Myron's Blaby reading list

The right wing UK think tank Social Affairs Unit publishes the Standpoint Magazine which has Baron Lawson of Blaby on its advisory board.

So Myron Ebell is just the man to write a book review of Lawson's utterly shite book An Appeal to Reason: A Cook Look at Global Warming:

First published last year, Lord Lawson's Appeal is the best short book on the entire range of issues in the global warming debate that is available from a British publisher. This paperback edition with a substantial new afterword is therefore most welcome. Lawson is lucid, thoughtful and fair-minded. The book's highly useful footnotes and bibliography attest to Lawson's familiarity with the wide range of scholarship on the many scientific disciplines that contribute to understanding the climate and with the major economic analyses of the energy-rationing policies proposed to deal with warming.

That should not be surprising. Lawson was an active participant in the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs, which took expert testimony from a wide range of scientists and economists. In 2005, the committee produced the best official report on global warming that has so far been done. Although leading peers from all three major parties were involved and agreed unanimously, their report has been ignored by all three major parties. Its conclusions, you see, were "sceptical".

Unusually, Myron's appraisal of this terrible report -- which has probably been summarized into Lord Blaby's publication -- is almost accurate.

The abstract includes:

We have some concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, with some of its emissions scenarios and summary documentation apparently influenced by political considerations.

There are significant doubts about some aspects of the IPCC's emissions scenario exercise, in particular, the high emissions scenarios. The Government should press the IPCC to change their approach.

As it turns out, years of political considerations have influenced the IPCC to seriously under-estimate the emissions and climate change scenarios. Today, in 2009, it appears that reality is, not surprisingly, running ahead of the predictions.

So, we're screwed, aren't we, as it was already looking bad on the over-conservative predictions.

Well, not according to Baron Stern of Brentford whose book, also reviewed by Myron, is called A Blueprint for a Safer Planet: How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity, which is based on The Stern Review. Myron writes:

Although the mammoth Review appears to be a most professional piece of work and contains an impressive economic apparatus, its methodology and analysis have been rubbished by leading resource economists. The include William Nordhaus of Yale, Richard Tol with multiple academic appointments, Sir Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge, and a team headed by David Henderson, former chief economist at the OECD (to whom Lawson dedicates his book).

...On the science, Stern claims that the case for alarm is indisputable. In fact, however, he does not base his case on scientific facts and observations but rather on the alarming predictions of computer models.

I'm sorry. I've got to stop you right there. When we put a rocket into space, its trajectory is entirely based on a computer models to send it to where we want it to go. You have a problem with that? What we have here are computer models telling us that the environment is going where we don't want it to go.

As Lawson points out, this is a public relations con by the alarmist industry. The computer models have no forecasting ability, nor do United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists claim that they do, however much they give that impression.

On the economics, in a section titled "Why some economists got it so badly wrong", he dismisses in two pages the economists, more distinguished and expert in the field than he is, who criticised his Review. Rather than explaining why this consensus is wrong, Stern mounts his high horse and claims that the economists who disagree with him do so because they are morally obtuse. This is comical. Lawson aptly compares him to Dickens's immortal creation, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House.

So there you have it. The "economists more distinguished and expert in the field than" Stern is are William Nordhaus, Richard Tol, and Sir Partha Dasgupta. Myron used these names before, massively exaggerating their qualifications and fraudulently claiming that their conclusions agreed with him during some Congressional testimony in December 2007, and they didn't complain, so it's safe to use them again. After all, no one outside the Myron Ebell Climate has heard of them, whereas people have heard of Bjorn Lomborg, whom Myron is not going to be so silly as to claim has any economic qualifications at all.

But let's finish the poncey review:

...Dickens's immortal creation, Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House...

Stern's global deal looks to me like a series of Heath Robinson contraptions that must be made to run in perfect harmony. I'm not surprised that the Labour government finds it an alluring prospect, but I am disturbed that the intellectual adolescents now leading the Conservative Party have found an agreeable guru in Stern as well.

The Tories would in my view do much better if they listened to the sage advice of one of their soundest leaders of the past half century — the former Energy Secretary and Chancellor, Nigel Lawson.

Hey, Myron, you know when the food starts running out because the environment is so screwed and depleted (as predicted) that there's no longer enough to go around, you will cry Uncle for the government to hand out some food rations to your family, as always happens in a famine.

There are famines in all parts of the world today, and it ain't your corporations like your Exxons or Starbucks that organize the relief. It's usually the UN or some other government-backed organization.

You know why?

Because there's no f***ing money to be made out of feeding destitute people after a crisis when they've used up everything they have left.

This has been your Moment of Hatred. Good Day!