When the IPCC sticks to the scientific facts, they’re fine. But now we have their new report that is nothing but a collection of potential panics about things that could happen as a result of global warming – potential secondary effects of a primary process that is poorly understood at best.

In fact, parts of it have already been disproven. And parts of its are demonstrable nonsense. Global warming will produce longer growing seasons. How precisely does this cause famine?

(There’s a wonderful critique of famine specifically in P.J. O’Rourke’s All the Trouble in the World in which he goes over numerous studies that have shown that no famine in the last millenium has been the result of a lack of food. All of them have been the result of politics.)

This is precisely what I’ve been ranting about on global warming. It’s not enough to present the facts – we have to be presented with disaster scenarios.

The dire predictions this reports makes are precisely the predictions Paul Ehrlich made in The Population Bomb – famine, pestilence and destruction of the world’s poor. Well, the hysterics were wrong then and they’re probably wrong now. Among other things, they assume no adaptation of human beings. No flood walls. No slow migration to higher elevation. No pesticides to wipe out malaria. No improvements in water infrastructure. No adaptation by the bears either. It’s the Fallacy of the Unbroken Trend all over again.