If any business were to submit a prospectus as patently false and deliberately dishonest as the ones used to advance the cause of the global warming industry, its directors would all be in prison by now. One candidate for prison would be whoever tweets under the name @BarackObama. When he Tweeted: "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous" he was promulgating a demonstrable untruth. No one has ever doubted that climate changes. Pretty much everyone - probably more than 97 per cent, even - agrees that there is a degree of anthropogenic input, even it's just the barely measurable contribution of beef cattle farts or the heat produced by cities. But the dangerous bit? No one has come even close to demonstrating it, there is no reliable evidence for it, and very few scientists - certainly far, far fewer than 97 per cent of them - would ever stake their reputations on such a tendentious claim. So how do the eco-swine go on getting away with it? Jamie Whyte provides a fascinating, erudite and original answer in his new paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs: Quack Policy - Abusing Science in the Name of Paternalism. 

Contrary to what you may have heard, there is no "bee-pocalypse." There is lots of alarmist talk about "colony collapse disorder," people are blaming pesticides and talking about hundreds of billions of dollars at risk. But a closer look tells a very different story. Yes, honeybees are dying in above-average numbers, but the most likely cause is the varroa destructor mite and associated viruses. Moreover, if you look at the actual numbers, they undermine much of the catastrophic rhetoric. In the United States, where we have good data, beekeepers have adapted to CCD. Colony numbers were higher in 2010 than any year since 1999. The beekeepers are not passive victims. Yet, scare stories abound. We are being warned that "bee deaths may have reached a crisis point for crops," and some commentators go as far as invoking an impending "bee-pocalypse" or a "bee-mageddon." They fondly  employ a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the Earth, man would have no more than four years to live." The implication seems to be that if the smartest guy on the planet was alarmed, we should be too. However, the quote seems to have been made up, first appearing in 1994 in a pamphlet distributed by French beekeepers, protesting the high cost of sugar for feeding bees and opposing a proposed reduction of tariffs on imported honey.

Emerging markets are now big enough to drag down the global economy. As Indonesia, India, Ukraine, Brazil, Turkey, Venezuela, South Africa, Russia, Thailand and Kazakhstan try to shore up their currencies, the effect is ricocheting back into the advanced world in higher borrowing costs. Even China felt compelled to sell $20 billion of US Treasuries in July. "They are running down reserves by selling US and European bonds, leading to a self-reinforcing feedback loop," said Simon Derrick from BNY Mellon. We are told that emerging markets are more resilient than in past crises because they have $9 trillion of reserves. But any use of that treasure to defend the exchange rate entails monetary tightening, and therefore inflicts a contractionary shock on countries already in trouble. We are also told that they borrow in their own currencies these days, immune to the sort of dollar squeeze that caused such havoc in the early 1980s and the mid-1990s. This is true, but double-edged. India, Brazil and others will surely be tempted to stop fighting markets, let their currencies slide and inflict the pain on foreigners - that is to say, on your pension fund.