Does Income Inequality Cause Global Warming?

Oh why not?  Courtesy of Megan McArdle at The Atlantic  and a mischievous suggestion from Glenn Reynolds is the chart below showing that the trend of income inequality has reversed sharply the last few years.  And what do you know, the shape of the graph does indeed look a lot like the shape of the various global temperature graphs that show a halt in warming over the last decade or so (I’ve used Roy Spencer’s here).  Maybe income inequality, rather than greenhouse gases, cause global warming??  It would be the perfect Field Theory of Everything for the left, and is almost too irresistible.

Actually, if you parse out global warming diplomacy, you can see this has been the theory all along.  Recall the comments I’ve quoted before from one of Germany’s climate diplomats, Ottmar Edenhoffer, who was candid enough to admit:

“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”

Funny how this curve. . .

. . . looks a lot like this one.

Meanwhile, the German scientist John noted the other day who has defected from the warmist camp has given an interview with Der Spiegel entitled “I Feel Duped on Climate Change” that has some fun bits in it.  Some excerpts:

SPIEGEL: You are an electric utility executive by profession. What prompted you to get involved in climatology?

Vahrenholt: In my experience as an energy expert, I learned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more of a political than a scientific body. As a rapporteur on renewable energy, I witnessed how thin the factual basis is for predictions that are made at the IPCC. In one case, a Greenpeace activist’s absurd claim that 80 percent of the world’s energy supply could soon be coming from renewable sources was assumed without scrutiny. This prompted me to examine the IPCC report more carefully.

SPIEGEL: And what was your conclusion?

Vahrenholt: The long version of the IPCC report does mention natural causes of climate change, like the sun and oscillating ocean currents. But they no longer appear in the summary for politicians. They were simply edited out. To this day, many decision-makers don’t know that new studies have seriously questioned the dominance of CO2. CO2 alone will never cause a warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Only with the help of supposed amplification effects, especially water vapor, do the computers arrive at a drastic temperature increase. I say that global warming will remain below two degrees by the end of the century. This is an eminently political message, but it’s also good news.

Worth reading the whole thing.  Meanwhile, the climate house of cards . . . well, you know the rest of this sentence.

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