Global warming science implodes overseas: American media silent

Rick Moran

The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens – yes dozens – of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the “consensus” of 2500 of the world’s climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.

We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.

Glaciergate, tempgate, icegate, and now, disappearing Amazon forests not the result of warming, but of logging. And the report the IPCC based their bogus “science” on was written by a food safety advocate according to this Christopher Booker piece in the Telegraph :

Dr North next uncovered “Amazongate”. The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

This is a great story. It has everything a media outlet could desire; scandal, conflict of interest (IPCC head Pauchuri runs companies that benefited from climate scare stories), government cover ups – why then, has this unraveling of the basis of climate science that posited catastrophic man made warming not been making any news at all in the United States?

It’s too easy to simply claim “bias.” Media outlets don’t pass up juicy stories that could potentially increase their readership and revenue for ideological purposes (except the New York Times – and even they could spin all of this to show skeptics to be using flawed arguments like the liberal Guardian is doing in England).

Perhaps its time to ask why this story being revealed overseas with new revelations almost daily in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Timesonline, and other Fleet Street publications can’t get any traction here. Blogs like Watts up with That and Climate Depot are keeping us informed of the latest from England but we hear crickets chirping when it comes to stories from major newspapers and – outside of Fox News – the cable nets.

As global warming the political movement is losing its scientific justification, the American people – who will be asked to foot the bill to the tune of trillions of dollars if Obama goes ahead with his “green” plans – are grossly uninformed about the state of the debate. Until the media starts to give this story the coverage it deserves, that state of affairs will not change.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2010/01/global_warming_science_implode.html at January 31, 2010 – 12:38:44 PM CST

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Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn’t been verified

By David Rose
Last updated at 12:54 AM on 24th January 2010

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The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

Chilling error: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrongly asserted that glaciers in the Himalayas would melt by 2035

Dr Lal’s admission will only add to the mounting furore over the melting glaciers assertion, which the IPCC was last week forced to withdraw because it has no scientific foundation.

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

The claim that Himalayan glaciers are set to disappear by 2035 rests on two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain, which were then recycled without any further investigation in a 2005 report by the environmental campaign group WWF.

It was this report that Dr Lal and his team cited as their source.

The WWF article also contained a basic error in its arithmetic. A claim that one glacier was retreating at the alarming rate of 134 metres a year should in fact have said 23 metres – the authors had divided the total loss measured over 121 years by 21, not 121.

Last Friday, the WWF website posted a humiliating statement recognising the claim as ‘unsound’, and saying it ‘regrets any confusion caused’.

Dr Lal said: ‘We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was “grey literature” [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors.’

In fact, the 2035 melting date seems to have been plucked from thin air.

Professor Graham Cogley, a glacier expert at Trent University in Canada, who began to raise doubts in scientific circles last year, said the claim multiplies the rate at which glaciers have been seen to melt by a factor of about 25.

‘My educated guess is that there will be somewhat less ice in 2035 than there is now,’ he said.

Forced to apologise: Chairman of the IPCC Raj Pachauri

‘But there is no way the glaciers will be close to disappearing. It doesn’t seem to me that exaggerating the problem’s seriousness is going to help solve it.’

One of the problems bedevilling Himalayan glacier research is a lack of reliable data. But an authoritative report published last November by the Indian government said: ‘Himalayan glaciers have not in any way exhibited, especially in recent years, an abnormal annual retreat.’

When this report was issued, Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, denounced it as ‘voodoo science’.

Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Pachauri blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures.

It was an accusation rebutted angrily by Dr Lal. ‘We as authors followed them to the letter,’ he said. ‘Had we received information that undermined the claim, we would have included it.’

However, an analysis of those 500-plus formal review comments, to be published tomorrow by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the new body founded by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson, suggests that when reviewers did raise issues that called the claim into question, Dr Lal and his colleagues simply ignored them.

For example, Hayley Fowler of Newcastle University, suggested that their draft did not mention that Himalayan glaciers in the Karakoram range are growing rapidly, citing a paper published in the influential journal Nature.

In their response, the IPCC authors said, bizarrely, that they were ‘unable to get hold of the suggested references’, but would ‘consider’ this in their final version. They failed to do so.

The Japanese government commented that the draft did not clarify what it meant by stating that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by 2035 was ‘very high’. ‘What is the confidence level?’ it asked.

The authors’ response said ‘appropriate revisions and editing made’. But the final version was identical to their draft.

Last week, Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue.

Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter. ‘He didn’t contact me or any of the other authors of the chapter,’ he said.

The damage to the IPCC’s reputation, already tarnished by last year’s ‘Warmergate’ leaked email scandal, is likely to be considerable.

Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’.

Environmentalist Alton Byers said the panel’s credibility had been damaged. ‘They’ve done sloppy work,’ he said. ‘We need better research on the ground, not unreliable predictions derived from computer models.’

Last night, Dr Pachauri defended the IPCC, saying it was wrong to generalise based on a single mistake. ‘Our procedure is robust,’ he added.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1245636/Glacier-scientists-says-knew-data-verified.html#ixzz0ddGjmCKo

WEATHER REPORT……………….

WEATHER REPORT……………….

The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a
report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen , Norway . Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers
all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions
report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf
stream still very warm. Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many
points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals
of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds. Within a few
years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable.

  I’m sorry, I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922 as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post.

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NATURAL: 100 REASONS WHY

CLIMATE CHANGE IS NATURAL: 100 REASONS WHY

Climate change campaigners: 100 reasons why climate change is natural and not man-made

Tuesday December 15,2009

HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:

1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.

6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.

7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trend

The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” – suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming

10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago

12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds

13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.

14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions

15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”

16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.

18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control

19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.

20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century – within natural rates

21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades

23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries

24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder

25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research

26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles

27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.

28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population

29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago

30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles

31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming

32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures

33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere

34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere

35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything

36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes

37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that “none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases”

38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC

39) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense” but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally

40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’s many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms

41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful

42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical

43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests

44) The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years

45) The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

46) The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations

47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto Protocol has no scientific grounding at all.

48) The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change
 
49) The head of Britain’s climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the Government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.

50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are “no direct subsidies” but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve Wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.
 
51) Wind farms are not an efficient way to produce energy. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) accepts a figure of 75 per cent back-up power is required.
 
52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”
 
53) Climate alarmists have raised the concern over acidification of the oceans but Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway , and others, have noted that the composition of ocean water – including CO2, calcium, and water – can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans.
 
54) The UN’s IPCC computer models of human-caused global warming predict the emergence of a “hotspot” in the upper troposphere over the tropics.  Former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, David Evans, said there is no evidence of such a hotspot

55) The argument that climate change is a of result of global warming caused by human activity is the argument of flat Earthers.  
 
56) The manner in which US President Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to order emission cuts shows how undemocratic and irrational the entire international decision-making process has become with regards to emission-target setting.
 
57) William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.”
 
58) Canada has shown the world targets derived from the existing Kyoto commitments were always unrealistic and did not work for the country.
 
59) In the lead up to the Copenhagen summit, David Davis MP said of previous climate summits, at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 that many had promised greater cuts, but “neither happened”, but we are continuing along the same lines.

60) The UK ’s environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55 billion, before taking into account the impact on its economic growth. 
 
61) The UN’s panel on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. J. Graham Cogley a professor at Ontario Trent University, claims this inaccurate stating the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.
 
62) Under existing Kyoto obligations the EU has attempted to claim success, while actually increasing emissions by 13 per cent, according to Lord Lawson. In addition the EU has pursued this scheme by purchasing “offsets” from countries such as China paying them billions of dollars to destroy atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which were manufactured purely in order to be destroyed.
 
63) It is claimed that the average global temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times but sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years according to Penn State University researcher Michael Mann. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that 20th century changes in average global temperature were unusual or unnatural.
 
64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.
 
65) The globe’s current approach to climate change in which major industrialised countries agree to nonsensical targets for their CO2 emissions by a given date, as it has been under the Kyoto system, is very expensive.
 
66) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures when looking at the history of the Earth’s temperature. 
 
67) Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty”.
 
68) The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.
 
69) In explaining the average temperature standstill we are currently experiencing, the Met Office Hadley Centre ran a series of computer climate predictions and found in many of the computer runs there were decade-long standstills but none for 15 years – so it expects global warming to resume swiftly.

70) Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope.  Such hysteria (over global warming) simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.”
 
71) Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s status as the flagship of the fight against climate change it has been a failure.
 
72) The first phase of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which ran from 2005 to 2007 was a failure. Huge over-allocation of permits to pollute led to a collapse in the price of carbon from €33 to just €0.20 per tonne meaning the system did not reduce emissions at all. 
 
73) The EU trading scheme, to manage carbon emissions has completely failed and actually allows European businesses to duck out of making their emissions reductions at home by offsetting, which means paying for cuts to be made overseas instead.
 
74) To date “cap and trade” carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions.
 
75) In the United States , the cap-and-trade is an approach designed to control carbon emissions and will impose huge costs upon American citizens via a carbon tax on all goods and services produced in the United States. The average family of four can expect to pay an additional $1700, or £1,043, more each year. It is predicted that the United States will lose more than 2 million jobs as the result of cap-and-trade schemes. 
 
76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years.
 
77) Why should politicians devote our scarce resources in a globally competitive world to a false and ill-defined problem, while ignoring the real problems the entire planet faces, such as: poverty, hunger, disease or terrorism.
 
78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years.
 
79) Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. (We are still not able to control the sun).
 
80) A substantial number of the panel of 2,500 climate scientists on the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, which created a statement on scientific unanimity on climate change and man-made global warming, were found to have serious concerns.
 
81) The UK’s Met Office has been forced this year to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by revelations about the data.
 
82)  Politicians and activists push for renewable energy sources such as wind turbines under the rhetoric of climate change, but it is essentially about money – under the system of Renewable Obligations. Much of the money is paid for by consumers in electricity bills. It amounts to £1 billion a year.
 
83) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors.  
 
84) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase science for political purposes.
 
85) Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.
 
86) There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures – in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water.
 
87) The Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy contains a massive increase in electricity generation by wind power costing around £4 billion a year over the next twenty years. The benefits will be only £4 to £5 billion overall (not per annum). So costs will outnumber benefits by a range of between eleven and seventeen times.
 
88) Whilst CO2 levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout history, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years.
 
89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.

90) Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.
 
91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.
 
92) If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).
 
93) US President Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions by 2050 to equal those of 1910 when there were 92 million Americans. In 2050, there will be 420 million Americans, so Obama’s promise means that emissions per head will be approximately what they were in 1875. It simply will not happen.
 
94) The European Union has already agreed to cut emissions by 20 percent to 2020, compared with 1990 levels, and is willing to increase the target to 30 percent. However, these are unachievable and the EU has already massively failed with its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), as EU emissions actually rose by 0.8 percent from 2005 to 2006 and are known to be well above the Kyoto goal.
 
95) Australia has stated it wants to slash greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the pledges were so unpopular that the country’s Senate has voted against the carbon trading Bill, and the Opposition’s Party leader has now been ousted by a climate change sceptic.
 
96) Canada plans to reduce emissions by 20 percent compared with 2006 levels by 2020, representing approximately a 3 percent cut from 1990 levels but it simultaneously defends its Alberta tar sands emissions and its record as one of the world’s highest per-capita emissions setters.
 
97) India plans to reduce the ratio of emissions to production by 20-25 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2020, but all Government officials insist that since India has to grow for its development and poverty alleviation, it has to emit, because the economy is driven by carbon.
 
98) The Leipzig Declaration in 1996, was signed by 110 scientists who said: “We – along with many of our fellow citizens – are apprehensive about the climate treaty conference scheduled for Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997” and “based on all the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions.”
 
99) A US Oregon Petition Project stated “We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of CO2, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
 
100) A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.”

Payoff! U.N. climate chief cashes in on carbon scheme

HEAT OF THE MOMENT

Payoff! U.N. climate chief cashes in on carbon scheme

Tied to conglomerate that stands to make hundreds of millions in emissions deal

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Posted: December 11, 2009
12:10 am Eastern

By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

Rajendra K. Pachauri

NEW YORK – A story emerging out of Britain suggests “follow the money” may explain the enthusiasm of the United Nations to pursue caps on carbon emissions, despite doubts surfacing in the scientific community about the validity of the underlying global warming hypothesis.

A Mumbai-based Indian multinational conglomerate with business ties to Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman since 2002 of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, stands to make several hundred million dollars in European Union carbon credits simply by closing a steel production facility in Britain with the loss of 1,700 jobs.

The Tata Group headquartered in Mumbai anticipates receiving windfall profits of up to nearly $2 billion from closing the Corus Redcar steelmaking plant in Britain, with about half of the savings expected to result from cashing in on carbon credits granted the steelmaker by the European Union under the EU’s emissions trading scheme, or ETS.

Corus has accumulated 7.5 million European Union surplus carbon allowances, or EUAs, given the company free by the EU, after corporate officials lobbied EU officials aggressively in Brussels.

‘Help! Mom! Radicals Are Ruining My Country!’ Will kids’ swing-set business stay afloat despite 246 czars, regulations, huge taxes?

The Corus-owned 7.5 million EUAs are estimated at up to $650 million; the company also anticipates “saving” 6 million tons of carbon dioxide by closing the plant and not producing the plant’s capacity of 3 million tons of steel. The 6 million tons of carbon dioxide is worth an estimated $130 million at current rates and possibly as much as $325 million at expected market levels.

The British government also announced Wednesday it would auction off rather than cancel the millions of carbon permits resulting from the Corus Redcar steel plant closing The Corus Redcar facility is scheduled to be closed in January, and if the facility is to be closed more than 50 days, Corus would not be entitled to receive the permits, worth about $147.5 million per year at current market rates.

How does the closing of a steelmaker in Britain tie to the chairman of the U.N.’s global warming science committee?

In 1974, the TATA Group provided the financial resources to found the Tata Energy Research Institute, or TERI, a policy organization headquartered in New Dehli, India, of which Pachauri has been chairman since the group was formed.

Continued business ties between TERI and TATA are demonstrated by a press announcement on the TERI website dated Feb. 4 in which Jairam Ramesh, the Indian minister of state for commerce and industry as well as minister of state for power, announced a joint venture with TERI and TATA power to extract and use carbon dioxide for the propagation of micro-algae.

On Dec. 10, 2007, Pachauri shared with Al Gore the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on global warming. At the Nobel ceremonies, Pachauri in his Nobel lecture openly represented the U.N.’s IPCC.

The TATA Group decision to close the Corus steelmaking plant has caused the Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown political difficulties. Manufacturing accounted for 22.5 percent of Britain’s economic output when Labour came to power in 1997, while it accounts for little more than 11 percent today, according to the London Times.

Arguing that the Brown government needs to provide financial assistance to manufacturing in Britain, Kirby Adams, the chief executive officer of Corus told the newspaper, “Jobs paying £30,000 ($50,000) a year are only in manufacturing sectors or sectors where you are adding value – you are not going to make that flipping burgers.”

He added: “In some way I hope that this [decision to close Corus Redcar] will be the final wake-up call or alarm bell to get things across to people in Whitehall and Westminster – we need to help other sectors of the economy, not just the columns of the Bank of England.”

In July, thousands of steelworkers marched in Redcar, North Yorks, England, protesting the proposed closing of the Corus steelmaking facility.

The European Union Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading System began operations in January 2005, billing itself as “the largest multi-country, multi-sector Greenhouse Gas Emission Trading system world-wide.”

ClimateGate ‘An Inconvenient Scandal’ Which ‘Threatens to Crumble’ Global Warming Consensus

ClimateGate ‘An Inconvenient Scandal’ Which ‘Threatens to Crumble’ Global Warming Consensus

ABC and CBS discounted the scientific relevance of the admissions and obfuscations displayed in the ClimateGate e-mails, but on Wednesday night they finally devoted full stories to the controversy and quoted the “most-damning” of the e-mails, the ones referring to a “trick” to “hide the decline” in a temperature measurement and in which a scientist fretted “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

The two networks, however, painted the “stolen” e-mails not as laudatory whistle-blowing, but as an unwanted impediment to the left’s global warming agenda. “Just as the world seems finally poised to do something about global warming, an inconvenient scandal,” ABC’s David Wright began in playing off the title of Al Gore’s movie. He despaired that “as the controversy heats up, the consensus about making the tough choices to curb carbon emissions threatens to crumble.”

On CBS, Wyatt Andrews relayed how “to many Republicans, Climategate proves that global warming is a deception,” before he countered: “But if that’s true, it’s a fraud adopted by most of the world’s leading scientists, along with NASA, the U.N., the American Medical Association, and the National Academies of Science of 32 countries, including the United States. To most of them, Climategate is a sideshow compared to one overwhelming fact:” Viewers then were treated to this declaration from the scientist with the “hide the decline” boast: “The last decade is the warmest decade on record.”

ABC anchor Charles Gibson set up the World News segment:

In Copenhagen right now, world leaders are focused on the long-term and potentially devastating effects of climate change, global warming. And for all the scientific ammunition being presented at the U.N. conference, some stolen e-mails are giving encouragement to global warming skeptics.

Meanwhile, NBC continued its blackout of any embarrassing disclosures in the e-mails as anchor Brian Williams introduced a story:

As we’ve been reporting, there’s been a world conference going on in Copenhagen. It’s about climate change and global warming, but that subject heated up here today with a newspaper article by Sarah Palin, and then a return shot from Al Gore.

Reporter Anne Thompson concluded with the usual agenda: “At the climate talks, the bigger issue is American credibility, and will the United States live up to its promise to cut carbon dioxide emissions?”

Earlier rundowns of how the evening newscasts have ignored and dismissed ClimateGate:

Friday: “NBC Nightly News Takes Up ClimateGate, But Frets It Could ‘Delay Taking Action‘”

Sunday: “ABC and NBC Acknowledge ‘ClimateGate,’ But Remain Undeterred: ‘Science is Solid‘”

Monday: “Nets Panic: Clock at Zero in ‘Life and Death’ Effort to Avoid ‘Global Catastrophe‘”

Tuesday: “CBS and NBC Trumpet UN Predictions About Warmest Decade Since 1850”

The MRC’s Brad Wilmouth corrected the closed-captioning against the video to provide these transcripts of the stories on the Wednesday, December 9 evening newscasts:

ABC’s World News:

CHARLES GIBSON, IN OPENING TEASER: Hot topic: Did scientists skew their research to support theories about global warming? …
            
GIBSON, BEFORE COMMERCIAL BREAK: And still ahead on World News, have global warming skeptics found a smoking gun? The controversy over climate change will be our “Closer Look.”

…

GIBSON: We began tonight’s broadcast with the powerful blast of bitter cold and snow that’s blanketing much of the country – and its powerful, to be sure. But its effects will be short-lived. In contrast, in Copenhagen right now, world leaders are focused on the long-term and potentially devastating effects of climate change, global warming. And for all the scientific ammunition being presented at the U.N. conference, some stolen e-mails are giving encouragement to global warming skeptics. David Wright has our “Closer Look.”

DAVID WRIGHT: Just as the world seems finally poised to do something about global warming, an inconvenient scandal.

GLENN BECK, FOX NEWS CHANNEL: Let’s start with the science that has been so settled for all these years.

WRIGHT: Skeptics of climate change suddenly have plenty of new fodder.

REP. JAMES SENSENBRENNER (R-WI): There is increasing evidence of scientific fascism that’s going on.

WRIGHT: 1,000 e-mails dating back more than a dozen years stolen from a top climate research center in Britain.

SENATOR JAMES INHOFE (R-OK): For the taxpayers’ sake, let’s look at this controversy from top to bottom.

WRIGHT: As the controversy heats up, the consensus about making the tough choices to curb carbon emissions threatens to crumble.

JON STEWART, THE DAILY SHOW: Poor Al Gore! Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. Oh!

WRIGHT: In the e-mails, the scientists are downright dismissive of naysayers. In one message, a researcher at Lawrence Livermore Labs offers to “beat the crap out of” a leading skeptic. In another, Penn State’s Michael Mann suggests hiding data from dissenters, writing, “This is the sort of ‘dirty laundry’ one doesn’t want to fall into the wrong hands.”

MICHAEL MANN: Imagine somebody going through all of the emails you ever sent, looking for a single word or phrase that could be twisted.

WRIGHT: One of the most damning e-mail exchanges credits Mann with a “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures. In another, the head of the National Center for Atmospheric Research writes a colleague, “The fact is, we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

KEVIN TRENBERTH, NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH: It shows human nature at work, but I don’t think it throws any, casts any aspersions on the science.

WRIGHT: Global warming may be a scientific issue, but it’s also a hot-button political debate. So right now, the scientists aren’t the only ones on the defensive. Politicians are, too.

LISA JACKSON, EPA ADMINISTRATOR: There is nothing in the hacked e-mails that undermines the science.

WRIGHT: That may be true, but the e-mails threaten to undermine the political effort under way in Copenhagen.

JAMES HOGGAN, HOGGAN AND ASSOCIATES PR: This is going to get worse. They are going to use this and blow it up way beyond anything that the evidence supports.

WRIGHT: At a recent book signing in Chicago, Al Gore was a soft target.
                                
UNIDENTIFIED MALE PROTESTER: Research Climategate! This guy is a fraud! It’s a scam!

WRIGHT: The protesters wasted little time posting their antics online, where their message now has a worldwide megaphone. David Wright, ABC News, Washington.

CBS Evening News:

KATIE COURIC: President Obama will be spending a lot of time on Air Force One. He’s flying tonight to Oslo where he’ll accept the Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow. He returns home on Friday. But next week, it’s back to Scandinavia for the climate conference in Copenhagen. The U.S. and China squared off there today, each accusing the other of failing to cut greenhouse gases. And Wyatt Andrews tells us the entire conference is taking place under a cloud that’s become known as Climategate.

WYATT ANDREWS: To anyone skeptical about the science of global warming-
                    
REP. DARRELL ISSA (R-CA): Climategate.

REP. MIKE PENCE (R-IN): Climategate.

REP. MARSHA BLACKBURN (R-TN): Climategate.

ANDREWS: -Climategate is the biggest scandal ever.

GLENN BECK: They’re just cooking the books.

ANDREWS: Climategate is the term being used for a handful of e-mails stolen last month from  the influential CRU, the Climatic Research Unit in England. By far, the most embarrassing e-mail is from 1999 in which CRU’s director Phil Jones brags that he’s used a trick to “hide the decline.” “Hide the decline” meaning hiding studies from tree rings that show the earth cooling since 1960 when actual temperatures show a trend toward warming. The phrase “hide the decline” is now so infamous it’s being spoofed on YoutTube.

CLIP OF VIDEO WITH CARTOONS OF PROF MICHAEL MANN AND A COW SINGING:: Hide the decline, hide the decline.

ANDREWS: And the fact that global temperatures have gone down in some years was in other e-mails, with one scientist lamenting, “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we cant.” To many Republicans, Climategate proves that global warming is a deception.

REP. JAMES SENSENBRENNER (R-WI): And at worst it’s junk science, and it is a part of a massive international scientific fraud.

ANDREWS: But if that’s true, it’s a fraud adopted by most of the world’s leading scientists, along with NASA, the U.N., the American Medical Association, and the National Academies of Science of 32 countries, including the United States. To most of them, Climategate is a sideshow compared to one overwhelming fact:

PROF. MICHAEL MANN: The last decade is the warmest decade on record.

ANDREWS: Michael Mann is the professor who’s being lampooned in that YouTube video. Mann says “hide the decline” was never an attempt to deceive, it was the use of real temperatures to show a real trend.

MANN: Those who deny the existence of this problem, who don’t have the science on their side, have instead engaged in a smear campaign to distract the public, to distract policymakers.

ANDREWS: Climategate advocates do want political traction. They hope any uncertainty over manmade global warming might change the President’s plan to offer CO2 cuts in Copenhagen next week. Wyatt Andrews, CBS News, Washington.

— Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center

Capitalism and Climate Change – by Dick Morris

Capitalism and Climate Change – by Dick Morris

Posted By Dick Morris On December 10, 2009 @ 12:00 am In FrontPage | 3 Comments

The worst nightmare of the left is about to come true: The United States is about to achieve the carbon emissions goals set by the 1997 Kyoto Accords. Once seemingly beyond reach, the United States is already halfway toward meeting the stringent Kyoto goals for reduction in carbon emissions without a cap-and-trade law or a carbon tax or carbon dioxide being declared a pollutant.

Environmental nightmare? Yes. The goals of the climate-change crowd are not reduction in global warming but the enactment of a worldwide system of regulation that puts business under government ^[1] control and transfers wealth from rich nations to poor ones under the guise of fighting climate change. Should the emissions come down on their own, as they are doing, the excuse for draconian legislation goes, well, up in smoke.

The facts are startling. In 1990, the year chosen as the global benchmark for carbon emissions, the United States emitted 5,007 million metric tons of carbon (mmts). Kyoto specified that emissions must be reduced to a level 6 percent lower than in 1990. For the U.S., that means 4,700 mmts.

American carbon emissions rose year after year until they peaked in 2007 at 5,967 mmts. But, in 2008, they dropped to 5,801. And, in 2009, the best estimate is for a reduction to 5,476. So, in two years, U.S. carbon emissions will have gone down by more than 500 mmts — a cut of over 8 percent.

President Obama has pledged to bring the U.S. carbon emissions down by 17 percent. He’s halfway there.

A combination of the recession and an increased emphasis on cutting emissions is working and may make onerous regulation unnecessary and even redundant.

How can we achieve the other half of the hoped for reduction?

If 60 percent of American cars were electric, the net savings ^[1] in carbon would be 450 mmts (even counting the coal burned for the higher levels of electricity required).

And if one-third of the truck fleet ran on natural gas, the carbon savings would add another 150 to 200 mmts.

The point is that public education and increased environmental consciousness — the normal way we Americans respond to challenges — may suffice without the need for government regulation. And what persuasion fails to achieve, higher gasoline prices will do for us — move people to buy electric ^[1] cars.

Good news huh?

Not if you are a socialist banking on climate change as the banner to regulate all utilities and industries in the world. Their game plan is to use the financial ^[1] crisis to regulate white-collar businesses like banking, insurance and finance while using fears of climate change to extend government regulation to the blue-collar trades.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton calls cap-and-trade a “massive redistribution of wealth from the north to the south” (i.e., from the developed northern hemisphere to the less developed southern half of the globe). What the globalists and the one-world crowd had hoped to achieve by foreign aid, they now seek to bring about by cap-and-trade, forcing businesses ^[1] and utilities to pay rural societies for the right to pollute with carbon.

But market forces are accomplishing what they are hoping only regulation can achieve. And the rationale for the global system of regulation being negotiated at Copenhagen is being made unnecessary even as the agreement is being hammered out.

There is a great deal of justified skepticism about the entire question of whether climate change is going on and, even more, how much human activity is contributing to it. But while the world divides into those who demand global regulation to fight climate change and those who say it isn’t happening, there is now an inconvenient truth: The market is taking care of the problem on its own.

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Famous weather scientist: Climategate ‘tip of iceberg’

‘Conspiracy would become manifest’ if all climate research e-mails unveiled

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Posted: December 08, 2009
9:46 pm Eastern

By Bob Unruh
© 2009 WorldNetDaily

 

The Colorado scientist described by the Washington Post as “the World’s Most Famous Hurricane Expert” says the “ClimateGate” e-mails from the United Kingdom that revealed possible data manipulation are evidence of a conspiracy among “warmists,” those who believe man’s actions are triggering possibly catastrophic climate change.

“The recent ‘ClimateGate’ revelations coming out of the UK University of East Anglia are but the tip of a giant iceberg of a well organized international climate warming conspiracy that has been gathering momentum for the last 25 years,” said Colorado State University’s Dr. William Gray.

His are the annual hurricane forecasts that are the standard for weather prognostications. His work pioneered the science of forecasting hurricanes and he has served as weather forecaster for the United States Air Force. He is Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science at CSU and heads the school’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences Tropical Meteorology Project.

He was referring to e-mails and other information that had been obtained by a hacker and posted on a Russian web server that included e-mails among scientists who are part of the cadre of researchers who believe man-made global warming is an impending catastrophe for the world.

One e-mail said: “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd (sic) from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

 

Another expressed internal doubts: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

Global Warming or Global Governance? What the media refuse to tell you about so-called climate change

Further, an e-mail exchange suggested the suppression of information: “Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re (Assessment Report 4)? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.”

Gray said, “This conspiracy would become much more manifest if all the e-mails of the publically funded climate research groups of the U.S. and of foreign governments were ever made public.”

His comments are in a commentary at the online Climate Depot.com and were posted just as officials from around the globe are conferencing in Copenhagen on the issue of “global warming” and what taxes should be imposed on those who use energy.

“The Cap-and-Trade bill presently before Congress, the likely climate agreements coming out of the Copenhagen Conference, and the EPA’s just announced decision to treat CO2 as a pollutant represents a grave threat to the industrial world’s continued economic development,” Gray warned. “We should not allow these proposals to restrict our economic growth. Any United Nations climate bill our country might sign would act as an infringement on our country’s sovereignty.”

He said he probably would have been “concerned” over the possibility people are causing serious global climate degradation “had I not devoted my entire career of over half-a-century to the study and foreasting of meteorological and climate events.”

“There has been an unrelenting quarter century of one-sided indoctrination of the western world by the media and by various scientists and governments concerning a coming carbon dioxide … induced global warming disaster,” he said. “These warming scenarios have been orchestrated by a combination of environmentalists, vested interest scientists wanting larger federal grants and publicity, the media which profits from doomsday scenario reporting, governmental bureaucrats who want more power over our lives, and socialists who want to level-out global living standards.

“These many alarmist groups appear to have little concern over whether their global warming prognostications are accurate, however. And they most certainly are not. The alarmists believe they will be able to scare enough of our citizens into believing their propaganda that the public will be willing to follow their advice on future energy usage and agree to a lowering of their standard of living in the name of climate salvation.”

He said there still remains to be an “honest and broad” scientific debate on the influence of CO2 on global temperature, and such models as have been used are flawed.

He cited a global warming of about 1 degree Fahrenheit over the last century, and that’s “not a consequence of human activities.”

“The disastrous economic consequences of restricting CO2 emissions from the present by as much as 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050 (as being proposed in Copenhagen) have yet to be digested by the general public. Such CO2 output decreases would cause very large increases in our energy costs, a lowering of our standard of living, and do nothing of significance to improve our climate,” he said.

Gray launched the practice of seasonal hurricane forecasts – forecasting months in advance what might be included in a coming hurricane season. After the 2005 Atlantic season, he said he was stepping down from the primary authorship of the CSU report, turning over those duties to Philip J. Klotzbach.

He’s long described global warming as a hoax, telling the Post three years ago, “I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people.”

University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit

 

Myron Ebell, of the GlobalWarming.org website where “cooler heads prevail,” said the e-mails obtained from the University of East Anglia were “shocking.”

“It’s kind of interesting to learn that petty politics seems to be more prevalent in the scientific community than in the political community,” he said.

The documents, he said, “raise a huge number of questions about the integrity of a lot of people in the alarmist community.

“What I’ve seen there is a very strong effort to manage the issue by scientists and not as a scientific issue. It’s very improper,” he said. “One of the criticisms is that we need scientists to be scientists, and policy can be handled in public debate.”

Phil Jones, head of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, confirmed the documents appeared authentic. He later said he was stepping down for a time.

Despite the advocacy of a financially vested former vice president, Al Gore, and others, public opinion about whether mankind is causing an ultimately catastrophic rise in global temperatures is shifting.

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has urged members of Congress to consider the joint opinion of nearly 32,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s, who believe humans likely have little or nothing to do with any “global warming.”

The Petition Project, launched some 10 years ago when the first few thousand signatures were gathered, has steadily grown without any special effort or campaign.

But in the last few years, and especially because of the release of Gore’s movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” the campaign has been reinvigorated.

“Mr. Gore’s movie, asserting a ‘consensus’ and ’settled science’ in agreement about human-caused global warming, conveyed the claims about human-caused global warming to ordinary moviegoers and to public-school children, to whom the film was widely distributed. Unfortunately, Mr. Gore’s movie contains many very serious incorrect claims which no informed, honest scientist could endorse,” project spokesman and founder Art Robinson has told WND.

Robinson, a research professor of chemistry, cofounded the Linus Pauling Institute of Science and Medicine with Linus Pauling in 1973, and later cofounded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine.

Paul later cited the petition results in  statement to Congress.

“Our energy policies must be based upon scientific truth – not fictional movies or self-interested international agendas,” Paul said. “They should be based upon the accomplishments of technological free enterprise that have provided our modern civilization, including our energy industries. That free enterprise must not be hindered by bogus claims about imaginary disasters.”

The petition states: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”

Robinson has warned of serious political and economic consequences of assuming “global warming” results from mankind’s actions.

“The campaign to severely ration hydrocarbon energy technology has now been markedly expanded,” he said. “In the course of this campaign, many scientifically invalid claims about impending climate emergencies are being made. Simultaneously, proposed political actions to severely reduce hydrocarbon use now threaten the prosperity of Americans and the very existence of hundreds of millions of people in poorer countries,” he told WND.

Climate Treaty Reparations would cost $50-$200bn per year

By Howard Richman & Raymond Richman

Here’s a quiz. What’s the worst thing on the table at the UN Climate Control Conference in Copenhagen December 7-18?  If you guessed cap-and-tax, you would be wrong. The reparations could be much, much worse.

The draft of the treaty encompasses 181 pages and recites that it shall be the obligation of the developed countries (Europe, United States, Japan, Australia, etc.) to pay  the developing countries (China, India, Africa, etc.) huge reparations, annual sums to erase poverty and to share technology with them. Australian lawyer Janet Albrechtsen explains the most recent draft of the treaty:

Clause after complicated clause sets out the requirement that developed countries such as Australia pay their “adaptation debt” to developing countries. Clause 33 on page 39 says that by 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be at least $US67 billion ($73bn), or in the range of $US70bn to $US140bn a year.

How developed countries will pay is far from clear. The draft text sets out various alternatives, including Option 7 on page 135, which provides for “a (global) levy of 2 per cent on international financial market (monetary) transactions to Annex I Parties”. This means industrialized countries such as Australia, if we sign. 

In the behind-the-scenes negotiations, the developed countries have already agreed to pay $167 billion per year, but the developing countries are holding out for $400 billion per year according to BusinessGreen.com:

Developing nations … are insisting on a minimum of £242bn [$400 billion] per annum by 2020 to help them fight global warming, compared with the developed world’s offer of only £100bn [$167 billion] per year.

It is not clear what share will come from the United States. But based upon the totals cited by BusinessGreen, it safely can be assumed that Obama will volunteer somewhere between $50 and $200 billion per year by 2020 as the U.S. share.

The treaty has been complicated by the “climategate” scandal which gives additional evidence of the unscientific behavior of the proponents of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, the backbone of the treaty.

The scientific consensus that once backed the man-made global warming theory has disappeared, and a new theory, based upon cosmic rays and solar activity, is proving to be much more predictive of climate change, with carbon dioxide playing a minor role if any. If the science backing the treaty is wrong, we shall discover in 10 to 50 years that the world community has wasted tens of trillions of dollars.

Moreover, the distribution of the benefits and costs of global warming is very uncertain. Global warming would benefit colder countries while harming coastal countries. And carbon dioxide is, in general, a great help to plant life and agricultural production.

The costs of the treaty, however, are far clearer. The largest share of the burden would be borne by the United States. Students of history may remember that the reparations forced upon Germany by the victors of World War I, resulted in hyperinflation, destroyed the German middle class, and eventually brought Adolf Hitler to power, causing World War II. Economist John Maynard Keynes predicted this disaster at the time. In a 1919 paper (“The Capacity of Germany to Pay Reparations”) he correctly predicted:

The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable — abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if it did not sow the decay of the whole civilized life of Europe….

Keynes was arguing that Germany would not be able to pay the reparations because it would not have the surplus of exports over imports necessary to pay for them. Germany had had an excess of imports in the years just before World War I, not an excess of exports. Not only that, but it had lost raw materials resources in the peace treaty that were needed for its iron goods exports, and its merchant marine and manpower had just been decimated by the war. Keynes was simply pointing out that Germany could not afford to pay the reparations.

America is in a similar position. We have had a huge and growing excess of imports over exports for more than a decade. Our manufacturing exports have already been decimated by the currency manipulations of developing countries and by their policies of keeping out American products through one pretext or another. For example, both China and India have labeled their automobile sectors as “strategic sectors” so that they could keep out American produced vehicles through the high tariffs permitted by WTO rules. Using this pretext, China also applies tariffs to American auto parts, motorcycles, and mining machinery.

China will continue to manipulate the dollar-yuan exchange rate to ensure that new solar panel and windmill factories will be located in China and not the United States. They have already ensured that Chinese-made windmills and solar panels will not contain many American-made parts.

Basically what this treaty proposes is that the United States go ever further in debt to China, selling China our remaining assets, so that we can pay reparations to the developing countries, so that they can afford to buy windmills and solar panels from China.

The result would greatly accelerate the present trends. We would become a nation unable to get out of debt, even with the falling dollar. We would stop being an “ownership society” and become, in the words of Warren Buffett, a “sharecropper society.”

President Obama will pull out all of the stops to get the treaty negotiated in Copenhagen next week and ratified in 2010 by the U.S. Senate. He knows that time is against him. Given time, more and more Americans will discover the new scientific realities. Moreover, his huge Democratic Party majority in the Senate will likely disappear in November 2010, and he may never again get another chance to get the two-thirds vote needed to ratify it.

The authors maintain a blog at tradeandtaxes.blogspot.com, and co-authored the 2008 book, Trading Away Our Future: How to Fix Our Government-Driven Trade Deficits and Faulty Tax System Before it’s Too Late, published by Ideal Taxes Association.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/climate_treaty_reparations_would_cost_50-200bn_per_year.html at December 08, 2009 – 12:45:02 PM EST

The EPA’s war on carbon

Lead Story

The EPA’s war on carbon

By Michelle Malkin  •  December 7, 2009 11:28 AM

Eco-czars of the Obama administration, activate!

Form of…a corrupted “scientific” finding on greenhouse gas “public endangerment.”

Timed for maximum impact on the Copenhagen global warming treaty talks, the Obama EPA is set to announce that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare, paving the way for the green bureaucrats to radically regulate emissions.

Keeping an open mind about dissenting researchers? Listening to input from the Hill? Screw them:

The Obama administration is pressing for a new law that would establish a cap-and-trade system to curb emissions from power plants and scores of other sources. But the administration has also warned that it plans to move ahead with EPA rules absent a final bill. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is urging GOP colleagues to back an emissions bill in part because Congress, not EPA, should decide the contours of a national emissions program. The so-called endangerment finding stems from a major 2007 Supreme Court decision that enables EPA to limit the emissions if it finds that greenhouses gases are indeed a danger. The agency issued a preliminary finding in April.

The EPA announcement could also give U.S. negotiators more leverage at the international climate talks in Copenhagen that begin today, demonstrating domestic action even though Congress has not completed a final bill to curb emissions.

Although EPA chief Lisa Jackson will make the announcement this afternoon, the edict has global warming zealot and Obama energy czar/chief ClimateGate denier Carol “Put nothing in writing…ever” Browner’s fingerprints all over it.

Take a moment to refresh your memories on how Obama’s enviro-ministers have dealt with inside watchdogs on the endangerment issue. It’s the same way the ClimateGate cabal has dealt with its critics: By attempting to squash them. From my June 26 column:

The free market-based Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington (where I served as a journalism fellow in 1995) obtained a set of internal e-mails exposing Team Obama’s willful and reckless disregard for data that undermine the illusion of “consensus.” In March, Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency, asked agency officials to distribute his analysis on the health effects of greenhouse gases. EPA has proposed a public health “endangerment finding” covering CO2 and five other gases that would trigger costly, extensive new regulations of motor vehicles. The open comment period on the ruling ended this week. But Carlin’s study didn’t fit the blame-human-activity narrative, so it didn’t make the cut.

On March 12, Carlin’s director, Al McGartland, forbade him from having “any direct communication” with anyone outside his office about his study. “There should be no meetings, emails, written statements, phone calls, etc.” On March 16, Carlin urged his superiors to forward his work to EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, which runs the agency’s climate change program. A day later, McGartland dismissed Carlin and showed his true, politicized colors:

“The time for such discussion of fundamental issues has passed for this round. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision… I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office.”

Contrary comments, in other words, would interfere with the “process” of ramming the EPA’s endangerment finding through. Truth-in-science took a backseat to protecting eco-bureaucrats from “a very negative impact.”

In another follow-up e-mail, McGartland warned Carlin to drop the subject altogether: “With the endangerment finding nearly final, you need to move on to other issues and subjects. I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change. No papers, no research etc, at least until we see what EPA is going to do with Climate.”

But, of course, the e-mails show that EPA had already predetermined what it was going to do – “move forward on endangerment.” Which underscores the fact that the open public comment period was all for show. In her message to the public about the radical greenhouse gas rules, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson requested “comment on the data on which the proposed findings are based, the methodology used in obtaining and analyzing the data, and the major legal interpretations and policy considerations underlying the proposed findings.” Ms. Jackson, meet Mr. Carlin.

The EPA now justifies the suppression of the study because economist Carlin (a 35-year veteran of the agency who also holds a B.S. in physics) “is an individual who is not a scientist.” Neither is Al Gore. Nor is environmental czar Carol Browner. Nor is cap-and-trade shepherd Nancy Pelosi. Carlin’s analysis incorporated peer-reviewed studies and, as he informed his colleagues, “significant new research” related to the proposed endangerment finding. According to those who have seen his study, it spotlights EPA’s reliance on out-of-date research, uncritical recycling of United Nations data, and omission of new developments, including a continued decline in global temperatures and a new consensus that future hurricane behavior won’t be different than in the past.

But the message from his superiors was clear: La-la-la, we can’t hear you.

In April, President Obama declared that “the days of science taking a back seat to ideology are over.” Another day, another broken promise.

Philip Klein has more on the EPA bureaucrats expanding their power under the guise of saving the planet:

Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, made these intentions clear in her opening memo to employees in January 2009. “EPA will stand ready to help Congress craft strong, science-based climate legislation that fulfills the vision of the President,” she wrote, adding, “As Congress does its work, we will move ahead to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision recognizing EPA’s obligation to address climate change under the Clean Air Act.”

The Supreme Court decision Jackson referred to is Massachusetts v. EPA. Decided in 2007, the Court ruled that, pending a finding of “endangerment,” the EPA was required to regulate greenhouse gases in new vehicles. Obama appointed the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the suit, Lisa Heinzerling, to be senior policy counsel on climate change at the EPA, a position that does not require confirmation. In her speeches and academic writings, Heinzerling has advocated an unabashedly activist role for the federal government in regulating carbon emissions….

Heinzerling has gone so far as to argue that since global warming kills people, a failure to address it is tantamount to somebody not acting on prior knowledge that a homicide is going to take place.

“Knowledge that death and suffering will result from our actions leads uncontroversially to a moral obligation to change our behavior,” Heinzerling wrote in a 2008 article for the Georgetown Law Journal. “In the United States, knowing killing is condemned in the criminal laws of all 50 states, in modern regulatory laws at the federal level, and in civil jury awards in tort cases. These laws embody a moral commitment against knowing killing that, in traditional criminal contexts, is uncontroversial. It should be no more controversial when it occurs on a global scale.”

Jackson is set to speak in Copenhagen.

I call to your attention GOP Sen. Jim Inhofe’s warning when the EPA took its first steps on this finding:

Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Ranking Member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said today that the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed endangerment finding will unleash a torrent of regulations that will destroy jobs, harm consumers, and extend the agency’s reach into every corner of American life. Despite enormous expense and hardship for the American economy, these regulations will have virtually no effect on climate change.

“Today’s action by the EPA is the beginning of a regulatory barrage that will destroy jobs, raise energy prices for consumers, and undermine America’s global competitiveness,” Senator Inhofe said. “It now appears EPA’s regulatory reach will find its way into schools, hospitals, assisted living facilities, and just about any activity that meets minimum thresholds in the Clean Air Act. Rep. John Dingell was right: the endangerment finding will produce a ‘glorious mess.’

“It’s worth noting that the solution to this ‘glorious mess’ is not for Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation, which replaces one very bad approach with another. Congress should pass a simple, narrowly-targeted bill that stops EPA in its tracks.”

Endangering Farmers, the Elderly, and Construction Workers: Once EPA makes a finding that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare under the Clean Air Act, who, specifically, would be affected? As EPA’s Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) makes clear, an endangerment finding would lead to regulations covering nearly every facet of the American economy. In reading through comments filed in the regulatory docket, one is struck by how broadly the Clean Air Act would apply once an endangerment finding is made-especially to sources that have hitherto never come under the ambit of the Act. EPA received thousands of public comments from various industries and groups that expressed concern and outright opposition-on issues of cost, competitiveness, jobs, and administrative complexity-to greenhouse gas regulation under the CAA.

AN “HISTORIC” DAY: EPA’s finding is indeed historic news, for the simple fact that it will enlarge EPA’s regulatory reach to an unprecedented degree, extending it into every corner of the US economy, causing enormous economic damage. According to Peter Glaser, a national legal expert on the Clean Air Act, an endangerment finding will lead to new EPA regulations covering virtually everything, including “office buildings, apartment buildings, warehouse and storage buildings, educational buildings, health care buildings such as hospitals and assisted living facilities, hotels, restaurants, religious worship buildings, public assembly buildings, supermarkets, retail malls, agricultural facilities…and many others.” An array of new development projects could be delayed, perhaps for several years, causing “an economic train wreck.” This conclusion was supported recently by the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis, which found that EPA’s new carbon regulations would destroy over 800,000 jobs and result in a cumulative GDP loss of $7 trillion by 2029.

Risky Legal Schemes: “…hospitals, schools, farms, commercial buildings, and a host of other small sources emit more than 250 tons per year of CO2-a limit expressly mentioned in the statute-they will be required, once an endangerment finding is made and CO2 becomes a regulated pollutant, to obtain costly, burdensome pre-construction permits for their activities…Further, Glaser notes that “the statutory language is mandatory and does not leave any room for EPA to exercise discretion or create exceptions.” In short, unless Congress exempts them, there’s no way out for schools, assisted living facilities, and thousands upon thousands of small businesses.”

I declare the Obama eco-appartchiks a public danger whose regulatory emissions must be contained.

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Side note: My views on the Obama green power grab and the global warming mob have been clear and unchanged from day one. Some folks have asked about the ad that is appearing on the site today. I obviously do not agree with the advertiser’s support for the Copenhagen treaty.