DROUGHT! WATER SHORTAGES! CROP FAILURES! PLAGUE! FLOODS! DEFORESTATION!

Headlines from the Bible’s “Revelation Newsletter?” Maybe a preview of the latest Hollywood enviro-catastrophe big budget thriller?

Nope.

It’s the conclusion reached by a report to be issued tomorrow by a consortium of international climate change policy boards:

The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow – and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already.

The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world – and it is remarkably brief. In as little as 10 years, or even less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming may have been reached.

This will come as news to scientists who SUPPORT the idea of global warming but have yet to come up with a standard of measurement to determine exactly how much greenhouse gas is in the atmosphere…much less how much of it is caused by human industrial activity.

The problem isn’t, as some have stated, that global warming is a hoax. The problem is NOBODY KNOWS WHETHER IT’S TRUE OR NOT!

Scientists agree that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are probably rising…and that’s the extent of their agreement. A consensus has been emerging over the last 15 years that there is a strong possibility that the earth’s temperature will rise anywhere from 2 degrees to 5 degrees centigrade over the next century. That, by the way, is a huge spread. It’s probably the difference between catastrophe and Eden.

For example, a rise of 2.5-3 degrees in the earth’s aggregate temperature will cause a rise in sea levels of as little as 4 feet or as much as ten feet. Such a rise would cause massive flooding of coastal cities in the US and elsewhere…IF HUMAN BEINGS STOOD BACK AND DID NOTHING ABOUT IT!

The idea that people would sit idly by watching as sea water washed over them is silly. Building the necessary dikes and levies to keep the water out would be relatively inexpensive and could be done quickly. After all, the entire country of Holland is several dozen feet below sea level. They’ve had a dike and levy system in place since the middle ages.

Crop failures and droughts due to global warming are two more myths of catastrophe. While some areas of the planet would experience a shift in moisture patterns, the net result of climate change would mean some of the less temperate zones (like southern Canada and Northern United States) would experience longer growing seasons resulting in increased yield for their crops. So, any subsequent decrease in yield will be offset by an increase somewhere else. And that’s not even taking into account new technologies in agriculture that are already revolutionizing dryer areas of the planet with drought resistant seed strains of grain and fodder.

The real question is how much of this is caused by humans and how much is a result of a natural rise in temperature. Originally, climatologists thought that measuring industrial activity using as a baseline CO2 levels in the year 1750 would give a clue to how much human activity has impacted climate on the planet. Alas, their projections have been called into question, most notably here. Using ice core samples from several dozen glaciers, scientists have concluded that any correlation between human activity and CO2 levels must be tempered by the realization that there have been other large spikes in greenhouse gas emissions going back as far as 18 million years.

Somehow, I don’t think there were any coal-fired electrical plants back then.

Then there’s the simple notion that the sun may be a culprit of temperature rise.

Sunspots appear to intensify the SunÂ’s brightness and energy output, and their numbers are associated with climate, said Solanki, who is also managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany.

Looking back over several hundred years, Solanki’s team found that not only did a dearth of sunspots signal a cold period – sometimes for as long as 50 years – but they also discovered that the number of sunspots increased over the past century as the Earth’s climate grew steadily warmer.

What’s becoming clear in this debate is that proponents of the global warming theory have crossed over the line between science and towards an almost religious fervor when defending the basic tenets of climate change. MIT Meteorologist Richard Lindzen recently outlined this problem:

“Essentially if whatever you are told is alleged to be supported by ‘all scientists,’ you don’t have to understand [the issue] anymore. You simply go back to treating it as a matter of religious belief,” Lindzen said. His speech was titled, “Climate Alarmism: The Misuse of ‘Science’” and was sponsored by the free market George C. Marshall Institute. Lindzen is a professor at MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

Once a person becomes a believer of global warming, “you never have to defend this belief except to claim that you are supported by all scientists—except for a handful of corrupted heretics,” Lindzen added.

These “heretics” include Danish scientist Bjorn Lomborg whose book “The Skeptical Environmentalist” caused a huge backlash in the mainstream scientific community. Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute fisks the attempted debunking of Lomborg’s book in “Scientific American” and sums up the reasons for this reaction:

The reason Scientific American is apoplectic about that argument is because it is scientific and convincing. If it convinced the Bush administration to walk away from Kyoto, how long will it be before it convinces Congress to derail the multibillion-dollar gravy train feeding the global warming claque?

This gets to the crux of the matter. Dozens of the best scientists in the field have an enormous amount of personal prestige invested in climate change theory. Do contrary opinions and studies get the attention they deserve? Or are they suppressed due to a mindset amongst both scientists and climate bureaucrats at the UN that will brook no opposition?

Climate alarmists remind me of the population alarmists of the 1970’s. At that time, it was believed that the earth would be unable to support a population of 6 billion people; that both economic collapse and mass starvation in countries like India and China would be the result.

Of course, India is now a net exporter of food and China is very close to self sufficiency in food production. Why?

What Malthusians like Paul Erlich, author of “The Population Bomb” forgot when predicting population disaster was the endless capacity of human beings to adapt, to change, and thanks to free markets, alter economic activity to deal with shortages and surpluses.

This was brought home by Erlich’s famous bet with Nobel Prize winning economist Julian Simon:

Simon offered Ehrlich a bet centered on the market price of metals. Ehrlich would pick a quantity of any five metals he liked worth $1,000 in 1980. If the 1990 price of the metals, after adjusting for inflation, was more than $1,000 (i.e. the metals became more scarce), Ehrlich would win. If, however, the value of the metals after inflation was less than $1,000 (i.e. the metals became less scare), Simon would win. The loser would mail the winner a check for the change in price.

Ehrlich agreed to the bet, and chose copper, chrome, nickel, tin and tungsten.

By 1990, all five metal were below their inflation-adjusted price level in 1980. Ehrlich lost the bet and sent Simon a check for $576.07. Prices of the metals chosen by Ehrlich fell so much that Simon would have won the bet even if the prices hadn’t been adjusted for inflation.

The doomsayers and chicken littles in the climate change debate have made a similar mistake. The problem is, they’re betting with the world’s economic health by advocating policies that would stifle growth and cause the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars from productive countries like the US and Western Europe to the socialist kleptocracies of the third world. And all of this based on questionable science that cries out for further vetting and honest inquiry with all sides of the debate being given the opportunity to prove their claims.

Isn’t that what science is all about in the first place?

UPDATE:

Paul over at Wizbang makes some excellent points on this study:

This paper is just an environmentalist manifesto dressed up as science. Ted Kaczynski without the bombs but with a few letters behind his name. The environmental movement has a problem they did not expect to have when it started. A deadline.

To fully understand this report, you have to first understand that the environmental movement is not about science, it is about policy. Be they socialists, luddites or whatever their motivation, the aim is to affect policy. Therein lies the problem.

Indeed. And while Paul takes the position that global warming is a hoax, he points out quite rightly the abysmal record of environmentalists in predicting disaster.

Judging by this report, they haven’t learned anything from the past.