we are all doomed. Floods and other natural disasters caused by global warming will trigger an economic catastrophe worse than the 1929 Wall Street crash. Far from green policies putting prosperity at risk, it is only such policies, he says, that will keep our consumer societies from global economic catastrophe.

Even before his actual words were published, the political game of greener than-thou had begun in earnest. First past the post was the Environment Minister David Miliband, after a leak from his department of proposals aimed at addressing global warming which would simply end modern life as we know it.

If these were implemented, drivers would be forced off the roads by swingeing increases in taxes and fuel duties. Cheap air flights would become as distant a memory as Concorde. Household goods, from washing machines to lightbulbs, would be priced off the shelves. In other words, we would be taxed back to an earlier, less prosperous age, and those on modest incomes would be hit the hardest.

Mr Miliband was promptly fried to a carbonised crisp by Gordon Brown, doubtless for daring to steal the Treasury’s own environmentally-friendly thunder. If Brown is to be the new green, the Chancellor wants to take the credit himself. Mr Miliband’s greater crime, however, was surely that his outrageous proposals at least had the merit of honesty. Reducing carbon emissions must cause considerable pain to western consumer societies. But the deeper question is, for what gain?

After all, Britain accounts for a mere 2 per cent of the world’s energy demand. If we garaged every car, grounded every plane and rationed families to one lightbulb apiece, it would make virtually no difference. China alone — which is opening a new power station every day — would make up our carbon emissions in 13 months. In short, whatever we do to curb our carbon emissions is all but irrelevant to the future of the planet.

Sir Nicholas is well aware of this fact. So his message is that the whole world has to co-operate in reducing carbon emissions. But the greatest flaw in his argument is that the science upon which he is basing his dire predictions is flaky.

Sir Nicholas, Mr Miliband, the Royal Society, the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir David King, and a host of other terrifically grand panjandrums all claim there is no longer any scientific debate about whether man-made global warming is happening. It’s a settled fact. Argument over.

Phooey. They are all simply playing green politics.

You have only to read the scientific assessments made by the ecological holy of holies itself, the International Panel on Climate Change, to see that the science that is used to support the theory actually stresses over and over again the uncertainties surrounding it, and the extreme unreliability of the computer models that produce the apocalyptic forecasts of huge rises in global temperature.

Such models bear about as much relation to reality as astrology. As the distinguished American meteorologist Professor Richard Lindzen observed last weekend, the computer modelling performed at the Hadley Centre, one of Britain’s most vociferous proponents of man-made climate change, was seriously at odds with the actual warming that was taking place.

The facts are that the rise in temperature over the past century, 0.6C (plus or minus 0.2C), is unexceptional; and that clouds and water vapour are far more significant presences in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.

Yet this is an issue where ideology is simply driving out evidence. Sir Nicholas will apparently highlight the threat of catastrophic rises in sea level. But according to the IPCC, the seas are not rising. Although they were higher in the last century than in the previous one, it says in its Third Scientific Report: ‘No significant acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise during the 20th century has been detected.’

Yet people prefer to believe the absurdities propounded by former U.S. presidential candidate Al Gore in his eco-doomsday film An Inconvenient Truth. In the film he cites, for example, the Polynesian island of Tuvalu as a place where rising sea levels forced residents to evacuate their homes. But this isn’t true. Sea levels at Tuvalu actually fell during the latter half of the 20th century. An inconvenient truth indeed. But who cares about the facts when there’s money to be made out of human credulity?

For the Treasury, whose speciality has been to devise ever more fiendish stealth taxes, the hysteria over climate change has presented it with a bonanza plucked from the air (literally). It doubtless thinks it can impose eye-watering new taxes by proclaiming that this is the only way to save the planet. Since Sir Nicholas is a senior Treasury official, it might be assumed that the Chancellor intends to tax modern life until the electoral pipsqueaks turn green.

But this isn’t the only pound sign now flashing emerald at the Treasury. A lot of people are making a fortune out of climate change doomsday scenarios. Carbon trading, in particular, is now an enormous global business.

This is how it works. Governments set limits on carbon emissions and then permit companies to trade in the credits they stack up for meeting these targets. If companies want to emit more, they must buy more credits from companies with a carbon surplus. The aim is to give firms an incentive to reduce their carbon emissions.

The credits, however, are given for a virtual commodity — tonnes of carbon dioxide which have not been put into the atmosphere. The system can easily be abused — by setting the targets too high, or by rewarding countries such as Russia or the Ukraine where emissions have fallen because their economies are failing.

Nevertheless, this virtual market is producing vast profits. Thus the bank Morgan Stanley recently unveiled a £1.6bn investment in carbon trading; and the World Bank, where Sir Nicholas previously worked as chief economist, is heavily involved in the trade. Is it any surprise, therefore, that his report is expected to give carbon trading an enormous boost?

And the Chancellor is already there before him. In a speech delivered last April, Mr Brown said: ‘Our ultimate goal must be a global carbon market,’ which he saw as a driver of future economic growth. In other words, on the back of an alleged global catastrophe, Mr Brown sees an unrivalled national business opportunity. Sir Nicholas, it would appear, was brought in to make the argument for a policy that had already been decided.

This is literally making money out of thin air. Surreal, or what? Our Chancellor is taking us from economics to airconomics. The biggest business opportunity of the century may make the South Sea Bubble look like the acme of prudence.

The great satirist Jonathan Swift mocked scientists by inventing a scheme by which they made sunbeams out of cucumbers. Making money out of the air, on the back of a scientifically unproven panic, would surely defy even the powers of a Swift to invent a more preposterous fiction.