Interesting article in todays "Daily Telegraph"

Some excerpts:

"When The Skeptical Environmentalist was published two years ago, it caused no end of trouble. Bjorn Lomborg was a statistician who was fed up with the flaky numbers that support so many of those doom-and-gloom forecasts, so he set out to try to establish the facts. His conclusions were a bitter disappointment to those who have made careers out of spooking us with tales of impending disaster.

He found that, on the whole, things are getting better. On all objective measures of health, prosperity, access to valuable technology, levels of pollution and general well-being, the proportion of the global population that is benefitting has never been higher. We are not, he decided, heading for hell in a handcart. Fittingly for a statistician, his book made strenuous efforts to track down source material. It contains nearly 3,000 footnotes, and made Lomborg public enemy No 1 among the environmental fascists.

It is probably too much to hope that Adapt or Die* will have the same seismic impact on these sensitive souls, but it represents a long-overdue and concerted attack on the Kyoto Protocol, that far-away agreement whose true costs are only now starting to appear over the economic horizon.

Kyoto was John Prescott's first international boondoggle following his elevation to the dizzy height of Deputy Prime Minister, and he had a lovely time. He returned home having committed Britain to swingeing cuts in the level of emissions of carbon dioxide. And why not? After all, under New Labour at Year Zero, anything was possible, and 2010 must have seemed an impossibly long time away.

Well, it isn't now, and it's starting to dawn on tired old Labour that hitting those targets is going to be both expensive and painful. Adapt or Die argues, with almost as many source footnotes as Lomborg, that it's also pointless. A telling chapter from Martin Agerup (a Danish economist rather than a Swedish statistician) asks whether Kyoto is a good idea, and by now you won't be surprised by the answer.

The Kyoto meeting came about because of worries that human activity was raising the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide lets ultraviolet radiation through, but traps infrared - the so-called greenhouse effect. Ergo, more of it, thanks to our profligacy with fossil fuels, must mean global warming. The consequences will be dire, and it's all our fault.

This is a potent argument for the hair-shirt brigade who secretly hope for tsunami, pestilence and mass starvation to sweep us all away, as a kind of retribution for our decadent squandering of the Earth's bounty. Such feelings underpin the directionless protests against globalisation, and the Kyoto protocol was one response from bemused governments.

Unfortunately, the science doesn't support the doomsters' thesis. Agerup points out that it's hard enough to forecast the weather a week ahead, let alone a decade hence; he then picks apart the stats on which Kyoto is based, and finds it "amazing that such sloppy practices are used as an input to a modelling exercise that involves the use of supercomputers and costs millions of euros.''

He further points out that "there is no empirical evidence that hurricanes and storms are increasing in frequency or intensity" and concludes that it's not even clear from the science whether more CO2 in the atmosphere will mean a warmer or colder planet."