Wednesday, May 10, 2017

MP McGuinty's October 4 2016 statement in the House is replete with fundamental errors

On October 4, 2016 MPP for Ottawa South David McGuinty made a statement in the House of Commons that was so full of economic and scientific errors I felt it worthy of comment. To find his statement follow the link and then search for his name and go to the second occurrence of it.

1. The statement says the issue of climate change has nothing to do with ideology, yet the very essence of the topic is political control over people's decisions regarding energy and how they live their lives. If advocating for a massive interference in the governance of the nations of the world and the use of political force against all of humanity is not an ideology then I wonder what an ideology is?

2. The statement refers to 2,200 Nobel Peace Prize winners. Aside from the fact the Nobel Peace Prize has nothing to do with science but rather is ideological, only the IPCC organization was awarded the prize, not 2,200 scientists. The scientists referenced are those whose work is cited in support of the IPCC hypothesis of dangerous man-made climate change warranting a massive restriction of human rights, a hypothesis which is explicitly rejected by many of the scientists whose work is cited by the IPCC.  Dr. Frederick Seitz, in reference to the 1995 IPCC report: "I have never before witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than the events that led to this IPCC report." Richard Lindzen, prof of meteorology at MIT, who at first participated in the IPCC process but then gave up: "There's little doubt that the IPCC process has become politicized to the point of uselessness." "They controlled who participated and who were the lead authors, especially of critical chapters."

3. The statement refers to IPCC scientists as if the IPCC was a scientific body, when in fact it is a political body composed of government representatives. A small number of scientists write chapters for the IPCC reports and an even smaller number review the full content.

4. The statement states that we have droughts and floods. While no doubt true, this statement is meaningless since it ignores all context. Are such weather events similar to the past or not? Do they represent a greater or lesser danger to mankind due to our use of fossil fuel energy? There is massive evidence that humanity is safer from nature and nature is safer from humanity due to our use of fossil fuels. Global death rates from extreme weather events declined by 98 percent since the 1920s, while economic damages corrected for population growth and wealth have not increased. Similarly, the incidence of droughts and famines in history is well documented and has declined massively since the advent of fossil fuel energy.

And what about the IPCC itself? In the 2013 IPCC Technical Summary, under Key Uncertainties, there are a few interesting statements.


"There is only medium to low confidence in the rate of change of tropospheric warming and its vertical structure."

"Based on model results there is limited confidence in the predictability of yearly to decadal averages of temperature both for the global average and for some geographical regions. Multi-model results for precipitation indicate a generally low predictability. Short-term climate projection is also limited by the uncertainty in projections of natural forcing."

"In Antarctica, available data are inadequate to assess the status of change of many characteristics of sea ice (e.g., thickness and volume)."

"There is low confidence in an observed global-scale trend in drought or dryness (lack of rainfall), due to lack of direct observations, methodological uncertainties and choice and geographical inconsistencies in the trends."

"There is low confidence that any reported long-term (centennial) changes in tropical cyclone characteristics are robust, after accounting for past changes in observing capabilities."

5. The statement references the Stern report, which is an economic paper referenced to give support for the use of massive political power over citizens' activities. Economic analysis of the Stern report, however, shows that Stern chose to use an extremely low, near-zero discount rate (0.1%) instead of a normal rate such as 3.5%, thus essentially Stern equates cost and value today with that in the distant future, when we know that economic growth has made us many times wealthier today than a hundred years ago and that this trend continues. To highlight this, at 3.5% growth we would have 31.2 times more wealth in 100 years whereas at 0.1% growth we will be 1.1 times wealthier. This is not a trivial difference and reveals the uselessness of the Stern report.

6. The statement references the carrying capacity of the planet and the need to live within it. The notion of a planetary carrying capacity is an anti-concept that uses non-essential characteristics to make us think there is a problem. An essential characteristic of man is that he creates resources from raw materials found in nature. The raw materials have always been there and they only become resources through the application of human reasoning to make them valuable for human life. The concept of value is a moral one and not a scientific one, thus no scientist can identify a threshold for the excess creation of value, since there is no measurable limit to value creation. The entire physical matter of the planet is a potential resource for humans, as are other planets and stars.

The challenge of human food supply provides one illustration of the limitless ability of humans to create value. Before the discovery, commercialization and industrialization of fossil fuel energy, the basic condition of humans was to be hungry, weak and sick. With fossil fuel energy we live longer, healthier lives with abundant food. Only in the shrinking portion of the world that has yet to adopt a greater degree of capitalism and industrialization is widespread hunger a problem. 150 years ago, 25 men working all day harvested and threshed a ton of grain. Today with a combine harvester it takes… six minutes. Farm productivity is up 2,500-fold by this measure. In just the last 25 years 2 billion people have emerged out of a condition of hunger and only a single country's population gets less than 2,000 calories per day: Zambia. In just 25 years (1990-2015) extreme poverty was reduced by 138,000 people per day, for a total of 1.25 billion.

How does a reasoning being, faced with the incredible improvements in the human condition due to the use of fossil fuel energy that provides 85% of world energy not see the wonders we have accomplished? Only an ideology that sees humanity as a blight upon the face of the planet - a philosophy that is fundamentally anti-human - can oppose human freedom to produce more energy and progress naturally towards the discovery of even more abundant, more concentrated and even more powerful energy sources we will no doubt find. To quote Amory Lovins, one of the leaders of just such an ideology that has become known as environmentalism, "Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it." Oh, the horrors of clean, cheap, abundant energy!