CHURCHVILLE, VA—Once again the “rich countries” have managed to yank prosperity away from the Third World. And at Christmas too.

 

We’d promised them billions of unearned dollars in guilt payments for something called “global warming.” They don’t pay that much attention to thermometers, and weather is something they mostly live with rather than forecast.

 

• But we ourselves had warned them their islands were about to sink beneath the waves. It hasn’t happened yet, but the computer models say it will be so.
• We warned them their food crops would begin to fail—though crop yields around the earth have so far continued to increase.
• We told them that wild species like the polar bear would go extinct—if not yet then sometime soon.

 

“The heaviest burden of global warming will fall on the poorest countries,” said the best and brightest of our thinkers and climate modelers. “We must pay billions to the third world to finance greener energy systems so they won’t burn coal or kerosene.”

 

Then, at Copenhagen—the “last chance” for humans to save the world—we decided not to save it. Can we blame the Third World for being angry and mystified? 

 

Villagers on the South Pacific island of Tanna still worship a ghostly American named John Frum who was stationed there during World War II. Every February 15^th , the islanders stage a ceremony, complete with GI “uniforms,” bamboo rifles, and an American flag. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder told writer Paul Raffaele of Smithsonian Magazine in 2008.

 

Such “cargo cults” were common when primitive peoples were visited by sailors who had compasses and chronometers, and later radios and TVs. Third World peoples mostly still haven’t seen our shipyards, railroads, and nitrogen fertilizer, so they don’t understand what supports our abundance.

 

They don’t know how we learned that global warming was coming, and they haven’t seen any evidence that it will. But we said we’d make them rich, and since we decided not to, they’re unhappy.

 

The Chinese, of course, are different. They’ve got 4,000 years of court records, detailing how Chinese crops and wild animals shifted north with the repeated global wamings during the Bronze Age, the Roman Empire and the Medieval period—and then shifted back south during the intervening cold periods. Chinese researchers have studied their own ice cores and fossil pollen. They can’t have much respect for the Western computer models, which repeatedly forecast the runaway warming that hasn’t appeared. Their own thermometers have detailed the non-warming since 1998—but they’d take our carbon subsidies.

 

In the wake of Copenhagen’s collapse, my wife was asked, “With so many poor people in the world, shouldn’t we share our abundance—global warming or not?”  That’s been the hidden agenda of the hard-left through the whole global warming campaign: “spreading the wealth.”  

 

My wife, however, had spent 15 years living in four African countries. She replied she’d never vote to give American money to Africa’s tribal thugs. It would simply disappear, as have so many billions in government handouts, enriching Swiss bank accounts not creating sustainable prosperity for the people. 

 

“They aren’t poor because we’re rich,” she says correctly. “Nor are we rich because they’re poor.” In the Pacific Northwest, early Indian tribes had a culture based on “potlatch.” Whenever anyone had good fortune, they threw a party for the tribe. The wealth was spread, but no one was better off after the party than before.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Copenhagen was two weeks of uninterrupted game-playing: 

 

• CFACT conned their way aboard a Greenpeace vessel with donuts—then unfurled a banner overside reading “Ship of Lies.”

 

• China told the world it really wants to cut its carbon emissions, if the West will just pay them a trillion or so dollars to offset the higher costs of wind and solar.

   

• President Obama warned the poor countries to volunteer fossil fuel cutbacks—in exchange for $100 billion per year that nobody has agreed to pay.  

 

Our “con of the week” goes, however, to the British climate “scientists” who have been keeping the world’s “official” temperature records.  Moscow’s Institute of Economic Analysis charged last week that the “British Team,” led by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the now-infamous Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University, cherry-picked Russian climate stations. They chose stations that supported the theory of recent man-made global warming, and ignored valid stations that did not. This “trick,” Russians

say, over-estimated Russia’s warming by more than half a degree Celsius. That’s no small thing; global warming since 1900 has totaled only about 0.6 degree C—and Russia has 12.5 percent of the earth’s land area.

 

Suddenly, the pieces of a massive “trick” against the human race may be falling into place: The Hadley Centre, East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit—and perhaps U.S. record-keepers too—have apparently manipulated the official temperature records to show far more warming than we’ve actually had. If you think it’s been hard to frighten us with just 0.6 degree of warming since 1900, how much harder with of half that?

 

Down in New Zealand, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research shows a strong warming trend since 1900. But the Climate Science Coalition of New Zealand has examined the still-available raw data from the same temperature stations, which shows far less cooling from 1853–1909, and far less warming in recent years. The Coalition says the data was manipulated by James Salinger, a former NIWA employee—who earlier worked for East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit!

 

Years ago, Jim Goodrich, then California State Climatologist, randomly selected three groups of Golden State temperature stations—one-third each from cities, suburbs, and rural areas. He found a strong warming trend in the cities, moderate warming in the suburban stations—and no warming at all in the countryside. The IPCC has assured us they’ve “adjusted” the temperature records for the urban heat island effect—but have never revealed the size of the adjustments. Now that lack of transparency takes on a sinister tone.

 

Eugenia Kalnay used the satellite and balloon temperature records in 2001 to model what U.S. temperatures would have been over the past 50 years—without any land use changes. She found U.S. warming since 1900 would have been little more than half as high:  0.25 degree C instead of 0.45 degree C.

 

Willis Eschenbach has a post at Anthony Watts’ blog: “The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero.” He examined five temperature records in the Darwin region; all five tracked each other closely. So why did the temperature station at Darwin Zero show massive “adjustment”?  Because it showed the 1880s were warmer than today? 

 

We should, of course, go back to the CRU’s original thermometer data—but the Climate Research Unit says they‘ve lost it! All they’ve kept is their “value-added product”—already adjusted in ways they can’t explain.

 

Remember this global con game scenario four years from now as you pay your quadrupled electric bill.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY, a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, is an environmental economist.  He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

Resources: 

 

“Russia Affected by Climategate,” RIA Novosti, 16 Dec., 2009; see also Anil Dawar and Will Stewart, “Climate Change ‘Lies’ by Britain,” London Daily Express, Dec. 17, 2009.

 

Terry Hurlburt, “New Zealand Climate Agency Accused of Data Manipulation,” www.examiner.com, Nov. 28, 2009.

 

Eugenia Kalnay and M. Cai, 2001, “Estimating the Impact of Urbanization and Land Use on U.S. Surfaces Temperature trends: Preliminary Report,” Nature 423, pp 528-531.

 

James D. Goodridge, 1992, “Urban Bias Influences on Long-Term California Air Temperature trends,” Atmospheric Environment 26B, pp 1-7.

 

Willis Eschenbach, “The Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero,”www.wattsupwiththat, Dec. 8, 2009.