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<div><SPAN contentEditable=false style="DISPLAY: inline-block"></SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">The real climate change catastrophe<br>
Misguided energy policies are harming the world’s poor</SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" /><o:p></o:p></SPAN>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">by Paul K. Driessen<br>
Townhall.com<br>
October 21, 2006</SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"> Our planet is again warming slightly, and the weather keeps taking unexpected turns. Many scientists say this is hardly unprecedented, cause for alarm, or proof that humans are now the dominant factor in climate change. Others disagree strongly, and point to every snowstorm, hurricane, deluge or drought as proof that urgent action is needed to avoid imminent climate catastrophe. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" /><st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Britain</SPAN></st1:place></st1:country-region><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">’s Royal Society wants ExxonMobil to further squelch debate, by ending its funding of researchers who say natural forces are the primary factor in climate change. (The Society didn’t mention the $250,000 award that scientist James Hansen received from Teresa Heinz Kerry for insisting that humans are the cause.) Others have threatened climate alarmism skeptics with "Nuremberg-style war crimes trials." </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">"Socially responsible" investor services refuse to list or recommend corporations they deem insufficiently sensitive on climate change. Companies have brought climate activists into their board rooms, lobbied Congress for climate and ethanol legislation, and retooled to produce new product lines that they hope will boost tax subsidies, profits and favorable PR. Meanwhile, headlines hype every scary scenario. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Asserting "the science is settled" ignores the debate that still rages. Proclaiming that "climate change is real," ignores Earth’s constant, natural warming, cooling and weather anomalies. Most important, our current knowledge simply does not warrant imposing alarmist policies on the world’s poorest citizens. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Four times, mile-thick ice sheets smothered Europe and <st1:place w:st="on">North America</st1:place>. A thousand years ago, Vikings raised crops and cattle in <st1:place w:st="on">Greenland</st1:place>. Four centuries later, the Norsemen were frozen out by the Little Ice Age, and priests performed exorcisms on glaciers advancing toward Swiss villages. The globe warmed in 1850-1940, cooled for the next 35 years, then warmed slightly again. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Detroit</SPAN></st1:place></st1:City><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial"> experienced six snowstorms in April 1868, frosts in August 1869, a 98-degree heat wave in June 1874, and ice-free lakes in January 1877. <st1:State w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Wisconsin</st1:place></st1:State>’s record high of 114 degrees F in July 1936 was followed five years later by a record July low of 46. In 1980, five years after Newsweek’s "new little ice age" cover story, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Washington</st1:City>, <st1:State w:st="on">DC</st1:State></st1:place> endured 67 days above 90 degrees. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Studies by National Academy of Sciences, NOAA, Danish and other scientists raise additional inconvenient truths that contradict catastrophic climate change hypotheses, computer models and predictions. The Southern Hemisphere has not warmed in the past 25 years. The "hockey stick" temperature graph (which claimed 1990-2000 was the hottest decade in 1000 years) broke under scrutiny. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">The sun’s radiant heat and cosmic ray levels affect planetary temperatures and cloud formation more strongly than most climate alarmists and computer models acknowledge. Contrary to 2005 assertions and predictions, interior Greenland and Antarctica are gaining ice mass, not losing it; Gulf Stream circulation has not slowed; and the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> is yet to be hit by a major hurricane in 2006.</SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">All in all, nothing suggests that predominantly human influences have suddenly supplanted the natural forces that clearly caused climate and weather cycles in past centuries. Yet, many still demand immediate action to prevent future climate change that they insist will be due mostly or solely to humans. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Few appreciate how costly such actions would be, especially for the world’s poorest citizens.</SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">According to government and private studies, the Kyoto Protocol would cost the <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> up to $348 billion in 2012, and force average American families to pay an extra $2,700 annually for energy and consumer goods. In US minority communities, concludes another, the climate treaty would destroy 1.3 million jobs and "substantially affect" standards of living. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Globally, <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kyoto</st1:place></st1:City> carries a $450 billion to $1 trillion annual price tag, in regulatory bills, higher energy costs and lost productivity, according to economist Bjorn Lomborg. That’s many times what it would cost to provide the world with clean drinking water and sanitation - which would prevent millions of deaths annually from intestinal diseases. In fact, the United Nations calculates that just $75 billion would ensure clean drinking water, sanitation and basic health care for almost every person in the world. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Over 2 billion of the Earth’s citizens - including 95% of Africans - still do not have electricity. That means no lights, refrigerators, stoves, radios, televisions or computers; no modern homes, hospitals, schools, offices or factories. Instead, people breathe polluted smoke from wood and dung fires, and die by the millions from lung diseases. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">The world should be rushing to their aid. Instead, in the name of preventing hypothetical climate change, environmentalists and rich countries oppose fossil fuel power plants in poor countries. To "protect wild rivers," they obstruct hydroelectric projects. They resist nuclear power, on the ground that it is "inherently dangerous." In short, they are telling a third of the world’s people: </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">"You cannot have modern, healthy, industrialized societies. Your only option is piddling amounts of expensive, unreliable electricity from wind and solar. To safeguard the world from speculative risks that we are concerned about, you must endure life-threatening dangers that perpetuate poverty, disease and childhood death in your destitute nations."</SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">To top it off, just as thousands of delegates and activist are about to board CO2-emitting jetliners to attend the next global warming confab in <st1:country-region w:st="on">Kenya</st1:country-region>, the European Union has proposed taxes on imports from poor nations that are exempt from <st1:City w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Kyoto</st1:place></st1:City>. The EU claims the exemption gives poor countries an "unfair trade advantage" over EU countries that are struggling to meet their initial treaty commitments. (Some EU nations have increased CO2 emissions by 20-50% since 1990, despite signing the treaty.) </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Others are blaming malaria and malnutrition on climate change, to deflect well-founded charges that their callous opposition to insecticides and biotechnology is killing African babies. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">For nearly everyone - but especially the world’s poor - it will be all pain, and no gain. Even perfect compliance with the Kyoto Protocol would result in Earth’s temperature being only 0.2 degrees F less by 2050 than if we did little or nothing. Assuming humans really are the culprits, actually controlling theoretical global temperature increases would require 40 <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:City w:st="on">Kyoto</st1:City></st1:place> treaties - each one more costly and restrictive than its predecessors, each one imposing greater government control over energy use and prices, emissions, and housing, transportation, heating, cooling and manufacturing decisions. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Climate alarmists demand that we handcuff modern economies, to promote solutions that won’t solve a problem which extensive evidence suggests is moderate, manageable and primarily natural in origin. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Infinitely worse, they use faulty models and exaggerated fears of climate cataclysm to justify depriving Earth’s most impoverished citizens of electricity, water purification and other modern technologies that would improve and save countless lives.</SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">That is unconscionable and immoral. It is the real climate catastrophe. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Truly ethical and socially responsible policies would foster robust debate about the costs, benefits and every other aspect of climate change - and ensure rapid technological and economic advancement (including modern pollution controls) in Third World countries. </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
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<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">They would leave critical development decisions to the real stakeholders: not climate alarmists - but those who must live with the consequences of decisions that affect their access to energy, health, hope, opportunity and prosperity. <br>
__________________ </SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana"><o:p></o:p></SPAN></div>
<div class=MsoNormal style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Arial">Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Congress of Racial Equality and Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death</SPAN></div>
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