Global Warming And Disproportionate Response

What will do more damage: Global warming or government policies?

Any risks of global warming need to be weighed against the risks of global warming policies. Policymakers must have accurate information on both sides of the equation in order to avoid measures that do more harm than good. Most of the recent proposals — the Senate’s Boxer-Kerry cap-and-trade bill, a new UN treaty, EPA’s regulatory scheme — fail to accurately weigh the risks because they are based on the false premise that climate change is a dire threat.

Simply put, global warming is not a crisis and should not be addressed as one. The recent wave of climate science scandals — climategate, glaciergate, hurricanegate, amazongate, others — have exposed a number of efforts initially crafted to hype the issue into something far scarier than the underlying science actually shows. Climategate — the release of internal emails from scientists with key roles in the UN’s 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report — largely centered around the strained attempt to portray temperatures in recent decades as unprecedented throughout recorded history. The researchers had to go to extreme lengths to create this impression — grafting one data set onto another to manufacture the desired “hockey stick” effect, using computer programs that add warming to the underlying temperature data and then destroying that data before others could see it — which speaks volumes about the weakness of their case.

But this would not be good for Saint Al Gore's portfolio.