THAT KYOTO IS A FRAUD

From:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/PO0312/S00036.htm

That Kyoto Is A Fraud - Owen McShane
Thursday, 4 December 2003, 9:35 am
Speech: Owen McShane - Centre For Resource Mngmnt. Studies  

Two weeks ago I was invited to participate in the Vice-Chancellor's
debate at Waikato University. The debate was "That Kyoto is a Fraud".
Jeanette Fitsimons took one side and I took the other. I wrote the
attached paper to inform myself of the issues. – Owen McShane

THAT KYOTO IS A FRAUD

Owen McShane
Introduction

I acknowledge that the city of Kyoto exists. Any claims to the
contrary are fraudulent.

However, the protocol developed out of the IPCC conference in Kyoto is
a fraud, because it is based on fraudulent assumptions, fraudulent
models and fraudulent manipulations of data.

First, a few key points:

- Climate Change is real. Claims that the climate is static and
unchanging are fraudulent.

- Claims that the burning of fossil fuels has released large amounts
of carbon into the atmosphere are not fraudulent.

- Claims that this carbon dioxide is a "pollutant" are fraudulent
because carbon dioxide is a benign gas which is also a fertilizer and
necessary for the growth of plants.

- The United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
claims a consensus exists that global average temperatures may
increase by 1 or 2 degrees by the end of the century. This claim is
probably not fraudulent in itself.

- However, most of the other IPCC assumptions, which have led to the
Kyoto Protocol, are fraudulent.

- This necessarily means that the Kyoto protocol itself is a fraud and
that our government is the victim of a major scam.

I shall now deal with the fourteen key fraudulent items which have
been used to construct the fraudulent Kyoto Protocol.

The Consensus fraud

We hear much about the scientific consensus on which the IPCC policy
papers are based.

However, there is no scientific consensus. Many more scientists
challenge the IPCC assumptions than support them. However, the
argument continues to rage and most of us feel incompetent to judge
given that climate science is so complex and specialized.

However, the IPCC scenarios are equally dependent on the economic and
demographic inputs to their computer models. There is absolutely no
consensus on these inputs. Indeed as economists start to examine these
inputs they are horrified by what they find.

Hence whatever the consensus on the climate science there is no
consensus on the economics. (I discuss this further in the "Economic
Inputs" fraud below).

This constitutes "the consensus fraud".

The "Averaging" Fraud

Kyoto advocates talk of sea levels rising and temperatures rising as
though these changes are universal and apply to each and every area of
the globe. The proposed amendment to our own RMA refers to "rising sea
levels".

But these "averages" are meaningless when applied to any particular
town, village or coastline.

For example the average sea level is rising at about a couple of
millimeters per year. But the movement of tectonic plates - up or down
- normally exceeds this rate of change. The result is that some parts
of New Zealand are actually experiencing falling sea levels while, in
other parts, the sea levels may be rising. The only reliable way to
find out whether the sea is rising or falling in some particular
location is to measure the sea level, over time, and at that place.

At present we have measuring devices in only two locations within New
Zealand. One of them, placed near Whakatane, has already recorded a
sudden leap upwards by the tectonic plate as it slides over the
Pacific plate. So the sea level there has just fallen by several mms.

We know too that the European plate is bouncing back from the released
weight of the ice caps of the last ice age. This explains why the
Dutch are not panicking about rising sea levels.

Radio New Zealand continues to talk of Tuvalu sinking beneath the
waves. The Australians have been measuring the level of seas
surrounding those islands and announced to a recent conference on this
crisis that the sea levels were actually falling.

The conference attendees were deeply saddened by this "good" news.

The fraudulent claim of universal inundation persists because of this
"averaging fraud".

The "Warming is Bad for Us" Fraud

The Kyoto Protocol assumes that some extra warming is bad for and must
be stopped, in spite of the historical evidence to the contrary. Even
if we accept that the globe is warming (and it has been for some
centuries now) we should be asking if this is a bad thing, which
should be stopped. Understandably, President Putin is not convinced.

The main challenges to the belief that "warming is universally bad"
are the beneficial experiences of the "benign medieval period", and
the equally unpleasant times which accompanied the "mini-ice-age"
which followed.

During the benign period of the 11th to 13th centuries, Europe was
certainly, and the rest of the world probably, some few degrees warmer
than today. This benign period saw civilizations flourish in Europe,
Asia and South America. Europeans used their agricultural surplus to
build the great cathedrals, the Cambodians built their temples, and
the South Americans built their Mayan and Aztec monuments. The
Polynesian navigators explored the Pacific, reaching as far south as
New Zealand. The Norsemen crossed the North Atlantic and settled
Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland.

Then came the "mini ice age" of the 14th century. Europe's food
production collapsed and an under-nourished population was vulnerable
to a wave of plagues that wiped out 40% of the European population.
Agricultural surpluses dried up, temple building stopped, and tribal
warfare flourished as people fought over scarce food resources. The
Polynesians stopped visiting New Zealand and the Norseman retreated
from Iceland, Greenland and North America. The Viking long ships were
iced up in their harbours and the English, Portuguese and Spaniards
came out to play. This is common knowledge. My library contains some
5,000 books; I suspect that over half of them bear some testament to
these historical truths.

This notion that a little warming may be good for us posed a serious
challenge to the IPCC and the climate change industry. So the IPCC
needed to re-write history. Dr Mann and his colleagues in fraud were
only too willing to oblige and in 1998 they generated the now infamous
"hockey stick" theory. (Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric
Average Temperature Series.) Organisations, such as NIWA, which depend
on the global warming industry, trot out the hockey stick graph at
every opportunity.

Dr Mann's paper declared that the benign period/mini-ice-age cycle had
never happened and that the world has been very slowly warming for the
last thousand or so years, but will go abruptly troppo towards the end
of this century. Hence the hockey stick - the handle represents the
long stable period, while the blade represents the sudden upturn
during the final years of the 21st century. (See the graph in appendix
one at the end of this paper.)

Most educated people should know that the benign period and the mini
ice age really did happen. Indeed the plagues of the mini ice age
destroyed faith in the established Church, and drove up the price of
labour and hence triggered the Renaissance, and the Agricultural and
Industrial Revolutions.

That's why we are here today, listening to this debate.

The IPCC has surely shot itself in the foot with this one - its
credibility has been so damaged that many people feel much more free
to express their doubts.

Then, just a few months ago, Energy and Environment published a paper
by McIntyre and McKitrick which has revealed fraud on an unsuspected
scale. These statisticians have had access to the base data which
Mann, Bradley and Hughes used to generate their famous hockey stick,
and have checked out their methods. Their abstract, which is a damning
indictment of the Mann research methodology reads:

ABSTRACT: - The data set of proxies of past climate used in Mann,
Bradley and Hughes (1998, "MBH98" hereafter) for the estimation of
temperatures from 1400 to 1980 contains collation errors,
unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data, obsolete
data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of principal
components and other quality control defects. We detail these errors
and defects. We then apply MBH98 methodology to the construction of a
Northern Hemisphere average temperature index for the 1400-1980
period, using corrected and updated source data. The major finding is
that the values in the early 15th century exceed any values in the
20th century. The particular "hockey stick" shape derived in the MBH98
proxy construction - a temperature index that decreases slightly
between the early 15th century and early 20th century and then
increases dramatically up to 1980 ¡X is primarily an artifact of poor
data handling, obsolete data and incorrect calculation of principal
components.

In other words the hockey stick diagram is a fraud.

What is more damning is that when McIntyre and McKitrick re-worked the
basis data, using honest analysis and constructions, they found that
the base data revealed just what any historian would expect.

The benign period did exist, was followed by a mini-ice age, and the
globe has been slowly warming ever since. The graphs included in
Appendix One make this more clear than any words of mine.

The "Stable Climate" Fraud.

Kyoto advocates tend to believe that the earth and its biosphere are
static systems. This leads them to conclude that any changes from
nature's "norm" must be our fault, and that we must intervene to
restore the "state of nature". I should not need to explain to an
educated audience that the "static earth" theory is patently nonsense.

However, if we are to accept the Kyoto Protocol, we have to believe
that the climate has been stable over most of human history and has
been warming only since we began to burn fossil fuels and otherwise
release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Hence the crucial role of the IPCC "Hockey Stick", which argues that
the climate has been stable for the last thousand years and has only
begun to warm since the early twentieth century.

The McIntyre and McKitrick paper, which overturns the Mann Hockey
Stick, only confirms what we should have known already. The climate
has been changing for as long as we have recorded measurements. Hence,
climate change may not be our fault, and may not respond to human
intervention.

It appears to be true that the polar ice caps are melting. As it
happens these particular polar ice caps are on Mars. They are made of
dry ice or CO2. Presumably the melting of these Martian ice caps has
nothing to do with our Earthly love affair with motor cars. Solar
forcing is the more likely explanation.

The Hockey Stick supports the "Stable Climate" fraud, but the Hockey
Stick itself is fraudulent.

The "Economic Inputs" Fraud

The IPCC has persuaded many Governments that the predictions of a
warmer future have been generated by expert climate scientists running
models through their powerful computers and that therefore their
predictions are correct.

Many people have bought into this fiction, and accepted that the
"Great Global Warming" debate is a scientific matter, which only
climate scientists can resolve. Climate science is complicated and
mysterious to most of us. So we mere lay people are expected to bow to
both the science and the policy response which is incorporated into
the Kyoto Protocol.

It's been a clever strategy, but it's beginning to unravel.

The unraveling began when Dr Bjorn Lomburg, the non-gloomy Dane, first
questioned the economics of the Kyoto Protocol, pointing out that the
costs of implementing the protocol for less than one year would
provide clean water for every human being on Earth - which is surely a
better use of public funds. This encouraged a few other economists to
look at the models behind the IPCC summaries; and they don't like what
they find.

For example, Ian Castles, a former head of Australia's Statistics
Bureau and Department of Finance, has asked the IPCC to advise
governments "that the economic projections used in the IPCC emissions
scenarios are technically unsound."

Climate science alone cannot generate a range of future global
temperatures. The climate modelers must make assumptions about
economic development, changing demographics and the use of technology,
all of which have a huge impact on emissions and consequent
temperature predictions.

The IPCC "modelers" who wrote The Special Report on Emissions
Scenarios, did not use any of the standard predictions for economic
and population growth.

Instead they set about creating a new set of economic forecasts that
would support average world temperature increases of somewhere between
1.4 and 5.8 degrees over the next 100 years. One leading economic
modeler, John Reilly of MIT's Joint Programme on the Science and
Policy of Global Change, explains that: "Someone with graph paper and
a magic marker [drew] a candidate line through the literature
estimates, and then someone else bumped it up a little in one place,
and down in another, taking some emissions from one region, and adding
them to another, shaving GDP here and boosting it there" until the
emissions "gave them the temperatures they wanted".

The Economist, of November 6th, 2003, pulled no punches in an essay
which included the following damning comments:

You might think that a policy issue which puts at stake hundreds of
billions of dollars' worth of global output would arouse at least the
casual interest of the world's economics and finance ministries. You
would be wrong. Global warming and the actions contemplated to
mitigate it could well involve costs of that order. Assessing the
possible scale of future greenhouse-gas emissions, and hence of
man-made global warming, involves economic forecasts and economic
calculations. Those forecasts and calculations will in turn provide
the basis for policy on the issue. Yet governments have been content
to leave these questions to a body - The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) - which appears to lack the necessary expertise.
The result is all too likely to be bad policy, at potentially heavy
cost to the world economy.

The computer modelers assume growth rates that are beyond any
historical experience. Between 2000 and 2050, per capita growth rates
in Asia and Latin American countries are projected to roar ahead by
between 50% and 65% per decade, non-stop, while per capita growth in
OECD nations grinds to a near halt. The IMF's latest World Economic
Outlook forecasts don't come close to forecasting these levels of
growth for poor nations. The end result is a bizarre economic future
in which the United States stops growing, developing nations overtake
the GDPs of OECD nations in about 30 years, and then soar to almost
three times OECD levels by the end of the century. (Could this be
because they are unburdened by the Kyoto Protocol? If so, the New
Zealand Government should take note.)

The Economist agrees and notes:

Contrary to standard practice, the IPCC measured the initial gaps
using market-based exchange rates rather than rates adjusted for
differences in purchasing power. This error makes the initial income
gaps seem far larger than they really are, so the subsequent
catching-up is correspondingly faster. The developing-country growth
rates yielded by this method are historically implausible, to put it
mildly.

Disaggregated projections published by the IPCC say that even in the
lowest-emission scenarios, growth in poor countries will be so fast
that by the end of the century Americans will be poorer on average
than South Africans, Algerians, Argentines, Libyans, Turks and North
Koreans. Mr Castles and Mr Henderson can hardly be alone in finding
that odd.

The essay concludes with a reference to "the dangerous economic
incompetence of the IPCC".

This is the "economic input" fraud. 

The Inter-Generational Equity Fraud

The simple-minded response to any change is to try and reverse or halt
it, especially if the change appears to generate more costs than
benefits. The more intelligent way to respond to change may be to
adapt to it, and to increase other people's ability to adapt. Human
beings are so plentiful because we are the most adaptable of species.
There were once only two of us. Now there are over six thousand
million of us. We have weathered ice ages, warm periods, floods,
volcanoes, and massive epidemics, including the great plagues of the
mini-ice-age.

The wealthier we are the more we are able to adapt. Another
mini-ice-age would not wreak the havoc of the last one because we can
now warm ourselves, feed ourselves and know more about dealing with
diseases and their vectors.

Policies that make us poorer, and hence reduce our key human advantage
would seem to be particularly ill advised.

This becomes even more so when we have a self-confessed ignorance. In
such cases, instead of drawing on the dangerous "Precautionary
Principle" we should draw on the "Adaptivity Principle". Adaptation is
more "human", and less threatening to our treasured freedoms.

The Government tells us we must accept the Kyoto cost burden because
otherwise future generations will suffer the horrible effects of
global warming. At the local level some New Zealand planners are
telling their Councils that people should move away from coastal areas
to avoid future inundation caused by increased sea levels.

Why should present day New Zealanders forsake their enjoyment of the
coast today for the benefit of New Zealanders in a hundred year's
time?

And why should we accept lower economic growth today in order to
benefit future generations? After all, reduced growth rates have
serious outcomes.

The present government seems to have accepted a target growth rate of
4% increase in GDP per year - which we must achieve to put us back
into the OECD rich league.

The average household income for the Auckland Region is $66,000
dollars a year. After one hundred years of growth at 4% per capita
this household's annual income will be $3.3 million per year. (I am
assuming that the future population implosion translates 4% growth
into 4% per capita growth.)

Surely these people will be able to deal with a degree or two of
warming. They might even be able to pay for their health care. And
each household would be paying the government about a million dollars
a year in tax.

On the other hand, after a hundred years of growth at only 3% a year
their income would be a miserly $1.3 million a year. If the local sea
level has risen by a foot or two I suspect they will still be able to
deal with it.

We have a choice. We can either attempt to prevent this climate change
and accept the costs this will impose, or we can choose to adapt to
it. Human beings are a remarkably adaptable species. In spite of the
population explosion of the last century the present generation is the
wealthiest, healthiest, longest-lived generation of human beings that
has ever lived.

The ethical problem is surely obvious. Given the uncertainty
surrounding the science, and the inherent variability of the climate
and the forces which drive it, our present level of ignorance cannot
justify making present generations poorer in order to protect the
perceived interests of people whose incomes will be hugely higher than
the incomes of the families of today. How can we justify imposing
costs on the poorest people in New Zealand today for the benefit of
future annual multimillionaires?

This is "the Inter-Generational Equity" fraud.

The Population Fraud

Needless to say these IPCC storylines also ignore the population
collapse taking place in the wealthy nations and which will occur
world-wide as poor nations get rich too.

The end result is that the IPCC is using economic and demographic
models that have no connection to reality. The latest population
figures from the United Nations paint a new vision of the future. The
population bomb is proving to be a squib. Some may prefer the medium
projection which shows the world's population continuing to grow very
slowly beyond the year 2040 when it will have grown to 9 billion from
the present 6 billion.

But a realist is more likely to favour the low projection, which shows
the population going into decline from about the year 2030 from a peak
of only 7.2 billion. This low rate of growth creates a massive problem
of too few young people to support a burgeoning population of the very
old.

The good news however is that all the worries about "sustainability"
disappear like the morning dew.

The UN's latest projections show New Zealand's population peaking at
only 4.5 million from its current base of 3.83 million.

This means that there will probably never be more than say an extra
650 thousand people occupying these lands, which may mean an extra
200,000 will be living in the Auckland Region.

The ARC and local Mayors are trying to convince us that this will
create massive problems that will require us to let them tell us how
and where to live. No more seaside and countryside living for
Aucklanders. Railway stations and bus stops are the way to go. The
Growth Forum anxiety is based on an assumption that Auckland alone
will need to accommodate between 400,000 and 600,000 extra people by
the year 2026.

But according to the UN projections the whole country will have only
an extra 600,000 to cope with, and no earlier than the year 2050.

Who is kidding whom?

All the rich nations, and Europe in particular, are in the early
stages of a massive population implosion. Germany now accepts that its
population will decline by a third by 2050. The populations of Italy
and Spain are projected to halve over the same period.

The Chinese are hardly wealthy yet, but their early introduction of
the one-child policy means that even China's population may halve over
the next fifty years.

As populations decline, emissions decline with them. The population
implosion is already under way.

Yet enthusiasts for the Kyoto protocol continue to talk about the
population explosion.

This is the population fraud.

The Energy Fraud

The IPCC modelers have used other inputs that stretch credibility.

For example, the scenario which generates the highest temperature
increase at the end of this century assumes that in one hundred years
time we shall be burning seventeen times as much coal as we are today.
This seems unlikely to say the least.

The latest global emissions of carbon dioxide from combustion of
fossil fuels, as published by the Carbon Dioxide Information and
Advisory Center, Oakridge, Tennessee, fell 1.1% between 1996 and 1999
(the last quoted figure).

The United Nations Handbooks of Energy Statistics explains this
"unexpected" trend.

- Between 1996 and 1998 the total world energy consumption decreased
by 0.30%

- Energy from "Solids" (Coal) fell by 3.9%

- Energy from "Liquids" (Oil) increased by 1.5%

- Energy from "Gas" increased by 0.15%

- Energy from "Electricity" (Hydro and Nuclear) increased by 4.6%

The reduction in carbon dioxide emissions is therefore caused by a
large reduction in the use of coal, but increases in oil, which emits
less carbon dioxide. Gas emits still less, and hydro and nuclear,
none.

"Renewables" such as wind and solar do not yet figure; presumably
because they are negligible.

The fraudulent documents created by the IPCC modelers generate massive
increases in carbon dioxide emissions over the next century.

These fraudulent emissions then generate fantasy temperatures.

These fraudulent scenarios have persuaded our Government to sign the
Kyoto Protocol.

To deliver their overheated world the IPPC's functionaries have simply
cooked the economic, energy, and demographic books.

This is creative accounting at its worst.

The Enron debacle costs its shareholders about US$25 billion. The
creative accountants and modelers involved in that corporate scam are
rightly condemned around the world, and held up as an example of the
evils of private enterprise.

The costs of the Kyoto Protocol make the Enron losses look trivial.
Lomburg suggests the costs could range from 140 to 274 trillion US
dollars.

This makes the Enron accountants look honest.

This is the "Inefficient Energy Use" Fraud

The "End-of-Technology" Fraud

The regional councils of Auckland and Canterbury are convinced that
their populations should live in high density cities crowded behind
the fencing wire curtain they call their "Metropolitan Urban Limit" or
"Green Belt". These New Victorians want us to revert to nineteenth
century lifestyles living in "new urbanist" villages, pedaling from
home to work and corner store.

These are the ideas of tiny minds bereft of imagination - minds whose
future visions are locked firmly in the past. It's interesting to
compare their narrow-minded visions with those offered up by much
older, but more imaginative, minds. Freeman Dyson, one of the
twentieth century's greatest mathematical physicists, and science
adviser to many Governments, is now eighty years old, but he sees
quite a different future, one that surely sits more comfortably within
our New Zealand heritage, and the way most New Zealanders want to
live.

In The Sun, the Genome and the Internet he predicts that three
technologies will combine to set us free to live wherever we choose.

He points out that the sun shines everywhere; on the roofs of the rich
and the poor, over the countryside and over the cities, in rich
countries and in poor countries. The technology to make solar energy
cheap and readily available is developing rapidly and decentralised
solar power will soon transform the energy economy of the world. But
the greatest gains may come from genetically engineering trees to
raise their solar efficiency from 1% to say 10%, and then to further
engineer them to produce liquid fuels directly from their roots.
Villages all around the world will then be able to source their own
fuel from their gardens and their forests, and bypass the need for
high tech hardware. New Zealand scientists should be in the vanguard
of this green revolution and probably will be - but not in New
Zealand's over-regulated laboratories. They will do their work
somewhere else.

The Internet will soon provide cheap broadband access all over the
globe, which will free everyone from the tyranny of centralised
information, and the consequent centralisation of power.

Villages will generate wealth. And wealthy urbanites will move to
these villages. They are already doing so where villages are wealthy
rather than poor. Dyson writes:

My vision is that solar energy, genetic engineering and the Internet
will work together to create a socially just world in which every
Mexican village becomes as wealthy as Princeton. ... Ethics must guide
technology in the direction of social justice. Let us help to push the
world in that direction as hard as we can.

Sadly, it won't happen here. Dyson's dream conflicts with the growth
strategies of the Auckland and Canterbury Regional Councils and they
will fight hard to enforce their vision through the courts. Sooner or
later we shall have to choose who has the better grasp of reality: the
eighty year old, but dynamic Freeman Dyson, and his colleagues - or
our young, but dreary planners, who dislike the present, fear the
future, and seek refuge in the past.

This is the "end-of-technology" fraud.

The "Gross Emissions" Fraud

Kyoto advocates mislead us all by focusing on emissions per head
instead on net emissions per square kilometre of governed territory.

This has a remarkable effect on priorities and targets.

A focus on net emissions recognizes that any nation both generates
anthropogenic green house gases and absorbs them. Generally, urban
areas create greenhouse gas emissions while rural areas absorb them.

Hence net emissions relate to population density. While the US may be
the greatest emitter there is now considerable evidence that the US is
an overall greenhouse gas sink. On the other hand Europe with its high
population densities far exceeds the United States in terms of net
emissions per square kilometre.

This is the "US is the great polluter" fraud.

The "Roots not Shoots" fraud

In the The New York Review of Books, May 15, 2003, Dyson provides
broad insights into the great uncertainties underlying global warming
(which he refers to as global weather changes) within his review of
The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change, by Vaclav
Smil.

His main point is that the effects of human action on climate are
driven by two interacting systems. The first of these is the physical
system made up of gases, water, minerals and the like. This is the one
we tend to focus on.

The second system is the impact on the biosphere itself. While carbon
dioxide is a greenhouse gas that tends to trap the sun's radiation, it
is also a vital fertilizer that stimulates plant growth and
consequently enhances the food supplies for all the animals, insects,
funghi and bacteria which live on and around them.

We hear a lot about the impact of carbon dioxide on the atmospheric
temperature but much less about the effect of the same gas on the
biosphere - other than the recognition that trees are carbon sinks.

In theory a crop yield should increase approximately with the square
root of the available carbon dioxide. This means that a 30 percent
increase in carbon dioxide concentration, as is thought to have
occurred over the past 60 years, should have produced a 5.5 percent
increase in the world's biomass, including plant foods.

Dyson was one of the first to point out that vegetation takes up
carbon and hence forests are carbon sinks. Governments who saw an
opportunity to trade in the carbon credits captures by trees have
seized on this early observation. Our government seized on it
literally and simply confiscated the carbon credits locked up in the
trees on farmers' land.

Unfortunately, governments did not read the small print.

Dyson pointed out that when the concentration of carbon dioxide
increases, plants increase the growth of roots over shoots. This is
because fewer leaves are required to collect the more readily
available carbon dioxide. But, when such plants decay, a greater
portion of carbon dioxide ends up in the topsoil, which is a major
reservoir of carbon dioxide. Dyson has always argued that we should
focus on the carbon trapped in the soil around the roots rather than
what is caught up in the wood.

Dyson calculates that an increase in depth of topsoil of only one
tenth of an inch over half the area of the U.S. would capture about
five billion tons of carbon in any given year. This is a billion tons
more that the four billion tons of anthropogenic carbon dioxide being
released into the global atmosphere at the present time.

Deforestation and erosion are obviously important variables. But
generally the Western world is reforesting at a remarkable rate. Since
the removal of agricultural subsidies in New Zealand, New Zealand is
certainly reforesting, and as livestock numbers decrease, eroded
hillsides are recovering, and there is massive regrowth in the
valleys. As New Zealanders move from town to country they plant
literally millions of trees per year and are rebuilding topsoil
wherever they go.

The recycling programmes operated by many Councils mean that far more
organic waste is being converted to compost, and hence to topsoil,
than was the case in even the recent past.

New Zealand may already be meeting its Kyoto targets and would be
doing so even faster if so many Councils did not attempt to keep us
locked up in the cities, and living on smaller and smaller lots.

Increasing our depth of topsoil is a classic "no regrets" approach to
meeting any Kyoto commitments.

No matter what we learn about climate change in future, and no matter
what happens to technology, population and energy use, no one is
likely to look back and criticize a policy which promoted the recovery
and enhancement of topsoil.

But on the basis of a fraudulent application of theory the Government
has seized the carbon credits from private forests and already
repressed investment in forestry planting in New Zealand.

The Kyoto advocates focus on the shoots when we should be focusing on
the roots.

This is the "roots not shoots" fraud.

The Great Flatulence Fraud

Some Points to Ruminate On

- Methane levels in the atmosphere are always changing. At present
they are falling. We don't know why.

- There is no reason to believe that ruminants are more or less
plentiful now than in times past. The 100 million cattle in the US
simply replaced the 100 million buffalo. Africa is full of belching
ruminants including elephants. Africa does not have to sign the Kyoto
protocol.

- One of the biggest sources of "anthropogenic" methane are the rice
paddies of Asian nations. The Asian nations are not required to sign
the Kyoto protocol.

- Most "natural" methane comes from wetlands. The government wants
farmers to build more wetlands. Will farmers who oblige have to pay
more tax? Landfills are another major source of "unnatural" methane,
and earn no foreign exchange. Should they be taxed?

- While our own dairy cow numbers are rising, beef cattle and sheep
numbers are falling sharply. Dairy cows feed on high quality pastures
and hence produce less methane per unit than sheep or beef. Our total
ruminant population is only 16 million beef equivalents - and is
falling.

- Canada has decided that the impact of their own 13 million beef
cattle on global methane levels is insignificant.

- India tops the methane pops with 317 million genetically inferior
beef equivalents all munching on inferior feed. If India increased its
farming efficiency to anything like our own their methane production
would drop by a half or more. The Indian herd size has increased by 17
million over the last three years; this increase alone is twice the
size of New Zealand's whole cattle herd.

- A litre of English milk has generated much more methane than a litre
of New Zealand milk on its passage from the grass, through the cow and
into the carton. We are the world's most efficient producers of milk
in terms of methane by-product because of our top quality livestock
and top quality feed.

If Science Minister Hodgson and his earnest men and women really want
to "make a difference" they should be funding New Zealand agricultural
scientists to go out into the world and convert the masses into our
own superior relationship to the Earth Mother rather than taxing our
farmers for being "ungrateful whingers".

It's a weird marketing policy which presents us to the world as a
curious mixture of stupid oafs and planet poisoning bad guys when we
are the smartest and the best guys.

Why do we want to provide the European protectionists with such
obvious ammunition?

This is the "Great Flatulence" Fraud.

The "We Must Suffer today for future generations" Fraud.

The Kyoto protocol argues (like other religious and secular doctrines)
that we must suffer today to ensure better times in future.

The combination of increased wealth, technological change, and the
population implosion means that the perceived problem will most likely
solve itself - at no cost. Whatever is happening to the climate there
are three good reasons to do nothing that harms the generations alive
today.

First, the population implosion is already well underway in the
developed world and global population goes into decline about half way
through this century.

Second, the combination of solar power, genome technology and the
Internet means that living patterns are changing, and will change, in
ways that we cannot fully comprehend but which work against the
assumptions of the IPCC models.

Third, future generations will be much wealthier than those of today,
and their extra wealth means that they will be able to deal with the
comparatively minor impacts of any likely changes. Humans are
adaptable creatures and our adaptability is proportional to our
wealth. Hence we should do nothing that destroys our ability to
generate wealth now and in the future.

The Fourteen Frauds of the Kyoto Protocol. 

1. The Consensus Fraud: - It claims that we have certainty when there
is none and claims scientific consensus when there is none.
Furthermore there is absolutely no consensus on the economic inputs to
the models.

2. The Averaging Fraud: - It translates global averages into local
events.

3. The "Warming is Bad for Us" Fraud: - The benign period of the
middle ages was warmer than today and civilizations flourished.

4. The "Climate Change is Unnatural" Fraud: - the Kyoto protocol
assumes that climate change is unnatural, is caused by human action
and hence will response to human intervention, and used the Hockey
Stick to support this argument. In reality climate change is normal
and natural, and the Hockey Stick is a fraud.

5. The Economic Inputs Fraud: - The IPCC models are driven by economic
inputs as well as climate change theory. The economic inputs are so
wildly improbable, and theoretically unsound, as to be fraudulent.

6. The Intergenerational Equity Fraud: - Future generations will be
wealthy beyond our dreams and will be able to adapt to climate change;
poor people today should not suffer today to improve the lot of the
wealthy populations of tomorrow.

7. The Population Fraud: - The population implosion is well underway
and will achieve Kyoto type reductions in emissions at no direct cost.

8. The Energy Fraud: - The IPCC models assume fossil fuel use rates
which deny historical records and reject all known trends. Carbon
dioxide emissions are falling - not rising, as the IPCC fraudulently
claims.

9. The End of Technology Fraud: - Technological changes and impacts,
now under way, will allow us to live wherever we choose and with
greatly reduced environmental impacts, and greatly reduce our use of
fossil fuels.

10. The Gross Emissions Fraud: - The Kyoto protocol focuses on gross
emissions rather than net emissions. This makes the US look like "the
great polluter" rather than a net carbon sink - which it probably is.

11. The Roots not Shoots Fraud: - The Kyoto protocol focuses on carbon
credits in the trees rather than the carbon absorbed into soil
organisms.

12. The Great Flatulence Fraud: - Our New Zealand farmers are the most
efficient ruminant farmers and should be telling others how to match
our own performance rather than being cast as the villains of the
methane world.

13. The Inter- Generational Equity Fraud: - There are no grounds for
requiring people today to suffer on behalf of future wealthier
generations. Wealth facilitates adaptation and humans are uniquely
adaptable.

14. The Hockey Stick Fraud: - Finally, the IPCC's "Hockey Stick" is
based on fraudulent manipulation of the data. The graph attached as
Appendix I below shows that the medieval benign period and the
mini-ice-age and the subsequent warming all actually happened. The
"Hockey Stick" is the greatest fraud of all.

Owen McShane

Director, Centre for Resource Management Studies