Parallel Lack of Standards: the IPCC & Bust Banks

See Donna Laframboise’s “What Financial Meltdowns Teach Us About the IPCC”:

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World is Michael Lewis’ latest book on the global financial train wreck.  Brimming with sharp observations and fabulous turns of phrase, it examines recent financial shenanigans in Iceland, Greece, and Ireland among other places.

I experienced a shock of recognition while reading those case studies.  People were doing bizarre things that they—and all of those around them—should have known would lead to tears.  Yet almost everyone bought in.  Normal rules were jettisoned.  Ordinary morality was abandoned.  Disbelief was suspended.  The few souls who tried to sound the alarm were ignored, ridiculed, demoted, or fired.

In other words, the behaviour I’ve spent the past three years writing about isn’t unique to climate science.  The same pattern is horrifyingly evident elsewhere.  It’s as though our IQs have all dropped sharply in recent years.  It’s as though we have no standards anymore.  [...]

When a Danish bank wrote a report concluding that something was amiss in the Icelandic banking sector the reaction was eerily similar to what we see in climate science.  The messenger was accused of having suspect motives and the message was summarily dismissed.

When an economics professor from Chicago gave a speech five months before Iceland’s economy crashed in October 2008 (in which he declared that their banks were already dead and that the economy had no more than nine months) Lewis reports that Iceland bankers in the audience “sought to prevent newspapers from reporting the speech.”

In other words, a gang of Icelandic kids trashed their nation’s economy.  And rather than stopping them, the grownups went along for the ride.  The checks-and-balances we would all expect to have been in place, the safeguards we would imagine going hand-in-hand with financial transactions of that magnitude, were entirely absent.

Does this make rational sense?  No.  Does it sound plausible?  Not really.  But it happened.  And the people of Iceland are going to be living with the consequences for a long, long, long time.

Another Accurate Awarmist Analysis

See “Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012”, by the semi-literate but hysterical John Stokes of The Canadian—from January 8th, 2007, but still endorsed by the publisher, evidently:

Runaway Global Warming promises to literally burn-up [!] agricultural areas into dust worldwide by 2012, causing global famine, anarchy, diseases, and war on a global scale as military powers including the U.S., Russia, and China, fight for control of the Earth’s remaining resources.

Over 4.5 billion people could die from Global Warming related causes by 2012, as planet Earth accelarates [sic] into a greed-driven horrific catastrophe.

See also WUWT.

UPDATE (2 January):  the NYT quoted the IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri:

“If there’s no action [on doing the bidding of the IPCC] before 2012, that’s too late,” Pachauri said.  [...]
Pachauri said that even if reality was worse than the final IPCC report suggested, that only made it more urgent to act quickly and forcefully.
“What we brought out is that if you delay action or don’t do enough the impact is quite devastating.  This only strengthens that message.”

(Thanks to Donna Laframboise.)