The Warming Scare doesn't Die - Despite the Cost & Evidence !

Matt Ridley, who describes himself as a ''Climate Lukewarmer'', speaks out on the Horrific Cost in Cash and Lives of the Global Warming Movement......because the Left needs it !


Climate policy is already doing harm. Building wind turbines, growing biofuels and substituting
wood for coal in power stations — all policies designed explicitly to fight climate change — have had negligible effects on carbon dioxide emissions. But they have driven people into fuel poverty, made industries uncompetitive, driven up food prices, accelerated the destruction of forests, killed rare birds of prey, and divided communities.

To name just some of the effects. Mr Indur Goklany estimates that globally nearly 200,000 people are dying every year, because we are turning 5 per cent of the world’s grain crop into motor fuel instead of food: that pushes people into malnutrition and death. In [Britain], 65 people a day are dying because they cannot afford to heat their homes properly, according to Christine Liddell of the
University of Ulster, yet the government is planning to double the cost of electricity to consumers by 2030.

As professor Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, the European Union will pay £165 billion for its current climate policies each and every year for the next 87 years. Britain’s climate policies — subsidising windmills, wood-burners, anaerobic digesters, electric vehicles and all the rest — is due to cost us £1.8 trillion over the course of this century. In exchange for that Brobdingnagian sum, we hope to
lower the air temperature by about 0.005?C — which will be undetectable by normal thermometers. The accepted consensus among economists is that every £100 spent fighting climate change brings £3 of benefit.

UPDATE
There has been no real warming of the atmosphere for 17+ years. There has been no increase in cyclones, and little evidence of a worldwide increase of droughts. Most of the low-lying Pacific and Indian ocean islands we were once warned were drowning are either stable or growing in size.  The world’s main food crops have had record harvests. The Arctic has not melted away, after all, and the Antarctic sea ice has been at record levels. Our dams are as full as ever.

In short, the catastrophe that warmists and our top scientific bodies have warned of for years has not come. It is now doubtful it will ever come.
 
Yet to this day, hoodwinked journalists, Marxist-loving green groups, an asshole AMA president Brian Owler, politicians and many (but far from all) scientists insist global warming is a massive threat and continue to push vastly expensive schemes that would actually not stop global warming even if it was occurring.
Why?

Steven Hayward (below) suggests an answer:

Try this out as a thought experiment: what would happen if, tomorrow morning, we had definitive proof that catastrophic climate change was impossible, wasn’t happening, and would never happen. Would Al Gore breathe a big sigh of relief… Of course not. The general reaction from environmentalists and the left would be a combination of outrage and despair. The need to believe in oneself as part of the agency of human salvation runs deep for leftists and the heretic environmentalists who have made their obsessions a secular religion. And humanity doesn’t need salvation if there is no sin in the first place. Hence human must be sinners—somehow—in need of redemption from the left.

The Way I See It......activist liberal elites always need a Grand Cause to satisfy their messianic needs, or for the political equivalent of a dopamine rush. For such people, the only thing worse that catastrophic climate change is the catastrophe of not having a catastrophe to obsess over—and use as an excuse to extend political control over people and resources.

NOTE:  Matt Ridley is an English science journalist and writes a  regular column for the Wall Street Journal and this month wrote an extensive article in the prestige's  science journal Quadrant entitled "The Climate Wars' Damage to Science''