It was showing the nanodegrees Celsius that the carbon regulation managed to subtract from the global mean temperature - 0.07 °C per 50 years - and the cost of this policy which used to be referred to as the Kyoto protocol. The counter was based on the figure $150 billion per year - these were claimed to be the global expenses.
Steve Milloy would be attacked as a denier from the left and left. Carbon regulation couldn't have been that expensive, the fearmongers would scream. Well, times have changed. According to Business Green (link via Benny Peiser),
Europe must invest €2.9tn to meet 2020 emissions goal (other sources)the EU commitments to reduce the carbonization of the economy before the year 2020 will cost a staggering €2.9 trillion which is $3.9 trillion.
That's the result of a study, Carbon Capital (PDF), by Accenture and Barclays Capital. The figure is $390 billion per year - it's more than twice the Milloy's "denier" value, and it's only the European Union which only represents 1/7 of the world's CO2 emissions.
If the expenses were extrapolated globally, according to a fairly shared burden, we should multiply the figure by 7 to get $2.7 trillion per year. That's 18 times the Milloy's figure that many alarmists have claimed to be an overestimate. And we're still talking about policies that can't possibly have any measurable impact on the global temperature.
So thanks to some breathtakingly irrational politicians who were tolerated at the top political tiers of our continent, the European Union is expected to pay dearly - €290 billion per year. The EU GDP per year is about €10,700 billion per year so you can see that according to the study, the Europeans will pay 2.7 percent of their whole GDP just for the meaningless "fight against climate change".
This is more than the budget for many traditional key sectors of the economy, including all of science. Even more strikingly, the annual €290 billion expenses are more than twice larger than the whole shared annual EU budget for 2011! ;-)
It's not hard to see that the climate regulation is a tumor that has to be liquidated as soon as possible. In five years or so, we have encountered an 18-fold increase of the amount of money wasted for this utter nonsense. If we see another 18-fold increase, we will be paying essentially 100% of our GDP to this idiocy.
Well, if there were a threat that this could be the case, I would prefer to reduce our compassion a little bit and shoot every person who dares to defend these insane policies. This is no longer funny. It's a threat for the civilization as we have known it for centuries.
