Traders counted carbon chicks before they were hatched!

Yesterday’s National Post reported the following:

Carbon trading faces a make-or-break year

Investment banks had high hopes for carbon trading. Point Carbon, an energy consultancy, predicted in 2008 that the market for trading carbon emissions permits would reach 2 trillion euros by 2020. However, the failure of the Copenhagen summit has dashed hopes of a global market. National schemes could help fill the gap, but political negotiations in the first half of 2010 will be crucial.

[…]

The Copenhagen summit failed to put in place a global scheme to trade emissions permits, replacing the Kyoto protocol, which expires by 2013. But local markets could make up some of the shortfall. The U.S. market, which Fages estimates could be worth $1.3 trillion by 2020, is the most important. The U.S. Senate is debating a scheme, but the original deadline for launching a federal market in 2012 may slip if a bill is not passed before mid-term elections in November.

Kevin Rudd, Australia’s prime minister, will put a carbon bill to the country’s Senate for a third time in February and may call an election if it is rejected. In Japan, prime minister Yukio Hatoyama wants to introduce a mandatory emissions target, against fierce industry opposition.

Investment banks had hoped to take advantage of climate change by originating, financing and hedging carbon reduction schemes as well as trading permits and credits.

However, to date it remains a niche business. Barcap, the biggest player, employs just four people on its trading desk. Some banks, including Credit Suisse and UBS AG, have withdrawn from the market. If individual countries don’t act soon then carbon trading will remain a sideshow for the foreseeable future. [emphases added -hro]

Certainly looks like they counted their carbon chicks before they were hatched! Enough to make one’s heart bleed, eh?!

I doubt that those poor deprived carbon traders will be too happy about some nuggets I found in a virtual goldmine, today [h/t “jaydee” via discussion on Macleans – where Andrew Coyne had postulated that “The truth is out there somewhere“].

English is not the first language of Gerhard Gerlich or Ralph D. Tscheuschner; but the message in their Before Climategate peer-reviewed paper comes through loud and clear. A few excerpts from the “Physicist’s Summary” section:

Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics [.pdf]

“There are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effect, which explains the relevant physical phenomena. The terms ‘greenhouse effect’ and ‘greenhouse gases’ are deliberate misnomers.

[…]

“Climatology misinterprets unpredictability of chaos known as [the] butterfly phenomenon as another threat to the health of the Earth.

“In other words: Already the natural greenhouse effect is a myth beyond physical reality. The CO2-greenhouse effect, however is a ‘mirage'” [205]. The horror visions of a risen sea level, melting pole caps and developing deserts in North America and in Europe are fictitious consequences of fictitious physical mechanisms as they cannot be seen even in the climate model computations. The emergence of hurricanes and tornados cannot be predicted by climate models, because all of these deviations are ruled out. The main strategy of modern CO2-greenhouse gas defenders seems to hide themselves behind more and more pseudo-explanations, which are not part of the academic education or even of the physics training. […] Evidently, the defenders of the CO2-greenhouse thesis refuse to accept any reproducible calculation as an explanation and have resorted to unreproducible ones. […] Regardless of the specific field of studies a minimal basic rule should be fulfilled in natural science, though, even if the scientific fields are methodically as far apart as physics and meteorology: At least among experts, the results and conclusions should be understandable or reproducible. And it should be strictly distinguished between a theory and a model on the one hand, and between a model and a scenario on the other hand, as clarified in the philosophy of science.

[…]

“The point discussed here was to answer the question, whether the supposed atmospheric effect has a physical basis. This is not the case. In summary, there is no atmospheric greenhouse effect, in particular CO2-greenhouse effect, in theoretical physics and engineering thermodynamics. Thus it is illegitimate to deduce predictions which provide a consulting solution for economics and intergovernmental policy.”

And if you happen to be interested in peer-reviewed scientific literature that the IPCC and its closed circle of committed “climate scientists” would probably prefer that you ignore (as they have chosen to do) Watts Up With That has a compilation of links to 450 such papers.

Speaking of WUWT, there are some hopeful signs that the media tide may be turning – and more importantly that “closet” global warming skeptics are reclaiming their right to freedom from climatically correct speech! In response to an article by Robert Bradley – and posted at WUWT – entitled “Climategate: Here Comes Courage” one woman wrote:

I have seen this effect myself. I am co-author on a scientific paper. A final draft was sent around for comments before being sent off to a journal for review. Climategate gave me the courage, born of outrage, to insist that the sentences which made gratuitous connections to global warming be removed as irrelevant. These had persisted despite my earlier objections. Amazingly, this time I got no fight. Getting these gratuitous references to global warming out of the literature is a small but important part of the battle, in my opinion.