Raw Facts, Rawhide!

Following up on cattle supposedly menacing our climate (see Bete noire), the RCP blog has a couple of good posts. Ross Kaminsky expands on the junk science behind the scare, also pointing out some good news on the subject:

According to an article in the UK's Telegraph newspaper, the upcoming report from the IPCC (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) will reduce its estimate of the human effect on climate change by 25% and cut in half their estimate of the maximum rise in sea levels which climate change could cause.

Tom Bevan puts us on to Steve Kelton of Livestock Weekly who had this to say in an email about "menace on the hoof":

When I hear of scientific geniuses "discovering" this contribution to "greenhouse gas" I have to wonder what obvious secret they will uncover next. By way of context, we have roughly 100 million head of cattle in this country today, which is perhaps half the number of bison that grazed just the central Plains a little more than a century ago; USDA wasn't around to take a census then, of course, so the count is uncertain, but that estimate is based on railroad bills of lading for hides shipped back East during the final slaughter years.

And while Kyoto-ensnarled Europe is exporting jobs to Kyoto-free China and India, regulating itself into economic decline, the US has outperformed Europe on limiting greenhouse emissions. According to the WSJ, in comparison to the Clinton/Ozone Man administration, "America's rate of growth in CO2 emissions from 2000-04 was eight percentage points lower than from 1995-2000". WSJ:

Cynics play down America's improvement, noting that its economy cooled from the earlier years to 2000-04. True, but the EU-15 also had lower economic growth in the latest period and still saw its emissions growth rate double. What's more, the U.S. economy expanded 38% faster than the EU-15 in 2000-04, and its population twice as fast. So the trend lines, for now, are reversing. That may make the green lobby choke on its alfalfa wrap, because its fund raising depends on vilifying the U.S. But facts are facts, no matter how underreported they are.

Quite an inconvenient truth for the greenies. The American approach?

The U.S. strategy has been to keep economic growth strong and provide incentives for private industry to develop cleaner technologies. For instance, the Bush Administration has granted $1 billion in tax credits for nine new coal-fired power plants that will double efficiency and reduce pollution compared with older generations. China is picking up on these tactics. This year it bought $58 million in machines from Caterpillar Inc. that trap methane in coal mines and use it to power electric generators.

Raw facts beat junk science. Capitalist incentives beat greenie regs. And let's harness a little more of that methane, underground or on the hoof.

Roll 'em, Rawhide!

POSTSCRIPT: I hear at WJH at least one social studies class is being shown Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth". At least it is not being shown in the science classes. But hopefully some information is being presented to balance and provide a rebuttal for this ridiculous melodrama of a movie. Here are a few previous posts which may prove helpful: Stuck on Stupid, God Went Green, Bad Science, The Last Paragraph, Lysenko's Heiress, Earliest Snow Ever.

And the Heartland Institute, based in Illinois.