The road to Hell is trod by (reduced) Carbon Footprints

The linked article on “The Low-Carbon Economy” is distressing to me, as is anything with the potential to mess up my life.  Not being of the hair-shirted climate change self-flagellate persuasion, I have not bought into the “climate change” dogma prevalent today, and therefore look very closely at anything coming from “experts” (I’m sick of inverted commas already in the first paragraph) that has the potential to affect me.

The Economy is a nebulous phantasm at the best of times, as is anything which deals with abstracts. The abstracts here are trillions of units of fiat currencies, the default reserve currency still (at time of writing) the $US.  Whatever it is, billions and trillions of these notional credit instruments flash electronically around the globe daily, and somehow maintain everyone’s confidence that we know what we’re doing. 

2008 was the most recent time the wheels came off (or the bubble burst, choose your metaphor) but you can expect some sort of serious economic reverse roughly every decade.  I understand in general how this works, but one of the things I understand very definitely is that people supposedly much smarter than me use financial instruments of their own clever devising to manipulate these money flows for their own benefit.

This entire Sci-Am article is a study in rent-seeking, which sums up the entire Carbon Trading and Green Energy industries as far as I can tell.   As I’ve said many times before, a lot of these Greens are really Watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) and have ridden this bandwagon for all it’s worth as a means of wealth distribution from First to Third World countries.  An example:

Using green bonds and modified insurance portfolios
If the top financial layer includes big institutional investors and banks, then a second tier of untapped finance lies with insurance companies extending policies to the most vulnerable populations in the developing world.

Through the use of mobile phone-based services and micro-credit institutions, a great deal of insurance has already been extended to what Jim Roth of LeapFrog Investments calls the “emerging consumer.” Over the past eight years, the social investment fund has backed a portfolio of companies selling insurance products totaling $40 million, of which $33 million went to low-income consumers in Africa and Asia.

“It’s an optimistic story,” said Roth, noting that the vast majority of those consumers had never owned insurance before.

“A key difference is they have less money. So the kinds of insurance policies they can buy tend to have lower premiums and less benefits.”

Governments in the developing world are also now pooling their resources into sovereign insurance funds that make payouts for climate adaptation programs, said Fatima Kassam of the African Risk Capacity Insurance Co., a specialized agency of the African Union. Niger received a $25 million payout last year, having paid in with a $3 million premium. “Governments are coming together to change the model on disaster management,” said Kassam.

Let’s be clear about one thing to explain why I’m so bent about this sort of foolishness.  The “insurance” is for climate change adaptation/mitigation.  Since “climate change” can mean literally anything at all that weather/climate does, no traditional insurance company (i.e. one which intends to stay in business) would write policies like this. This is very thinly-disguised wealth transfer.

 

The problem is that despite quantitative easing and no physical standard for our notional currencies, “wealth” is a zero-sum game; the wealth has to come from someone.  I am NOT a redistributionist; “law and order Libertarian” is probably closer to the mark, so I object to beggaring ourselves to make African kleptocrats richer.   

Green energy policies in the UK dramatically raised electricity prices as subsidized (to the producers) wind projects were forced into the market. Although this is now easing, it took clawing back the policies that started it, and similar things have happened in other places too.  Coal is the big thing to hate these days (Obama leading the pack) but it has the advantage of being cheap and abundant.  It’s also dirty, but modern scrubbing tech cleans it up quite acceptably, at least as long as you don’t consider CO2 to be pollution. 

This is where activists end up eventually, when all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked.  Back in the 1960s and 70s pollution was a real problem, and people rightly took action to clean it up. With the sulfur dioxide (acid rain) dealt with in the 1980s, North America and Europe ran out of serious, widespread environmental pollution sources.  Coincidentally or not, this is right when Global Warming popped on the radar as the next apocalypse.  Note that we (and both ice caps) are still here, despite all of the doom-laden pronouncements from 1988 onward.  Beware the “green intentions” of any climate lobby, and follow the money to see why people are really doing what they're doing.

There's a 'nac for that

Environment Canada this spring predicted a really hot summer. Living in the area predicted to be affected by this, I can say that they were right out to lunch, it being cool and wet, but mostly cool. They have now predicted a mild winter; I am sceptical to say the least. The Farmer's Almanac has come out with this prediction, which on past performance and personal observation I am more inclined to believe:

“It’s going to be colder, it’s going to be snowier … it’s not pretty.”

According to the almanac, central Canada, in particular, is expected to experience winter’s nasty bite.

“From Calgary to Quebec, we’re going to be up to our neck,” Burnett said.

One of the few exceptions will be southwestern Ontario, which will be cold, but with below-normal snowfall.

Burnett said forecasts show that while Toronto and the surrounding region will experience a deep-freeze, it’s going to be drier this winter, with “fluffier snow.”

Atlantic Canada, meanwhile, is set for a milder, but wet winter season, according to the almanac.

‘Baby lamb’ of summers next year

It may seem far in the future, but warmer temperatures will return – eventually.

Summer in Canada is expected to be milder and wet, with hotter and drier temperatures concentrated in Western Canada.

“Nothing really spectacular in the summer,” Burnett said

 

I don't of course know their exact method of generating these, but I do know that sunspot activity plays a significant part. Let's take a look at things we know to be true:

• We had a long, cold winter last year with the ice not melting completely on Lake Superior well into June
• During that winter, solar activity was at "the most anemic in 100 years,"

The sun is what keeps us alive, but there is a narrow range of variability in which we will be able to survive, and an even slimmer one in which we will thrive. Cold long winters mean a lot of things, foremost is shorter growing seasons, but they are also the way that ice ages start. The current "Climate Change" shibboleth permeates government agencies and the media, even though it's increasingly obvious to the impartial observer that they have no idea what they are talking about. This I feel explains the unsubstantiated wishful thinking which produces a relentless series of erroneous predictions.

Yes' I'm contrasting this with the Old Farmer's Almanac, another set of predictions, but the Almanac has a much better success rate than any of the expensive computer climate models the Climate Change crowd keep relying on. Really though, as soon as it changed from Global Warming (which we could all understand) to Climate Change, it ceased to have any linkage to what it was all about (CO2) in the first place.

If CO2 has the impact Al Gore etc. claimed, the constant upward march of the CO2 concentration over the years would have been linked to an increase in global temperatures as less of the sun's energy escaped back to space. That has not happened, nor have all of the icecaps and glaciers melted away with attendant catastrophic (to our costal cities) rise in sea level. What has happened is that data and media have been manipulated to make it look like at least some of that has happened, but it simply has not been getting appreciably (if at all) warmer out here in the real world.

So what? Forced to make a choice, I'll put my money on the Almanac's model, since it makes sense and because they don't have an agenda (that I can see or think of). In the end we'll see what we get and the computers have no hope of keeping up with reality. Be ready to bundle up, and get that snow blower tuned. I won't cry if I'm wrong on this one, but I'll be prepared.