Kein Grund zur Panik

16 führende Naturwissenschaftler und Ingenieure haben im Wall Street Journal die Stellungnahme No Need to Panic About Global Warming abgegeben. Darin finden sich folgende Argumente:

• Es gibt keinen Konsens innerhalb der Naturwissenschaften hinsichtlich des Klimawandels. "In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the 'pollutant' carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever [a prominent detractor of the IPCC]. And the number of scientific 'heretics' is growing with each passing year."


• Die Tatsachen widerlegen die offizielle Klimatheorie. "Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 'Climategate' email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: 'The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.' ... The lack of warming for more than a decade ... suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause."


• CO2 ist kein Schadstoff. "The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today."


• Politische Gleichschaltung der Klimawissenschaften. "Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. ... This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death."


• Klimapolitik bedient wirtschaftliche Sonderinteressen. "Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them."

Es geht auch anders

Politiker müssen nicht Speichellecker der Grünen sein. Das ist in Deutschland schwer vorstellbar, aber in zivilisierteren Staaten des Westens durchaus möglich. Ein Beispiel dafür gibt Joe Oliver, Minister of Natural Resources in Kanada. In einem vor kurzem veröffentlichten offenen Brief schrieb er:

"Unfortunately, there are environmental and other radical groups that would seek to block this opportunity to diversify our trade. Their goal is to stop any major project no matter what the cost to Canadian families in lost jobs and economic growth. No forestry. No mining. No oil. No gas. No more hydro-electric dams.

These groups threaten to hijack our regulatory system to achieve their radical ideological agenda. They seek to exploit any loophole they can find, stacking public hearings with bodies to ensure that delays kill good projects. They use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest. They attract jet-setting celebrities with some of the largest personal carbon footprints in the world to lecture Canadians not to develop our natural resources.

Finally, if all other avenues have failed, they will take a quintessential American approach: sue everyone and anyone to delay the project even further. They do this because they know it can work. It works because it helps them to achieve their ultimate objective: delay a project to the point it becomes economically unviable."

Hat jemals ein deutscher Politiker so klare Worte gefunden?