Climategate

Yet more IPCC Lies

2010-06-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

by James Delingpole
25th May 2010

Pope Catholic; night follows day; IPCC

found telling pack of lies about sea level rises

IPCC lies, cheats, distorts again. Yes, all right, it is a bit of a “dog bites man” or “pizza found to contain mozzarella and tomato resting on dough base” kind of story. But on the day in which Britain’s new Prime Minister announced in the Queen’s speech that one of his government’s main goals is to “combat climate change”, it’s perhaps just as well to remind ourselves of the kind of junk science and misinformation that is inspiring his green policies. (Hat tip: Barry Woods)

This one comes from the great Canadian blogger Donna Laframboise, who has noticed that the most recent report (2007) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change liberally cited a scientific paper which wasn’t published until 29 months after the cut off date for submissions.

“Ah what’s 29 months between friends?” you might say. But as Laframbroise rightly observes it strips the process of its integrity.

If IPCC authors are to accurately describe the scientific literature, an agreed-upon cutoff date is required. If expert reviewers are to comment on the IPCC’s use of that literature, they must be afforded adequate opportunity to examine it.

More sinister still, though, is the way the IPCC report has twisted the paper – by one David G Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey – for its own ends. Here’s what Vaughan’s paper said about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).

Since most of WAIS is not showing change, it now seems unlikely that complete collapse of WAIS, with the threat of a 5-m rise in sea level, is imminent in the coming few centuries.

Note that phrase “it now seems unlikely”.

Now see how the IPCC interprets Vaughan’s paper:

If the Amundsen Sea sector were eventually deglaciated, it would add about 1.5 m to sea level, while the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) would account for about 5 m (Vaughan, 2007).

Yes, yes, IPCC no doubt it WOULD. But as the report you cite to prove it made pretty explicit: IT AIN’T GOING TO HAPPEN.

Still, as the IPCC has twigged by now, tell a lie often enough and it becomes part of the “consensus”.

That’ll be why Vaughan’s paper appears to have become almost as big a poster child for the Fourth IPCC report as Mann’s hockey stick was for the earlier ones. Just see how many times Vaughan is cited:

Working Group 1, Chapter 4 lists a D. Vaughan (UK) as a contributing author
WG1, Chapter 10 lists a D. Vaughan (UK) as a contributing author
WG2, Chapter 15 lists a David G. Vaughan (UK) as one of two coordinating lead authors
WG2’s Summary for Policymakers lists a David Vaughan as a drafting author
WG2’s Technical Summary lists a David Vaughan (UK) as a lead author

Maybe the IPCC were hoping that if they wrote his name in slightly different ways we wouldn’t notice. Bad luck IPCC. We did.

Oh and while we’re on the subject of things that could happen as a result of “Global Warming” but which aren’t going to, check out this story about Polar Bears. Apparently they’re all doomed – again – because a bunch of Canadian scientists have worked out that this is the sort of thing that might happen if you punch a few scary figures into a computer. (Hat tip: Mike Daly)

Dr Molnar, Professor Andrew Derocher and colleagues from the University of Alberta and York University, Toronto focused on the physiology, behaviour and ecology of polar bears, and how these might change as temperatures increase.

“We developed a model for the mating ecology of polar bears. The model estimates how many females in a population will be able to find a mate during the mating season, and thus get impregnated.”

Ah. So it’s not actually based on counting real polar bears or noting how in the last 10,000 years they’ve survived much more drastic changes in global climate than the ones we’ve experienced recently.

The latest US assessment of the conservation status of polar bears included the only two previous studies to assess the impact of climate change, but these extrapolated population trends, rather than directly modelling how the ecology of polar bears may alter.

The new study by Dr Molnar’s team offers a way to improve these predictions, and suggests the potential for even faster declines than those found by the US assessment.

“Canada has about two-thirds of the world’s polar bears, but their conservation assessment of polar bears didn’t take climate change seriously,” says Dr Molnar, a flaw noted by the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group last year.

“Our view is that the Canadian assessment should be redone, properly accounting for climate change effects.

“The status of polar bears is likely much more dire than suggested by the Canadian report,” he adds.

Yes! Yes! I trust this man. He clearly knows what he’s doing. Let’s give him another research grant – a really big one this time. With enough money, I’m sure he and his team will be able to model the entire polar population off the planet by 2013 at the latest.

And won’t that just teach all us sceptics a lesson we’ll never forget!!!!

James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com

Article courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk

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Tax Dollars Perpetuate Global-Warming Fiction

2010-05-25T23:54:00.000-07:00

Editorial
25th May 2010

$6 million study is used to lobby for cap-and-tax

With public faith in the global-warming myth on the wane, leftist zealots are desperate to spin a new tale - and they're spending your tax money to do it. Three years ago, Congress appropriated $5,856,600 for the National Academy of Sciences to complete a climate-change study. This bureaucratic attempt to cook the books, which was completed last week, may be too late to save this dying religion.

The academy now offers the taxpayer-funded research for download in three separate sections for $44 each. The first volume presents the case that human activities are warming the planet and that this "poses significant risks." A second report urges that a cap-and-trade taxing system be implemented to reduce so-called greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The final section of the study explores strategies on adapting to the "reality" of climate change, meaning purported "extreme weather events like heavy precipitation and heat waves."

None of the big-government recommendations are worth the 1,089 pages of presumably recycled paper on which they are to be printed if planetary warming is actually a phenomenon beyond human control, so the first volume is of primary interest. "Advancing the Science of Climate Change" asserts that the Earth's temperature has risen over the past 100 years and that human activities have resulted in sharp increases in carbon dioxide. The coincidence of these facts on their own, of course, proves nothing. The Earth has been as warm or warmer in past periods, such as the medieval and Roman warm periods, long before the internal combustion engine and coal plants were around to take the heat for a particularly sweltering summer day.

"Both the basic physics of the greenhouse effect and more detailed calculations dictate that increases in atmospheric GHGs should lead to warming of Earth's surface and lower atmosphere," the National Academy report goes on to assert. That is to say, the theory that mankind's increased carbon-dioxide output is responsible for warming is true because the theory's calculations say so. "Detailed simulations" of climate provide verification in the eyes of these left-leaning scientists. The same climate models that can't predict tomorrow's weather accurately are supposed to forecast decades into the future.

That this logic is entirely circular is not lost on the public, only a third of whom believe mankind's collective exhalations are about to destroy the planet. A recent Rasmussen survey found that a majority (59 percent) think it's more likely that scientists are falsifying research data to support their own personal theories about global warming.

The overall message of climate alarmists is "Trust us," but the Climategate e-mails exposed these hacks' lack of credibility, as they are willing to manipulate and suppress data to try to prove their point. Science should not be abused to push a political agenda - and here the National Academy is doing the work of Democrats by taking tax dollars to pimp for higher taxes on gasoline, electricity and other essential elements of modern life. In return, these ideological leftists are rewarded with even more of your money to conduct additional "research."

It's time to pull the plug on public funding for these science-fiction writers.

Article courtesy of The Washington Times

Lord Monckton wins Global Warming debate at Oxford Union

2010-05-25T23:26:00.000-07:00

by Anthony Watts
24th May 2010

I’m waiting for actual photos of the event from the official photographer, but for now I’ll make do with what can be found on the Internet. For those who don’t know, the Oxford Union is the top of the food chain for scholarly debate. This is a significant win.

The Oxford Union Debate Chamber - image from Wikimedia

Founded in 1823 at the University of Oxford, but maintaining a separate charter from the University, The Oxford Union is host to some of the most skillful debates in the world. Many eminent scholars and personalities have come and either debated or delivered speeches in the chamber. Monckton was invited as part of the formal Thursday debate.

It is described as follows:

The Union is the world’s most prestigious debating society, with an unparalleled reputation for bringing international guests and speakers to Oxford. It has been established for 182 years, aiming to promote debate and discussion not just in Oxford University, but across the globe.

Here is a view inside from a previous debate:

The Debate Chamber - Photo by: Rajiv Dabas

From the SPPI Blog, an account of the debate:

Oxford Union Debate on Climate Catastrophe

Source: SPPI

Army of Light and Truth 135, Forces of Darkness 110

For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that “global warming” is or could become a global crisis. The only previous defeat for climate extremism among an undergraduate audience was at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland, in the spring of 2009, when the climate extremists were defeated by three votes.

Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world’s premier debating society, carried the motion “That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change” by 135 votes to 110. The debate was sponsored by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington DC.

Serious observers are interpreting this shock result as a sign that students are now impatiently rejecting the relentless extremist propaganda taught under the guise of compulsory environmental-studies classes in British schools, confirming opinion-poll findings that the voters are no longer frightened by “global warming” scare stories, if they ever were.

When the Union’s president, Laura Winwood, announced the result in the Victorian-Gothich Gladstone Room, three peers cheered with the undergraduates, and one peer drowned his sorrows in beer.

Lord Lawson of Blaby, Margaret Thatcher’s former finance minister, opened the case for the proposition by saying that the economic proposals put forward by the UN’s climate panel and its supporters did not add up. It would be better to wait and see whether the scientists had gotten it right. It was not sensible to make expensive spending commitments, particularly at a time of great economic hardship, when the effectiveness of the spending was gravely in doubt and when it might do more harm than good.

At one point, Lord Lawson was interrupted by a US student, who demanded to know what was his connection with the Science and Public Policy Institute, and what were the Institute’s sources of funding. Lord Lawson was cheered when he said he neither knew nor cared who funded the Institute.

Ms. Zara McGlone, Secretary of the Oxford Union, opposed the motion, saying that greenhouse gases had an effect [they do, but it is very small]; that the precautionary principle required immediate action, just in case and regardless of expense [but one must also bear in mind the cost of the precautions themselves, which can and often do easily exceed the cost of inaction]; that Bangladesh was sinking beneath the waves [a recent study by Prof. Niklas Moerner shows that sea level in Bangladesh has actually fallen]; that the majority of scientists believed “global warming” was a problem [she offered no evidence for this]; and that “irreversible natural destruction” would occur if we did nothing [but she did not offer any evidence].

Mr. James Delingpole, a blogger for the leading British conservative national newspaper The Daily Telegraph, seconded the proposition, saying that – politically speaking – the climate extremists had long since lost the argument. The general public simply did not buy the scare stories any more. The endless tales of Biblical disasters peddled by the alarmist faction were an unwelcome and now fortunately failed recrudescence of dull, gray Puritanism. Instead of hand-wringing and bed-wetting, we should celebrate the considerable achievements of the human race and start having fun.

Lord Whitty, a Labor peer from the trades union movement and, until recently, Labor’s Environment Minister in the Upper House, said that the world’s oil supplies were rapidly running out [in fact, record new finds have been made in the past five years]; that we needed to change our definition of economic growth to take into account the value lost when we damaged the environment [it is artificial accounting of this kind that has left Britain as bankrupt as Greece after 13 years of Labor government]; that green jobs created by governments would help to end unemployment [but Milton Friedman won his Nobel Prize for economics by demonstrating that every artificial job created at taxpayers’ expense destroys two real jobs in the wealth-producing private sector]; that humans were the cause of most of the past century’s warming [there is no evidence for that: the case is built on speculation by programmers of computer models]; that temperature today was at its highest in at least 40 million years [in fact, it was higher than today by at least 12.5 F° for most of the past 550 million years]; and that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic [no one has asked them].

Lord Monckton repeatedly interrupted Lord Whitty to ask him to give a reference in the scientific literature for his suggestion that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic. Lord Whitty was unable to provide the source for his figure, but said that everyone knew it was true. Under further pressure from Lord Monckton, Lord Whitty conceded that the figure should perhaps be 92%. Lord Monckton asked: “And your reference is?” Lord Whitty was unable to reply. Hon. Members began to join in, jeering “Your reference? Your reference?” Lord Whitty sat down looking baffled.

Lord Leach of Fairford, whom Margaret Thatcher appointed a Life Peer for his educational work, spoke third for the proposition. He said that we no longer knew whether or not there had been much “global warming” over the 20th century, because the Climategate emails had exposed the terrestrial temperature records as defective. In any event, he said, throwing good money after bad on various alternative-energy boondoggles was unlikely to prove profitable in the long term and would ultimately do harm.

Mr. Rajesh Makwana, executive director of “Share The World’s Resources”, speaking third for the opposition, said that climate change was manmade [but he did not produce any evidence for that assertion]; that CO2 emissions were growing at 3% a year [but it is concentrations, not emissions, that may in theory affect climate, and concentrations are rising at a harmless 0.5% a year]; that the UN’s climate panel had forecast a 7 F° “global warming” for the 21st century [it’s gotten off to a bad start, with a cooling of 0.2 F° so far]; and that the consequences of “global warming” would be dire [yet, in the audience, sat Mr. Klaus-Martin Schulte, whose landmark paper of 2008 had established that not one of 539 scientific papers on “global climate change” provided any evidence whatsoever that “global warming” would be catastrophic].

Lord Monckton, a former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the UK, concluded the case for the proposition. He drew immediate laughter and cheers when he described himself as “Christopher Walter, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, scholar, philanthropist, wit, man about town, and former chairman of the Wines and Spirits Committee of this honourable Society”. At that point his cummerbund came undone. He held it up to the audience and said, “If I asked this House how long this cummerbund is, you might telephone around all the manufacturers and ask them how many cummerbunds they made, and how long each type of cummerbund was, and put the data into a computer model run by a zitty teenager eating too many doughnuts, and the computer would make an expensive guess. Or you could take a tape-measure and” – glaring at the opposition across the despatch-box – “measure it!” [cheers].

Lord Monckton said that real-world measurements, as opposed to models, showed that the warming effect of CO2 was a tiny fraction of the estimates peddled by the UN’s climate panel. He said that he would take his lead from Lord Lawson, however, in concentrating on the economics rather than the science. He glared at the opposition again and demanded whether, since they had declared themselves to be so worried about “global warming”, they would care to tell him – to two places of decimals and one standard deviation – the UN’s central estimate of the “global warming” that might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. The opposition were unable to reply. Lord Monckton told them the answer was 3.26 plus or minus 0.69 Kelvin or Celsius degrees. An Hon. Member interrupted: “And your reference is?” Lord Monckton replied: “IPCC, 2007, chapter 10, box 10.2.” [cheers]. He concluded that shutting down the entire global economy for a whole year, with all the death, destruction, disaster, disease and distress that that would cause, would forestall just 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.024 Kelvin or Celsius degrees of “global warming”, so that total economic shutdown for 41 years would prevent just 1 K of warming. Adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective.

Mr. Mike Mason, founder and managing director of “Climate Care”, concluded for the opposition. He said that the proposition were peculiar people, and that Lord Monckton was more peculiar than most, in that he was not a real Lord. Lord Monckton, on a point of order, told Mr. Mason that the proposition had avoided personalities and that if Mr. Mason were unable to argue other than ad hominem he should “get out”. [cheers] Mr. Mason then said that we had to prepare for climate risks [yes, in both directions, towards cooler as well as warmer]; and that there was a “scientific consensus” [but he offered no evidence for the existence of any such consensus, still less for the notion that science is done by consensus].

The President thanked the speakers and expressed the Society’s gratitude to the Science and Public Policy Institute for sponsoring the debate. Hon. Members filed out of the Debating Chamber, built to resemble the interior of the House of Commons, and passed either side of the brass division-pole at the main door – Ayes to the right 135, Noes to the left 110. Motion carried.

Article courtesy of Watts Up With That?

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National Academy of Sciences completely ignores Climategate

2010-05-25T15:19:00.000-07:00

by T. Lau
25th May 2010

National Academy of Sciences

Issues Reports on Climate Change

During the Bush administration, Congress asked the National Academy of Sciences, comprised of the nation's elite scientists, to study the issue of climate change and issue a report. Last week the NAS did exactly that, and issued three sobering reports on climate change. The reports (titled Advancing the Science for Climate Change, Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change and Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change) are notable because they abandon normal scientific language for an urgent tone in calling for action.

The first report concludes that climate change is happening, and it is caused by humans. The report notes that science is never closed and that there is still serious debate about global warming, but the report states that "climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for -- and in many cases is already affecting -- a broad range of human and natural systems. The report recommends that a single government entity be given the authority and resources to coordinate a national effort to improve understanding and responses to climate change.

The second report on limiting the magnitude of future climate change recommends that the U.S. must reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions which will require actions beyond business as usual. The report suggests either a tax on emissions or cap and trade, or both, but cautions that putting a price on carbon alone will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The third report about adapting to the impacts of climate change makes several recommendations to lawmakers, including making plans now for a possible five foot rise in sea levels by the end of the century. These plans may include relocating population areas away from coasts and shore lines.

Overall the NAS says there is an "urgent need" for the U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The scientists also conclude that the evidence makes a "compelling" case that climate change is happening now. With all this science weighing in, and climate reports that 2010 is already shaping up to beat 2009 as the warmest year on the planet on record, are there any climate change doubters left out there?

Article courtesy of Enterprise IT Planet

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More on the ABC News Hit Job

2010-05-25T15:01:00.000-07:00

by Jeff Poor
25th May 2010

Left on the Cutting Room Floor: Climate Depot's

Marc Morano Takes on ABC News' Dan Harris

'World News' segment cut skeptic interview from 11 minute

to just 10 seconds, then links it with white supremacists

We’ve all sort of known the media have been in the tank for the global warming alarmist movement. For evidence, look no further than a March 2008 segment that aired on ABC “World News” attacking leading climate skeptic, University of Virginia environmental scientist Professor Emeritus Fred Singer.

And the same culprit behind that 2008 segment, “World News” weekend anchor Dan Harris, was at it again with a piece that aired on May 23 attempting to link climate change skeptics to white supremacists.

But for balance, Harris included a few brief remarks, all of 10 seconds, from Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com, a news aggregator website Harris called “aggressive.” But the actual interview Harris conducted with Morano was much more extensive and in depth. Throughout the interview, Harris asked Morano questions, but with premises that weren’t necessarily true.

During the back-and-forth, Harris asked Morano about the “threat” from people who challenged global warming skeptics, the validity that ClimateGate was a real scandal, the charges from Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., that ClimateGate exposed fraud, how someone could be skeptical of global warming with such a broad consensus and what Harris deemed as “interesting,” that climate skeptics were susceptible to threats as well. However, 99 percent of that was left out of the segment. What was left out of the ABC News segment? Transcript as follows:

HARRIS: So we’ll just get your reaction, I know this is a complaint you’ve heard before, but of late, climate scientists say they’re seeing a big spike in threatening e-mails, and the FBI is looking into it and the scientists say that it’s stopping them from doing their work for some are quite scared. What is your – what do you think of this alleged trend?

MORANO: Well, first of all, no one advocates violence. There’s always lunatics on any side of any hotly contested debate that will make threats or do threats of physical harm or death threats. No one is advocating that. But, what I will say is these scientists who for decades have been telling people that the debate was over, the science is settled and that we must act now. We must radically alter our lifestyles. We need to make all these changes in order to confront the crisis of global warming.

That’s all been now exposed, especially the lie of consensus as a con job. The idea that all scientists agree with a con job, the idea, you know, that this was the best science that we can have was a con job. So right now, the public is very appropriately venting their anger to the very scientists who spend decades refusing to debate, suppressing dissenting opinion, trying to redefine what peer-reviewed literature meant and using the U.N. political process, which called -- demonized skeptics as “flat-earthers.” And so, the public is appropriately angry at these scientists. And again, no one’s advocating violence but it is refreshing to see these scientists hear from the public, when you go to a used car salesman and you get conned, you get a lemon, you don’t go back to the used car dealer all happy and pleasant. You have a lot of anger and that’s what these scientists are appropriately feeling and that is why I actually published the e-mails, publicly available e-mails, of these scientists on my Web site, Climate Depot.

HARRIS: Now, on ClimateGate, isn’t it true that several of the subsequent investigations exonerated these guys from cooking the books?

MORANO: Right, you’re referring to Lord Oxburgh and these other reports? U.N. scientists have like laughed. Richard Tol, a lead author at the U.N. is laughing at this Oxburgh report and other scientists. This was essentially a light piece of paper – a couple of pages long. Didn’t interview any of the skeptics. Had a very narrow focus on what they were looking at and these were all warmists. The head of it, Lord Oxburgh, had massive conflict of interests that he never would have gotten away with had it been the other way around and say a skeptic was heading an oil-funded interest. This was a complete laughingstock investigation.

And the bottom line is, we’ve seen the e-mails, we’ve heard the top U.N. scientists now turning on each other. I have a whole report of U.N. scientists turning on the U.N. saying it’s run its course, it’s time to disband it. Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chief should resign. So these little committees that get together that are all politically connected, full of global warmist, aren’t going to change the fact there’s a civil war going on within the U.N. over these ClimateGate e-mails. And the American people realize what ClimateGate was all about. You don’t need a committee to read the very words of these scientists.

HARRIS: I recognize you’re no longer in the employ of Sen. [James] Inhofe. Let me ask you about his recent report. Some of the scientists we have spoken to say that of all the pushback they have gotten in recent months – the most disturbing thing to them was this report from Sen. Inhofe that named the 17 scientists and tends to raise the specter of criminal investigation or criminal charges. People are calling that “McCarthyite.” How do you -- what’s your pushback on that?

MORANO: No, I think he’s identified, if I’m not mistaken, 17 scientists that warrant further investigation. This is absolutely appropriate. These are scientists, many of them on the government dole, the United Nations money. These scientists who’ve actively been involved in at least the appearance of or actively involved in rebuking Freedom of Information Act requests – scientists who get public fund s to do research that have a lot of questions to answer. And for them to say, “Oh my gosh, what horror!” No, they’re on the public dime in many cases and they’re advocating public policy changes and radical changes to our lifestyles down to the toilet paper we use, down to the light bulbs we can use. Down to how much we’re going to be paying for gas and home energy, all based on their science which has now –been credible accusations that they have cooked the books. So it’s completely appropriate for the government to start looking at them and naming names.

HARRIS: When you attack the consensus, that’s where I get a little confused because you can say what you want about the U.N., but you can also add in to their -- you know, NASA, NOAA, the American Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the National Academy of Sciences in pretty much every developed nation on the planet.

How can you construct a consensus this broad on a hoax?

MORANO: First of all, it’s not a “broad consensus.” What you just said there were political arguments. You’re insulting the intelligence of ABC News by using that as proof of a consensus. What you’ve done is – all those groups you’ve mentioned – the National Academy of Sciences, the American Meteorological Society, the American Advancement [of Science], the American Chemical Society – they’ve all had two dozen or so governing board members vote on a statement that is vaguely similar to what the United Nations says about global warming. Science groups don’t take direct votes of their member scientists. Most of the members we find out aren’t even aware these statements are issued at the time they’re issued. But what’s happened since is massive blowback. The American Chemical Society was shocked at the number of dissenting scientists upset at their stand. The National Academy of Sciences is having a big blowback. The American Physical Society is having a big blowback of member scientists. When you get away from that political governing board, the American Meteorological Society, it has been documented, has been staffed by former [Vice President Al] Gore staffers in their bureaucracy.

Dan, you’re bringing up a political argument and masquerading it as science and that’s a disservice to ABC News viewers. Look at the actual scientific conferences. In Norway, in 2008 – I can send you the documentation. There was a scientific conference held only every four years – the Geological Congress. It’s called the Olympic event of scientists. Two-thirds of the scientists were estimated to be skeptical, hostile and dismissive of UN IPCC scientists. In Canada, 50,000 earth scientists canvassed – remember the member scientists, not the politically connected 2,000 board members – 67 percent rejected a consensus on manmade global warming. Scientists are speaking up around the world and the blowback against this call for Nuremberg trials for skeptics by Grist magazine, blowback against Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s saying coal barons who are skeptical need to be put in jail.

I had scientist join the Senate list of 700 dissenting scientists simply because the head of the U.N. compared them to flat-earthers. They say things like we can remain silent no longer. We’re not going to be demonized like this. So, the idea of broad consensus is now laughable. Even the ClimateGate scientists don’t have a consensus when they’re talking about the U.N. and my favorite quote – it was Kevin Trenberth, I believe, who said “We can't do geo-engineering because we don't understand the climate system well enough to know what impact it will have.”

That’s your consensus, Dan? I think you can do better than that.

HARRIS: One last question. You alluded to this, but I want to give you the chance to flesh it out a little bit. Somebody from Sen. Inhofe’s office made this point. I think it’s an interesting one. You made it as well – that scientists and others who have skepticism about climate change have been harassed as well.

MORANO: Yes, I have an entire documented report. Let’s start from the top. On Climate Progress, Joe Romm’s blog, he defended a post saying the future generations will strangle climate skeptics in bed. Talking Points Memo had a piece that said when will climate skeptics be executed, when can we start punishing them now for what they’ve done? Grist magazine, I mentioned the Nuremberg-style trials. I mentioned threats and intimidation. I had two e-mails that were threatening to me that the Sergeant of Arms in the Senate had to investigate. So, I laugh when I hear these scientists say, ‘Oh these are threatening e-mails.’ Skeptics have been getting these for years. Talk to Tim Ball in Canada, the climatologist who’s skeptical. He’s gotten death threats. There’s been reports in, I want to say Europe. I can’t remember the guy’s name, but I can get it for you. There’s been reports about skeptical scientists in Europe having their tires flattened after receiving threats. So threats are on all sides of this. There’s no way we can look at this and say, “Oh these poor ClimateGate scientists” or “poor U.N. scientists.” The bottom line is they were at ground zero perpetuating a con job of the illusion of a consensus. They deserve the public wrath they’re getting. It’s refreshing that they’re finally getting a hostile reaction. They’re not in their little cocoon of the U.N. or the mainstream media like ABC News.

HARRIS: Are there other points that I have not given you a chance to make that you feel like I should – that need to be made?

MORANO: Yeah, other than just public opinion – you know Richard Lindzen had a great quote: “The educated are very vulnerable to manmade climate fears, but ordinary people see right through them.” And the bottom line is whether you’re talking Australia, Canada, Europe, England, India, South Africa, America – skepticism has grown by leaps and bounds. We now have more Americans believing in haunted houses than manmade global warming. That’s scientific progress and that is why these ClimateGate scientists and the U.N. scientists are in a panic. That and their civil war going on. Again, I can send you a report of all the scientists turning against the U.N. Lead authors, former chairmen, former members. We have reports of scientists leaving. It was the best science politics can manufacture and it’s been exposed through ClimateGate and now through the civil war going on in the U.N. and it’s about time. The American people can breathe a sigh of relief. People around the world can breathe a sigh of relief. This whole manufactured crisis is ending. It’s dying and we’re watching the last throes of it and we should all be happy about that.

HARRIS: Marc, thank you for doing this. I appreciate it.

MORANO: Thank you, Dan. I appreciate it.

HARRIS: Have a good rest of your weekend.

MORANO: Alright, I’ll expect to do a rebuttal to your piece on Sunday night or Monday morning. So look for it. I don’t expect the -- I think you did the Fred Singer piece last year, which was atrocious reporting. I believe that was you, right? You did the piece on Fred Singer?

HARRIS: I did the piece on Fred Singer.

MORANO: So I’m not expecting much from you, but we’ll have fun.

HARRIS: Well, thank you for having low expectations.

MORANO: I have very low expectations.

HARRIS: OK.

Article courtesy of Business & Media Institute

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Brits turn skeptical on Global Warming

2010-05-25T12:39:00.000-07:00

by Kevin Spak
25th May 2010

ONLY 26% BELIEVE IN MAN-MADE CLIMATE CHANGE

Campaigners wave a flag to call for action against the climate change, from the roof of the House
of Parliament in central London, with Big Ben's clock tower in background, Sunday, Oct. 11, 2009.

(AP Photo/Akira Suemori)

Britain is suddenly a nation of climate skeptics. In a February poll, just 26% agreed that “climate change is happening now and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41% as recently as November 2009, the New York Times reports. The sudden plunge is probably due in part to the so-called “climategate” emails, heavily covered by the UK media, and in part to the seemingly cold winter.

Of course, two independent panels have found that the “climategate” emailers didn't intentionally distort any data, and the winter was actually the fifth warmest on record, globally. But the perception persists, and has made climate change a non-starter politically. David Cameron barely touched the issue in his campaign, and in a poll, conservative lawmakers ranked it as their bottom priority.

Article courtesy of Newser

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Billionaire Buys Blair Climate Change Advice

2010-05-25T12:24:00.000-07:00

25th May 2010

Tony Blair hired by US billionaire

Vinod Khosla for climate change advice

Tony Blair has been hired as an adviser on climate change

by Californian billionaire Vinod Khosla, the latest in a

string of jobs the former prime minister has taken

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair during a visit to Alexandra Avenue Health and Social
Care Centre in Harrow, north London, which he visited as part of the Labour party's
General Election campaign Photo: PA

The agreement will see Tony Blair Associates give strategic advice to Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in companies pursuing green technologies. Mr Khosla, who made his fortune as co-founder of computing giant Sun Microsystems, is hoping that Mr Blair's decade on the global stage helps unlock doors for the companies that California-based Khosla Ventures invests in.

The former prime minister, briefly enlisted last month by Gordon Brown to help Labour's flagging election campaign, will lend his name to projects, make introductions and deliver advice. Khosla Ventures has already raised more than $1bn from investors to bet on a range of technologies from solar power to biofuels.

Mr Khosla said that "with Tony's advice and influence' we will create opportunities for entrepreneurs and innovators to devise practical solutions that can solve today's most pressing problems."

It wasn't disclosed how much Mr Blair will be paid for the advice he gives to Khosla. He already has a £2m lobbying post with JP Morgan Chase and a £500,000 job with Zurich Financial.

Mr Blair also charges tens of thousands of pounds for public speaking, received a £4.5m advance for his memoirs and set up Tony Blair Associates to advise foreign countries including Kuwait. In total, he is estimated to have earned at least £15 million since leaving office two and a half years ago.

Mr Blair said that he believes "entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and beyond will have a tremendous impact on our environmental future."

Article courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk

Climate Fears Turn to Doubts Among Britons

2010-05-25T07:40:00.000-07:00

by Elisabeth Rosenthal
24th May 2010

Last month hundreds of environmental activists crammed into an auditorium here to ponder an anguished question: If the scientific consensus on climate change has not changed, why have so many people turned away from the idea that human activity is warming the planet?

Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A poll conducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.

And London’s Science Museum recently announced that a permanent exhibit scheduled to open later this year would be called the Climate Science Gallery — not the Climate Change Gallery as had previously been planned.

“Before, I thought, ‘Oh my God, this climate change problem is just dreadful,’ ” said Jillian Leddra, 50, a musician who was shopping in London on a recent lunch hour. “But now I have my doubts, and I’m wondering if it’s been overhyped.”

Perhaps sensing that climate is now a political nonstarter, David Cameron, Britain’s new Conservative prime minister, was “strangely muted” on the issue in a recent pre-election debate, as The Daily Telegraph put it, though it had previously been one of his passions.

And a poll in January of the personal priorities of 141 Conservative Party candidates deemed capable of victory in the recent election found that “reducing Britain’s carbon footprint” was the least important of the 19 issues presented to them.

Politicians and activists say such attitudes will make it harder to pass legislation like a fuel tax increase and to persuade people to make sacrifices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Legitimacy has shifted to the side of the climate skeptics, and that is a big, big problem,” Ben Stewart, a spokesman for Greenpeace, said at the meeting of environmentalists here. “This is happening in the context of overwhelming scientific agreement that climate change is real and a threat. But the poll figures are going through the floor.”

The lack of fervor about climate change is also true of the United States, where action on climate and emissions reduction is still very much a work in progress, and concern about global warming was never as strong as in Europe. A March Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans believed that the seriousness of global warming was “generally exaggerated,” up from 41 percent a year ago.

Here in Britain, the change has been driven by the news media’s intensive coverage of a series of climate science controversies unearthed and highlighted by skeptics since November. These include the unauthorized release of e-mail messages from prominent British climate scientists at the University of East Anglia that skeptics cited as evidence that researchers were overstating the evidence for global warming and the discovery of errors in a United Nations climate report.

Two independent reviews later found no evidence that the East Anglia researchers had actively distorted climate data, but heavy press coverage had already left an impression that the scientists had schemed to repress data. Then there was the unusually cold winter in Northern Europe and the United States, which may have reinforced a perception that the Earth was not warming. (Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a United States agency, show that globally, this winter was the fifth warmest in history.)

Asked about his views on global warming on a recent evening, Brian George, a 30-year-old builder from southeast London, mused, “It was extremely cold in January, wasn’t it?”

In a telephone interview, Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank and a climate change expert, said that the shift in opinion “hadn’t helped” efforts to come up with strong policy in a number of countries. But he predicted that it would be overcome, not least because the science was so clear on the warming trend.

“I don’t think it will be problematic in the long run,” he said, adding that in Britain, at least, politicians “are ahead of the public anyway.” Indeed, once Mr. Cameron became prime minister, he vowed to run “the greenest government in our history” and proposed projects like a more efficient national electricity grid.

Scientists have meanwhile awakened to the public’s misgivings and are increasingly fighting back. An editorial in the prestigious journal Nature said climate deniers were using “every means at their disposal to undermine science and scientists” and urged scientists to counterattack. Scientists in France, the Netherlands and the United States have signed open letters affirming their trust in climate change evidence, including one published on May 7 in the journal Science.

In March, Simon L. Lewis, an expert on rain forests at the University of Leeds in Britain, filed a 30-page complaint with the nation’s Press Complaints Commission against The Times of London, accusing it of publishing “inaccurate, misleading or distorted information” about climate change, his own research and remarks he had made to a reporter.

“I was most annoyed that there seemed to be a pattern of pushing the idea that there were a number of serious mistakes in the I.P.C.C. report, when most were fairly innocuous, or not mistakes at all,” said Dr. Lewis, referring to the report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Meanwhile, groups like the wildlife organization WWF have posted articles like “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” providing stock answers to doubting friends and relatives, on their Web sites.

It is unclear whether such actions are enough to win back a segment of the public that has eagerly consumed a series of revelations that were published prominently in right-leaning newspapers like The Times of London and The Telegraph and then repeated around the world.

In January, for example, The Times chastised the United Nations climate panel for an errant and unsupported projection that glaciers in the Himalayas could disappear by 2035. The United Nations ultimately apologized for including the estimate, which was mentioned in passing within a 3,000-page report in 2007.

Then came articles contending that the 2007 report was inaccurate on a host of other issues, including African drought, the portion of the Netherlands below sea level, and the economic impact of severe storms. Officials from the climate panel said the articles’ claims either were false or reflected minor errors like faulty citations that in no way diluted the evidence that climate change is real and caused by human activity.

Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, successfully demanded in February that some German newspapers remove misleading articles from their Web sites. But such reports have become so common that he “wouldn’t bother” to pursue most cases now, he added.

The public is left to struggle with the salvos between the two sides. “I’m still concerned about climate change, but it’s become very confusing,” said Sandra Lawson, 32, as she ran errands near Hyde Park.

Article courtesy of The New York Times

Garbage In >>>> Faster Garbage Out

2010-05-24T15:51:00.000-07:00

by Megan Treacy
24th May 2010

Climate Change Research gets its own Supercomputer

Some of the world's most powerful supercomputers have been working on climate change research and solutions, but their time is split among many of the globe's major issues. That is changing now that one supercomputer is dedicated solely to running algorithms and calculations in the name of climate change.

Computer-maker Cray has just been awarded $47 million from the DOE to build supercomputers that will be used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The first computer will be a Cray model XT6 called the Climate Modeling and Research System and will be in the lab's hands by the end of the year.

Cray will supply the lab with another, more powerful computer in 2011 called "Baker" and more high-performance computing gear in 2012. With the budget assigned to this project, the computers will easily have a speed of a petraflop or greater.

Article courtesy of EcoGeek

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Heartland Institute’s 4th Annual Conference on Climate Change

2010-05-24T15:43:00.000-07:00

by Ross Kaminsky
24th May 2010

Heartland Conference Gave Global

Warming Skeptics Great Ammunition

Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley pulled an enormous calculator out of the inside pocket of his finely tailored English suit, pointed to a formula in the paper he was holding, punched some buttons, and explained, showing me the calculator results, that if we shut down the entire world’s economy for 25 years, the maximum possible impact on global temperatures would be 1 degree centigrade.

That’s what passed for light banter at the Heartland Institute’s 4th Annual Conference on Climate Change, which I had the good fortune to attend for three days last week, meeting a pantheon of climate “skeptic” heroes including Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, Pat Michaels, Steve McIntyre and Roy Spencer, just to name a few of the dozens of speakers hailing from two dozen nations.

Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, set the tone the first night while addressing the meeting’s roughly 800 attendees. Bast quoted a scientist—and I use that term very loosely—from the University of East Anglia, home of the Climategate scandal, who actually wrote in a recently published book: “We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but what climate change can do for us.” Rarely has there been a more public statement of the mindset of global warmists.

The three-day meeting was composed of meals in a large room for all attendees with four simultaneous interspersed break-out sessions, usually with three or four speakers each, on topics of science, economics or public policy. Because there were four sessions at once, I necessarily missed three quarters of the presentations, but Heartland has already begun posting video coverage and PowerPoint presentations on their web site so people can see what they missed. Pajamas Media (PJTV) also streamed and archived many of the presentations and speeches.

Following are some of the highlights of the various presentations and speeches I attended. My focus tended toward the science-oriented break-out sessions.

From Sweden’s Nils-Axel Mörner, one of the world’s leading experts on sea levels: Sea levels are simply not rising around the Maldives, Tuvalu, Bangladesh, even Venice, despite the fact these low-lying places are the poster children for the supposed coming catastrophe caused by “global warming. Referring to some of his older work, Mörner made a point I had never heard before: If the sea level were rising, then the Law of Angular Momentum says that the speed of Earth’s rotation must slow. However, the earth’s rotation is not slowing, thus confirming his data that sea levels are not rising.

From New Zealand scientist Bob Carter: Sea levels around Australia have fallen more than a meter over the past 6,000 years. Still, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continues to trumpet sea-level rise as a cause of major concern and a reason to curb worldwide carbon emissions. According to Dr. Carter, “In using IPCC advice to set their policies, national governments are negligent and fail utterly to do their duty to their people.”

From Western Washington University’s Don Easterbrook: “We have begun global cooling which I predicted in 1998.” He also noted that natural global warming much more intense than modern warming has occurred many times in the geologic past without substantial changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Easterbrook also pointed out that twice as many people are killed by extreme cold as by extreme heat and that global cooling poses far greater other risks as well, including risks to food production and increased demand for energy.

Perhaps the most important non-warmist scientist, MIT’s Richard Lindzen said that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere would contribute only 1 degree (Celsius) to warming. All IPCC models predict more because they assume “positive feedbacks” which exist only in models; real measurements show slight negative feedback. (Positive feedback means that climatic reaction to warmer temperatures would be changes that would lead to even warmer temperatures, which is not what is happening.)

Lindzen savaged IPCC models, saying that their higher sensitivity to CO2 changes is made consistent with observed warming by invoking arbitrary negative forcings and other adjustments. He also noted that “even if it were true that models are our only tool, it would be true only if models were objective and not arbitrarily adjusted.”

He argued that we should be suspicious of climate alarmism for five primary reasons: The alarmists claims of incontrovertibility, their arguing from authority instead of scientific reasoning or even elementary logic, their use of the term “global warming” without either definition or quantification, their identification of complex phenomena that have multiple causes as being based on a single cause, and their conflation of natural climate variability with man-made global warming.

And in the most fundamentally significant words spoken about those who disagree with the cult of Al Gore, Lindzen suggested that the word “skeptic” should not be used:

“Skepticism” implies doubts about a plausible proposition. Current global-warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition. Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible. Quite the contrary. The failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from Climategate and other instances of overt cheating.

I asked Dr. Lindzen whether, much as government seems inherently corrupting to many politicians, something in the structure of science has become inherently corrupting to many scientists. His response was that “science has changed to being ‘programmatic,’ meaning that when you get the answer, you end the program. So we have a structure in science that tends to cause scientists to want to avoid getting answers.”

Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick spent some time signing small hockey sticks that said “Mann-made global warming” on them, in reference to the infamous IPCC “hockey stick” graph created by Michael Mann and utterly destroyed by McIntyre and McKitrick. It is a wonder that Mann still has a job anywhere. Indeed, several conference speakers noted how every investigation into the corruption of the climate alarmists, including Climategate, has been an utter whitewash.

One of the other fascinating scientific topics was how global temperatures are measured. Joe D’Aleo of Icecap noted that 75% of the world’s weather stations dropped out around 1990, with missing data increasing ten-fold after 1990. There are either no adjustments or totally inadequate adjustments for “urban heat island effect”, a point made by several speakers who suggested that most of the warming the IPCC has measured is simply the warming created in big cities. The point was driven home by a picture of the Rome airport weather station: It’s in a fenced area right behind the jet wash of airplanes taking off.

IPCC data is changed frequently with no explanation: 20% of NASA’s data changed 16 times in 2.5 years from 2004 to 2007. Data modifications for Darwin, Australia changed a cooling trend of .7 degrees into a warming trend of 1.2 degrees, and other such shenanigans. It’s the ultimate example of “garbage in, garbage out.”

Perhaps one of the most remarkable presentations was by Andrei Illarionov of Moscow’s Institute for Economic Analysis. He showed that the methodology of Phil Jones and the “keepers of the surface temperature data” at the University of East Anglia was such that no matter how many of Russia’s weather stations were used, the resulting data sets were nearly identical, matching the data from Russia’s four oldest stations, all of which are in major urban areas and thus substantially overstate actual changes in climate. The same fraudulent methodology is almost certainly used for data for everywhere else on earth. I spoke with Illarionov for more than half an hour trying to understand how it was possible. I still don’t understand except that it’s clear the warmists’ data prove Mark Twain’s maxim that “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

The conference concluded with one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard, by the aforementioned Lord Christopher Monckton, one of the most important and effective opponents of Al Gore in the world. Describing Monckton’s speech can’t do it justice. Instead, I urge you to watch it yourself at this link, clicking on the third video in the first row. It will be one of the most enjoyable and informative hours you’ve heard. His infectious enthusiasm and drive for the truth is a large part of the reason that the 4th International Conference on Climate Change had just a hint of celebration, of the sense that maybe we’re finally winning—or at least no longer losing.

Article courtesy of Human Events

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Coming soon to your County ??

2010-05-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

by BC Upham
24th May 2010

Maryland County first in Nation to impose Carbon Tax

Maryland’s Montgomery County gave preliminary approval Tuesday to a tax on carbon emissions, the first such tax by a county nationwide.

The vote by the all-Democratic council was held amid angry protests and heckling from opponents, one of whom kept repeating the question “define greenhouse gas,” according to Gazette.net.

The tax of $5 per ton of CO2 applies to emitters of one million tons or more of CO2 each year, which, in Montgomery County means one company: the local coal-fired power plant, run by Mirant.

“This is an important measure for the people of Montgomery County,” said Councilmember Roger Berliner, the bill’s chief sponsor. “We have taken an action that says those who pollute our environment should pick up after themselves.”

Inspiration for the landmark bill may not only be based on environmental stewardship, however. Montgomery County, like many, many other parts of the country, is facing a severe budget shortfall this year, and it is estimated that the tax could raise $15 million. Half of the money raised would go to county greenhouse gas reduction efforts, according to the text of the bill (PDF).

Mirant Mid-Atlantic VP Robert Gaudette said that the county would only raise about $7.5 million because, as a result of the tax, the plant will reduce output. The Dickerson Generating Plant, located along the Potomac river in Dickerson, MD, emits 3.47 million tons of CO2 each year, about a quarter of the county’s total emissions of CO2.

Gaudette also said the bill would result in a worse over-all environment because it would force utilities to buy their electricity from out-of-state providers which have less stringent air-quality rules.

Berliner dismissed this reasoning, and said he took his environmental advice from environmental leaders, not coal companies, according to Gazette.net. The bill received the support of the local chapter of the Sierra Club, the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, and Dr. Matthias Ruth, director of the environmental policy program at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

Article courtesy of Triple Pundit

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ABC News Hit Job

2010-05-24T13:22:00.000-07:00

by Jeff Poor
24th May 2010

Hit Job: ABC News attempts to align Climate

Change Skeptics with White Supremacists

At first, Michael Mann, a Penn State professor and a central figure in the Climategate scandal, but best known for his discredited "hockey stick graph" didn't like being mocked in a YouTube video. Now Mann is alleging he's a victim of hate groups.

On ABC's May 23 "World News Sunday," a segment from anchor Dan Harris alleged that threatening e-mails Mann received were part of a "spike" in violence aimed at the global warming alarmist community.

"The ongoing oil spill crisis in the Gulf is keeping the debate over climate and energy very much in the headlines and that debate is becoming increasingly venomous with many prominent scientists now saying that they are being severely harassed," Harris said.

Curiously Harris makes no mention of the real violence in the form of eco-terrorism that has come from the environmental left or Greenpeace repeatedly targeting the Competitive Enterprise Institute's Chris Horner, by stealing his garbage on a weekly basis, as his Web site points out. Instead, this "severe harassment" ABC warned about were e-mails from fringe Internet elements sent to Mann.

"The FBI tells ABC News it's looking into a spike in threatening e-mails to climate scientists like Penn State's Michael Mann," Harris said.

And Mann, who has a lawsuit against Minnesotans for Climate Change, a group that publicly mocked him for his discredited hockey stick graph, where he allegedly intentionally hid data to accentuate the argument of global warming alarmism, complained that the e-mailers are trying to trample his free speech rights.

"It's an attempt to chill the discourse and I think that's what most disconcerting," Mann said.

But despite overwhelming evidence that Mann's science has some flaws and that there are some bad characters among the global warming alarmists, Harris attempted to link radical fringe elements on the Internet to outspoken climate change alarmism skeptic Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.

"A white supremacist Web site recently posted Mann's picture alongside several other climate scientists, with the word ‘Jew' next to each image," Harris said. "To many scientists, however, the most disturbing recent development was a report released by Republican Sen. James Inhofe, naming 17 climate scientists, some of whom Inhofe says have engaged in potentially illegal behavior."

According to Harris and NASA's Dr. Gavin Schmidt, Inhofe's efforts to highlight the evidence that scientists deliberately manipulated data to mislead the public is "McCarthy-ite."

Harris cited internal investigations at these scientists' respective institutions to assure viewers there was nothing wrong.

"Sen. Inhofe's report was referring to an incident late last year known as ClimateGate, where stolen e-mails gave the impression that climate scientists may have been trying to hide flaws in their research, although several subsequent investigations have exonerated the scientists," Harris said.

ABC News did air a few sentences from Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com (A news aggregator site Harris called "aggressive.)

"Sen. Inhofe's former spokesman, Marc Morano, who now runs one of the most aggressive climate skeptic Web sites in the country, did agree to an interview, arguing that skeptics have been getting threats for years."

Morano explained that no one was promoting violence, but when so much on the line from a government policy perspective, the public should be engaged.

"No one is advocating violence," Morano said, "but it is refreshing to see these scientists hear from the public. When you go to a used-car salesman and you get conned ... you don't go back to the used-car dealer all happy and pleasant. You have a lot of anger, and that's what these scientists are appropriately feeling."

Nonetheless, at the end of Harris' segment, Schmidt dismissed any challenges on the theory of anthropogenic global warming and said scientists were too "hyper-competitive" to allow that to happen.

Article courtesy of News Busters

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The Which B-liar Project

2010-05-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

by Michael V. Copeland
24th May 2010

Tony Blair's Next Act

A silent cement factory on the Northern California coast is not where you would expect to find a former British Prime Minister on a Sunday afternoon. But there was no mistaking a blue-blazered Tony Blair hopping down from a black SUV as it rolled to a stop in a cloud of dust in front of a series of construction trailers. The reason for Blair's visit to this windy stretch of the Pacific just north of Monterey was also immediately recognizable in the next person to be disgorged from the vehicle: Vinod Khosla, arguably venture capital's leading green technology investor.

Blair, the consummate politician, has joined Khosla, the relentless technologist, at his eponymous venture capital firm as a senior advisor. Like Al Gore before him with VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Blair will be a rainmaker for Khosla Ventures, making introductions and helping match technologies with geo-politics and policy to fight climate change. Britain's roving diplomat will be compensated, but that is not the main driver, both men are quick to say. So it's not fair to label Blair a venture capitalist – yet.

"Let me be absolutely clear," Blair, says flashing his megawatt smile, "I am not a financial expert or a technology expert. There are two things I can help with: Understanding what the trends are in government policy and regulations. And there is a global set of connections that I may be able to help him make."

The cement factory that Blair toured is operated by Calera, a startup in which Khosla has invested, whose idea is to take carbon dioxide gas from any source – in this particular case of from a neighboring power plant – and with the addition of sea water and some fancy processes turn it into aggregate for cement or cement itself. The process is a high-tech (and high-volume) version of what happens when so-called "hard" water forms those white calcium deposits in your shower head. In the bathroom, it's called a nuisance. At the industrial scale Calera is testing, it's called carbon sequestration.

Khosla, who is never shy about stating the correctness of his opinion, is clear about why he needs Blair's help to bring technologies like Calera's to the world. "Energy and climate change involves more complexity, more nuances, more politics, and more policy influences than Silicon Valley has ever been involved with via say a website, a semiconductor company or a search engine," Khosla says. "There is a lot I don't know as a technologist, and frankly I worry a lot about what I don't know. That is where Tony can help."

Blair and Khosla are of the same mind that tackling climate change is perhaps the most important problem facing the globe. "If the science is correct, we will end up facing an uncertain future, not just in environmental terms but in economic terms," Blair says. "It's one of those things that illustrates most critically the clash between short-term political interests and the long-term interests of the public."

Both men also agree that any solutions must be rooted in business. Markets must drive the adoption of technologies, and profit must be a possibility if real change is to occur, Blair says. "My view of climate change is very simple. We are going to have to come up with solutions to tackle climate change that allows our economies to grow. From a practical point of view we have to make a low-carbon future business-friendly. "

That friendliness must extend to the developing economies of the world if any efforts are to stand a chance of success. "China, India and other parts of the developing world are not going to sacrifice everything because we tell them they must," Blair says. "We need solutions for the developing world, and for the rest of the planet that change the way we consume and the way we grow. What government can do is create a framework of incentives that business and industry can go out and develop the technologies to take advantage of."

What Blair won't be doing is hammering out term sheets with prospective startups. "I don't expect him to get deals done," Khosla says. "But I would I ask him his advice on a technology before entering Europe with it. I want his opinions on which geographies are best suited to what technologies, and what we should do first in the U.S., in Europe and in China, Africa and the rest of the world."

Still, watching Blair plunge his hands into a drum filled with the gooey cement-like product of the Calera factory, it's clear he will get his hands dirty both literally and figuratively. Though he has plenty on his plate, including negotiations in the Middle East, Blair seems genuinely excited about the chance to bring new technologies to bear in the fight against climate change. He says he and his team will jump in on individual companies if they can offer some help. And should everyone involved do well financially, by doing good for the environment, so much the better.

"This next phase of action over environment will be taken only if it is seen as part of an enlightened self-interest," Blair says. "That is how we can make efforts toward combating climate change effective, and that is what this partnership is really all about."

Article courtesy of Fortune

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Plane Stupid or just plain stupid ??

2010-05-24T12:55:00.000-07:00

24th May 2010

Manchester Airport closed after Climate Change

Protesters chain themselves to an Airbus

Protesters breached security at Manchester Airport today and cut through a perimeter fence in a bid to block the freight terminal.

Environmental activists from Manchester Plane Stupid said they gained access to the airfield at about 6.45am in what they said was a protest against the planned extension of the airport's World Freight Terminal.

Six campaigners created a 'human circle' around a stationary plane using arm tube lock-ons, while a second group of around ten people mounted giant tripods at the road entrance to the terminal.

Plane Stupid handout photo of protesters surrounding the wheel of a plane at Manchester Aiport

A banner reading 'More air freight more climate change. Stop all airport expansion now' was unfurled at the site.

The freight terminal, situated off Junction 6 of the M56 motorway, currently handles 170,000 tonnes of inbound and outbound freight every year.

By 2015 the airport expects to increase that capacity to around 250,000 tonnes of cargo per year.

Annie McLaughlin, from Manchester Plane Stupid, said: 'The airport, which is owned by local councils, has kept local residents in the dark about the proposed expansion plans, failing to adequately inform them that their homes face demolition.

'The proposed expansion of the freight terminal makes no sense, economically or environmentally.

'The existing capacity is not fully utilised and an expansion would simply be a stepping stone to expansion of the airport as a whole, which would be an environmental disaster.

Other protesters climbed on top of giant tripods and blocked access roads to traffic

'With the planet on the verge of climate breakdown it is essential that the real cost of aviation expansion is taken seriously, currently emissions from aviation are not included in Manchester City Council's Climate Change Action Plan.'

Lisa Jameson, also from Plane Stupid, added: 'This isn't just about airport expansion or rising carbon emissions.

'This is about challenging an economic system based on the absurdity of infinite growth on a planet of finite resources, a system which prioritises bailouts for the banks and then makes us pay for it in public service cuts.

'Capitalism is the cause of the problem, climate change is just a symptom.'

Flights were suspended for 20 minutes following the security breach, an airport spokesman said.

A Manchester Airport spokesman said: 'At around 7.10am this morning protesters cut through a fence at Manchester Airport and gained access to a remote area of the airfield.

'They also staged a simultaneous protest at the airport's freight centre.

'The disruption to the airport's operations was minimal and the airport is open for business as usual.'

A spokesman for Greater Manchester Police said officers were currently in the process of removing the protesters from the airport.

Article courtesy of MailOnline

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Climate Change Concern declines in Poll

2010-05-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

by Owen Bowcott
23rd May 2010

Only 62% of Britons interested in subject, down

from 80% in 2006, according to YouGov survey

Sizewell B in Suffolk. The poll suggests resistance to building new nuclear

power stations is decreasing. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Popular concern about climate change has declined significantly, following this year's harsh winter and rows over statistics on global warming, a survey has found.

The numbers of those interested in where Britain's electricity comes from have also slipped back, according to a survey commissioned by the energy company EDF, demonstrating what appears to be growing consumer complacency in an era of electric-powered gadgetry.

At the same time resistance to building new nuclear power stations appears to be slackening. The results of the YouGov poll, based on a sample of 4,300 adults questioned during the week after the general election, show that interest in climate change fell from 80% of respondents in 2006, to 71% last year and now stands at only 62%. Only 80% say they are interested in where electrical power is made, down from 82% the previous year.

Other recent polls have recorded a similar drop in public alarm about the imminence of climate-triggered disaster. The number of climate change agnostics – those unsure whether human activity is warming the planet – has risen from 25% in 2007 to 33% now.

There may be many reasons for the change. Failure to reach agreement on fresh emissions targets at the Copenhagen climate summit, the furore over the leaking of global warming data from the University of East Anglia and the recent cold weather may all have contributed to confusion around the issue.

The French-owned firm EDF, which commissioned the latest poll, owns British Energy, which runs eight nuclear power stations in the UK. EDF plans to build a new generation of nuclear plants, with the first in operation by 2017.

The survey says the "favourability rating" of nuclear power stations rose from +4 to + 16 between 2007 and this year.

Among Lib Dems – the coalition party explicitly opposed to new nuclear building – as many as 58% of supporters believe "nuclear energy has disadvantages, but the country needs it to be part of the energy balance", according to the survey. Slightly fewer, 47%, are in favour of the construction of new nuclear power stations; 32% are opposed.

Vincent de Rivaz, chief executive of EDF Energy, said the poll "recognises the scale of the energy challenges facing the UK and the need for a low-carbon, eco-friendly economy as outlined by the coalition government.

"We are pleased to see strong public support across voters from all three major political parties in favour of new nuclear build. We also note that opposition to new nuclear build has continued to fall. This strong public support is further reflected by the clear backing for planning reform to facilitate investment in low carbon technologies, including nuclear.

"We need urgent action if we are to meet the UK's carbon emissions targets and address the looming energy gap. We believe nuclear power is the lowest cost low-carbon solution and can be built in the UK without subsidy. Therefore, it must be part of an affordable, clean and secure generation mix."

EDF, he said, "remains resolute in its commitment to a truly sustainable economy".

Article courtesy of Guardian.co.uk

The Senate Climate Bill and what it might mean for America

2010-05-23T14:06:00.000-07:00

by David Burwell
23rd May 2010

After months of negotiation, Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman unveiled their long-awaited climate and energy bill last week.

As efforts continue to contain the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and midterm elections approach in November, there are doubts that movement on climate change legislation will occur.

In a Q&A, David Burwell evaluates the new energy and climate bill and its chances for moving forward this year.

Burwell argues that despite an unfavorable domestic political environment, the United States urgently needs to adopt new climate and energy policies in order to reduce its dependency on oil and maintain its leadership in the global economy.

What is the goal of the climate bill? Will the bill help reduce emissions, lessen oil dependency, and create new jobs?

The new energy and climate bill put forward by Senators Kerry and Lieberman seeks to reduce carbon pollution by 17 percent (from 2005 levels) by 2020 and by over 80 percent by 2050. Reductions will come from all sectors—commercial, residential, power generation, and transportation, with limits on industrial sources of carbon pollution being delayed until 2016.

In order to reduce American dependence on oil, the bill specifically targets transportation carbon emissions because the transportation sector is responsible for over 70 percent of domestic oil consumption. The bill allocates more than $8 billion annually in new investments in transit—higher speed rail, green freight, and smart growth (bikeable/walkable) community grants—tax credits for creating a new generation of heavy duty trucks fueled by natural gas, and incentives for building electric and hybrid vehicles. It also embraces President Obama’s proposals for increased vehicle fleet efficiency.

The bill’s sponsors claim it will create millions of new jobs that will not easily be exported because building the new, low-carbon energy grid must happen within U.S. borders. The bill also aims to reduce the potential economic costs for industries focused on fossil fuel production and industrial workers by both delaying the imposition of limits on these industries and funding worker training programs for new clean energy jobs.

Does the United States need new energy and climate policies?

Absolutely. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and the recent mine disaster in West Virginia that killed 29 miners underscore the need for new U.S. energy sources that are clean, green, and safer than our existing energy portfolio. The United States also exports over $300 billion annually to buy foreign oil–this money would be better spent stimulating the domestic economy.

Carbon emissions represent more than 80 percent of America’s greenhouse gases and the United States currently produces over 20 percent of global carbon emissions. These emissions are the primary driver of global warming and in the long term, the problems caused by climate disruption—including the loss of coastal areas and desertification of arid lands in the western United States—will cause major and on-going problems to America’s economy.

Globally, if current trends continue, the impacts will be even worse, with hundreds of millions of environmental refugees moving across borders and exacerbating social and resource conflicts. Health risks will increase as tropical diseases move into communities that lack natural immunity to these diseases. And up to 35 percent of all species will be lost as the habitats needed for their survival disappear.

Kerry and Lieberman’s bill is a step in the right direction, but more is needed to minimize the negative effects of climate change.

What are the key elements included in the text?

The critical element of the legislation is that it puts a price on carbon and thus discourages carbon emissions, which cause global warming. Carbon pricing is applied to all sectors of the economy in different ways and in a phased process to reduce any potentially negative impacts for the U.S. economy, household finances, and the national budget.

A second important element is that the bill calls for two-thirds of all revenues generated by carbon pricing to either be paid back to consumers or be used to reduce the national deficit. Since wealthier households have higher carbon emissions than low-income households, the rebate program has the effect of turning a flat, regressive carbon tax into a progressive tax that allows medium- and low-income households to benefit from carbon pricing.

And finally, the bill’s focus on investing in low-carbon technologies will ensure that the United States remains competitive in a changing global economy. The United States, which has long been the global leader in investing in new technology, now lags behind China in terms of its investment in green and clean technology—and by a substantial margin. Pollution is waste and waste is economically inefficient. By reducing carbon pollution and thus reducing waste, the United States can maintain its position as an economic leader.

Is the bill likely to move ahead this year? What are its biggest hurdles?

The biggest hurdle is politics—it will be difficult to move the bill forward with elections approaching in November. Opponents of the bill will say that the price on carbon raises taxes. It is easy to call carbon pricing a tax, and to gain political points by opposing all taxes (over 200 members of Congress have signed a pledge to “never” vote for a new broad-based tax).

But, if the United States is serious about reducing the deficit and government spending, both new taxes and budget cuts will have to be adopted. In a recent poll, members of the U.S. public were asked which programs they were willing to cut to reduce the deficit. Only one program, foreign aid—which represents less than one percent of the federal budget—was cut by more than 50 percent of respondents. So, if budget cuts are unacceptable, the United States is going to have to face the reality of higher taxes in order to get our fiscal house in order. There are difficult choices ahead.

The carbon pricing scheme included in the Kerry-Lieberman bill is quite progressive due to its rebate provisions. Also, it targets more transportation choices as an investment priority. Since the average cost of owning and maintaining a car in the United States is now over $8,300 per year per car, more choices means less total households costs for travel. Americans now pay, on average, 19 percent of their household budget on transportation—more than on health care. Kerry-Lieberman helps to reduce these costs.

The argument for rapid enactment of the energy and climate bill is simple economics. The economic risks of continuing dependence on fossil fuels make structural changes necessary. Energy will need to come from biofuels, solar, wind, nuclear, clean natural gas, and (if possible and economically efficient) clean coal.

How does the legislation compare to the climate bill passed by the House last year?

The two bills have similar features including two key components: one, setting up a carbon pricing structure and, two, establishing a variety of rebates, allowances, and offsets to reduce economic hardship to industries, communities, and individuals. And both bills have the same target, a 17 percent carbon reduction below 2005 levels by 2020 and 80 percent reduction by 2050.

The Senate bill differs from the House bill in four primary ways. It calls for the phasing in of the carbon cap to buffer the impact on the manufacturing sector; it has a greater focus on nuclear power and offshore oil drilling; it allocates more revenues to rebates and deficit reduction, and it has a different mix of recipients for the revenues generated by carbon pricing (for example; it allocates more for green transportation and less for habitat protection). Green, low-carbon transportation investments benefit more from the Senate bill versus the House-passed bill.

Did the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico have any impact on the text of the bill or the chances of its eventual passage?

It’s difficult to tell how the spill impacted the bill’s text. By the time the bill was finally presented by Senators Kerry and Lieberman after numerous stops and starts, the spill may have increased its focus on the need to reduce oil consumption—particularly from the transportation sector—and provided more emphasis on funding green transport and green fuels. Exactly how much, though, is difficult to measure.

Beyond this year, the spill surely moves the United States toward greater recognition that a legislative fix is needed to reduce dependence on energy. The world is moving away from dependence on fossil fuels and the United States will do the same. The real question is whether the United States will lead in the efforts or follow other countries.

How could this climate bill impact transportation in the United States?

Without a doubt the United States is facing a transportation crisis. The transportation program is internally broken and financially broke. Congress has not enacted an increase in the gas tax since 1993, and the tax’s buying power has been reduced by 40 percent due to inflation. In short, the Highway Trust Fund is penniless.

The bill makes a new, clear link between climate protection and transportation reform. It provides funding for green transportation infrastructure, creates discretionary investment programs designed to reduce transportation carbon; funds green transportation technologies; such as moving trucks from diesel fuel to natural gas and promoting new electric vehicle technologies; encourages increased fuel and vehicle efficiency; and seeks to reduce demand for energy through better coordination between land development and transportation investments.

Transportation agencies have traditionally failed to consider the climate implications of transportation planning and investment. They argue that transportation agencies don’t make environmental policy, they implement it. This bill removes that argument by directly linking climate policy to transportation policy.

How is transportation related to climate change?

Transportation is responsible for about 30 percent of carbon emissions in the United States. And the figure is even higher if the costs of producing, refining, and distributing transportation fuels to the consumer are included. Moreover, transportation continues to be the fastest growing source of domestic carbon emissions—growing over 25 percent since 1990. By comparison, during that same timeframe, total domestic carbon emissions increased at a rate of only about 16 percent.

And developing economies are in a rapid stage of motorization, with car sales in China growing more than 50 percent annually and total Chinese sales now exceeding total U.S. sales. India is not far behind. In short, unless countries radically change the global transportation paradigm climate change cannot be adequately addressed. Kerry-Lieberman, though it has hurdles left to clear, is the first necessary step in that direction.

Article courtesy of Gov Monitor

Australia Government Adviser joins call for Carbon Tax

2010-05-23T14:01:00.000-07:00

by Reuters
20th May 2010

The architect of Australia’s stalled carbon-emissions trading scheme has called for an interim carbon tax to be imposed, arguing that a tax would be preferable to further inaction and debate over emissions trading.

The idea of a carbon tax has resurfaced as a policy option after the government, facing stiff parliamentary opposition, shelved its plan to cut greenhouse gases. The plan would have forced polluters to buy emission permits through an open market.

“I still think that (a carbon tax) is the best way forward, far better than having the policy vacuum that we’ve got,” Garnaut said in an ABC radio interview, when asked whether he supported calls for tax of A$20 ($17) a ton of carbon emissions.

Garnaut, who led an official inquiry into policy options on climate change, had recommended a trading scheme because other countries were moving in that direction and because open markets would ensure that carbon prices were consistent world-wide.

Europe already has a mature trading system, where emissions are valued at about 15 euros ($18,60) a ton.

Last month, the government shelved its emissions-trading plan until at least 2013 after it was defeated twice in the Senate.

Under the constitution, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd could have called a snap election to resolve the issue but he baulked, citing the failure of climate-change talks in Copenhagen in December and arguing that Australia should not go it alone.

The Greens party, which opposed Rudd’s scheme because they judged it too feeble to halt climate change, are now calling for him to at least impose a tax until such time as there is global agreement on a new climate-change treaty.

Article courtesy of Times Live

Democrats Say Climategate Politicizing Science

2010-05-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

by Connie Hair
21st May 2010

The House Energy Independence and Global Warming Select Committee's Democrat leadership actually held a hearing yesterday to complain about what they called the “politicization” of climate science in the wake of the Climategate scandal.

I am not making this up.

Led by Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.), co-author of the Waxman-Markey cap and trade national energy tax bill, Democrats complained that Climategate scientists are being harassed after data and emails leaked by a whistleblower exposed the leading scientists hawking the anthropogenic global warming scam worldwide had cooked their numbers.

Leaked correspondence also showed the Climategate scientists colluded to discredit and ostracize other scientists for honest inquiry into the bona fides of their “consensus” science.

In his opening statement, Markey chastised Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli over his recent civil investigative demand for data and information from the University of Virginia in relation to grants sought by former professor Michael Mann.

Mann is one of the Climategate warmers admitting in email that he used “tricks” to manipulate the data.

Cucinelli has opened an inquiry into whether Mann used manipulated data to seek taxpayer grant money to fund his research.

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), ranking Republican on the committee, cited some of the more damning Climategate email at the hearing.

“The Majority has repeatedly tried to dismiss the Climategate emails,” Sensenbrenner said in his opening statement. “But no number of politically-motivated studies will change what the emails actually say. I want to read a few quotes:

• “I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same.”

• “There is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple.”

• “If you think that Saiers is in the greenhouse skeptics camp, then, if we can find documentary evidence of this, we could go through official AGU channels to get him ousted.”

• I got a paper to review written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. (...) If published as is, this paper could really do some damage. . . . It won't be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically (...) I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review – Confidentially, I now need a hard and, if required, extensive case for rejecting”

• “I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

“There are literally thousands of these,” Sensenbrenner said. “The emails expose an intolerant scientific culture and they raise legitimate questions about the strength of the so-called ‘scientific consensus.’”

Sensenbrenner also had to bat cleanup on harassment and attacks on Lord Christopher Monkton by Democrats over testimony before the very same committee. The full report with links to testimony transcripts is available in my original report on HUMAN EVENTS here.

“Two weeks ago, the minority’s witness, Christopher Monckton, argued that there have been three distinct periods of warming in the past 150 years and that the rates of warming in each of these periods were parallel,” Sensenbrenner said. “He demonstrated that both the EPA and the IPCC were wrong to claim that the rate of warming in the most recent period was higher than the previous two periods of warming. Finally, he questioned whether CO2 was the most likely cause of warming if previous temperature rises were identical when atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were much lower than they are today.”

“Neither the majority nor its witnesses responded to any of these arguments,” Sensenbrenner continued. “Instead, they attacked Lord Monckton for not presenting scientific information -- even though he clearly did -- they ridiculed his name, and they wrongly accused him of falsifying his credentials and then refused to allow him to respond.”

“I encourage everyone to read the transcript or watch the video on the Committee’s website. It was bullying and it was embarrassing,” he said. “As Lord Monckton said in response, ‘a certain amount of politics has crept in on one side of this debate -- and, therefore, inconvenient science has been dismissed as not being science at all.’”

Funny how Democrats see a legitimate fact-finding inquiry by a sitting attorney general as harassment yet see no problems with personal attacks on Monckton nor in the collusion to perpetrate a hoax by the Climategate warmers.

Go figure.

Connie Hair is a freelance writer, a former speechwriter for Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and a former media and coalitions advisor to the Senate Republican Conference.

Article courtesy of Human Events

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Climategate-inspired fraud probe kicks up storm

2010-05-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

by John Gill
20th May 2010

A row over academic freedom has broken out in the US over a state attorney general's demands that a university release documents relating to research-grant applications.

Ken Cuccinelli, attorney general of Virginia, issued a "civil investigative demand" to the University of Virginia last month demanding documents relating to grants obtained by climate scientist Michael Mann.

Mr Cuccinelli is investigating possible violations of the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act in relation to five research grants obtained by Professor Mann, who left Virginia in 2005 and is now based at Pennsylvania State University.

In defence of the move, Brian Gottstein, Mr Cuccinelli's spokesman, cited the controversy caused by the distribution of documents that were leaked or stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia last year.

"Climategate indicates that some climate data may have been deliberately manipulated to arrive at pre-set conclusions," he said.

"The use of manipulated data to apply for taxpayer-funded research grants in Virginia is potentially fraud. The only prudent thing to do was to look into it."

In February, Mr Cuccinelli sought judicial review of the US Environmental Protection Agency's finding that greenhouse-gas emissions pose a threat to public welfare.

Rachel Levinson Waldman, senior counsel at the American Association of University Professors, accused Mr Cuccinelli of attacking academic freedom.

"The breadth of the request suggests that it is meant to intimidate faculty members and discourage them from pursuing politically controversial work; it's a shot across the bow," she said.

"(This) injection of politics into the academic arena is ... counter not only to the interests of scholars in climate science, but also to the interests of the state's flagship institution in academic excellence."

Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union for Virginia, warned that if the institution were to "roll over", it "could chill university-based scientific inquiry". The university is considering its options.

Article courtesy of Times Higher Education

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Greenies: the Red, the Dumb and the Angry

2010-05-23T12:36:00.000-07:00

by James Delingpole
21st May 2010

Just back from the Oxford Union where, last night, we debated the motion: This House Would Put Economic Growth Before Combatting Climate Change. Though I wouldn’t necessarily say I sucked, my performance definitely wasn’t as strong as the one I gave at Heartland. Luckily I had the benefit of a blindingly good team in the form of Lord Lawson of Blaby, Lord Leach and Viscount Monckton – who temporarily ennobled me to Lord Delingpole of Blogosphere so I didn’t feel too left out.

Much to my surprise the motion carried. (133 Ayes; 110 Noes) I suppose I oughtn’t to be surprised, what with all the arguments so obviously in favour of our side and none in favour of theirs. But you never quite know with undergraduates – even frightfully clever Oxford ones – because, never having inhabited the real world, they can all too easily incline to dreamy idealism combined with an utter failure to grasp economic reality.

What really struck me about the occasion, though, was the unspeakable direness of the opposition. I don’t mean the nice girl from Trinity College: as an officer of the Union, she had to take whatever side of the debate she was given to argue. I mean the three others, who embodied pretty much everything wrong with the green movement: its crypto communism; its woeful ignorance; and its sphincter-popping rage.

Representing the ignorance camp was Lord Whitty – a nice chap with a moustache, but totally out of his depth on science, economics or indeed anything else. When you consider that this man was until quite recently our Environment Minister, this is rather worrying. At one point he tried to claim that Earth’s temperature was the hottest it had been in 14,000 years. “What about the Medieval Warm Period?” I asked. No, what he meant, he said was “If temperatures go on rising then by the end of the century we could be experiencing the hottest temperatures in 14,000 years.” This is such unutterable drivel, it’s not even worth deconstructing. Yet this was the guy – I said it before but it bears repeating – in charge of Britain’s Environment Policy. Still, better him than the lethal Chris Huhne, I suppose.

I shan’t bother describing the young man representing the Red faction. Suffice to say that as he rambled away about equality, injustice, the evils of growth, capitalism etc, I leaned across to Lord Lawson and said: “Jesus. If this is the **** you had to put up with from the opposite benches I’m bloody glad I was never an MP.”

Finally, we were introduced to a fellow named Mike Mason, founder and managing director of something called ClimateCare. Mike was angry. Very, very angry. He showed this by having a go at us, one by one, dismissing Lord Lawson as a “failed chancellor”, or some such, casting aspersions on Viscount Monckton’s title and describing me as a “right wing hack.” I suppose, yes, “right wing hack” is one way of describing me. But I don’t recall, when I took the floor, referring to Mike Mason as a “typical, ranty green libtard who stands to make loads of money fleecing the gullible something rotten by selling carbon offsets.” Of course I do ad hom, now and again. But not in formal Oxford debates. It’s just rude and unnecessary and exposes – as poor Mike went on most impressively to demonstrate – the abject poverty of your arguments.

Both at Heartland and Oxford we were followed by a film crew who are making a documentary about the war between Warmists and Sceptics. The director, who was a very keen Green when he started the documentary, admitted he’d altered his position quite markedly since talking to both sides. What struck him about deniers/sceptics/realists – or whatever you want to call them – was their courtesy and their thoroughness. What struck him about the warmists was their eye-popping rage.

It’s true. The Warmists really are a malign and spleen-filled bunch. As of course you would be if the science was against you, the public were growing increasingly sceptical, and all you really had left to defend your cause was bullying and bluster.

Article courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk

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IPCC Bias Exposed Yet Again

2010-05-19T15:16:00.000-07:00

17th May 2010

The UK Telegraph reports that Rajendra Pachauri has "defended the use of grey literature" in the IPCC's reports. As long as it supports the IPCC's pre-conceived conclusion of man-made warming, that is.

Because whenever grey literature challenges the consensus, the knee-jerk response is "but it isn't peer-reviewed!". Hands up who can spot the hypocrisy there?

The head of the UN's climate change panel has defended the use of unproven science to justify climate change by saying the "grey literature" cannot be ignored.

…

In a hearing at the InterAcademy Council, an organisation of the world's science academies which is conducting an independent review of the processes and procedures of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri described the inclusion of the glacier claim as "human failure" which should not have happened. [No it wasn't, it was deliberately put in to "pressure policymakers", see here - Ed]

But the IPCC's chairman said there was a need to use information which was not from peer-reviewed scientific journals, because in some places that was the only research that had been done.

He said the media and other sections of society had misunderstood the role of such information, labelling it grey literature, "as if it was some form of grey muddied water flowing down the drains".

Dr Pachauri said academic work being done by bodies including the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, national governments and charities "cannot be ignored" [all backing the alarmist view, of course - Ed], but had to be closely examined [yeah, right - Ed] to make sure it was robust. (source)

And the IPCC was also very keen to use one particular journal that was unpublished at the time the report was finalised:

It was so impressed by one edition of the academic journal Climatic Change that it cited 16 of the 21 papers published that month. The journal editors should take a bow. When three-quarters of a single issue of your publication is relied on by a Nobel-winning report, you're doing something right.

Except for one small problem. The issue in question - May 2007 - didn't exist yet when the IPCC wrote its report. Moreover, none of the research papers eventually published in that issue had been finalized prior to the IPCC's cutoff date. (source)

But hey, who cares? When an organisation and its chairman are so politically and financially motivated to come up with evidence to support a pre-conceived conclusion, anything goes. Yet it is on the advice of this organisation that governments around the world are basing their climate policies. Climate madness.

Article courtesy of Australian Climate Madness

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Here We Go Again

2010-05-16T14:40:00.000-07:00

by Chris Horner
12th May 2010

Disgraceful Display of the Day

Today at 1:30 pm Eastern time Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) will host a press conference announcing the fifth Senate reinvention of "cap-and-trade" global warming legislation since 2003, the "American Power Act". Call it the American Power Grab Act, instead, for reasons that will become obvious momentarily.

The orchestrated spectacle, with a cast expected to be in the dozens which massive alignment of special interest groups is apparently supposed to persuade you of the justness of their cause, is in fact a manifestation of all that is wrong with Washington and what Americans have become increasingly enraged by.

At this press conference, Sens. Kerry and Lieberman have both already indicated, they will insist that their scheme isn't "cap-and-trade" because... they aren't going to use that term this time around. Kerry has even said that "this is not an environment bill." It seems that the public aren't buying that argument, either, so it's really about whatever appeals to you. Just not what it was about the previous four times they've tried to slip this Power Grab past you. Except that a summary of the bill makes plain it is, too, cap-and-trade. And worse. It includes billions of dollars each year in gas tax revenue to underwrite the wealth transfers these companies are so in favor of.

For this latest effort to hide an enormous tax and wealth transfer -- a unilateral move that guarantees jobs will be shipped to China, India, Philippines, Mexico and elsewhere -- -- these lawmakers will be surrounded by numerous representatives of Big Green. That includes not just the wealthy pressure group industry but many among "Big Business", numerous of whom are the benefactors enabling those pressure group chiefs' huge salaries and vast PR budgets to scare you into accepting an agenda that uses the state to, oddly enough, enrich these same companies. Huh.

Sen. Lieberman has repeatedly teased the breadth of today's organized scrum as proof that the scheme is now a good idea. Absent from his cheerleading is the fact that you are not represented at the table when your wealth and future prospects were being divvied up.

The reason for so many businesses leaping onto the stage today is also the dog that surely will not bark when the media report on industry's touting of an enormous energy tax and wealth transfer from individuals: why do they support this?

The answer is because they have been promised a slice of the spoils taken from the average taxpayer and ratepayer. I detail who these companies are and how they hope to cash in on this scheme in my new book "Power Grab". For example, consider Exelon. This Chicago-based utility, which today is expected to be represented both individually by its CEO and by its trade association the Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI), expects more than one billion dollars in increased profits for no additional capital investment if the scheme announced today passes. Their only cost would have been the lobbyists.

That's just one company. But the windfall, arranged by politicians, comes from average American families. The company even admits the whole sordid mess in a Forbes article from earlier this year:

"Exelon needs that legislation to happen sooner rather than later. Without a carbon price of some sort, Exelon's fortunes aren't so bright.... 'The conundrums are real,' [Exelon CEO John] Rowe acknowledges. 'There's nothing that's going to drive Exelon's profit in the next couple of years wildly. It just isn't going to happen.'

Except, of course, carbon legislation. And because of that, the company views spending on lobbying for legislation almost like a capital expense....

Exelon has very deep ties to the Obama Administration. Frank M. Clark, who runs ComEd, helped advise Obama before he ran for President and is one of Obama's largest fundraisers. Obama's chief political strategist, David Axelrod, worked as a consultant to Exelon. Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, helped create Exelon. Emanuel was hired by Rowe to help broker the $8.2 billion deal between Unicom and Peco when Emanuel was at the investment bank Wasserstein Perella (now Dresdner Kleinwort). In his two-year career there Emanuel earned $16.2 million, according to congressional disclosures. His biggest deal was the Exelon merger."

The article details how Exelon wrote the provisions allocating the energy use "allowances", or ration coupons. Others, including (according to Sen. Kerry) BP, wrote the provisions applying to oil companies, to ensure costs are passed straight through to you.

I lay the particularly odious example of Exelon -- and those of others on the dais, ranging from Duke Energy to GE to "Chicago Climate Exchange" members -- bare in "Power Grab". Before your elected representatives impose this on you later this year, as soon as by the July 4 congressional recess, educate yourself on the rhetoric and ruses employed to part you from your money and, if history is any guide, threaten your family's lives and indeed your livelihood altogether.

Article courtesy of American Spectator

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Public Citizen Press Release

2010-05-12T12:19:00.000-07:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 12, 2010 12:50PM

CONTACT: Public Citizen
Phone: 202-588-1000

Climate Bill Is a Misnomer: It’s a Nuclear

Energy-Promoting, Oil Drilling-Championing,

Coal Mining-Boosting Gift to Polluters

Statement of Tyson Slocum, Director

of Public Citizen’s Energy Program

WASHINGTON - May 12 - After half a year of delay, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) are set to release their nuclear energy/cap-and-trade bill today. Until we see legislative text, we can comment only on the broad outline made available yesterday and an additional summary being circulated among legislative staff.

It's not accurate to call this a climate bill. This is nuclear energy-promoting, oil drilling-championing, coal mining-boosting legislation with a weak carbon-pricing mechanism thrown in. What's worse, it guts the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) current authority to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Here's our take on what we know is in the new bill:

Nuclear Power Incentives

At its core, this legislation is all about promoting nuclear power and handing taxpayers the bill. Consider: - Sections 1101 and 1105 would prioritize the needs of nuclear power corporations over the rights of citizens to have full, public hearings about the risks and dangers of locating nuclear power plants in their communities. - Section 1102 increases loan guarantees primarily for nuclear power to a jaw-dropping $54 billion. These loans are a terrible deal for the taxpayer, especially considering the high risk of default that even the government acknowledges. - Section 1103 provides $6 billion in taxpayer-subsidized risk insurance for 12 new nuclear reactors. - Section 1121 allows nuclear power plant owners to write off their depreciation much faster. Section 1121 provides a 10 percent investment tax credit for new reactors. - Section 1123 extends the Advanced Energy Project credit to nuclear reactors. - Section 1124-6 allows municipal power agencies to derive certain tax, bond and grant benefits from investing in nuclear power.

Oil

Apparently oblivious to the ongoing disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, the legislation expands offshore drilling. In fact, all new offshore drilling, leasing and permitting should be halted.

Section 1202 allows states to keep 37.5 percent of oil and gas royalty money. That's like saying because more rich people live in California and New York compared to Mississippi and New Mexico, those higher-income states should be able to keep more federal dollars raised from income taxes. Royalty revenue sharing is patently unfair - especially because the disaster in Gulf shows that an oil spill does not respect state boundaries.

Coal

Section 1412 establishes a carbon tax paid by ratepayers and collected by utilities to fund carbon capture and storage (CCS) - with no money allocated to rooftop solar or energy efficiency investments. Section 1431 will provide valuable emissions allowances for free to coal utilities pursuing CCS - an untested, risky strategy that benefits the coal industry and is gobbling up a lion's share of subsidies that otherwise could go to renewable energy development.

Merchant coal power plants (whose rates are not regulated) will get roughly 5 percent of the free allowances, which will provide opportunities for them to gouge consumers.

And while the nuclear and coal industries will receive a lot of taxpayer money and loan guarantees, Section 1604 states that "voluntary" renewable energy markets are "efficient and effective programs" and states that "the policy of the United States is to continue to support the growth of these markets." This is backward: Renewable energy should be getting the guarantees, rather than the coal and nuclear industries.

Offsets

The legislation allows entities to "reduce" their domestic greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing offsets from projects located in the U.S. and around the world. The recent offset crisis in Europe, where the offset market collapsed due to fraud, underscores the lack of accountability and transparency with offsets.

Consumer Protections Rather than follow President Barack Obama's cap-and-dividend plan, which would have required polluters to pay and would have distributed 80 percent of the money directly to families through the Making Work Pay tax credit, or the Cantwell-Collins CLEAR Act, which calls for distributing monthly checks to households, the Kerry-Lieberman approach relies on distributing valuable free allowances to utilities from 2013-2029, then requiring that utilities use the money "exclusively for the benefit of the ratepayers." But Congress won't be defining "benefit"; rather, 50 different state utility commissions will. Some will do a great job, but most will allow utilities to structure expensive energy efficiency programs that benefit shareholders more than ratepayers.

Wall Street

It appears that Wall Street may not have gotten everything it wanted - yet. The legislation appears to incorporate elements of S.1399, sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), which creates an Office of Carbon Market Oversight at the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), giving the agency authority to regulate spot and futures emission markets. It requires all entities seeking to trade emissions derivatives to register and be approved by the CFTC, and all transactions must be cleared through a CFTC-regulated Carbon Clearing Organization. This is a good start to ensure that Wall Street plays no role in gambling on climate policy.

Danger remains, however, in creating carbon trading markets open to non-energy producers. Strong regulations in place today may be easily subverted tomorrow, leaving Wall Street positioned to control our climate future.

Conclusion

The Kerry-Lieberman bill represents a missed opportunity. By meeting behind closed doors, the lawmakers empowered corporate polluters to play an oversized role in influencing the legislation to the detriment of the climate and consumers. President Obama had it right when he successfully campaigned on a theme of making polluters pay and delivering benefits directly to households.

We need a bill that does not incentivize failed and dangerous technologies like nuclear power and does not enrich utilities at the expense of consumers.

###

Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization founded in 1971 to represent consumer interests in Congress, the executive branch and the courts.

Reports: China to impose Carbon Tax from 2012

2010-05-12T12:10:00.000-07:00

by Tom Young
12th May 2010

Local paper reports that officials are moving forward with plans

to introduce a tax on carbon for China's heavy industries

China will impose a carbon tax on industry from 2012 to curb carbon dioxide emissions, a business newspaper reported late yesterday.

The Chinese language Economic Information Daily quoted official sources in the Ministry of Finance as saying the tax would start at 20 yuan (£1.95) per tonne of carbon dioxide, and rise to 50 yuan a tonne by 2020.

The tax would equate to 11 yuan per tonne of coal and 17 yuan per tonne of oil.

"The next step will be stepping up the pace in resource tax reform, and after these reforms, in 2012 or 2013, we will introduce a carbon tax, but one with a low starting point," an unnamed source told the paper.

The decision came after a recent survey conducted by officials in the Ministry concluded that a tax was the most efficient method of reducing carbon emissions from industry.

The Ministry of Finance study also said the tax reforms may include concessions for industries that would be heavily affected by the levy, provided that the businesses agree to work towards reducing energy consumption and emissions.

Revenue from the tax would be used to fund energy-saving and environmentally friendly industries, the newspaper reported. It also said that the central government would allow local governments to distribute up to a third of the tax revenue to regional schemes.

China is the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases from human activity and has been facing international pressure to curb greenhouse emissions. The country has significantly increased investment in low-carbon technologies and recently secured the top spot as the world's largest clean tech investor. However, until now few policy or tax measures have been introduced to cut emissions.

The government has vowed to cut "carbon intensity" – the amount of carbon dioxide emitted to create each unit of economic value – by 40 to 45 per cent by 2020, compared with 2005 levels, as part of the international Copenhagen Accord agreement.

But improved economic activity since the recession has made those targets harder to reach and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao warned last week that he is willing to use an "iron hand" to close down the most carbon-intensive factories to ensure the targets are met.

Wen laid out new targets to shut down 10GW of outdated small coal-fired plants, reduce capacity at the worst-performing iron smelting plants by 25 million tonnes, cut steel production at older facilities by six million tonnes, and similarly scale back cement production by 50 million tonnes.

Some city-wide and regional carbon trading schemes are also in place, but have failed as yet to establish a strong price on carbon.

Article courtesy of Business Green

USA TODAY still haven't heard about Climategate !!!

2010-05-12T09:00:00.000-07:00

by Doyle Rice
May 10th 2010

Report: Climate change could render

much of world uninhabitable

Hot enough for you?

A worst-case scenario of global warming, in which temperatures would soar some 21 degrees, is that much of the world may simply become too hot for humans to live in, according to new research published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We found that … a 21-degree warming would put half of the world's population in an uninhabitable environment,"says study co-author Matthew Huber of Purdue University.

While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that the result of business-as-usual warming would be 7 degrees by 2100, eventual warming over several centuries of 25 degrees is feasible, says Huber.

The new research calculated the highest tolerable "wet-bulb" temperature that humans can withstand.

"The wet-bulb limit is basically the point at which one would overheat even if they were naked in the shade, soaking wet and standing in front of a large fan," says study lead author Steven Sherwood of the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

The researchers found that humans and most mammals experience a potentially lethal level of heat stress at a "wet-bulb" temperature above 95 degrees sustained for six hours or more.

(The more familiar air temperature is known as the "dry-bulb" temperature; wet bulb temperatures can be used along with the dry bulb temperature to calculate humidity.)

Researchers say that while wet-bulb temperatures of 95 degrees never happen now, they would begin to occur with global-average warming of about 12 degrees, calling the habitability of some regions into question.

"We show that even modest global warming could therefore expose large fractions of the population to unprecedented heat stress, and that with severe warming this would become intolerable," the authors write.

"If warmings of 10 degrees C (18 degrees F) were really to occur in next three centuries, the area of land likely rendered uninhabitable by heat stress would dwarf that affected by rising sea level. Heat stress thus deserves more attention as a climate-change impact."

Article courtesy of USA Today

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Still Under Attack, Climate Scientists Fight Back

2010-05-12T08:49:00.000-07:00

by Bryan Walsh
7th May 2010

Iceberg Lake at Glacier National Park. Photograph: National Park Service / AP

Has any field suffered a faster drop in public confidence than climate science? Two and a half years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was finishing up its widely acclaimed fourth assessment on global warming, which made an unequivocal case for the threat of man-made climate change. For its work, the IPCC was rewarded with the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize — shared with Al Gore for his green advocacy — and polls showed strong concern over global warming, even in the U.S. By the time of President Barack Obama's election in 2008, the stage seemed set for climate science to go from the professional journals to the stuff of legislation.

But that was then. Thanks in part to the events of Climategate last November — when someone hacked into and released thousands of e-mails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at Britain's East Anglia University — climate scientists now find themselves under fire. The Climategate e-mails revealed that scientists used terms like trick while discussing climate modeling techniques, which was enough to set off skeptics, who considered it proof that scientists were bending data to reach their conclusions, and making climate change seem worse than it really was. In the aftermath of Climategate, critics also uncovered factual errors — small and few, but real — in the IPCC's fourth assessment. (See how alternative energy sources were discussed at the World Energy Technologies Summit.)

It energized global-warming skeptics. Most recently, on April 23, Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli launched a civil investigative demand (CID) with the University of Virginia (UVA), searching for information on the climate scientist Michael Mann, who once worked at UVA. Mann, who now runs the Earth Systems Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, authored many of the controversial e-mails at the center of Climategate.

The cost of these assaults is real. Despite the fact that a parliamentary inquiry in Britain looked into Climategate and in March exonerated Phil Jones, the head of CRU, of any wrongdoing, the damage had been done. A British survey in February found a 30% drop over just one year in the percentage of adults who said climate change was "definitely" real, and polls in the U.S. have found a similar decline. (See one of the latest global-warming worries discovered by scientists.)

In the face of that dwindling in public confidence — and a renewed surge in attacks from global-warming skeptics — climate scientists are finally fighting back. In the May 7 edition of Science, 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, including 11 Nobel laureates, signed a letter decrying what they call the "political assaults on scientists and climate scientists in particular." They argue that the attacks on climate science are ideologically motivated by those who want to delay any action on global warming and that it has resulted in a new McCarthyism. "There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions," the authors write in Science. But "for a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet."

That was the argument made by Representative Edward Markey, the pugnacious Massachusetts Democrat in charge of the Select House Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming, at a congressional hearing he held Thursday morning on the science of climate change. With the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico still leaking oil with no clear end in sight, Markey reminded Congress that climate change and dependence on petroleum are intertwined — and that no amount of denial could change that inconvenient fact. The U.S. needs to "acknowledge the basic facts that have been known for decades," Markey said in his opening statement. "Increasing carbon pollution in the atmosphere is warming the planet and the only way to put a halt to such warming is to move to clean-energy solutions." (See a video of how Google is diving into clean-energy technologies.)

Even in Virginia, where attorney general Cuccinelli has kept up his investigation into Mann's work, academics have pushed back and criticized skeptics for going too far. Cuccinelli's CID is exploring potential violations of the Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act; it gives the state 30 days to produce more than 10 years' worth of documents related to state-funded research by Mann during his time at UVA. (Cuccinelli has said he wants to find out whether any of Mann's research, which was conducted with some state grants, was purposefully "steering a course to reach a conclusion," according to the Washington Post.) But Mann's peers at UVA have reciprocated, releasing a position statement arguing that Cuccinelli's investigation may be politically motivated — he has also filed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency for attempting to regulate greenhouse gases — and that his actions "directly threaten academic freedom and, thus, our ability to generate the knowledge upon which informed public policy relies."

Ultimately, that's what may lie at stake here — whether politics can be kept from interfering with science. In truth, climate change is as much a political problem as it is a scientific one, and no one would argue that science is free of bias. But science does have a self-correcting mechanism — in fact, this week the InterAcademy Council, a coalition of global scientific organizations, named a 12-member committee to review the workings of the IPCC. Scientists have learned from Climategate that they need to be more open. Climate change is too global a problem to be left to the academy, and if scientists are to be trusted, they need to be held accountable — but not by investigations carried out in the name of partisanship rather than truth.

Article courtesy of Time

Virginia AG's risky Climate Science Investigation

2010-05-12T08:40:00.000-07:00

by Andrew Freedman
10th May 2010

The fallout from the so-called 'climategate' email affair has metastasized yet again, this time into a highly controversial investigation by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, who is examining the research practices of a former University of Virginia climate scientist. The civil investigation seeks to determine whether Michael Mann, a prominent specialist in the planet's climate history who now directs the Earth Systems Science Center at Penn State University, violated Virginia's Fraud Against Taxpayers Act when he conducted research financed by the state of Virginia prior to leaving the faculty in 2005.

Mann has correctly labeled the investigation a "witch hunt," and even ardent climate science skeptics have condemned Cuccinelli's actions, as noted by Andrew Revkin on DotEarth last week.

According to the civil investigative demand (CID), which is similar to a subpoena, Cuccinelli's investigation "relates to data and other materials that Dr. Mann presented in seeking awards/grants funded, in whole or in part, by the Commonwealth of Virginia or any of its agencies as well as data, materials and communications that Dr. Mann created, presented or made in connection with or related to" five separate grants. Interestingly, most of the grants were funded mainly by the federal government, not the state of Virginia.

The investigation also seeks all correspondence between Mann and a list of about 40 climate scientists, several of whom had their emails stolen in the climategate dustup. The list includes Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in Britain, Gavin Schmidt of NASA and the realclimate blog, Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., as well as well-known climate skeptic Steve McIntyre, a longtime critic of Mann's work.

Mann specializes in paleoclimatology and has written numerous studies on the earth's climate history. His reconstruction of climate change during the past 1,000 years became one of the most controversial climate science charts in history when it was included in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report in 2001. It showed a highly unusual and sharp increase in temperature during the latter part of the 20th century, and was cited as evidence that human activities are significantly altering the climate. The chart was dubbed the Hockey Stick, since the temperature increase resembles the blade on a hockey stick.

Due to persistent questions about that study, a National Research Council panel examined its methods in 2006, and found no major flaws. In the wake of climategate, Mann has been investigated by his current academic institution, which has essentially cleared him of wrongdoing, although part of the investigation is still ongoing.

Cuccinelli's investigation has the potential to dramatically curb scientific research at U. Va. and elsewhere. If scientists fear they will be investigated if the attorney general dislikes their research results (Cuccinelli is known to be skeptical of the widely held scientific view that human activities are warming the climate), they may refrain from conducting potentially controversial research.

It's extremely difficult to read the CID as anything other than an assault on climate science research, and to a broader degree, on scientific research in general. For example, if Cuccinelli's investigation were truly about whether Mann improperly used grant funding, why would the CID include a list of scientists, several of whom were swept up in 'climategate', and several (such as McIntyre) who did not work on the grants at all?

Couldn't this really be about trying to unearth more fodder for climate science skeptics by revealing more of Mann's emails?

There has been widespread criticism of Cuccinelli's investigation, including from the Washington Post's editorial board, which published a scathing editorial on May 6, saying that Cuccinelli "has declared war on the freedom of academic inquiry."

"By equating controversial results with legal fraud, Mr. Cuccinelli demonstrates a dangerous disregard for scientific method and academic freedom," the editorial stated.

In an article in the Post yesterday, Cuccinelli was quoted as saying the investigation is not about Mann's research results, but rather the way he spent state funds. "That subpoena is directed at the expenditure of dollars. Whether he does a good job, bad job or I don't like the outcome -- and I think everybody already knows his position on some of this is one that I question. But that is not what that's about," Cuccinelli said.

However, considering the costs to Virginia of pursuing the investigation, when compared to the grant funding in question, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick wrote: "Spending half a million dollars of taxpayer funds to possibly recover some part of half a million dollars of misspent grant money doesn't even begin to make sense."

Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado whose correspondence with Mann is being sought under the CID, said the investigation is purely political, and is extremely unlikely to turn up any evidence of misconduct.

...Make no mistake, this is a fishing expedition pure and simple. The point of the "investigation" is not to recover Virginia funds that were misappropriated, as the law might suggest, but to go back to the Climategate well one more time to see if more embarrassing information or emails might be dredged up. And on this point, there are probably more embarrassing things in Mann's emails and files. But given the attention he has received and the information already found in the East Anglia emails, it'd be a shock to find anything indicating research misconduct.

For more reaction to Cuccinelli's investigation, see climate skeptic Tom Fuller's open letter to Cuccinelli, as well as articles from the Climate Progress blog and US News and World Report.

Article courtesy of The Washington Post

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White House using Oil Disaster to win votes for US Climate Bill

2010-05-12T07:48:00.000-07:00

by Suzanne Foldenburg
11th May 2010

White House aims to use Deepwater

Disaster to win votes for US Climate Bill

US Senators prepare to roll out legislation after oil spill 'tragedy

heightens interest in energy and wanting a different plan'

The deadly explosion at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Photograph: KPA/Zuma/Rex Features

Senators are set to take a last run at producing a climate and energy law tomorrow, betting on the spectre of environmental disaster raised by the BP oil spill to build support for a comprehensive overhaul of America's energy strategy.

But despite a strong push from the Obama administration, there are concerns the debate about the energy future could be lost in the wrangling about offshore oil drilling permits.

The official roll-out by Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman caps eight months of negotiations with political figures and industry executives aimed at getting broad support in Congress for shifting the economy away from coal and oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Climate legislation passed by the US Senate could unblock a major obstacle which prevented agreement on a binding global deal at last year's Copenhagen summit.

"We are more encouraged today that we can secure the necessary votes to pass this legislation this year in part because the last weeks have given everyone with a stake in this issue a heightened understanding that as a nation, we can no longer wait to solve this problem which threatens our economy, our security and our environment," Kerry and Lieberman said in a joint statement.

The White House is also trying to use the disaster to make a case for a bill. "This accident, this tragedy, is actually heightening people's interest in energy in this country and in wanting a different energy plan," Carol Browner, the White House climate adviser told Bloomberg television at the weekend.

Time is fast running out for climate and energy legislation, with Democrats expected to suffer heavy losses in the mid-term elections.

But the thinking in Congress is that the economic disaster in the Gulf is more likely to hurt, than help, such efforts in large part because offshore drilling was a key part of the proposals.

The two Senators deliberately gave a boost to offshore drilling under a strategy that saw the Obama administration and the White House working to build support among Republicans and industries that stood to be affected by the new regulations.

Early drafts promised to build more nuclear power plants and expand offshore oil drilling. The pro-business message was further underlined in plans for a roll-out originally scheduled for last month, which envisaged a public show of support from big oil companies, including BP.

The proposal is expected to require a 17% cut in emissions levels from 2005 levels by 2020. Earlier versions suggested a sector-by-sector approach to emissions cuts. Electricity producers would face a cap in 2012, with heavily polluting industries such as steel and cement manufacturers winning a delay until 2012.

In addition to financial incentives for nuclear power and offshore oil and gas drilling, the proposals would have created funds for carbon capture and storage.

The proposals would also have curbed the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to acting on emissions, and would have stopped states, such as California, from imposing more stringent environmental regulations.

Such concessions to the nuclear and oil industry, while angering environmentalists, do not appear to have created a solid bank of Republican support.

Kerry and Lieberman lost their lone Republican ally, Lindsey Graham. The South Carolina Senator, who initially withdrew his support over a dispute about immigration, now argues the spill in the Gulf has wrecked any chance of success.

"There are not nearly 60 votes today and I do not see them materialising until we deal with the uncertainty of the immigration debate and the consequences of the oil spill," he said in a statement.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, also cast doubt this week on the likelihood of getting a comprehensive climate and energy bill through the Sentate. He told Spanish language Univision network a limited energy-only bill — that would not cap emissions — stood a better chance.

Meanwhile, the battle lines are being drawn on offshore drilling. Some Democratic Senators are now threatening to vote against any climate bill that allows expanded drilling. "I will have a very hard time ever voting for offshore drilling again," Senator Jay Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat told reporters.

Others, including Graham, remain adamant in their support for drilling.

Environmental organisations are also expanding their campaigns against drilling, both in the Gulf of Mexico, and new projects scheduled for Alaska.

That could force yet another revision to the proposal by the time it sees the light of day on Wednesday. "The one part we are still talking about is the offshore drilling," Lieberman told reproters. "The other parts are really in pretty solid shape."

Article courtesy of Guardian.co.uk

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Message to the Environmental Movement - Climategate

2010-05-11T08:09:00.000-07:00

Video courtesy of rageunderground @YouTube

Cap-and-Trade Is Back

2010-05-11T07:18:00.000-07:00

by Brian Sussman
10th May 2010

On Wednesday, Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) plan to introduce legislation designed to inflate the cost of energy, strain family budgets, and decimate America's manufacturing sector -- all in the name of supposedly saving the climate.

Kerry and Lieberman have been revamping legislation that narrowly passed the House of Representatives last year. The House bill imposes oppressive limits on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and establishes a complex cap-and-trade scheme in which the federal government determines how much CO2 a business may emit. If a business exceeds its allowance, it may purchase additional "carbon credits" from an exchange, where the credits will be traded like a commodity. Rules for the exchange of carbon credits, including the trading of carbon derivatives, are addressed in the House bill, and my sources tell me that the Senate version will include these same stratagems.

In an e-mail sent to the media last week regarding their plans, Kerry and Lieberman said, "We can no longer wait to solve this problem which threatens our economy, our security and our environment."

My insiders also say the new Kerry-Lieberman proposal will keep the House bill's goal of attaining a 17-percent reduction of greenhouse gases (below their 2005 level) by 2020. Apparently the Senate bill will allow cap-and-trade to hit power companies first, and then within six years include the manufacturing sector.

The new bill apparently calls for more loan guarantees to build nuclear plants and grants U.S. coastal states a share of the revenue produced by any expansion of offshore oil and natural-gas drilling.

This is a bill that will cause all of us to suffer great loss.

Presently, 40 percent of CO2 emissions in the United States are derived from electricity generation, 35 percent from transportation, and 25 percent from business, industry, and natural gas to heat homes.

So where will the 17% cut come from, especially given that (according to U.S. census projections) there will be an additional 30 million people in the United States by 2020? If the cuts are distributed proportionately, the biggest blow will be to electricity production. Since 50 percent of our nation's electricity is derived from coal, that industry and its customers will be hit hardest. Coal plants are going to have to be shuttered. And what will replace that energy resource? Nothing.

Some might counter that the House bill touts complex tax credits for wind and solar development. However, when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, those two alternatives don't provide a watt of energy -- they're simply enhancements, not baseload providers. Additionally, the Kerry-Lieberman loan giveaway for the construction of nuclear plants -- which do not generate carbon emissions -- is simply a lure to entice gullible Republicans to bite, because the White House is not a fan of nuclear power.

Recall that during his January State of the Union address, Mr. Obama said that America needs to be "building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country."

In an apparent move to make good on his promise, two days after the speech, Bloomberg reported: "President Barack Obama, acting on a pledge to support nuclear power, will propose tripling guarantees for new reactors to more than $45 billion[.]"

However, the proposal was a ruse. Many forget that shortly after taking office Obama's first budget planned to cut off money for the Nevada nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain -- meaning that the $10 billion in taxpayer dollars spent since 1983 to ready Yucca for storing nuclear waste was a total loss. Yucca Mountain will officially be zeroed out in fiscal year 2011.

Meantime, Energy Secretary Steven Chu has announced the creation of a special panel to find a solution for storing nuclear waste.

Problem is, we already had a solution -- Yucca Mountain.

America has no nuclear option. And, as I have written here at American Thinker, the probability of additional drilling for domestic fossil fuels is low as well.

So where will the carbon cuts come from? They'll come from the American people, who will be forced to use less energy because of the higher costs imposed by cap-and-trade and a variety of new energy taxes.

Proving my point, last week members of Congress, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, took part in the Good Jobs, Green Jobs National Conference. One of the better-attended seminars was entitled "Efficiency and Renewables." Presenters included Nancy Sutley, White House Council on Environmental Quality. According to the brochure promoting this session, "The cheapest, cleanest, and fastest emission reductions will come from the energy we never have to use at all. Cutting energy use also saves money on homeowners' electricity bills and reduces costs for business."

Translation: America does not need a plan for additional power plants to serve a growing population; instead, the people must use less power. Coercion through increased pricing will be a key prod in producing the societal behavior modification necessary to accomplish this goal.

By the way, Nancy Sutley is also the woman who announced the hiring of the radical Van Jones in March 2009, declaring: "Van Jones has been a strong voice for green jobs, and we look forward to having him work with departments and agencies to advance the President's agenda of creating 21st-century jobs that improve energy efficiency and utilize renewable resources. Jones will also help to shape and advance the administration's energy and climate initiatives with a specific interest in improvements and opportunities for vulnerable communities."

Further straining the family budget, a new set of fees and taxes will be imposed on all sectors of the economy that produce greenhouse gases. This will include transportation, farming, livestock production -- even restaurants that cook barbecued chicken and ribs over an open flame and bottling companies that sell fizzy drinks. To absorb the increased cost of doing business, companies large and small will be forced to raise their prices. Already pinched personal bank accounts will be further hammered, as virtually everything is going to cost more.

The Kerry-Lieberman bill is also a job-killer. To meet the demands of the new emissions limits, the few manufacturing businesses that remain in the United States will be further shipped overseas. This is a part of an elitist plan to redistribute America's wealth abroad. In other words, this legislation will purposefully execute the loss of well-paying domestic jobs, so that those in third world and underdeveloped nations have a chance to improve their standard of living -- at our expense.

Proving my point is the House version of this bill. If your manufacturing job is shipped overseas, you are eligible for three years of unemployment compensation at 70% of your pay, plus retraining and relocation expenses. The intent is to pacify your anger with a three-year paid vacation.

And another dirty little secret about the Democrats' need to pass cap-and-trade: It's a revenue-builder. According the Wall Street Journal, the cap-and-trade system could actually generate between roughly $1.3 trillion and $1.9 trillion between fiscal years 2012 and 2019.

This so-called energy bill is a punch to the gut that American does not need. And keep in mind, as I have conclusively proven through past missives at American Thinker, as well as in my book Climategate, that the temperature of the earth is not warming, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, and without the greenhouse effect, planet Earth would be a big ball of ice.

To pass, cap-and-trade will need bipartisan support. Thus far only Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Susan Collins (R-ME) have spoken out in favor of supporting a mandatory cap on greenhouse gases.

However, other Senate Republicans who could cross over and support this bill are Olympia Snowe of Maine, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, George LeMieux of Florida, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, and the retiring George Voinovich of Ohio.

Article courtesy of American Thinker

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Lock Monckton's Written Testimony to U.S. Congress

2010-05-10T07:50:00.000-07:00

Testimony of The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

Before Congress, 6 May 2010

The Select Committee, in its letter inviting testimony for the present hearing, cites various scientific bodies as having concluded that –

1. The global climate has warmed;
2. Human activities account for most of the warming since the mid-20th century;
3. Climate change is already causing a broad range of impacts in the United States;
4. The impacts of climate change are expected to grow in the coming decades.

The first statement requires heavy qualification and, since the second is wrong, the third and fourth are without foundation and must fall.

The Select Committee has requested answers to the following questions:

1. What are the observed changes to the climate system?

Carbon dioxide concentration: In the Neoproterozoic Era, ~750 million years ago, dolomitic rocks, containing ~40% CO2 bonded not only with calcium ions but also with magnesium, were precipitated from the oceans worldwide by a reaction that could not have occurred unless the atmospheric concentration of CO2 had been ~300,000 parts per million by volume. Yet in that era equatorial glaciers came and went twice at sea level.

Today, the concentration is ~773 times less, at ~388 ppmv: yet there are no equatorial glaciers at sea level. If the warming effect of CO2 were anything like as great as the vested-interest groups now seek to maintain, then, even after allowing for greater surface albedo and 5% less solar radiation, those glaciers could not possibly have existed (personal communication from Professor Ian Plimer, confirmed by on-site inspection of dolomitic and tillite deposits at Arkaroola Northern Flinders Ranges, South Australia).

In the Cambrian Era, ~550 million years ago, limestones, containing some 44% CO2 bonded with calcium ions, were precipitated from the oceans. At that time, atmospheric CO2 concentration was ~7000 ppmv, or ~18 times today’s (IPCC, 2001): yet it was at that time that the calcite corals first achieved algal symbiosis. In the Jurassic era, ~175 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 concentration was ~6000 ppmv, or ~15 times today’s (IPCC, 2001): yet it was then that the delicate aragonite corals came into being.

Therefore, today’s CO2 concentration, though perhaps the highest in 20 million years, is by no means exceptional or damaging. Indeed, it has been argued that trees and plants have been part-starved of CO2 throughout that period (Senate testimony of Professor Will Happer, Princeton University, 2009). It is also known that a doubling of today’s CO2 concentration, projected to occur later this century (IPCC, 2007), would increase the yield of some staple crops by up to 40% (lecture by Dr. Leighton Steward, Parliament Chamber, Copenhagen, December 2009).

Global mean surface temperature: Throughout most of the past 550 million years, global temperatures were ~7 K (13 F°) warmer than the present. In each of the past four interglacial warm periods over the past 650,000 years, temperatures were warmer than the present by several degrees (A.A. Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006).

In the current or Holocene warm period, which began 11,400 years ago at the abrupt termination of the Younger Dryas cooling event, some 7500 years were warmer than thepresent (Cuffey & Clow, 1997), and, in particular, the medieval, Roman, Minoan, and Holocene Climate Optima were warmer than the present (Cuffey & Clow, 1997).

The “global warming” that ceased late in 2001 (since when there has been a global cooling trend for eight full years) had begun in 1695, towards the end of the Maunder Minimum, a period of 70 years from 1645-1715 when the Sun was less active than at any time in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004). Solar activity increased with a rapidity unprecedented in the Holocene, reaching a Grand Solar Maximum during a period of 70 years from 1925-1995 when the Sun was very nearly as active as it had been at any time in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Usoskin, 2003; Solanki, 2005).

The first instrumental record of global temperatures was kept in Central England from 1659. From 1695-1735, a period of 40 years preceding the onset of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, temperatures in central England, which are a respectable proxy for global temperatures, rose by 2.2 K (4 F°). Yet global temperatures have risen by only 0.65 K (1.2 F°) since 1950, and 0.7 K (1.3 F°) in the whole of the 20th century. Throughout the 21st century, global temperatures have followed a declining trend. Accordingly, neither global mean surface temperature nor its rates of change in recent decades have been exceptional, unusual, inexplicable, or unprecedented.

Ocean “acidification”: It has been suggested that the oceans have “acidified” – or, more correctly, become less alkaline – by 0.1 acid-base units in recent decades. However, the fact of a movement towards neutrality in ocean chemistry, if such a movement has occurred, tells us nothing of the cause, which cannot be attributed to increases in CO2 concentration. There is 70 times as much CO2 dissolved in the oceans as there is in the atmosphere, and some 30% of any CO2 we add to the atmosphere will eventually dissolve into the oceans. Accordingly, a doubling of CO2 concentration, expected later this century, would raise the oceanic partial pressure of CO2 by 30% of one-seventieth of what is already there. And that is an increase of 0.4% at most. Even this minuscule and chemically-irrelevant perturbation is probably overstated, since any “global warming” that resulted from the doubling of CO2 concentration would warm the oceans and cause them to outgas CO2, reducing the oceanic partial pressure.

Seawater is a highly buffered solution – it can take up a huge amount of dissolved inorganic carbon without significant effect on pH. There is not the slightest possibility that the oceans could approach the neutral pH of pure water (pH 7.0), even if all the fossil fuel reserves in the world were burned. A change in pH of 0.2 units this century, from its present 8.2 to 8.0, even if it were possible, would leave the sea containing no more than 10% of the “acidic” positively-charged hydrogen ions that occur in pure water. If ocean “acidification” is happening, then CO2 is not and will not be the culprit.

2. What evidence provides attribution of these changes to human activities?

In the global instrumental record, which commenced in 1850, the three supradecadal periods of most rapid warming were 1860-1880, 1910-1940, and 1975-2001. Warming rates in all three periods were identical at ~0.16 K (0.3 F°) per decade.

During the first two of these three periods, observations were insufficient to establish the causes of the warming: however, the principal cause cannot have been atmospheric CO2 enrichment, because, on any view, mankind’s emissions of CO2 had not increased enough to cause any measurable warming on a global scale during those short periods.

In fact, the third period of rapid global warming, 1975-2001, was the only period of warming since 1950. From 1950-1975, and again from 2001-2010, global temperatures fell slightly (HadCRUTv3, cited in IPCC, 2007).

What, then, caused the third period of warming? Most of that third and most recent period of rapid warming fell within the satellite era, and the satellites confirmed measurements from ground stations showing a considerable, and naturally-occurring, global brightening from 1983-2001 (Pinker et al., 2005).

Allowing for the fact that Dr. Pinker’s result depended in part on the datasets of outgoing radiative flux from the ERBE satellite that had not been corrected at that time for orbital decay, it is possible to infer a net increase in surface radiative flux amounting to 0.106 W m–2 year–1 over the period, compared with the 0.16 W m–2 year–1 found by Dr. Pinker.

Elementary radiative-transfer calculations demonstrate that a natural surface global brightening amounting to ~1.9 W m–2 over the 18-year period of study would be expected – using the IPCC’s own methodology – to have caused a transient warming of 1 K (1.8 F°). To put this naturally-occurring global brightening into perspective, the IPCC’s estimated total of all the anthropogenic influences on climate combined in the 256 years 1750-2005 is only 1.6 W m–2.

Taking into account a further projected warming, using IPCC methods, of ~0.5 K (0.9 F°) from CO2 and other anthropogenic sources, projected warming of 1.5 K (2.7 F°) should have occurred.

However, only a quarter of this projected warming was observed, suggesting the possibility that the IPCC may have overestimated the warming effect of greenhouse gases fourfold. This result is in line with similar result obtained by other methods: for instance, Lindzen & Choi (2009, 2010 submitted) find that the warming rate to be expected as a result of anthropogenic activities is one-quarter to one-fifth of the IPCC’s central estimate.

There is no consensus on how much warming a given increase in CO2 will cause.

3. Assuming ad argumentum that the IPCC’s projections of future warming are correct, what policy measures should be taken?

Warming at the very much reduced rate that measured (as opposed to merely modeled) results suggest would be 0.7-0.8 K (1.3-1.4 F°) at CO2 doubling. That would be harmless and beneficial – a doubling of CO2 concentration would increase yields of some staple crops by 40%. Therefore, one need not anticipate any significant adverse impact from CO2-induced “global warming”. “Global warming” is a non-problem, and the correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.

However, ad argumentum, let us assume that the IPCC is correct in finding that a warming of 3.26 ± 0.69 K (5.9 ± 1.2 F°: IPCC, 2007, ch.10, box 10.2) might occur at CO2 doubling. We generalize this central prediction, deriving a simple equation to tell us how much warming the IPCC would predict for any given change in CO2 concentration –

ΔTS ≈ (8.5 ± 1.8) ln(C/Co) F°

Thus, the change in surface temperature in Fahrenheit degrees, as predicted by the IPCC, would be 6.7 to 10.3 (with a central estimate of 8.5) times the logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. We check the equation by using it to work out the warming the IPCC would predict at CO2 doubling: 8.5 ln 2 ≈ 5.9 F°.

Using this equation, we can determine just how much “global warming” would be forestalled if the entire world were to shut down its economies and emit no carbon dioxide at all for an entire year. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 is 388 parts per million by volume. Our emissions of 30 bn tons of CO2 a year are causing this concentration to rise at 2 ppmv/year, and this ratio of 15 bn tons of emissions to each additional ppmv of CO2 concentration has remained constant for 30 years.

Then the “global warming” that we might forestall if we shut down the entire global carbon economy for a full year would be 8.5 ln[(388+2)/388] = 0.044 F°. At that rate, almost a quarter of a century of global zero-carbon activity would be needed in order to forestall just one Fahrenheit degree of “global warming”.

Two conclusions ineluctably follow. First, it would be orders of magnitude more cost-effective to adapt to any “global warming” that might occur than to try to prevent it from occurring by trying to tax or regulate emissions of carbon dioxide in any way.

Secondly, there is no hurry. Even after 23 years doing nothing to address the imagined problem, and even if the IPCC has not exaggerated CO2’s warming effect fourfold, the world will be just 1 F° warmer than it is today. If the IPCC has exaggerated fourfold, the world can do nothing for almost a century before global temperature rises by 1 F°.

There are many urgent priorities that need the attention of Congress, and it is not for me as an invited guest in your country to say what they are. Yet I can say this much: on any view, “global warming” is not one of them.

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Putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank...

2010-05-10T07:20:00.000-07:00

by Andrew Orlowski
14th April 2010

Oxburgh blesses Climategate Boffins

Keep on keeping calm, and carry on

All's well at CRU. The University of East Anglia's scientific enquiry into the Climategate affair, led by Lord Oxburgh, has exonerated the staff involved.

After just 15 days on the job, Oxburgh has dismissed the charges in a brisk five-page report. The academics under fire were the IPCC's leading authorities on temperature reconstructions, and their work was central to the claim that recent temperatures are anomalous.

Oxburgh finds space, however, to blame the Climatic Research Unit's external critics for taking a "selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by CRU". These critics failed to account for the "difficult circumstances under which university research is sometimes conducted".

However Oxburgh admits the enquiry team looked at the issue with one eye shut. No critics of CRU's work, Stephen McIntyre or Doug Keenan, were interviewed, and the enquiry admits "We have not exhaustively reviewed the external criticism of the dendroclimatological work".

The only criticism is mild. The enquiry notes:

"It is regrettable that so few professional statisticians have been involved in this work because it is fundamentally statistical. Under such circumstances there must be an obligation on researchers to document the judgemental decisions they have made so that the work can in principle be replicated by others."

Oxburgh concludes: "We found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganised researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public attention."

McIntyre calls the report "flimsy and embarrassing" and "a feeble sleight-of-hand" in his initial commentary on Oxburgh's conclusion. McIntyre says the conclusion that the team "regrettably" "neglected" to indicate the divergence problem - when tree data disagrees with the instrumental temperature record - is incorrect

"The Climategate emails show that they did so intentionally," counters McIntyre.

Lord who?

The choice of Lord Oxburgh was questioned by critics, one of whom compared it to "putting Dracula in charge of the Blood Bank".

Oxburgh has paid directorships of two renewable energy companies, and is a paid advisor to Climate Change Capital, the Low Carbon Initiative, Evo-Electric, Fujitsu, and an environmental advisor to Deutsche Bank. Last month we revealed that Oxburgh had failed to declare his directorship of GLOBE, an international network of legislators with ties to the Club of Rome.

Oxburgh's is the second of two 'independent' enquiries commissioned by the University. The other, led by Sir Muir Russell, continues.

You can download the Oxburgh report here. It won't take you long to read. ®

Article courtesy of The Register

Montgomery Official proposes Carbon Tax on major emitters

2010-05-10T07:07:00.001-07:00

by Michael Laris
22nd April 2010

As drops in buckets go, this is very small drop in a very big bucket.

Just in time for Earth Day, Montgomery County Council member and longtime energy lawyer Roger Berliner (D-Potomac-Bethesda) is proposing an excise tax on major carbon emitters in the county. He said his goal is to spur faster action to address global warming. And if he can raise millions of dollars a year with the carbon tax, he said, that will be another welcome byproduct.

The proposal would put a $5 tax on each ton of carbon dioxide sent skyward by "major emitters." In Montgomery, that means one facility: the 843-megawatt Dickerson generating plant that Mirant runs near Poolesville.

That facility accounts for about 2.33 million tons of carbon dioxide yearly. The nation's annual greenhouse gas tally has hit about 7 billion tons in recent years.

Mirant officials appear ready for a fight. The firm generates power across Maryland, in Alexandria, in California and beyond. Asked whether company executives are prepared to pay the tax, a Mirant spokeswoman said simply: "No."

Berliner said that the tax would help county coffers in a time of serious fiscal challenges and that Pepco officials told him that the tax would have no discernable impact on rates. The county is paying to reduce its emissions, and the biggest emitters should pitch in, he said. "We are spending, and will be spending, millions of dollars on carbon-reducing programs," Berliner said.

A Mirant spokesman argues that Montgomery would just be adding one more levy.

"You're not reducing greenhouse gas emissions. All you're doing is taxing a business with 150 employees in your county," said Misty Allen, Mirant's director of external affairs for the mid-Atlantic. "Maryland and Montgomery County are not islands unto themselves with respect to electricity. . . . Greenhouse gases should be regulated on an international basis or, at most, at the national level."

Allen added that Maryland is part of a broader effort known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and that the company must pay into that program. "At least with programs like RGGI, which are regional, it creates a more level playing field for electricity generators," Allen said.

But Berliner said that the initiative needs more teeth and that he thinks his tax will help.

The regional program "just is the framework, and it doesn't truly advance the environmental agenda," Berliner said, noting that actual reductions in emissions remain years off. "What [this tax] does is give you the best of both worlds. It gives you the framework, and then it says, 'I'm going to induce you to do more. It's time to get on with this.' "

The draft legislation, which Berliner is set to unveil Thursday, notes that "Montgomery County has embraced an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and has begun to engage in programmatic efforts to reduce these emissions. These efforts constitute a significant investment by the County and its constituents and cover both stationary sources (County owned and otherwise) and mobile sources."

Half the funds raised by the tax "must be reserved for and allocated in the annual operating budget to funding for County greenhouse gas reduction programs, including mass transit," according to the draft.

Veronique Bugnion, managing director of Point Carbon, a Washington-based firm that analyzes carbon markets, said the Montgomery effort is modest but could have an impact.

"It might be a very small drop in the big global warming bucket," she said. "At the same time, regional and local policies often have the goal of being a role model, being an example for bigger policies."

That's part of Berliner's idea.

"It is indeed the threat of local government action like this that will drive the industry crazy to the point they are more willing to accept a national regime," he said.

Article courtesy of The Washington Post

Carbon Tax is an expensive fraud

2010-05-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

by Michael Dorgan
6th May 2010

AS Eamon Gilmore and others lambaste the Government for not giving adequate protection to those most at risk due to the inception of the carbon tax, why do our elected representatives still refuse to ask the real questions? Why are they not asking what is the justification of a carbon tax?

Ostensibly it is being introduced because we humans are producing a dirty pollutant that's making the climate warmer, which in turn will have apocalyptic consequences.

Yet the past few years have seen a decrease in global temperatures with record cold snaps in many places causing all sorts of chaos as carbon emissions, astonishingly, continue to climb. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which we are told consists of the "creme de la creme" of scientists, climatologists etc, has lost all credibility and so has its "theory" of anthropogenic global warming.

They have been distorting, manipulating and hiding data; while threatening others who oppose their views.

The Medieval Warming Period and Little Ice Age were erased from history by the UN by creating the infamous hockey stick graph that was used all over the world to advocate man-made global warming.

They have now admitted that the Medieval Warming Period may have been warmer than current temperatures. The fear-mongering about the melting Himalayan glaciers was also based on fiction, along with the Arctic glaciers whose percentages are now growing.

This data was then used to set policy, make laws and design treaties. In Ireland, we have a carbon tax, for what? Based on what? There is no independent scientific data to suggest that C02 has ever caused the Earth's climate to alter and subsequently there is none to suggest it will in the future. Those who have and continue to produce such evidence have been proven to be fraudsters.

Where is the debate when more and more people, according to polls, do not believe in the hype? Why does Al Gore avoid debating the issue? The answer is simple: he and the rest of these greenies know it's a fraud!

When 30,000 scientists sign a petition saying it is a fraud, there is no exposure; when scandal after scandal is revealed about the IPCC, it is buried in the back pages.

The carbon tax is based on a fraud yet there continues to be a deafening silence from politicians and the media who have both invested heavily in pushing this pseudo-science.

Bear this in mind when you see your forthcoming heating bills.

Article courtesy of Independent.ie

Electricity Rate Hike Shocker

2010-05-10T06:48:00.000-07:00

by Lorrie Goldstein
9th May 2010

A 25% increase is just the start

Government Plans to price Carbon
will drive Bills ever higher

Bad enough energy experts predict the cost of electricity in Ontario is going to skyrocket by about 25% by the end of next year.

That’s scary in a time of high unemployment, frozen salaries, fixed incomes and a still shaky economic recovery.

What’s more frightening is this massive hike in electricity rates — which shows no signs of slowing down post-2011 — hasn’t yet factored in the cost of putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, either directly through a carbon tax, or indirectly through cap-and-trade.

This, ostensibly, to fight climate change. Ostensibly, because cap-and-trade, the form of carbon pricing preferred by most Canadian politicians, including Premier Dalton McGuinty and Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has failed to lower greenhouse gas emissions in Europe.

Today, every time another price hike in electricity rates is announced, politicians like McGuinty and Energy Minister Brad Duguid, along with hydro officials, solemnly lecture us about the need to fight climate change. But most of these rate increases have nothing to do with that.

The two biggest hikes Ontarians face on their hydro bills at the moment are a 12% increase in the regulated electricity price approved by the Ontario Energy Board, which took effect May 1 and will raise rates to consumers by 8%-9.5%, plus another 8% hike July 1, when Ontario’s new Harmonized Sales Tax comes into effect.

The HST will also increase the price of gasoline by 8%, as well as the price of natural gas and oil used for home heating, which again has nothing to do with putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions.

Far from addressing climate change, our electricity rates are going through the roof mainly to generate more revenue for government, a better return on equity for utilities, to upgrade our aging electrical grid and pay off debt.

The only impact on climate change is a brutal and unfair one to consumers. It’s that at some point, which obviously varies from household to household, electricity becomes so expensive, people cut their consumption not for the sake of the environment or because they have a choice, but because they can’t afford to pay for the electricity they need.

That’s already happened in the U.K., where millions of households have been driven into “fuel poverty”, defined as paying more than 10% of income for home energy costs alone.

Ontario’s multi-billion-dollar subsidy of wind and solar power — which basically means forcing consumers to pay more than the market price for electricity — is just starting to kick into hydro rates and will have a major upward impact in future.

Presumably, this will lower greenhouse gas emissions, if that power is used to replace fossil fuel-generated electricity.

But unless the government puts a price on carbon dioxide emissions — thereby raising electricity prices even more — these subsidies make no economic sense over the long term.

All that will happen is renewable energy companies will happily gobble up these inflated government subsidies, which last about 20 years, until they run out, then close shop.

In order for wind and solar power to become major energy sources, economically viable over the long term, they have to become price competitive with fossil fuels.

The whole point of putting a price on carbon dioxide emissions, whether through a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, is to speed up this process, by raising the cost of fossil fuels.

Eventually, so the theory goes, breakthroughs in research and technology will make renewable energy less expensive and more reliable, to the point where it will one day replace fossil fuels as a major energy source, funded primarily by private investment.

Whether all of this will ever happen, or work according to plan, is anyone’s guess.

For now, McGuinty and Duguid need to tell people the truth. That is, most of the recent price hikes to electricity have nothing to do with fighting climate change.

If we want to do that, it’s going to cost us even more for electricity than we’re paying now (as well as for almost everything else), even with a 25% rate hike by the end of 2011.

As hard as that may be to believe. Or stomach.

Article courtesy of Toronto Sun

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Whoops!

2010-05-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

by James Delingpole
4th May 2010

Whoops! CO2 has almost nothing to do with
Global Warming, discovers top US Meteorologist

The other night I had a nightmare in which a general election was approaching and all three main competing parties had the same suicidal policy. They all believed in this thing called the Big Bad Fairy and were convinced that the only way to drive off the BBF and her evil hordes was by spending huge sums of taxpayers’ money – £18 billion a year was, I believe, the figure quoted in the nightmare – and by ruining the country with ugly, spinning Fairy Towers for the bad fairy hordes to nest in.

Then I woke up and found…

Seriously, though, what do we do? How we can possibly stop the environmental and energy policy of our next government being based on what US meteorologist Dr Roy Spencer calls “the worst case of mass hysteria the world has known.”?

Dr Spencer, formerly senior scientist for climate studies at NASA, now leads the US science team for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSRE) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. He co-developed the original satellite method for precise monitoring of global temperatures from Earth-orbiting satellites. He’s just the kind of egghead the IPCC claims to represent when it tells us the world is getting dangerously warmer, it’s man’s fault – the result of CO2 emissions – and it must be urgently addressed.

Except Dr Spencer doesn’t agree with any of that. He thinks it’s all nonsense, based on a very elementary error he describes in his new book The Great Global Warming Blunder. I summarise his arguments in this article.

Climate change, he shows, is an almost entirely natural process on which human influence is negligible.

Of course, sceptics have been making this point for years, arguing that the quantities of carbon dioxide (CO2) produced by man are so tiny that even if they were to double there would still be no dangerous Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

What they have been unable to answer convincingly until now, though, is the alarmists’ counterargument that CO2 emissions are exaggerated by “positive feedbacks”.

One type of positive feedback often cited by alarmists is cloud cover. When CO2 causes the world to warm, they argue, it reduces the number of clouds. Clouds are what help protect our planet from the burning heat of the sun, by reflecting solar radiation.

So even if the effect on climate of CO2 is relatively small, the potential knock-on effect is vast. This is why the predictions of temperature rises made by the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports are so large and terrifying.

But according to Spencer, these alarmists have got completely the wrong end of the stick. The mistake they have made is to confuse cause with effect. It’s not man-made global warming that is causing cloud cover to grow thinner, leading to a spiral of ever-rising temperatures. Rather, it’s natural variations in cloud cover that are helping to cause global warming.

This is what’s so annoying about the drivel produced by people like the Conservatives’ Shadow Secretary for Energy and Climate Change Greg Clark. I mention him because the likelihood is that this ill-informed buffoon will, this time next week, be in charge of arguably the most important sector of our economy: making decisions on how we power our industry, how much our utility bills are inflated through “green taxes”, how much money we waste on windfarms, and so on.

Yet this man’s entire ecological world view – his Weltanschauung, if you prefer, because I know how much some of you love it when I come over all German on you – is based on an urban myth.

I’m not necessarily saying “Don’t vote Conservative?” But “Don’t vote Greg Clark” might be a good start.

PS Telegraph blogs has been having a bit of trouble with the system, so you may need to be patient trying to get your comments in. My guess is that the trolls will be unusually active on this post, and that one of the things they’ll rush gleefully to point out is that Roy Spencer is a proponent of Intelligent Design. As if, somehow, that killer fact is so damning it utterly nullifies Dr Spencer’s meteorological expertise.

Article courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk

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Virginia launches Investigation into Climategate's Michael Mann

2010-05-04T16:02:00.000-07:00

by Lawrence Solomon
4th May 2010

The State of Virginia has decided to investigate possible wrong-doing by Michael Mann of Climategate fame. Michael Mann is best known as the scientist, associated with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, who came up with the controversial Hockey Stick Graph that became the icon of the global warming movement. Virginia's investigation is the first by a government on this side of the Atlantic.

In the investigation, Virginia's Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II, has demanded that the University of Virginia, where Mann was a professor until five years ago, produce documents to determine whether Mann defrauded taxpayers in obtaining climate change research grants.

Cuccinelli's investigation, he explained, directly flowed from the Climategate emails, which raised reasonable doubts about whether any wrong-doing had occurred. If Mann knowingly presented inconsistencies in obtaining government research funds, Cuccinelli explained, Mann would be civiliy liable.

Article courtesy of Probe International

The $10,000,000,000,000 Climate Fraud

2010-04-30T09:50:00.000-07:00

Editorial
28th April 2010

Al Gore is co-founder of an investment management firm that is now

the fifth-largest shareholder in the Chicago Climate Exchange

Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House.

Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore's appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation's philanthropic leaders.

"Time's running out (on climate change)," Gore told them. "We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together."

Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the climate scam alive as evidence of outright climate fraud grows, just as they were critical in the beginning when the Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, essentially, air. More specifically perhaps, hot air.

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) advertises itself as "North America's only cap-and-trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide." Barack Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002 when the CCX startup grants were issued. As president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities. Now isn't that special?

Few Americans have heard of either entity. The Joyce Foundation was originally the financial nest egg of a widow whose family had made millions in the now out-of-favor lumber industry.

After her death, the foundation was run by philanthropists who increasingly dedicated their giving to liberal causes, including gun control, environmentalism and school changes.

Currently, CCX members agree to a voluntary but legally binding agreement to regulate greenhouse gases.

The CCX provides the mechanism in trading the very pollution permits and carbon offsets the administration's cap-and-trade proposals would impose by government mandate.

Thanks to Fox News' Glenn Beck, we have learned a lot about CCX, not the least of which is that its founder, Richard Sandor, says he knew Obama well back in the day when the Joyce Foundation awarded money to the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, where Sandor was a research professor.

Sandor estimates that climate trading could be "a $10 trillion dollar market." It could very well be, if cap-and-trade measures like Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer are signed into law, making energy prices skyrocket, and as companies buy and sell permits to emit those six "greenhouse" gases.

Article courtesy of Investors Business Daily

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Citizen’s Group Plans Extensive Audit of U.N. Climate Report

2010-04-29T01:25:00.000-07:00

by Gene J. Koprowski
28th April 2010

A leading global warming skeptic recruited a group of concerned citizens to fact-check the sources referenced in the U.N.'s latest climate-change bible -- and gave the report an "F." Now she's planning the nail in the coffin: a comprehensive audit of the entire report.

Following a series of scandals that led to doubts about the accuracy of the United Nations' most recent climate-change report, Donna Laframboise of NoConsensus.org gathered a group of citizens online and proved that the U.N. over-relied upon so-called "gray literature," rather than using exclusively peer-reviewed scientific reports as the organization was supposed to do.

Now Laframboise and her colleagues are taking the next step, FoxNews.com has learned. They are building an online database that will let everyone see exactly what the report claims -- and precisely how it came to those conclusions.

“There's a pile of work that can and should be done on this report,” Laframboise told FoxNews.com.

The Canadian watchdog is working with a computer programmer in Australia whose software will let her and her colleagues further analyze the report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N.'s climate arm.

“It's starting to look good, and he is linking in all sorts of other material, including IPCC reviewer comments to various parts of the text -- at the moment they aren't easy to access by the average person -- as well as the entire Climate-gate e-mail database,” Laframboise said.

“I suspect it'll be a month, perhaps two, before he's ready for prime time. At that point, there will be a friendly web-based interface for everyone to use. When he finally goes live, it's going to be an extremely powerful research tool. So there are good things in the pipeline.”

Contacted repeatedly by FoxNews.com for comment on Lafromboise's criticism's and NoConsensus.org's plans, IPCC spokeswoman Isabel-Garcia Gill refused to comment.

The Union of Concerned Scientists was critical of Lafromboise's initial effort. Chief scientist Peter Frumhoff, a lead author of the deforestation section of the U.N.’s climate-change report, claimed that “by and large, the IPCC process works exceptionally well.” He welcomed an additional review of the IPCC data, saying that “independent review of IPCC procedures … will assess opportunities for further strengthening it.”

But another former contributor to the IPCC process, Patrick J. Michaels, a scientist and senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, and the past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, told FoxNews.com that the real criticism of the U.N.’s climate report has just begun.

In addition to Laframboise’s NoConsensus.org, he said, there is a new “parallel universe” of online publications emerging, manned by serious scientists critical of the approach by governments around the world to climate change. He includes sites such as Climate Audit, Watts Up With That?, and TheBlackboard in that galaxy.

“A parallel universe is assembling itself parallel to the IPCC,” Michaels told FoxNews.com. "This universe has become very technical -- very proficient at taking apart the U.N.’s findings."

Michaels is presenting a new report during the upcoming Heartland Institute conference on climate change that examines the EPA finding that carbon dioxide is endangering the planet and needs to be regulated. The finding was released last winter on the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit.

“The endangerment finding was based on the fourth assessment finding by the IPCC and the synthesis report by the U.S. Global Change Research Institute,” said Michaels. He worries that policymakers, who cannot get cap and trade legislation through the U.S. Senate, may try to make regulations based on the U.N.’s global warming report, as incorporated into the “endangerment” finding on CO2.

That report, says Michaels, “suffers from systemic errors.”

All of this skepticism is hacking away at public support for global warming regulations. A poll published last week by Rasmussen Reports indicates that only 33 percent of Americans think global warming is caused by human activity; 48 percent think it is caused by longer-term planetary trends.

Getting new data out to the public is the mission of Laframboise, Climate Audit, and the other online publishers. “Many of the volunteers who participated in the citizen audit feel there is more work to be done and have expressed an interest in taking part in future projects,” Laframboise told FoxNews.com.

“We're in a position to assess whether the IPCC followed or broke any other rules. Now that we’ve seen how seriously they took the peer-reviewed rule, we suspect that there are numerous other guidelines, that they themselves established, and boasted about following, that were also violated. A number of promising avenues for further research were suggested by the project we’ve just completed.”

Article courtesy of Fox News

Australia won’t Cap and Trade

2010-04-28T17:18:00.000-07:00

by Lawrence Solomon
27th April 2010

Seeing countries around the world back away from their climate change commitments, and seeing his own electoral support crumble, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced today that Australia will be shelving its cap and trade program for at least three years, until after the next election. “That will provide the Australian government at the time with a better position to assess the level of global action on climate change," he told the Australian press.

In recent weeks, Rudd has been embarrassed by decisions by the US and Japanese governments to put climate change on the back burner and alarmed by the growing opposition at home to climate change legislation. His once popular plans to cut back emissions by 5% by 2020, which were scheduled to begin next year, have been twice rejected by Australia’s Senate faced certain defeat in a third vote that was expected in several weeks.

Once the darling of the environmental movement, Rudd is now widely seen as ineffectual. A poll commissioned by the Climate Institute and the Conservation Foundation found that just 36% of voters saw Rudd as the best person to handle climate issues, and that 40% found no difference between his Labour government and opposition conservatives. Other polling shows the opposition gaining in the public opinion polls, as an increasingly skeptical public turns against the climate change orthodoxy.

By scrapping next year’s cap and trade plan, the Rudd government – and the Australian public – will see benefits in the upcoming budget, expected May 11. With Australians no longer needing to finance the cap and trade program, budget watchers predict a saving of some $2.32 billion.

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

Article courtesy of National Post

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Seeing is Believing

2010-04-28T17:05:00.000-07:00

Video courtesy of co2science @YouTube

More Global Warming Profiteering by Obama Energy Official

2010-04-28T16:35:00.000-07:00

by Christopher Horner
26th April 2010

Surprising documents made available to this author reveal that Assistant Secretary of Energy Cathy Zoi has a huge financial stake in companies likely to profit from the Obama administration’s “green” policies.

Zoi, who left her position as CEO of the Alliance for Climate Protection — founded by Al Gore — to serve as assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy, now manages billions in “green jobs” funding. But the disclosure documents show that Zoi not only is in a position to affect the fortunes of her previous employer, ex-Vice President Al Gore, but that she herself has large holdings in two firms that could directly profit from policies proposed by the Department of Energy.

Among Zoi’s holdings are shares in Serious Materials, Inc., the previously sleepy, now bustling, friend of the Obama White House whose public policy operation is headed by her husband. Between them, Zoi and her husband hold 120,000 shares in Serious Materials, as well as stock options. Reporter John Stossel has already explored what he sees as the “crony capitalism” implied by Zoi being so able to influence the fortunes of a company to which she is so closely associated.

In addition, the disclosure forms reflect that Zoi holds between $250,000 and $500,000 in “founders shares” in Landis+Gyr, a Swiss “smart meter” firm. She also still owns between $15,000 and $50,000 in ordinary shares.

“Smart meters,” put simply, are electric meters that return information about customer power usage to the power company immediately and allow a power company to control the amount of power a customer can consume. These smart meters are a central component of the Obama administration’s plans to reduce electricity consumption as part of the “smart grid.”

In a rare moment of candor, Obama “Energy Czar” Carol Browner said to US News & World Report last year: “We need to make sure that …[e]ventually, we can get to a system where an electric company will be able [sic] to hold back some of the power so that maybe your air conditioner won’t operate at its peak, you’ll still be able to cool your house, but that’ll be a savings to the consumer.” (emphasis added)

Clearly, DoE funding to encourage the adoption of “smart meters” would very likely lead to much increased sales by Landis+Gyr — and a potential windfall for Zoi. But surely Zoi doesn’t participate in the relevant “energy efficiency” policy ??

In fact, as a condition of her employment with the Obama administration, while Ms. Zoi maintained significant security holdings in Serious Materials and Landis+Gyr, she promised to “not participate personally and substantially in any particular matter that has a direct and predictable effect on the[ir] financial interest” without obtaining a waiver first.

But then, if she doesn’t participate in decisions that could have a “direct and predictable effect” on her Landis+Gyr holdings and she doesn’t participate in decisions that could have a “direct and predictable effect” on her holdings in Serious Materials, it seems worth asking in which decisions she can participate.

Doesn’t Zoi’s involvement in these issues raise serious ethical or legal issues?

Given her position and the breadth of the decisions and duties from which she would have to recuse herself if someone with the rather glaring conflicts as Ms. Zoi has follows through on her promises to avoid participating in decisions that would impact companies in which she oddly has retained a substantial financial interest — what decisions and policies is she participating in? Has she obtained waivers? If so, on what; if not, why not? Re-read her title. Re-review her investments. What, precisely, is she doing on our dime and how come she is permitted to carry such obvious conflicts of interest that either preclude her from working on nearly any matter of substance under her purview, or trigger automatically serious ethical and other considerations? And, what happened to that whole ethical, transparency thing?

(See the exclusive PJTV interview with Christopher Horner.)

Article courtesy of Pajamas Media

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Climate Change Bill collapses in Senate

2010-04-28T15:19:00.000-07:00

25th April 2010

A long-awaited climate change bill that would put a price on excessive carbon emissions and generate billions of dollars has been postponed indefinitely.

US Senator John F. Kerry's 20 years of climate change plans hit the bottom Saturday after Senator Lindsey Graham, who had allied himself with Kerry on the issue, abandoned the effort in an unprecedented move.

The South Carolina Republican suddenly decided to switch priorities, claiming that that the Senate's Democratic leadership might proceed with a controversial immigration bill first.

"Moving forward on immigration — in this hurried, panicked manner — is nothing more than a cynical political ploy,'' Graham said. “I know from my own personal experience the tremendous amounts of time, energy, and effort that must be devoted to this issue to make even limited progress.''

The bill, which would create a system that prices carbon emissions and leads most of the proceeds to the public in rebate forms, would provide clean energy incentives worth USD 2 billion a year to the coal industry, Kerry told the Boston Globe, calling it "reduce and refund."

The goal of the plan is to cut 17 percent of carbon pollution from 2005 to 2020 and 80 percent by 2050.

"It is going to put America, for the first time in 30 years, legitimately on the road to energy independence, and it is going to reduce pollution in the air," Kerry said.

Giving states a chance to resume stricter regulations, the House bill will temporarily freeze until 2017.

The Senate bill will probably make that freeze permanent; however, according to the bill's draft, lost revenues will be paid to states for such programs.

Article courtesy of PressTV

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The Stern Review Scandal

2010-04-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

by Donna Laframboise
24th April 2010

The IPCC broke three of its own rules when it cited the Stern Review 25 times in 12 chapters.

In March 2007, Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was interviewed by a reporter from the Bloomberg business news service. The discussion centered on the soon-to-be-released second installment of the IPCC's newly updated climate bible.

Tangentially, Pachauri was asked about the Stern Review, a report written by economists employed by the British government. Pachauri told Bloomberg the IPCC was aware of the 700-page report but that his organization's ability to make use of it was limited because it was not peer-reviewed.

Imagine my surprise therefore, when an audit of IPCC references I organized recently revealed that the IPCC had cited the Stern Review all over the place. Not once or twice. And not in a chapter or two. I'm talking at least 25 times across 12 chapters.

Given that Pachauri told a reporter that relying on this report would be improper why would the IPCC cite it on this page, this page, this page - and on two separate occasions on this page?

Why would the Stern Review be used as the sole supporting evidence for an IPCC claim regarding how many people in India and China depend on glaciers for their water supply? Why would it be cited on this page, this page, this page, twice on this page, on this page, this page, this page, in an executive summary here, and five times on this page?

Why would it be mentioned here, here, here, two more times here, and here as well? I mean, how many more times could it possibly have been cited had it been a full-fledged, peer-reviewed document?

But that isn't the only irregularity. The IPPC likes to brag about its allegedly rigorous internal review process. After the first draft is written, expert reviewers are invited to offer their feedback. A second draft is then prepared and, once again, reviewers are invited to submit comments.

The IPPC is at perfect liberty to ignore these comments, but that is a discussion for another time. What's important here is that, in order to be eligible for inclusion in the IPCC report, documents had to be published prior to a hard deadline. As chairman Pachauri explained in an essay four days ago, the 2007 IPPC report:

...was based on scientific studies completed before January 2006, and did not include later studies...

The big reason for this deadline is that all material discussed in the IPCC report needed to be available for inspection by the expert reviewers.

Moreover, there were cutoff dates after which comments from said reviewers were no longer accepted. For the two sections of the IPCC report where references to the Stern Review abound those dates were July 21 and September 15, 2006.

So guess when the Stern Review was released? Not until October 30th - ten full months after the publication date deadline, and well after the expert reviewers were out of the picture. Which begs the question: why bother with an elaborate internal review process if, after all the reviewers go home, you're going to insert new material into 12 different chapters?

Not one of the "2,500 expert reviewers" Pachauri boasted about as recently as four days ago was given any opportunity to read the 700-page Stern Review - never mind advise the IPCC as to whether that report disregards evidence from bona fide peer-reviewed studies.

The conclusion here isn't pretty: by citing the Stern Review, the IPPC broke not one, not two, but three of its own rules. First, it had to deliberately overlook the fact that this document is not peer-reviewed. (See examples here of Pachauri claiming that the IPCC bases its report solely on peer-reviewed literature and that non-peer-reviewed material belongs "in the dustbin".)

Second, it had to violate the published-before-January-2006 rule about which Pachauri recently reminded us.

Third, it had to subvert its own requirement that text in the IPCC report be subject to two rounds of expert review.

Are we impressed yet?

April 25th UPDATE: The orginal post implied, in the first line of paragraph six at the first link, that the Stern Review was cited twice on this page. Actually, it's mentioned twice by name within the same paragraph, but there's only one citation. I've therefore removed the "twice" that originally appeared in that clause. Having now quadruple-checked the numbers, it seems the 2007 IPCC report cited the Stern Review on 26 separate occasions. I arrived at my findings this way (clicking on the links in paragraphs 4, 5 and 6 above will take you to each of these pages):

Working Group 2

-page 4.7.2 cites the Stern Review once
-page 6.6.5 cites it once
-page 7.5 cites it once
-page 9.1 cites it twice (5 so far)
-page 10.4.2 cites it once
-page 16.5.2 cites it once
-page 16.5.4 cites it once
-page 16.6 cites it once
-page 18.4.2 cites it twice (11 so far)
-page 18.5 cites it once
-page 19.3.2 cites it once
-page 19.3.7 cites it once
-page 20 cites it once
-page 20.6.1 cites it 5 times

TOTAL: 20 citations, 9 chapters

Working Group 3

-page 1.2.2 cites it once
-page 1.2.3 cites it once
-page 1.2.3.2 cites it once
-page 9.1 cites it twice
-page 11.5.1 cites it once

TOTAL: 6 citations, 3 chapters

Article courtesy of No Frakking Consensus

IPCC's Brand New Global Warming Screw-up: Happy Earth Day ??

2010-04-28T13:24:00.000-07:00

22nd April 2010

Today is the 40th annual Earth Day, when the Blue Bird of climate change look at every country to see if they have been environmentally good or bad. She rewards the good countries with favors and punishes the bad by pooping on their bad gas-guzzling methods of transportation.

Bangladesh, must have been a good country, because a new study has proven the UN's climate change body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is wrong again, and despite the IPCC prediction, Bangladesh is not about find itself under the rising ocean anytime soon. The IPCC had said a one-metre (three-foot) rise in sea levels would flood 17 percent of Bangladesh and create 20 million refugees by 2050.

The claim helped create a widespread consensus that the low-lying country was on the "front line" of climate change, but a new study argues the IPCC ignored the role sediment plays in countering sea level rises.

..IPCC's prediction did not take into account the one billion tonnes of sediment carried by Himalayan rivers into Bangladesh every year, which are crucial in countering rises in sea levels, the study funded by the Asian Development Bank said.

"Sediments have been shaping Bangladesh's coast for thousands of years," said Maminul Haque Sarker, director of the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS), who led research for the study.

Let me take the IPCC's side for a second, how can someone expect scientists to know that rivers pouring into a larger border of water will deposit sediment. After all, not many people have heard of the Mississippi Delta, or the Nile Delta. Just because the Ganges delta, which crosses India and Bangladesh is the largest delta in the world, why would people expect the IPCC scientists to take it into account.

Previous "studies on the effects of climate change in Bangladesh, including those quoted by the IPCC, did not consider the role of sediment in the growth and adjustment process of the country?s coast and rivers to the sea level rise," he told AFP.

Even if sea levels rise a maximum one metre in line with the IPCC's 2007 predictions, the new study indicates most of Bangladesh's coastline will remain intact, said Sarker.

"Based on the findings of the study, it appears that most of Bangladesh?s coastline, notably the Meghna estuary, which is one of the largest in the world, would rise at the same pace as the sea level growth," he said.

The Bangladesh mistake joins the multitude of other mistakes made by the IPCC during the past few months, including:

* Its prediction of the melting of the Himalayan glacier was wrong

* The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world.

* Basing some of its Claims on information in press releases and newsletters not scientific study, or making statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished. Other claims were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups like the WWF (for example the panel based claims about disappearing mountain ice on anecdotal evidence in a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine).

* IPCC’s panel had wrongly reported more than half of the Netherlands was below sea level because it had failed to check information supplied by a Dutch government agency.

And don't forget the screw ups about the snow on other mountain tops, the mis-used report about the shrinking rain forests or the bogus claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020.

On top of all that is the Hockey Stick, the centerpiece of the IPCC's claim, which has had some many holes put into it source data, it can be sold as Swiss Cheese.

The Global warming Moonbats claim that the climate change detractors are taking just one or two mistakes and using it to trash their theory. If there were merely one or two mistakes they would be correct. The truth is their climate change research has so many mistakes in it, I wouldn't believe their weather forecast for tomorrow. Why should anybody trust their predictions for the world climate for years to come?

Article courtesy of The Lid

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A Modern-Day Little Ice Age

2010-04-28T10:54:00.000-07:00

22nd April 2010

Quieter activity on Sun may push Britain

into a Modern-Day Little Ice Age

Frozen Britain: Large parts of Britain and Central Europe were covered in snow during last winter, as

this Nasa satellite image from January 7 shows. Scientists think low solar activity could be the culprit

Horse racing on frozen rivers? Ice bowling? Activities last seen during Britain's Little Ice Age could once more be seen, researchers believe.

Having just emerged from a bitterly cold winter the experts are warning that Britain could return to the mini ice-age at the end of the 17th century. This is despite claims that global warming is causing Arctic ice to melt and temperatures to rise.

Back then the Thames played host to 'frost fairs' complete with puppet shows, horse races and ice bowling. Henry VIII is even said to have travelled all the way from central London to Greenwich by sleigh.

The prediction of a return to an annual deep freeze follows research linking solar flares and other activity on the surface of the Sun with the weather across northern Europe.

Scientists found that when the Sun is relatively calm, winters are harsh.

The Sun passes through high and low phases of activity during an 11-year cycle, which affects how much radiation and particles stream towards Earth.

Visible evidence of this cycle is provided by the dark sun spots on the Sun's surface.

If there are a large number of these spots, the Sun is experiencing a particularly high level of magnetic activity and therefore radiates very brightly. Which leads to warmer winters but now the opposite is true.

The cold winters are brought by the the freezing winds coming to northern and central Europe from Siberia.

These winds are normally stopped by the jet stream but scientists have found that this bends at times of low solar activity allowing the cold air through. The connection between the jet stream bending and solar activity is not fully understood.

A frost fair on the Thames River. Henry VIII is even said to have

travelled all the way from central London to Greenwich by sleigh

Scientists believe cold winds travel south towards Europe and mild west winds are blocked

due to a bend in a jet stream. The bend is thought to be caused by low solar activity

This bend also stops warm winds from the Atlantic reaching this part of Europe.

Professor Mike Lockwood started the investigation after he realised the past two cold British winters had coincided with a particularly quiet period in the Sun's activity.

He was helped in his research by colleagues at Reading University, along with scientists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire and the Max Planck Institute in Germany.

The team studied British weather records back to 1659. These were then compared with solar activity over the same period.

Solar activity is indicated by the strength of the solar magnetic field, which extends to Earth where it causes small fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field.

Reliable measurements of the Sun’s magnetic field are only available from 1900 onwards, so researchers used computer simulations for further back in time.

The statistical comparisons clearly showed that after decades of high solar activity and comparably mild winters, low solar activity and severe winters had become more common in Europe again.

Professor Somi Solanki from the Max Planck Institute said this meant the recent cold weather did not contradict the theory that global warming is being caused by human activity.

'The connection between solar activity and cold winters in Europe only became apparent after we subtracted the superimposed trend towards global warming,' he said.

So don't throw away your thermals just yet.

Global warming? The unusual sight of a snow-bound street in West London

this February. The severe winter could be due to a kink in the Gulf Stream

Article courtesy of MailOnline

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EU Climate Chief Calls for Energy Tax

2010-04-28T09:26:00.000-07:00

19th April 2010

The European Union's top climate official called for an energy tax to boost the bloc's climate protection efforts.

EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard told Monday's Neue Osnabruecker Zeitung that "energy taxes are among the instruments we should use for climate protection in the EU, because that's how energy consumption is reduced."

Denmark's Hedegaard, who led the U.N. climate negotiations in Copenhagen last year, said instead of imposing high work-related taxes, which threaten European companies competing with foreign firms "it would be much smarter to install a system that includes a top tax rate for areas threatening the common good, such as a excessive energy consumption."

French President Nicolas Sarkozy wanted to introduce a carbon emissions tax as part of a plan to slash greenhouse gas emissions, combat climate change and become less dependent on fuel imports.

Drafted as a tax on transport and household fuels, the measure was due to come into effect this year but was scrapped by Sarkozy last month after significant headwind for his reform plans.

Paris said it would postpone the tax in order not to damage French companies' competitiveness because other European nations aren't planning a similar tax.

France and Italy last week pressed the EU to consider a carbon tax on imports from countries who are not doing enough to stop climate change.

In a letter to European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi urged Brussels to "specify without reservation the conditions in which such an adjustment mechanism could be set up."

Their letter pointed out that the commission is due to report in June on carbon pollution by key industries and make recommendations.

"It would be unacceptable if the ambitious efforts already agreed by the EU to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ... were compromised by carbon leaking due to lacking or insufficient action by certain third countries," the letter reads.

The European Union does have joint goals: Brussels in 2008 agreed on ambitious climate protection and renewable energy targets.

The EU aims to cut its greenhouse gases by 20 percent, boost the share of renewables in the energy mix to 20 percent and reduce energy consumption by 20 percent -- all by 2020.

The 27-member bloc will shoot for a 30-percent emissions cut if the world's other big polluters agree to their own binding reductions at the end of a U.N. process to agree to an ambitious successor to the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012.

Article courtesy of UPI

Climategate: a scandal that won’t go away

2010-04-27T19:10:00.000-07:00

by Christopher Booker
17th April 2010

From Macbeth to Watergate, it’s not the act that leads to

nemesis, but the attempts to 'trammel up the consequence’

Rajendra Pachauri, right, with Al Gore, receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the IPCC in 2007

If you were faced with by far the biggest bill of your life, would you not want to be confident that there was a very good reason why you should pay it? That is why we need to know just how far we can trust the science behind the official view that the world is threatened with catastrophe by global warming – because the measures proposed by our politicians to avert this supposed disaster threaten to transform our way of life out of recognition and to land us with easily the biggest bill in history. (The Climate Change Act alone, says the Government, will cost us all £18 billion every year until 2050.)

Yet in recent months, as we know, the official science on which all this rests has taken quite a hammering. Confronted with all those scandals surrounding the “Climategate” emails and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the political and academic establishments have responded with a series of inquiries and statements designed to show that the methods used to construct the official scientific case are wholly sound. But as was illustrated last week by two very different reports, these efforts to hold the line are themselves so demonstrably flawed that they are in danger of backfiring, leaving the science more questionable than ever.

The first report centred directly on the IPCC itself. When several of the more alarmist claims in its most recent 2007 report were revealed to be wrong and without any scientific foundation, the official response, not least from the IPCC’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was to claim that everything in its report was “peer-reviewed”, having been confirmed by independent experts.

But a new study put this claim to the test. A team of 40 researchers from 12 countries, led by a Canadian analyst Donna Laframboise, checked out every one of the 18,531 scientific sources cited in the mammoth 2007 report. Astonishingly, they found that nearly a third of them – 5,587 – were not peer-reviewed at all, but came from newspaper articles, student theses, even propaganda leaflets and press releases put out by green activists and lobby groups.

In its own way even more damaging, however, was the report from a team led by Lord Oxburgh on the scientific integrity of the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU). Two sets of evidence have been used more than anything else to drive the worldwide scare over global warming. One is a series of graphs showing how temperatures have suddenly shot up in recent decades to levels historically unprecedented. The other is the official record of global surface temperatures. For both of these, the CRU and the key group of top British and American scientists involved in those Climategate emails have been crucially responsible.

Lord Oxburgh himself is linked to various commercial interests which make money from climate change, from wind farms to carbon trading. None of the panel he worked with on his report were climate “sceptics”; and one, Dr Kerry Emanuel, is an outspoken advocate of man-made global warming. Even so, it was surprising to see just how superficial their inquiry turned out to be, based on two brief visits to the CRU and on reading 11 scientific papers produced by the research unit in the past 24 years, chosen in consultation with the Royal Society (which is itself fanatical in promotion of warming orthodoxy).

The crown jewels of the IPCC’s case that the world faces catastrophic warming have been all those graphs based on tree rings which purport to show that temperatures have lately been soaring to levels never known before in history – thus eradicating all the evidence that the world was hotter than today during the Medieval Warm Period, long before any rise in CO2 levels. Best known of these graphs, of course, was Michael Mann’s “hockey stick”, comprehensively discredited by the expert Canadian statistician Stephen McIntyre and Professor Ross McKitrick. But the IPCC was able to defend its case with the aid of another set of “hockey sticks”, based on different tree rings, produced by Mann’s close allies at the CRU.

The most widely quoted of the Climategate emails was that from the CRU’s director, Philip Jones, saying that he had used “Mike’s Nature trick” to “hide the decline”. If there was anything in the CRU’s record which a proper inquiry should have addressed it was the story behind this email, because what it highlighted was the device used by the CRU to get round the fact that its tree-ring data hopelessly failed to show the result the warmist establishment wanted. When their Siberian tree rings showed temperatures in the late 20th century sharply dropping rather than rising, the “trick” used by Prof Jones and his colleague Dr Keith Briffa, copied from Mike Mann’s own “hockey stick”, was simply to delete the downward curve shown by the tree rings, replacing them with late 20th-century temperature data to show the dramatic warming they wanted.

The significance of this sleight of hand can scarcely be exaggerated. Why, in using this misleading graph, did the IPCC not explain the trick that had been played by its leading scientists? If tree rings were so inadequate in reflecting 20th-century temperatures, why should they be relied on to reflect temperatures in earlier centuries? Why, when fresh Siberian tree ring data came to light, making a nonsense of the CRU’s earlier temperature reconstructions, did the CRU simply ignore the new data?

Anyone who has followed the meticulous analysis of this curious story by Steve McIntyre on his Climate Audit website might well conclude that we are looking here at a complete travesty of proper scientific procedure, matched only by the bizarre methods used by Mann himself to construct his original hockey stick. Yet these are the men, Mann, Jones and Briffa, who acted as the “lead authors” of the key chapters of the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports.

They quite shamelessly promoted the rewriting of history produced by themselves and a small group of colleagues – the so-called Hockey Team – which the IPCC in turn used as its main evidence to convince the politicians that the world faces unprecedented warming.

Yet scarcely a hint of this hugely important story is contained in the Oxburgh report, which simply glosses it over, hoping to appease critics by throwing in a few vaguely critical comments about how Jones and his team were a trifle “disorganised” in archiving their data. It ignores the utterly damning critiques of the CRU’s methodology produced by McIntyre and McKitrick. It does not even begin to question the way the CRU has compiled its global temperature record, relied on by the IPCC as the most authoritative of all the official data sources for surface temperatures.

Yet this in turn has given rise to all sorts of controversies, not least when Prof Jones last year admitted that much of his data had been “lost” (following his repeated refusals of applications to see it by McIntyre and others). More damaging still was the charge by senior Russian scientists that, in compiling its global record, CRU had cherry-picked the data supplied from Russia, suppressing that from most of the country while retaining the data from the vicinity of cities which, thanks to the “urban heat island” effect, showed a warming trend. So even the accuracy of CRU’s temperature record has been called seriously in doubt, although one would never have guessed it from Oxburgh.

As is reflected in so many political tragedies, from Macbeth to Watergate, it is often not the original dark act itself which leads to nemesis but the later attempts to “trammel up the consequence”. Nothing will do more to reinforce suspicion of the CRU’s conduct than the failure, first by those MPs, and now by the team led by Lord Oxburgh, to address properly the way in which it appears to have abused the principles of true science – a scandal which should be of concern not just to us here in Britain, who paid for it, but across the world.

Article courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk

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Cap and Trade is NOT DEAD - What it Will Cost You ??

2010-04-27T16:19:00.000-07:00

Video courtesy of Fox News

Police Question Climategate Information Seekers

2010-04-27T14:20:00.000-07:00

15th April 2010

Police are investigating anyone who requested information from the

University Department at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ Scandal

Norfolk Constabulary is trying to work out who stole thousands of emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia at the end of last year.

The emails, that were posted on the internet, appear to show scientists were unwilling to reveal data on global warming and led to an international scandal known as ‘climategate’.

Already prominent climate change sceptics around the world have been questioned and members of staff at the university, but is has now emerged that ordinary members of the public who did nothing more than request information are also being targeted.

Sebastian Nokes, a businessman and climate change sceptic, wrote to a national newspaper to complain.

He said all he had done was request information on the CRU’s disclosure rules and he was questioned on his political and scientific beliefs.

Detective Superintendent Julian Gregory, who is leading the investigation, said his unit is looking into anyone who could give clues to who stole the emails and working with experts in "extremism".

“As with any investigation we will interview anyone who may have information which is of relevance to the enquiry,” he said.

The university was cleared of scientific malpractice recently. There is separate ongoing investigation by academics into whether Freedom of Information requests were dealt with correctly.

Article courtesy of Telegraph.co.uk

Whitewashing is quick work !!!

2010-04-27T13:52:00.000-07:00

by Iain Murray
15th April 2010

Hard on the heels of the report of the one-day British Parliamentary inquiry into the Climategate scandal comes the report of the grandly-named International Science Assessment Panel set up by the University of East Anglia (UEA). Surprise, surprise, it finds nothing wrong except a few lapses in concentration caused by all the hard work climate scientists are doing to save the planet. Unfortunately for the alarmist cheerleaders who will treat these reports as complete exoneration, they suffer from exactly the same problems as the scientific reports Climategate centered around. They are sloppy and incomplete while pretending to be the comprehensive answer. As such, they damage the authority of science just as much as Climategate itself.

The Parliamentary Inquiry was never going to produce much. A single day’s hearings about a complicated subject with no-one on the committee an expert and several members true believers in global warming alarmism is not a recipe for an in-depth investigation. The main skeptical witness was Lord Lawson of Blaby, who, for all his strengths, is not an expert in the science himself. Researchers like Ross McKitrick, who have laid out strong cases for why Climategate reveals deliberate manipulation of science, were not asked to give evidence.

In the end, the Committee basically took the UEA scientists’ word for it, giving them the benefit of the doubt, and saying that the scientists were blameless. Even this committee, however, did find that “The leaked emails appear to show a culture of non-disclosure at CRU [the UEA’s Climate Research Unit] and instances where information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure, particularly to climate change skeptics.” Finding an anti-scientific culture at CRU and also that the CRU’s Director’s reputation remained intact, as the Inquiry did, is political doublespeak of the highest order. Its finding should be viewed in that light.

As for the so-called International Science Assessment panel, not much scientific assessment was done, by its own admission. The report states that the eight members spent 15 person-days total talking to UEA scientists, but no figure is given for discussions with outside figures like Prof. McKitrick. The substantive part of the report is just 5 pages long, weighing it at about 2000 words, shorter than most magazine articles on the subject. The panel members only looked at eleven published articles from CRU selected on the advice of the Royal Society, which itself has taken on a role as an advocate for global warming alarmism. All eight panel members didn’t read all eleven papers. Instead, “Every paper was read by a minimum if three Panel members at least one of whom was familiar with the general area to which the paper related. At least one of the other two was a generalist with no special climate science expertise but with experience of some of the general techniques and methods employed in the work.”

The whitewash has been applied so thinly, you can still see the scandal poking through. “Regrettable” lapses in scientific judgment are excused because of the pressures the scientists felt working in such a high-profile field, which in any other working environment would have been reason to be extra careful about quality control. Moreover, one of the main critiques from the skeptics about the research of CRU and others even before climategate was the lack of interaction with professional statisticians. Even this report finds this criticism has value: “We cannot help remarking that it is very surprising that research in an area that depends so heavily on statistical methods has not been carried out in close collaboration with professional statisticians.” In fact, the handling of the historical temperature data and fabrication of the so-called hockey stick by the CRU scientists, Michael Mann and others was only possible because they did not share their methodology with statisticians, who would have called them on it. The Wegman Report to Congress refers.

Clearly the main accusations leveled at UEA after the Climategate scandal have not yet been addressed in any form by an independent inquiry. There is one more to come, from Sir Muir Russell’s team, which supposedly will investigate accusations of abuse of the peer-review process. If it approaches the inquiry with the same lack of thoroughness and superficiality as the previous inquiries, it will doubtless also find little wrong. However, those who have read Ross McKitrick’s narratives know there is a case to answer.

Until such time as an independent inquiry actually addresses these concerns in a thorough and, yes, unbiased manner, Climategate will remain an open wound in the side of climate science.

Iain Murray is a Director of Projects and Analysis and Senior Fellow in Energy, Science and Technology at CEI. He is also a contributor to OpenMarket.org. A veteran blogger, Mr Murray contributes to National Review Online’s Corner and Planet Gore blogs, The Commons Blog and CEI’s own OpenMarket.

Article courtesy of The Daily Caller

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Could the Frost Fair be back in business ??

2010-04-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

by Fiona MacRae
15th April 2010

Experts predict our rivers could

freeze once again during winter

Britain's rivers could once more become home to 'frost fairs' as waterways freeze for months at a time, research suggests.

Experts have warned that the country should brace itself for a return to the bitterly cold winters last seen at the end of the 17th century - despite claims that global warming is causing Arctic ice to melt and temperatures to rise.

During the 'Little Ice Age' of the 1500s and 1600s, winters were so harsh that the Thames froze over for up to three months a year.

Frozen in time: The Frost Fair on the Thames in 1841 was the last -

but could lower temperatures see them make a comeback?

The river played host to fairs complete with puppet shows, food stalls, horse races and ice bowling. Henry VIII is even said to have travelled all the way from central London to Greenwich by sleigh.

The prediction of a return to an annual deep freeze follows research linking solar flares and other activity on the surface of the sun with the weather across northern Europe.

Scientists found that when the sun is relatively calm, winters are harsh. And the last time the sun was as quiet as it is now was in 1684, the coldest winter on record.

Icy chill: Winter snow on the Grand Union Canal, in Hemel Hempstead, January

The theory, published today in the Institute of Physics journal Environmental Research Letters, could help explain why Britons have just shivered their way through the deepest freeze for 31 years.

The jet stream usually brings mild winds from the west over the Atlantic and into Northern Europe. Over the past couple of winters, it appears to have lost its way for weeks at a time, and the researchers believe the low solar activity is to blame.

The result is that the UK was hit by freezing north-easterlies from the Arctic.

The Reading University researchers said: 'This winter in the UK has been the fourteenth coldest in the last 160 years and yet the global average temperature for the same period has been the fifth highest. We have discovered this kind of anomaly is significantly more common when solar activity is low.'

Professor Mike Lockwood, the report's chief author, said the trends do not guarantee colder winters but suggest 'a greater number' will occur.

Article courtesy of MailOnline

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Criminalizing Climate Skepticism

2010-04-27T10:51:00.000-07:00

by Paul Joseph Watson
13th April 2010

Club of Rome behind Eco-Fascist purge

to criminalize Climate Skepticism

Ultra elitist organization that openly bragged of inventing global warming scare to manipulate population behind new onslaught of green fascism which would criminalize questioning man-made climate change

The British lawyer who last week called for introducing international laws through the United Nations which would make it a crime against humanity to question the reality of man-made global warming has close ties with the Club of Rome – the ultra elitist organization which openly bragged of how it invented the climate change scare as a means of manipulating the global population to accept world government.

British lawyer-turned-campaigner Polly Higgins (pictured top) recently launched an initiative to have the UN put pressure on national governments to pass laws that would declare the mass destruction of ecosystems a crime against peace, punishable by the International Criminal Court.

Under the guise of going after big corporations and polluters for the war crime of emitting the gas that humans exhale and plants breathe, the proposal would actually target individuals and people who merely express skepticism towards man-made global warming.

“Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute “climate deniers” who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change,” reported the London Guardian.

Some respondents to the Guardian article agreed that merely questioning whether man-made climate change was real should be criminalized – literally calling for the establishment of a UN-run thought police that would prosecute anyone who expressed dissent against the AGW belief system.

“Would be nice if corporate-sponsored climate change denial was made an offence,” wrote one.

“Think about that lineage and possible development of a war-crimes-style trial: Come up with an issue that will fit the bill to terrify the public into accepting the strictures and governance that you demand out of fear of overpopulation (and a general control fetish), then follow that up with putting those who challenged you in the dock,” writes Planet Gore.

“I’m thinking hard, and have catalogued quite an inventory already, but must admit that this might be the best manifestation of the greens’ fascistic tendencies and totalitarian bent.”

It has now emerged that Higgins is on the board of a company called DESERTEC (www.desertec.org), which is a “charitable initiative of the Club of Rome,” according to an official DESERTEC press release.

Who or what is the Club of Rome?

The organization was founded in 1968 by global elite kingpin David Rockefeller and counts amongst its members some of the most influential power brokers on the planet, including current and former Heads of State, UN bureaucrats , high-level politicians and government officials, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe.

The Club of Rome’s 1972 publication The Limits To Growth was a Malthusian blueprint on how the human population needed to be reduced in order to prevent an ecological collapse, which in itself was merely a disguised version of the abhorrent eugenicist ideas that were circulating in the early part of the 20th century and eventually died out with Hitler. The widely discredited population bomb paranoia of the 70’s and 80’s was gradually replaced by the climate change fearmongering that we see the organization pushing today, which again is merely another regurgitation of the eugenics-obsessed policies of the elite.

Prominent members of the Club of Rome include Al Gore and Maurice Strong, both of whom are intimately involved with privately-owned carbon trading groups like the Chicago Climate Exchange, whose multi-million dollar profits are solely reliant on protecting the credibility of the man-made global warming thesis from skeptics who have challenged its legitimacy in light of the Climategate scandal.

On page 75 of their 1990 publication entitled The First Global Revolution, the organization outlined how they would manufacture ecological scares in order to manipulate the public into accepting the imposition of a dictatorial world government run by them.

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. All these dangers are caused by human intervention… The real enemy, then, is humanity itself,” states the report, which can be read in full at the end of this article.

The passage appears under a subheadline entitled, “The common enemy of humanity is Man.”

Of course, to unite the public against a common enemy, by using divide and conquer to turn humanity against itself, villains need to be created in the public eye who can be blamed for slowing efforts to save the planet from the mythical threat of global warming, even as Arctic ice levels return to normal and much of the globe has just experienced its coldest winter in decades.

With global warmists despondent at the fact that reality hasn’t backed up their increasingly fanatical predictions, and with public opinion increasingly turning against them, they’re simply pushing ahead anyway with the agenda to impose authoritarian control measures to regulate and tax every aspect of our existence.

And if you don’t like it, then you’re obviously a well-funded propagandist for oil companies (which in fact are the most aggressive proponents of global warming), and merely questioning the likes of Al Gore is a crime against humanity for which you will be summarily silenced and punished.

Article courtesy of Prison Planet

BBC: Carbon Credit Documentary should not have been shown

2010-04-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

by Mark Olden and Michael Gillard
11th April 2010

Corporation acts on Observer investigation into secretive trust linked to

socialite Robin Birley that funded film on his carbon credits firm, Envirotrade

The BBC has ruled that a sympathetic documentary about the 'philanthropy capitalism' of socialite

Robin Birley should not have been shown. Photograph: Richard Young / Rex Features

A BBC documentary about socialite Robin Birley and his carbon credits business venture in Africa should never have been broadcast, an internal inquiry by the corporation has found. Millions of viewers were misled because the sympathetic documentary shown on BBC World News failed to declare that it was financed by a secretive trust that was linked to Birley.

The BBC acted in response to an Observer investigation into Birley's "philanthropy capitalism" venture in Mozambique. Taxpayers' money was used to subsidise poor farmers there to protect forests and plant trees that absorb carbon dioxide. Envirotrade, Birley's company, then sells "carbon credits" to celebrities and businesses wanting to offset their emissions. Customers who used Birley's venture to offset emissions included the agency that handles Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

Rockhopper TV, the production company that made the documentary, knew but did not disclose to BBC executives, of links between Envirotrade and the Africa Carbon Livelihood Trust, which funded the making of the documentary. Had it done so, Taking The Credit, the documentary, would never have been shown, the BBC ruled, although it also claimed the programme was balanced.

Birley set up and funded the Mauritius-based trust but would not say who its other donors are or how much Rockhopper was paid to make the programme. Envirotrade saw it as a "marketing" opportunity.

A BBC statement said: "As a consequence of this case, [we] will work closely with Rockhopper to ensure that robust compliance measures are implemented … Until the BBC is fully satisfied that these measures have been put in place, no Rockhopper programmes will be acquired or commissioned."

Rockhopper, which is run by Richard Wilson, a former BBC environment correspondent, and ex-Sky News presenter Anya Sitaram, told the Observer that every indication suggested that the trust was independent.

However, the inquiry found there was a "conflict of interest [that] risked bringing the BBC's editorial reputation into disrepute" because the trust's managing director, Charles Hall, is also chief executive of Envirotrade.

The BBC's own compliance failures have not been made known because the corporation refuses to release its report into the Rockhopper affair, adding to concern that a wider problem exists over commercial sponsorship arrangements on its international channel.

Birley founded Envirotrade in 2002 with a South African, Philip Powell. A year later, the European Commission awarded a €1.5m (£1.3m) grant to Envirotrade and Edinburgh University to pilot a forest project at N'hambita, Mozambique. However, in October 2007, the EC suspended its last €450,000 payment for the project and concluded the following year that unsubstantiated claims were being made about its environmental impact. The suspension was still in force when Rockhopper filmed with Birley in Mozambique last August. By then, a second team of experts working for the EC had just returned from the project. Their report was more positive than the first, but continued to find "major drawbacks" with the implementation of an aspect key to N'hambita's survival – the sale of carbon credits. Viewers of the documentary, which was shown last October, were not told about these criticisms.

Envirotrade says it has sold £1m of carbon credits. However, the EC's criticisms could mean at least £150,000 are unverified and may have to be paid back. Charles Hall, Envirotrade's chief executive, told the Observer: "The business model for Envirotrade frankly remains to be proven. The fact that this can be made into a sustainable business on the basis of selling carbon offsets remains to be seen."

It has also emerged that Envirotrade's London arm is insolvent and owes £800,000 to its parent company in Mauritius.

Hall revealed that the N'hambita project needs an immediate £1m injection from Birley. However, Birley, who says he has already put in more than £1.5m, has given no legal undertaking to provide these extra funds.

Sitaram, executive producer of the documentary, said that had Rockhopper known about the EC's criticisms it would not have touched the project. However, six weeks before broadcast, Fern, a climate campaign group, outlined these criticisms in an email exchange with the programme's researcher.

Article courtesy of Guardian.co.uk

Document calls for “Global Regime” to tackle Climate Change

2010-04-27T10:00:00.000-07:00

by Steve Watson
12th April 2010

Says critics must be disarmed, all elements of

Copenhagen Accord must be operationalised

A confidential U.S. government document obtained by the London Guardian highlights the ongoing agenda to create a structure of global governance in the name of combating climate change.

“Titled Strategic communications objectives and dated 11 March 2010, it outlines the key messages that the Obama administration wants to convey to its critics and to the world media in the run-up to the vital UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico in November.” The Guardian reports.

The newspaper says that the document (full text below) was “accidentally left on a European hotel computer” before it was passed to their editors.

The number one item on the itinerary is to “Reinforce the perception that the US is constructively engaged in UN negotiations in an effort to produce a global regime to combat climate change.” (my emphasis)

The news comes on the back of revelations that rich countries have threatened to cut vital aid to developing nations if they do not back the deal agreed at the UN climate summit in Copenhagen last year.

Elsewhere, the leaked document pinpoints the need to continue “driving the climate change story” in the mainstream media, but also identifies the need to “disarm” critics and to bypass traditional media outlets to do so, focusing more on “new media”.

The document also highlights a need to “Create a clear understanding of the CA’s [Copenhagen accord's] standing and the importance of operationalising ALL elements.”

Although the final Copenhagen agreement was largely dismissed as a failure by both the mainstream media and climate skeptics, it established the framework for a global government which will control climate finances via taxes on CO2 emissions.

The latest leaked U.S. document calls for operationalising the elements of that framework.

The final text of the accord (PDF) states that funds obtained from climate financing will be controlled by a “governance structure,” and that a “High Level Panel” will be appointed to decide where the money will come from. In effect, this means that a UN-controlled structure of global governance will override the sovereignty of nation states in collecting and doling out funds obtained under the justification of climate change.

The agreement also gives the green light for carbon trading markets, which as we have documented are all owned by climate kingpins like Maurice Strong and Al Gore, to be more heavily financed and expanded.

Leaked UN documents uncovered in February also highlighted the need to establish a global governance structure in the name of combating climate change by 2012.

“Moving towards a green economy would also provide an opportunity to re-examine national and global governance structures and consider whether such structures allow the international community to respond to current and future environmental and development challenges and to capitalize on emerging opportunities,” the leaked white paper stated.

The paper outlined that the imposition of such “global governance structures” will be achieved with the help of “vast wealth transfers” from richer countries (in the form of carbon taxes levied on citizens) to poorer nations, amounting to no less than $45 trillion dollars.

The UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, has not been shy in proclaiming the unfolding agenda for a global governance structure to override national parliaments on the issue of climate change.

In an October New York Times editorial entitled “We Can Do It,” Ki-moon wrote that efforts to impose restrictions on CO2 emissions “Must include an equitable global governance structure.”

He re-iterated those sentiments in December following the Copenhagen summit, telling the LA Times “We will establish a global governance structure to monitor and manage the implementation of this.”

Last year at a forum in Oxford, England, Al Gore also called for global governance in order to implement global agreements on climate change.

Globalists are persistent and they will continue hammering away until they get what they want, not because the environment is on the verge of collapse, but because their agenda for world government is stalling as more people find out the true agenda behind the global warming scam.

Meanwhile, anyone who suggests global governance is on the agenda is derided as a conspiracy theorist, despite such open announcements of this very intention.

*******************

Text of the leaked document:

Strategic communications objectives

1) Reinforce the perception that the US is constructively engaged in UN negotiations in an effort to produce a global regime to combat climate change. This includes support for a symmetrical and legally binding treaty.

2) Manage expectations for Cancun – Without owning the message, advance the narrative that while a symmetrical legally binding treaty in Mexico is unlikely, solid progress can be made on the six or so main elements.

3) Create a clear understanding of the CA’s standing and the importance of operationalising ALL elements.

4) Build and maintain outside support for the administration’s commitment to meeting the climate and clean energy challenge despite an increasingly difficult political environment to pass legislation.

5) Deepen support and understanding from the developing world that advanced developing countries must be part of any meaningful solution to climate change including taking responsibilities under a legally binding treaty.

Media outreach

• Continue to conduct interviews with print, TV and radio outlets driving the climate change story.
• Increase use of off-the-record conversations.
• Strengthen presence in international media markets during trips abroad. Focus efforts on radio and television markets.
• Take greater advantage of new media opportunities such as podcasts to advance US position in the field bypassing traditional media outlets.
• Consider a series of policy speeches/public forums during trips abroad to make our case directly to the developing world.

Key outreach efforts

• Comprehensive and early outreach to policy makers, key stakeholders and validators is critical to broadening support for our positions in the coming year.
• Prior to the 9-11 April meeting in Bonn it would be good for Todd to meet with leading NGOs. This should come in the form of 1:1s and small group sessions.
• Larger group sessions, similar to the one held at CAP prior to Copenhagen, will be useful down the line, but more intimate meetings in the spring are essential to building the foundation of support. Or at the very least, disarming some of the harsher critics.

Article courtesy of Prison Planet

UK Campaigner urges UN to accept 'Ecocide' as International Crime

2010-04-27T09:14:00.000-07:00

by Juliette Jowit
9th April 2010

Proposal to declare mass destruction of Ecosystems

a Crime on a par with Genocide launched by Lawyer

Queensland, Australia: A huge oil slick on Warana beach on Queensland's Sunshine Coast.

Photograph: Dave Hunt/EPA

A campaign to declare the mass destruction of ecosystems an international crime against peace - alongside genocide and crimes against humanity - is being launched in the UK.

The proposal for the United Nations to accept "ecocide" as a fifth "crime against peace", which could be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC), is the brainchild of British lawyer-turned-campaigner Polly Higgins.

The radical idea would have a profound effect on industries blamed for widespread damage to the environment like fossil fuels, mining, agriculture, chemicals and forestry.

Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute "climate deniers" who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.

"Ecocide is in essence the very antithesis of life," says Higgins. "It leads to resource depletion, and where there is escalation of resource depletion, war comes chasing behind. Where such destruction arises out of the actions of mankind, ecocide can be regarded as a crime against peace."

Higgins, formerly a barrister in London specialising in employment, has already had success at the UN with a Universal Declaration for Planetary Rights, modelled on the human rights declaration. "My starting point was 'how do we create a duty of care to the planet, a pre-emptive obligation to not harm the planet?'"

After a successful launch at the UN in 2008, the idea has been adopted by the Bolivian government, who will propose a full members' vote, and Higgins has taken up her campaign for ecocide.

Ecocide is already recognised by dictionaries, but Higgins' more legal definition would be: "The extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished."

The ICC was set up in 2002 to hear cases for four crimes against peace: genocide, war crimes, crimes of aggression (such as unprovoked war), and crimes against humanity.

Higgins makes her case for ecocide to join that list with a simple equation: extraction leads to ecocide, which leads to resource depletion, and resource depletion leads to conflict. "The link is if you keep over-extracting from your capital asset we'll have very little left and we will go to war over our capital asset, the last of it," adds Higgins, who has support in the UN and European commission, and among climate scientists, environmental lawyers and international campaign groups.

Although there is debate over how frequently people go to war over resources such as water, a growing number of important voices are arguing this case. Most recently Sir David King, the UK's former chief scientist, predicted a century of "resource wars", and in response to a report on resource conflicts by campaign group Global Witness, Lessons Unlearned, the UN appeared to accept many of the arguments.

Controversially, Higgins is suggesting ecocide would include damage done to any species - not just humans. This, she says, would stop prosecutions being tied up in legal wrangling over whether humans were harmed, as many environmental cases currently are.: "If you put in a crime that's absolute you can't spend years arguing: you take a soil sample and if it tests as positive it's bang to rights."

Under an ecocide law, which would be more potent because prosecutions would be against individuals such as directors rather than the companies, traditional energy companies could have to become largely clean energy companies, much extractive mining would have to be scaled back or stopped, chemicals which contaminate soil and water and kill wildlife would have to be abandoned and large-scale deforestation would not be possible. "I'm only just beginning to get to terms with how enormous that change will be," admits Higgins.

Higgins will launch her campaign through a website – thisisecocide.com – asking for global support to pressure national governments to vote for the proposed law if it is accepted by the UN Law commission. The deadline for the text is January, and a vote has been scheduled on other amendments in 2012. It would need a two-thirds majority of the 197 member countries to pass.

Higgins hopes the UN's "one member, one vote" system will help over-ride likely opposition of some nations and vested business interests. She also believes many businesses favour clear regulation because they fear a future public backlash. And she cites how, when the US entered world war two, its car manufacturers - despite initial opposition - made 10 times the number of aircraft originally asked for. "It shows you how industry can turn around very fast."

Article courtesy of Guardian.co.uk

Mike Rivero - The Dangers of Belief

2010-04-27T08:59:00.001-07:00

Greenpeace to Warming Skeptics: “We Know Where You Live”

2010-04-08T05:44:00.000-07:00

by Paul Joseph Watson
5th April 2010

Will CNN and MSNBC devote weeks of endless coverage to

the violent extremist threat posed by Radical Greenies ??

An article carried by the official Greenpeace website written by a Greenpeace member urges climate activists to resort to criminal activity in an effort to reinvigorate momentum for their stalling global warming agenda, while ominously threatening climate skeptics, “we know where you live”.

The article, written by Greenpeace activist “Gene” from India, calls for “mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism”.

“Gene” then has a special message for roughly half of Americans who, in the wake of the climategate scandal, are now skeptical of man-made global warming – “We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you be few.”

“Gene” quotes another climate activist who calls for an army of greenies to break the law and take retribution against anyone who stands in their way.

“The politicians have failed. Now it’s up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It’s not working. We need an army of climate outlaws.”

Greenpeace has not issued a retraction of the comments, preferring instead to buffer the blog at both beginning and end with desperate-sounding explanations insisting that the author has peaceful intentions. The organization has obviously been taking a hammering for this as it worsens into another public relations disaster.

This is by no means the first time global warming adherents have resorted to physical threats in an effort to bolster their rapidly crumbling credibility on climate change issues. In June last year, a global warming activist posted an article on the Talking Points Memo website entitled “At What Point Do We Jail Or Execute Global Warming Deniers?”

Shortly after the article was retracted, a comment traced back to another prominent global warming activist which appeared on the Climate Progress blog threatened Skeptics that “an entire generation that will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds.” Website owner Joe Romm defended the comment as “clearly not a threat but a prediction”.

For years, climate Skeptics have been the target of campaigns to denounce them as criminals and traitors on the scale of the Nazis, with calls for Nuremberg trials. A July 2007 Senate report detailed how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation.

“Is this really the kind of caring, sensitive message this charity ought to be conveying to the world?” asks James Delingpole. “Not to judge by the comments below. Happy Easter, Greenpeace PR department! I think you’re going to have a busy next few days…”

As a recent Psychological Science study highlighted, warmists tend not to adhere to the caring, sensitive image they portray when it comes to their own private lives.

“Those who wear what the authors call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal,” summarizes the Telegraph’s Iain Hollingshead. “Faced with various moral choices – whether to stick to the rules in games, for example, or to pay themselves an appropriate wage – the green participants behaved much worse in the experiments than their conventional counterparts. The short answer to the paper’s question, then, is: No. Greens are mean.”

Despite Greenpeace’s efforts at damage control, there can be little doubt as to the true context of the article. By first encouraging climate activists to “break the law” in pursuit of their stalling political agenda, “Gene” has greased the skids for criminal activity. Concluding with the threat to climate Skeptics that “we know where you live,” is clearly a form of intimidation and an invitation for “an army of climate outlaws” to take physical retribution against people who disagree with them.

Imagine if Infowars put out an article urging its readers to break the law in order to combat the IRS, imagine if we told IRS agents, “we know where you live”. We’d be raided quicker than a heartbeat and Alex Jones would be demonized all over the establishment media as a dangerous extremist. Indeed, a mere peaceful letter-writing campaign urging governors to resign was leapt upon by the media and the federal government this past weekend as a concerning portend of the “extremist” threat posed by constitutionalists despite the fact that there was no indication of violence.

When so-called “right-wingers” or libertarians merely write letters urging peaceful political change, they are demonized as terrorist hate-mongers, but when greenies openly call for criminal behavior allied with thinly veiled threats of physical violence, it’s no big deal.

Will CNN and MSNBC devote weeks of endless coverage to Greenpeace’s threats towards people they disagree with? There’s more chance of Keith Olbermann awarding Rep. Hank Johnson (a major global warming adherent) his “worst person in the world” gong for hilariously warning that the island of Guam could capsize like a boat due to overpopulation.

Article courtesy of Prison Planet

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