European Commission Gets Global Warming Wrong

According to this report in the Financial Times, the people in the European Commission analsying global warming are a bunch of fucktards who couldn't find their arses if you gave them a map and they used both hands.

The FT report doesn't say that in so many words, of course. In fact it reports the European Commission's flawed analysis without any critical comment of its own. In short, the European Commission says that global warming is a good thing for Northern Europe:

Fewer in the north would die of cold, crops there would boom and the North Sea coast could become the new Riviera, an analysis to be approved by the European Commission next week shows.

It does say that Southern Europe wouldn't do quite so well, what with droughts and tourists from the North sunning themselves on their own beaches instead of holidaying in the Mediterranean. And it is all a pile of steaming shit.

Britain is about the same latitude as Siberia, which is fucking cold, but Britain and the rest of Northern Europe is a good deal warmer than it otherwise would be because of the Gulf Stream. Global warming may be on the brink of shutting down much of the Gulf Stream.

Of course, it's that horrible science stuff that the Bush maladministration ignores. And even the scientists disagree amongst themselves, with some saying "gonna be bad, gonna be soon" and others saying "the evidence is not conclusive." Don't let the wikipedia article article fool you: none of the scientists is saying it can't happen or it won't happen. The most that the optimistic ones are saying is that they do not believe the current evidence is strong enough to convince them (the data is "noisy" and what appears to be a trend may just be due to noise) and/or that they do not believe the theoretical arguments have been sufficiently-well justified. I doubt you'd find any of them willing to bet a large sum of money on Northern Europe getting warmer, colder or staying the same.

At this stage of the game we don't know enough to be sure what is going to happen in Northern Europe as a result of global warming. Which makes the European Commission's report a pile of steaming shit, because it has not assigned a probability to its conclusions but stated them as a certainty. A certainty that no respectable scientist in the field would back, not even the optimistic ones who think the shutdown to be unlikely.

Of course, the oil companies (particularly Exxon) tell us that global warming isn't happening at all and we can merrily continue burning fossil fuels and dumping additional carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere even though it's making the seas so acidic that shellfish may be wiped out (because the acid will dissolve their shells faster than they can secrete them). To paraphrase Mandy Rice Davies under cross-examination in the Profumo trial, "Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?"