Tuesday, February 18, 2003

IPCC Climate Report Gets Blown Away. In 100 years, will Libya have a larger economy than the United States? How about Lithuania and Tunisia? Would you be willing to place a multi-billion dollar bet that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea will have a higher GDP than the United States by 2100? Will Gabon's GDP race ahead of Australia's by 2100? If not Gabon, perhaps from the sands of Algeria an economic miracle will blossom, growing Algeria's economy larger than those of many first world nations? Would you be willing to bet Swaziland will overtake Australia by 2100? Vanuatu? New Caledonia? Care to wager a few hundred billion dollars on it? According to Statistics/Economics Professors Ian Castles and David Henderson, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has made all of those assumptions, and more, in their seminal IPCC reports on global warming, and the world is contemplating its bets at the casino called the Kyoto Protocol, the multibillion dollar treaty that flowed from the IPCC reports. The reports have vastly overstated the growth rates for developing countries, linked the GDP of these developing countries to greenhouse emissions, and consequently greatly overestimated the magnitude of global warming over the next 100 years. According to these two professors, using the IPCC's most conservative estimate of GDP growth rate of developing countries, all of the above instances will happen. [kuro5hin.org] 7:30:38 PM    comment []

Germans Cover-Up Smallpox Stockpile. Andrew Sullivan reports: Astonishing piece in the Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung today. Just before the German elections last year, German intelligence found very serious evidence of Iraq's stockpiling of smallpox bioweapons. The report came with a "high degree of confidence." The piece alleges that Schroder helped bury the report, so as not to get him off-message during his anti-American campaign. Gotta love those Germans!... [Useful Fools] 7:15:03 PM    comment []