The 'global warming' scam: a crime against humanity

Crime against humanity. Not a moderate phrase, that. The usual penalty for crimes against humanity, as dictators from Mussolini to Saddam Hussein have found out to their cost, is execution.

Yet Dr James Hansen, a paid senior citizen working for an agency of the United States Government that has profited mightily from “global warming”, has said that anyone who disagrees with his personal hang-ups about the potentially catastrophic threat to humankind from a little extra CO2 in the air should be put on trial for what he calls “high crimes against humanity”.

Hansen - an accident-prone academic who has been something of an international scientific laughing-stock ever since he wrote an article in a UK scandal-sheet last year that sea level might rise 246 feet - was not fired by NASA for saying, in effect, that the growing body of scientists who do not agree with his ill-founded, apocalyptic rodomontade should be killed.

For some reason that will perhaps fascinate the palaeo-sociologists of the far future, in what is supposed to be the Age of Reason and Enlightenment anyone who wants to declare his support for the New Superstition of catastrophic manmade “global warming” can make stuff up, exaggerate beyond all reason, and menace the infidel with death for crimes against humanity, and no one bats an eyelid.

A soberer, less silly, less politicised, and less excitable public figure, the UN’s Right-to-Food Rapporteur, has also recently used the phrase “crime against humanity”, but in the opposite context. Herr Ziegler has said, “When millions are going hungry, it is a crime against humanity that food should be diverted to biofuels”.

So, who are the criminals against humanity? The brave and diligent scientists whose research in many different fields now amply demonstrates that the chief conclusions of the UN’s climate panel are nonsense, or the pietistic true-believers whose policies allegedly designed to address the non-problem of “global warming” are already killing millions by starvation?

In Haiti, the poor are now living on mud pies made with real mud. They cannot afford anything else to eat. So they take earth, carefully remove the stones, grit, and weeds, mix it with water, add a tiny pinch of salt and a small knob of butter, and knead it and pound it and stir it into a paste, which they make into mud pies. They bake the mud pies in the sun for a few hours, then eat them or sell them to their neighbours for 3 US cents each. And somehow some of them stay alive.

Or, rather, they did. I was telling this story at a lecture to government and opposition leaders in Madrid recently, when one of the civil servants in the front row burst noisily into tears. I stopped and apologised for having caused distress. The civil servant said she had just returned from Haiti, where the doubling of world food prices had put even mud pies beyond the reach of the poorest Haitians. Now, she said, they were dying in large numbers. And she felt so helpless.

There have been food riots in a dozen major regions of the world over the past two years, but the mainstream news media have largely left them unreported. Millions are dying because food prices have doubled in two years. That doubling is the ineluctable consequence of the worldwide transfer of massive acreages of agricultural land from growing food for people who need it to growing biofuels for clunkers that don’t - a nasty spin-off from the “global warming” fraud.

The cruel madness is even worse than this, and may soon claim its first Australian life. The former government cut a shoddy deal with the UN’s hated climate bureaucrats by which, if it agreed to leave millions of acres of farmland fallow and designate them fatuously as “carbon sinks”, it would be exempted from its obligation to make the cuts in emissions of CO2 from fossil-fuelled power stations and automobiles that would be demanded if it ratified the Kyoto Protocol.

The previous administration, of course, did not ratify Kyoto. But one of Kevin Rudd’s first acts as Prime Minister was to grandstand at a UN climate junket in Bali two years ago and turn his signature to the Kyoto Protocol into a gruesome, gibbering publicity stunt.

Swiftly, Australia’s equally-hated climate bureaucrats swung into action. They began writing to farmers who had paid good money for their land and had been working hard to make a living from it. They said roughly this: “Your land has been designated as a carbon sink in the name of Saving The Planet. You must stop farming your land at once. You will not be allowed to make your living from it. Because it is now worth nothing, you will not be able to sell it. You will not be paid any compensation. Good afternoon.”

Farming is not something you do. It is something you are. The farmer has an intimate relationship with the land from which he earns his substance. Take away his right to farm his land, and you steal not only his earnings but also his very self.

This is not merely shatteringly unfair. It is unconstitutional. Yet that is what the Australian Government, conspiring with the administration in New South Wales, has done to Peter Spencer, a farmer who was told his land could no longer be worked because it was a “carbon sink”, and who is now on hunger-strike halfway up a mobile-phone mast on his land.

When Mr Spencer tried to take the State’s Minister for the Environment and Water to court in 2008 to get his land back, the judge in the State’s Supreme Court told him the courts could not intervene in political decisions. Mr Spencer will challenge that finding on appeal this spring, if he lives long enough.

But the judge added a stinging rider: “It is an extremely disheartening and sad occasion that a person whose life and resources have been placed into rural property for the purposes of conducting a grazing and farming business has been required to resort to this action.”

Article 51 of the Constitution of Australia lists the 31st of 39 legislative powers of Australia’s Parliament as follows:

“The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to the acquisition of property on just terms from any State or person for any purpose in respect of which the Parliament has power to make laws.”

The principle, therefore, is that if the national government (or, a fortiori, the government of a State or Territory) takes over a person’s land, it must pay just compensation, or else.

“Aha!” say the hated climatocrats and smirking Ministers, “but we haven’t actually taken Peter Spencer’s land. It’s still his. All we’ve done is to regulate his use of it, just as we do - for instance - with the zoning laws.”

In Scotland, such poisonous artifices to circumvent the plain intention of a law, and particularly of a constitution, would be regarded in the courts with the gravest disfavour. Yet in Australia, according to the judge in Peter Spencer’s case, the governing class can do pretty much as it likes, and to hell with the mere Constitution.

So the government is using Peter Spencer’s land as a “carbon sink”. Peter Spencer is not using his land at all. He is not allowed to. And he can’t sell it. The governments of New South Wales and of the Australian Commonwealth have exercised eminent domain over his property, making it - in all but name - theirs and not his. And they have not compensated him, on just terms or on any terms.

And why? Purely as a duck, dive, dodge, dibble-dabble or device to allow Australia to claim that she is complying with the Kyoto Protocol. Not that one should single out Australia for blame. Everyone else is fiddling too. The European Union’s emissions-trading scheme fell apart twice as the price of emitting a ton of carbon collapsed, and is now falling apart a third time because a very high proportion of the “trading in hot air”, as the boys in red braces on the dealing floors of the Square Mile call it, has turned out to be fraudulent.

In Russia, they are laughing all the way to the bank because the reference year for calculating cuts in carbon emissions is 1990, just before the Soviet empire imploded. There is less heavy industry in Russia now than there was when the Communists subsidised it, so Russia will make a fortune at our expense by complying with the Kyoto Protocol. But most countries have been using a variety of fiddles so as to appear to comply. The bottom line is clear. By 2012, the Kyoto Protocol was supposed to have reduced global carbon emissions to where they were in 1990. Yet here we are in 2010, and carbon emissions are - well - 40 per cent up on 1990.

And all of the vicious nonsense that has driven Peter Spencer up his pole is in the name of addressing the non-problem of “global warming”.

Just look at some of the other postings on this site. Bossy, hand-wringing, whingeing demands that the economies of the West should be selectively shut down, because otherwise the polar ice will melt, the sea will rise, coral islands will drown, tempests will roar, plagues, famines, droughts and floods will stalk the Earth, and there will be Horsemen of the Apocalypse all over the place.

There is no scientific basis for any of it. None whatsoever. The whole thing has been made up by a tiny handful of malevolent, radicalised scientists highly placed in various Western meteorological organisations. If you want to know who they are, read online the Climategate emails that they exchanged with one another over the past ten years. You will be struck - as I was - by just how nasty these fraudsters are.

If you want to know which scientific frauds each of these wretches committed, come to my lectures across Australia in late January and early February. Dates, times and venues will be posted from mid-January at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org.

You will also be struck by how cunning these nasty fraudsters are. Science these days is so very highly specialised that a scientist looking at science outside his specialist field is just as much in the dark as a layman with no scientific knowledge at all. If a couple of dozen in different sub-disciplines conspire together to make up bad science - and that is what Climategate shows the UN’s climate panel did - then the vast majority of the thousands of scientists participating worldwide will simply be unaware that they are being deceived, and they will be even more easily deceived than the layman, because they will tend to trust colleagues in their own profession.

The big lie peddled by the UN is the notion that a doubling of CO2 concentration will cause as much as 2-4.5C° of “global warming”. In fact, according to a stream of recent papers in the peer-reviewed journals, it will cause more like 0.5-0.8C° of warming. That is all - and it is harmless.

There has been global warming for 300 years, but we could have influenced just 20 years of warming - the 1980s and ’90s - and even then only in theory. For even if the IPCC were correct in its wildly-exaggerated estimate that CO2 caused 0.8 Watts per square meter of radiative forcing, a fall in cloud cover during these two decades caused more than five and a half times as much forcing, at 4.5 W/m2.

Even if every nation complied with the Copenhagen accord as none has complied with Kyoto, and even if the IPCC’s ludicrously-exaggerated estimate of the warming effect of CO2 and other greenhouse gases were correct, in ten years’ time somewhere between one-thirtieth and one-fiftieth of a Celsius degree of warming will have been forestalled, and at a cost of trillions. Better to wait and see whether - after 15 years with no statistically-significant “global warming” - the UN has gotten its sums wrong yet again.

Otherwise, the Copenhagen Accord’s negligible effect on the climate will have been achieved at the expense of the Australian Constitution, of your right to hold and work your property, and - I fear - of Peter Spencer’s life. If he dies, Kevin Rudd must resign. If I had my way, he would stand trial for crimes against humanity.