Death, taxes and climate change...

...all inevitable and unavoidable, and taken together form the unholy triad of IPPC left wing thinking. The green/left like to warn us that without punitive taxation and more state control of our lives we face climatastrophe. And according to former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, now president of the Geneva-based Global Humanitarian Forum, climate change-induced disasters, such as droughts and floods, kill 315,000 each year and cost $125 billion, numbers it says will rise to 500,000 dead and $340 billion by 2030. Adding to the gloom, Mr. Annan predicts "mass starvation, mass migration, and mass sickness" unless countries agree to "the most ambitious international agreement ever negotiated" at a meeting this year in Copenhagen.
Now standing up to be counted is one of the world's leading physicists Freeman Dyson, Dyson is scathing of climate models, and climate modellers...I mean it’s a fact that they don’t know how to model (the climate)... and the question is, how does it happen that they end up believing their models? But I have seen that happen in many fields. You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as being real. It is also true that the whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared. Really, just psychologically, it would be very difficult for them to come out and say, “Don’t worry, there isn’t a problem.” It’s sort of natural, since their whole life depends on it being a problem.
The Wall Street Journal takes a similar sceptical viewpoint in its editorial, calling Annan's report "Worse than Fiction" and observing... ...the Annan report deserves even closer scrutiny as an example of the sleight of hand that so often goes with the politics of global warming....the numbers here are a lot less scary when put into context. Malaria kills an estimated one million people a year, while AIDS claims an estimated two million. As for the economic costs, $125 billion is slightly less than the GDP of New Zealand. Question: Are targeted campaigns using proven methods to spare the world three million AIDS and malaria deaths a year a better use of scarce resources than a multitrillion-dollar attempt to re-engineer the global economy and save, at most, a tenth that number? We'd say yes... if the case for global warming is so open and shut, why the need for a report as disingenuous as Mr. Annan's?
...and from Christopher Brooker in the Daily Telegraph...the Arctic ice has failed to disappear...it is now not far off its 30-year mean. Al Gore's polar bears have failed to drown. The ice in the Antarctic is actually way above its 30-year average. Except in the minds of Kofi Annan, Lord Stern and Prince Charles's assembled worthies, the threatened catastrophe seems not to be happening. Meanwhile, on the planet where the rest of us live, the prospects for a new treaty in December, which according to an estimate by the International Energy Agency would cost us all $45 trillion, are not looking too hot. The Chinese and the Indians insist that, since all this global warming is the fault of the developed world, they will only sign the treaty if we agree to pay them $300 billion a year. The Africans and South Americans make similar demands...(H/T PKH)

...so why the need for alarm and scare stories? Simply because the case for man made climatastrophe is a lie, based on fear, overstatement and disinformation, and becoming more untenable by the day...