Verbatim Post
Climate alarmists speak about a “tipping point”—beyond which many ecosystems could not adapt to the effects of increasing levels of greenhouse gases trapped in the earth’s atmosphere. The evidentiary basis of their worries may be weak—the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, for example, discovered no warming trend after 2000. But the basis for something akin to a point of no return in the realm of what might be called “climate-policy finance” is increasingly evident, according to atmospheric physicist and Independent Institute Research Fellow S. Fred Singer.
“We’re reaching a tipping point—not of the earth’s climate, but of the financial schemes that permanently divert funds from productive activities into wasteful ones, all in the name of ‘saving the climate,’” Singer writes in his latest op-ed. “The results are evident: higher levels of spending, deficits, or taxes; higher prices for energy and electricity and therefore for all manufactured goods; less productive activity; less employment; and more misery.”
Policymakers seem less willing to commit their countries to emission targets like those spelled out in the Kyoto Protocol, which was extended at last month’s Durban Climate Summit until 2015. Russia, Japan, and Canada, for example, have indicated that they will stop playing the Kyoto charade, and even the White House has refused to forward the Kyoto treaty to the Democratic-controlled Senate for ratification. Climate researchers could mitigate the growing public cynicism toward their discipline, but doing so would require that they investigate the huge gulf between temperature data collected on land and temperature data collected in the atmosphere (and from non-temperature proxy sources). Until scientists do this, public cynicism toward climate research will get closer and closer to the point of no return.
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