Symptoms Ignored in Treatment of a Questionable Cause

Be sure to read Bjorn Lomborg's op-ed suggesting that excessive and misdirected fervor over climate change is likely to harm many people in the present in order to help a few in the future. The following are a few points that I found particularly interesting:

... implementing the Kyoto Protocol at a cost of $180 billion annually would keep only two million people from going hungry by the end of the century. Yet by spending just $10 billion annually on direct food aid, the United Nations estimates that we could help 229 million hungry people now. For every amount spent on climate policies to save one person from hunger in a hundred years, the same amount could save 5,000 people now. ...

Sea levels are rising, but they have been rising at least since the early 1800s. In the era of satellite measurements, the rise has not accelerated (actually we've seen a sea-level fall over the past two years). The U.N. expects about a 30-centimeter sea-level rise over this century — about what we saw over the past 150 years.

In that period, many coastlines increased, most obviously in Holland, because rich countries can easily protect and even expand their territory. But even for oft-cited Bangladesh, scientists just this year showed that the country grows by 20 square kilometers each year, because river sedimentation wins out over rising sea levels. ...

... famine has rapidly declined over the past half-century. The main deviation has been the past two years of record-high food prices, caused not by climate change but by the policies designed to combat it: the dash for ethanol, which put food into cars and thus upward pressure on food prices. The World Bank estimates that this policy has driven at least 30 million more people into hunger. To cite policy-driven famine as an argument for more of the same policy seems unreasonable, to say the least.

And while your mind is contemplating such matters, see Harold Ambler's detailed exploration of some of the the falsehoods and misleading presentation of the usual "climate change" argument.