Is it worth spending billions of dollars to try and stave off impending gloom and doom allegedly caused by catastrophic trends in climate change?  Consider the following.

Climate Realists

FRED SINGER
What do Climate Data Really Show? The Berkeley Climate Data Project
Saturday, February 19th 2011, 9:25 AM EST

The e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia in November 2009 produced what is popularly called “Climategate.” They exposed the thoroughly unethical behavior of a group of climate scientists, mainly in the UK and US, involved in producing the global surface temperature record used and relied on by governments….([1] Full Story)

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Fred Singer mentions in his article:

I applaud and support what is being done by the Project — a very difficult but important undertaking. I personally have little faith in the quality of the surface data, having been exposed to the revealing work by Anthony Watts and others. However, I have an open mind on the issue and look forward to seeing the results of the Project in their forthcoming publications.

Here is a link to the “revealing work by Anthony Watts”, the [2] Surfacestations Project.  I won’t presume whom Fred Singer means by “and others”, but he also mentioned “Climategate”.

If the term “Climategate” is new to you, you may wish to look up [3] a good historical overview of Climategate’s emergence into public view and of its resulting consequences.

When reading all of that about climate data and Climategate, keep in mind that we are engaging in a program of massive expenditures to address “fixes that the global climate needs” on the basis of alarmist and propagandistic findings of climate science that is at best not settled.

It is not a trivial problem for anyone in the world who pays the rising prices for the ability to use modern conveniences in everyday life. The costs of utilities and consumer goods experience enormous increases to help pay to implement climate fixes that are at best useless and at worst harmful and to help provide enormous profits from the resulting “solutions”.

Right now, the Alberta Government, under the leadership of Ed Stelmach, has committed $2 billion to the construction of a variety of oil-industry projects for carbon capture and sequestration that will ostensibly be beneficial in addressing allegedly adverse global climate trends.  Yet, we will find few people in this part of the world or elsewhere that cope with or suffer from record cold periods during winter who will clamour if the winters that make them shiver and even die in large numbers were to be a little less cold. It is obvious that cold weather kills and is at least costly.

One such project, [4] Shell’s Quest CCS Project, will blow 1.2 million tonnes of CO2 annually down Mother Earth’s derriere, of which $780 million in initial construction costs will be funded through Alberta tax revenues.  The sequestering of an annual 1.2 million tonnes of CO2  may sound like a lot to some, and a $780 million price tag to achieve that may seem worth paying for.  However, it will do no more than to reduce man-made, global, annual CO2 emissions by a total of 21 minutes-worth of those emissions at a rate of 957 tonnes per second of global man-made CO2 emissions, while that reduction will not affect the annual emissions of the 97 percent of CO2 produced by natural sources.

Moreover, no one has so far produced any incontrovertible evidence that such an effort will have any effects on global temperature trends.  You may or may not be inclined to accept that, given that Ed Stelmach has already committed $2 billion dollars to such efforts.  However, there is ample, real-world evidence that shows that atmospheric CO2 increases and reductions over time have followed temperature trends.  Not once during the geological record of the world was there ever a time when CO2 drove temperature variations.  Here are two of many links to sources that explain that.

• [5] Climate Change Reexamined, OEL M. KAUFFMAN, Emeritus, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry, University of the Sciences in Philadelphia, PA
  Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 723–749, 2007
• [6] The Myth of Dangerous Human-Caused Climate Change, M Carter, Professor, Marine Geophysical Laboratory (Node C), Sporing Road South, James Cook University, Townsville Qld 4811.
  The AusIMM New Leaders’ Conference Brisbane, QLD, 2 - 3 May 2007

Professor Carter states in that,

The currently favoured hypothesis of dangerous global warming includes the presumption that late 20th century warming was substantially caused by human emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide. As will be elaborated later, this theory has failed the three main tests to which it has been subjected. First, no close relationship exists between the 20th century patterns of increasing carbon dioxide and changing temperature; second, 20th century rates and magnitude of temperature change fall well within previous natural limits of change despite accompanying increases in human-sourced carbon dioxide; and, third, the deterministic computer models that are used to engender public alarm have proved unable to predict the course of temperature change over the period 1990 - 2006, let alone out to 2100.

It is folly to spend money to avert catastrophic warming that — based on the evidence — will not happen, given that catastrophic warming has never happened before, while ignoring the need to adapt to the next period of glaciation that will surely happen soon.

The money spent on such useless pursuits would be better spent in ventures that truly need to be undertaken, such as fixing Alberta’s seriously ailing health-care system and curbing our run-away, government-induced debt.