The end of the road for Global Warming hysteria

Global Warming hysteria has had a good run - over twenty years, but we're approaching the end of the road for the Global Warming Industry (bloated scientific bureaucracies, bloated green NGOs, the bloated UN IPCC, etc).  While I shall shed no tears for this crowd, it's not my dislike of the corrupted state of the science that leads me to this conclusion; rather, it's a merciless financial calculus that is playing itself out across the globe.

And just in the nick of time, too.  While terribly damaging to the world's economies, the worst part is the terrible impact green policies are having on the developing world.  The result of the anti-growth/anti-industrialization policies is literally keeping a billion people in poverty, with its associated high mortality and associated misery.

A quick level set before I get to the meat of my argument.  This is an outstanding introduction to the entire situation.  The first part recaps the state of the science, and lays out how pathetically weak the "consensus" view really is.  The second part lays out the political landscape: where this came from (Al Gore came to this very late) and where it's going.  Warning: this video is over an hour long, but is well worth watching in its entirety.



The film ends on a very depressing note, pointing out (rightly) that the huge bureaucracy is entrenched, and will resist all efforts to reform it.  My take: it doesn't matter.

The green movement is about to get steamrolled by what's steamrolling the entire Progressive welfare state: all governments world wide are in a fiscal crisis.  Some are in bad shape (the United States and Germany), some are in worse shape (the PIIGS countries - Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, and Spain), and some are in denial (Red China).  The state has grown aggressively, economies are buckling under the load, and Progressives are finding that they have run out of other people's money.

It's at this moment that the IPCC has asked for a multi-tens of trillions of dollars of wealth transfers to the developing world (money funneled through the UN, natch) for "Climate Change abatement".  And please pay no attention to the past ten years of cooling weather and a series of very public scandals in the Climate Science establishment.

Not happening, despite the entrenched green bureaucracy and their cheering section in the biased Main Stream Media.  But that's not the end of things.

As austerity bites hard, governments will be forced to slash programs.  They'll be on the lookout for expensive programs that aren't particularly popular, no matter how ideologically committed their supporters are.  We are in fact already seeing this: Spain has dramatically slashed its solar power subsidies, to the point where "green" companies are going bankrupt.  You see, the subsidies were the entire profit margin, and then some - how else can you deliver electricity that would normally cost five times as much as the alternatives?

Remember, this is the "renewable" power program that Obama modeled his now-stillborn "renewable" power program on.  Not happening.  But that's not the end of things, either.

The green establishment has been living on hyping disaster - ZOMG Thermageddon!!!1!!one! - for over a decade.  Essentially, it's all they know.  So they'll go try to wring a few more drops out of the public rag by amping the hype even more.  Expect the next IPCC report (Assessment Report #5, in perhaps 2 years) to be positively biblical in its predictions of utter destruction by a vengeful Goddess Gaia.

This will all be going on as the Euro collapses and all governments are wondering what else they can cut.  If it gets noticed at all, it will be a political problem for governments that would normally be sympathetic.  In the collapse, they can't afford to be.

As an example, ask yourself whether Obama would choose to put a billion dollars into the IPCC and the science establishment, or into ACORN?  Now spread this calculus across all of Europe and Asia as well.

There may be ten billion dollars a year going into the maw of the green bureaucracy.  As that bureaucracy makes life unpleasant for governments in the middle of a very painful retrenchment that is simply unavoidable, they'll make themselves a huge target.  Add in the continuing scandals, and it's easy to imagine a fig leaf of we're not canceling anything, just suspending the programs until we get the scandals sorted out.

Which somehow never seems to get sorted out, and ultimately the cuts become permanent.

Like I said, this isn't a rant about the corrupt science.  It's not even much of a prediction, because it's easy to call an outcome when there are no other alternatives.  But it's the end of the road for the green establishment.  Their ideology lives by eating other people's money, and now the money's run out.  They're fixin' to find out where they live on the priority list.

Hint: they'll find their place at the unemployment office.  And good riddance.

UPDATE 6 November 2011 21:50: This is incredibly important, about how it's quite simply immoral to keep the developing world in poverty.  I don't really agree with the whole green energy bit, but everything else if God's Own Truth.  The hard core Greens should be ashamed of themselves.



Via Roger Pielke Jr.