The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto reports a deadline before “climate chaos,” which apparently is not Wisconsin spring:

Uh-oh. “In two languages, French Foreign Minister Lauren Fabius started the countdown Tuesday to climate change disaster, speaking in Washington before a meeting with American counterpart Secretary of State John Kerry,” reports TheBlaze.com:

“We have 500 days to avoid the climate chaos,” Fabius said in French. . . .

Speaking then in English, Fabius touched on Iran, Syria, and Ukraine, but then quickly returned to climate change.

“And very important issues, issue of climate change, climate chaos,” the foreign minister said. “And we have–as I said, we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos, and I know that President Obama and John Kerry himself are committed on this subject and I’m sure that with them, with a lot of other friends, we shall be able to reach success on this very important matter.”

Taranto reports the deadline before whatever “climate chaos” is is Sept. 25, 2015.

My favorite online meteorologist, Mike Smith, anticipated all this last year by repeating Taranto’s list of climate “tipping points”:

• “Global Warming Tipping Point Close?”–headline, ClimateArk.com, Jan. 27, 2004
• “Warming Hits ‘Tipping Point’ “–headline, Guardian, Aug. 11, 2005
• “Earth at the Tipping Point: Global Warming Heats Up”–headline, Time, March 26, 2006
• “Global Warming ‘Tipping Points’ Reached, Scientist Says”–headline,NationalGeographic.com, Dec. 14, 2007
• “Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near on Global Warming”–headline, Puffington Host, June 23, 2008
• “Global Warming: Those Tipping Points Are Closer Than You Think”–headline, WSJ.com, April 29, 2009
• “Have We Reached the Tipping Point for Planet Earth?”–video title, StudioTalk.tv, May 11, 2010
• “Must-Read Hansen and Sato Paper: We Are at a Climate Tipping Point That, Once Crossed, Enables Multi-Meter Sea Level Rise This Century”–headline, ThinkProgress.org, Jan. 20, 2011
• “Earth: Have We Reached an Environmental Tipping Point?”–headline, BBC website, June 15, 2012
• “In spite of the continued released [sic] of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it’s an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.”–Al Gore, interview with Washington Post, Aug. 21, 2013

Smith added:

As far as I know, the earliest reference to global warming “tipping points” was in 1989. I did Google and Bing searches yesterday evening and there are more than one hundred alleged tipping points over the last 20 years.

Take, for example, the December, 2007, tipping point reference from National Geographic. Here are world temperatures (the same ones used by Al Gore’s friends at the IPCC) since 2000:

See any accelerating upward trend since January, 2008?

Plus, there is no upward temperature trend (actually, it is downward) since we passed 400 ppm in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. It, too, was supposed to produce an acceleration in the rate of warming.

This is ridiculous. 

By any definition of the scientific method of advancing a hypothesis (i.e., a given tipping point exists) and measuring the results (lack of the predicted acceleration of warming) the tipping point hypothesis is falsified. 

Global warming, more and more, has become a matter of ‘faith,’ not science.

I bring this up only to keep readers abreast of one of my favorite subjects, end-of-the-world predictions. Remember when the world ended in December 2012 as predicted by the Mayans?

You’re going to think Mike Smith made this up. He didn’t. April Fool’s Day was last week.

As the science behind catastrophic global warming continues to evaporate, the claims become more and more insane:

Concerns have previously been raised about the effect of methane emissions from cows on global warming.

But in the House of Lords today a Labour peer raised questions about the impact of human diet on emissions. Viscount Simon, 73, a Labour peer who has been a member of the House of Lords for more than 20 years, voiced his fears about the ‘smelly emissions’.

Lord Simon said: ‘In a programme some months ago on the BBC it was stated that this country has the largest production of baked beans and the largest consumption of baked beans in the world.’

He asked Lady Verma: ‘Could you say whether this affects the calculation of global warming by the Government as a result of the smelly emission resulting therefrom?’

Lady Verma described his question as ‘so different’ but she appeared to suggest that people should think twice about over-indulging in baked beans or any food which causes flatulence.

She added: ‘You do actually raise a very important point, which is we do need to moderate our behaviour.’

So you don’t think this an insignificant conversation, Baroness Verma is the Minister for Climate in the United Kingdom.

Smith channels his inner Mel Brooks, as in …

Dan Calabrese manages to take two positions on global warming, or whatever the envirowackos are calling it:

Remember, the whole “climate change” debate is a canard and always has been. Big government types, both in Washington and around the globe, are hyping this hysteria as a way of justifying things they want to do anyway. Massive tax increases and controls on industry are not some emergency steps they propose to take in the face of an emergency. They are the fundamental core of left-wing thinking, and they can’t make them happen without convincing people that we’re all doomed without them.

That is one of the reasons the following question is rarely considered: Even assuming man-made “climate change” is real, why are we to assume it would be a terrible thing? Just because the scientists working for the UN and cited by Democrats and the media say so?

Calabrese quotes American Thinker, which quotes the Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change:

The authors find higher levels of carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures benefit nearly all plants, leading to more leaves, more fruit, more vigorous growth, and greater resistance to pests, drought, and other forms of “stress.” Wildlife benefits as their habitats grow and expand. Even polar bears, the poster child of anti-global warming activist groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), are benefiting from warmer temperatures.

“Despite thousands of scientific articles affirming numerous benefits of rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2, IPCC makes almost no mention of any positive externalities resulting from such,” said one of the report’s lead authors, Dr. Craig D. Idso. “Climate Change Reconsidered II corrects this failure, presenting an analysis of thousands of neglected research studies IPCC has downplayed or ignored in its reports so that scientists, politicians, educators, and the general public can be better informed and make decisions about the potential impacts of CO2-induced climate change.”

The authors look closely at claims climate change will injure coral and other forms of marine life, possibly leading to some species extinctions. They conclude such claims lack scientific foundation and often are grossly exaggerated. Corals have survived warming periods in the past that caused ocean temperatures and sea levels to be much higher than today’s levels or those likely to occur in the next century.

Calabrese adds:

The authors also make what should be the rather obvious case that forced movement away from fossil fuels would cause devastating instability in the energy supply, destroy jobs and lead to economic chaos – all of which would be ridiculous when fossil fuels remain not only the most plentiful but also the most reliable energy source on Earth. When newer sources become viable through the advancement of technology, great, throw them into the mix. But in the meantime, there is no reason to force it when the alternative sources aren’t ready and fossil fuels remain plentiful, safe and clean.

None of this is necessarily to say that man-made global warming is real. I remain a skeptic, a position I base in part on the failures of their predictions to come to pass, in part on the way they try to silence their critics (which doesn’t usually indicate confidence in your own position) and in part on an understanding of what motivates them.

But what the NIPCC has done here is throw another useful question into the mix. Not only is it absurd for us to just take global warmists at their word that it’s happening, it’s also absurd to just take them at their word that it would be a bad thing. This report makes a compelling case that it would be far more beneficial than troublesome.

In either case, we have people purporting to tell us what will happen in the future – in spite of the fact that the same people have not been successful in previous attempts to do so – and also telling us that we must stop all debate and do everything they say. Now.

Why?

Why should we believe their assessment of the situation is accurate?

Why should we believe the consequences will be what they say?

Why should we believe the right solutions, assuming we need solutions, are ones they want?

Why should we discount a study from another group of climate scientists, this one not associated with government, just because it disagrees with the conventional orthodoxy on the issue?

Meanwhile, there is more bad news for the doomsayers, according to Breitbart:

The economic costs of ‘global warming’ have been grossly overestimated, a leaked report – shortly to be published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – has admitted.

Previous reports – notably the hugely influential 2006 Stern Review – have put the costs to the global economy caused by ‘climate change’ at between 5 and 20 percent of world GDP.

But the latest estimates, to be published by Working Group II of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, say that a 2.5 degrees Celsius rise in global temperatures by the end of the century will cost the world economy between just 0.2 and 2 percent of its GDP.

If the lower estimate is correct, then all it would take is an annual growth rate of 2.4 percent (currently it’s around 3 percent) for the economic costs of climate change to be wiped out within a month.

This admission by the IPCC will come as a huge blow to those alarmists – notably the Stern Review’s author but also including everyone from the Prince of Wales to Al Gore – who argue that costly intervention now is our only hope if we are to stave off the potentially disastrous effects of climate change.

Sir Nicholas (now Lord) Stern was commissioned by Tony Blair’s Labour government to analyse the economic impacts of climate change. Stern, an economist who had never before published a paper on energy, the environment, or indeed climate change, concluded that at least two per cent of global GDP would need to be diverted to the war on global warming.

Stern’s report has been widely ridiculed by economists, whose main criticism was that its improbably low discount rate placed an entirely unnecessary burden on current generations. Even if you accept the more alarmist projections of the IPCC’s reports on “global warming”, the fact remains that future generations will be considerably richer than our own – and therefore far more capable of mitigating the damages of climate change when or if they arise.

But Stern’s Review, published at the height of the global warming scare, was seized on by policy makers around the world as the justification for introducing a series of economically damaging measures, including carbon taxes, more intrusive regulation and a drive to replace cheap, efficient fossil fuels with expensive, inefficient renewables.

This is why Lord Stern has been variously described as “the most dangerous man you’ve never heard of” and been held responsible for some of the worst economic excesses of the green movement.

As Bishop Hill wrote:

When you see wind farms covering every hill and mountain and most of the valleys too, you can blame Stern. If you can’t pay your heating bills, ask Stern why this has happened. When children are indoctrinated and dissenting voices crushed, it is at Nicholas Stern that you should point an accusing finger. When the lights start to go out in a few years time, it’s Stern who will have to explain why.

Despite years of having mainstream economists pointing to the flaws in the Stern Review there has been an almost unanimous collective shrug from the media, more interested in climate porn than the wellbeing of their neighbours.

 

You’d think the environmental credentials of a founder of Greenpeace would be solid.

The problem from the environmental movement’s perspective is that Patrick Moore, Ph.D., acts like an actual scientist, which is why he said this (from Capitali$m Is Freedom):

There is no scientific evidence that human activity is causing the planet to warm, according to Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, who testified in front of a Senate committee on Tuesday.

Moore argued that the current argument that the burning of fossil fuels is driving global warming over the past century lacks scientific evidence. He added that the Earth is in an unusually cold period and some warming would be a good thing.

“There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years,” according to Moore’s prepared testimony. “Today, we live in an unusually cold period in the history of life on earth and there is no reason to believe that a warmer climate would be anything but beneficial for humans and the majority of other species.”

Three weeks after godawful cold weather, it’s back.

It may be back for years to come, in fact, and it has nothing to do with human activities. Michael Barone breaks the bad news:

Are we facing a dangerous period of global cooling? That’s not a question that many have been asking. But reports that there has been a sharp reduction in sunspot activity raises that possibility. It has happened before. In his book Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century, historian Geoffrey Parker writes:

“The development of telescopes as astronomical instruments after 1609 enabled observers to track the number of sunspots with unprecedented accuracy. They noted a ‘maximum’ between 1612 and 1614, followed by a ‘minimum’ with virtually no spots in 1617 and 1618, and markedly weaker maxima in 1625-26 and 1637-9. And then, although astronomers around the world made observations on over 8,000 days between 1645 and 1715, they saw virtually no sunspots: The grand total of sunspots observed in those 70 years scarcely reached 100, fewer than currently [the book was published in 2013] appear in a single year. This striking evidence of absence suggests a reduction in solar energy received on earth.”

The result of the “Maunder Minimum” of sunspots was a so-called Little Ice Age, with significantly colder temperatures in the temperate zones, low crop yields to the point of famine and, Parker writes, “a greater frequency of severe weather events—such as flash floods, freak storms, prolonged drought and abnormal (as well as abnormally long) cold spells.”

Global warming alarmists have been claiming for decade that increases in carbon dioxide emissions associated with human activity will produce disastrous climate events. Certainly if carbon dioxide emissions were the only factor affecting climate, increases in those emissions would indeed produce global warming. Inconveniently for this theory, world temperatures have not increased in the last 15 years. But surely there are other things that affect climate, including variations in solar activity—sunspots. And as Bjorn Lomberg has often written, global cooling would be much more dangerous to human beings than global warming.

Meanwhile, Facebook Friend Bob Dohnal summarizes the humans-are-destroying-the-earth crowd:

We do know that there were two global warming period in the last 2,000 years: Roman and Vikings. Things were better. What caused them ? Combination of things, and that was before all of the people on earth were exhaling regularly.

What is happening now? John Stossel has some good observations:

1. Is climate warming? Maybe? There is evidence, starting with dinosaurs, that climate changes all the time.

2. Is it a crisis? No. Working poor with out jobs, that is a crisis. World War, that is a crisis.

Last year we had fewer tornadoes, fewer hurricanes and the last 17 years climate has actually gotten little cooler. Big deal.

3. What can we do? If it is getting a little warmer? Fine, that is actually better.

What if we decide it is getting a little cooler? What do we do? who knows, breathe more? Light campfires in back and roast weenies?

For all of this baloney about changing lights, wind mills, solar, we have little to show but people with out jobs. The things that we do not need is sitting watching dufuses talk about Global Warming.

Bruce Murphy has something on Urban Milwaukee about windmills and that stupidity. Truth is around the world they are starting to close these down after hitting peak in 2006. EU has gone nuts trying to coordinate solar, wind and regular power peaks. Costs them a ton. No bennies.

Remember this in the future. When someone comes to you with these wild stories about commies under the bed, a turkey in every pot, Barbara Boxer and her cutsy warnings, take a deep breath, exhale and go read Beetle Bailey.