BILD on Climate Change: The End is Near

The cover of BILD, Europe's largest daily, on Saturday, Nov. 4, 2006, raises ecological alarmism to new heights.

BILD claims the end of the world as we know it. Disastrous consequences for mankind "during our lifetime" are predicted with absolute certainty, including melting of the poles (both!!) and of all (!!) glaciers, extinction of all fish in the Atlantic (no kidding!), rising sea levels with catastrophical consequences, devastating hurricans, increasing in frequency, etc., etc..... BILD concludes: "The earth has FEVER! The earth is sick. Unless we act, the earth will die. Same as the animals."

Whow! That's a scenario! And, best of all, it's just the start of a series of articles on the topic in BILD.

BILD's armageddon campaign is based on the recently published "Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change". With few exceptions, the German media rushed to accept the Stern paper as the new Bible of ecological alarmism.

The English magazine The Business published a rather skeptical evaluation of the Stern report:

Economists use a decimal point to prove they have a sense of humour. But Sir Nicholas Stern’s report warning that global warming will cost £3.68 trillion if left untreated shows that economists can also be taken too seriously. His portentious study, The Economics of Climate Change, prepared for the British government, was treated as if it had been carried down from Mount Sinai rather than put together by an ordinary British mandarin. The fawning media classes, which now regard environmentalism as the new religion, immediately took it as gospel (to do otherwise is the new heresy). (...)

As a compendium of alarmist studies on global warming, the Stern report has no rival. Few outlandish claims have not been included in his 570-page tome, making it a useful guide to current eco-nuttery. Naturally, it paints the now-familiar vision of apocalypse; malaria doubling; Bangladeshis drowning; Europeans expiring in summer heatwaves and hurricanes ripping apart America.

Read it all. Another critic of the Stern report: "Climate chaos? Don't believe it"

If you are living in Germany, better be prepared for more eco disaster predictions - after all, Tony Blair just met with Angela Merkel, and the two agreed "to work closely together to build a strong international alliance to fight global warming."

The disease is spreading with alarming speed...

Update: More on the true disasters facing Europe:

• German-triggered blackout exposes fragile European power network
• Europe faces the threat of power shortages

And a surprisingly sane article (in German) in FAZ: Spiel mit der Angst (Playing with fear)

Comments

[wingman]

What a BS! When you look at the earth's history, you will see that, even if all glaciers WOULD disappear and the polar ice caps WOULD melt, it wouldn't be for the first or the last time. Take a look here:
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm

[beimami]

BILD is Germany's National Enquirer, reaching millions of Germans who read little if anything else. Getting BILD to run this garbage is a significant victory for the Euro-Left as many of the readers will not have access to enough information to reject the claims in the article. It is doubtful, in my estimation, that anyone (possibly a few mentally ill individuals) at BILD or among the Euro elites is truly concerned about any threats that climate change poses. The goal, as usual, is more power for the EU and UN; that is, more power for the Euro-Left.

Moreover, one should not underestimate the impact of this sort of propaganda on American-German relations. Pumping such alarmist nonsense into the German public makes that public, in turn, more susceptible to provocation when articles are run implying that the U.S. is blocking efforts to ''fight global warming,'' a euphemism, as mentioned above, for UN/EU power grabs. The target of the article is ultimately not global warming, but U.S. sovereignty.

[Vilmos]

One more scaremongering: The Everest is shrinking due to global warming: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4204539.stm

The interested reader might want to read a speech by US Senator James Inhofe . OK, Sen. Inhofe is a politician and as such he is no authority when it comes to a scientific question. However, in this speech, he doesn't dissect the science behind Kyoto, but he analyzes the media hype.

http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=263759

Vilmos

[Pamela]

I get such a kick out of this stuff. Why do ideologues think their dissembling is opaque? This idiot, the idiots over at Lancet - it's all over the place. They think we're stupid.

Tim Worstall is all over this with the best round up I've seen so far.

Before I get back to that, I notice "If the Greenland or West Antarctic Ice Sheets began to melt irreversibly, the rate of sea level rise could more than double, committing the world to an eventual sea level rise of 5 - 12 m over several centuries.". Errrm... centuries? Current SRL is 2-3 mm/yr, ie 20-30 cm/century. Double that to 40-60 and you're a fair few centuries into the future before you hit 5m, let alone 12. SRL is the "great white hope" of impacts, since its unequivocally bad (at least I've never seen anyone assert it to be a good). 5m is SRL in a millenium might well cause problems, true, but I'm not really happy looking that far ahead - tech could do anything by then.

So, that's one number Stern lied about. (You can find lots more at the link I gave, it's the index to his Climate Change posts.)

Here's a howler:
The 27-page summary begins by saying, "The current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is equivalent to around 430 parts per million (ppm) CO2, compared with only 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution. These concentrations have already caused the world to warm by more than half a degree Celsius."
More specifically, that 54 percent increase of greenhouse gases was apparently associated with a warming of only 0.6 degrees Celsius, give or take two-tenths. Citing a 2001 survey of "high projections" for global warming, however, the report claims that a much smaller, 28 percent increase in greenhouse gases by the year 2050 could result in a "global average temperature rise" exceeding 2 degrees.
Yet if we use the same rule-of-thumb now used to predict 2 to 3 degrees more global warming by 2050, the much larger increase in greenhouse gases ever since 1750-1850 should already have increased the average global temperature by at least 2 degrees.
But it didn't.

[Pamela]

Yikes! Here's the Tim Worstall link.

[Mike H.]

If we all of us died out in one week the global warming would continue until the sun started cooling down. No one has disputed that fact. They can't because Mars is warming up and the rest of the planets are warming up. The question is how much we are adding to the increase on the Earth and yet no one can find out how much warming is being done in the aggregate. No one can figure out whether el Nino is causing the atmospheric change or is being caused by the atmospheric change. Scientists have just copped to the fact that something is changing and have snapped a bead on the 'guilty party', and the 'guilty party' is morphing in front of their eyes.

It's really unfair, things should stay like they are till an answer is found. /snark

[Vilmos]

An excellent joke in Canada's National Post newspaper. So an economist, Willian Watson, was commenting on the report. Quoting from head.

So I will now know what the tax on CO2 should be $85 per ton. So I started to look at the report, but I couldn't find it. Maybe one reason is that I could download the report only one chapter at at time. It has 27 chapters. (Would you trust the 21th century to a group that doesn't know how to merge pdf files?)

Vilmos

[Scott_H]

The sky has been falling for one reason or another most of my life. Of note, is that the reasons seem to change every few years. Anyone remember the Evil Empire and "duck-and-cover"? The way to get to the heart of most of these issues is to "follow the money."

So, what exactly am I supposed to be getting excited about this week?

[Tyranno]

Perhaps Germany, or any old European country, could lead the way in "saving the world" by . . . meeting their Kyoto Standards? ? ?

Tyranno

[joe]

I have been very busy the last month or so.

Do you mean Kyoto did not save the world? I thought that is what euros said it would do.

What happened?

[LC Mamapajamas]

@Vilmos:"(Would you trust the 21th century to a group that doesn't know how to merge pdf files?)"

ROFLMAO!!! Right on target :D.

I have a HUGE problem with researchers using computer models for climate change when we have no idea what the parameters should be! Of COURSE the computer models predict what the researchers want them to predict... since we don't know what the acutal parameters must be, they use the parameters that they prefer. How could their answers be right? It isn't possible.

[Account Deleted]

`BILD claims the end of the world.'

Whether this topic relates to year 2006.

What is the position now? Some are calling Al Gore's data as hoax.

[German In Name Only]

The diplomatic triangulation has made way for a government of ecological insolvency.

As to the apocalypse, when the uncertainity as to whether it might be closer than expected is growing more than desired, the best thing to do is find a scheme which distributes resources which are meant to last until it is there justly over the remaining time, whatever its duration may be.