Our View: Talk about a bunch of hot air

Another U.N. conference began Sunday in Bali to contrive another worldwide “solution” for global warming. Beware when the government wants to help. Be frightened when it’s a bunch of governments.

Most will assume as true the fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scary story that global warming is a certainty, and it poses catastrophic consequences - unless governments do something.

Never mind that the IPCC watered down its even scarier previous report from 2001. Instead of computer predictions of 35-inch sea-level rises in the next century, the latest report says 17 inches. Rather than temperature increases of 2.5 to 10.4 degrees, computers now say 3.2 to 7.2 degrees.

Never mind the report is compiled by government-appointed editors. Never mind that Draconian mandates to drastically reduce greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol Treaty have failed. In fact, expect more stringent, economy-retarding mandates from Bali.

There are opposing views, and solid evidence. Consider that the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, 41 organizations from 33 nations “independent of political parties and governments,” says: “the economic and social consequences of a Kyoto 2 Treaty could be devastating.” The group says government subsidies, taxes and regulations undermining economic growth should be eliminated instead or else billions of poor people will be harmed by making energy and clean water more expensive, perpetuating poverty.

Consider that soaring temperatures exist only in computer predictions. The 1-degree Centigrade increase of the past century is entirely within the normal range. Satellite measurements, the most accurate, show no southern hemisphere warming since 1979 and a decline in the north since 2001, despite rising greenhouse-gas levels.

Despite IPCC assumptions, increasing atmospheric CO2 doesn’t appear to increase temperatures, which historically increase before CO2 increases. Temperatures were no warmer than today when CO2 concentrations were 18 times higher in the Cambrian Period and 12 times higher in the Late Ordovician Period, an ice age yet.

“The scientific evidence on global warming is not yet settled sufficiently to provide a basis for potentially very costly and major policy initiatives,” says Wolfgang Kasper, emeritus professor of economics at the University of New South Wales.