Several days ago, David Middleton’s takedown of Secretary of State John Kerry’s speech to the Atlantic Council was posted on this site. There are so many things out of kilter in Kerry’s speech that this posting will highlight some additional issues.
Earning 4 Pinocchios From The Washington Post Fact Checker
Again as I did yesterday, I am reblogging a terrific posting from 
WattsUpWithThat by Paul Driessen. I have covered these topics on a number of occasions, but Driessen lays out the case about as well as can be done.
Guest opinion by Paul Driessen
Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA), other senators and Congressman Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) recently sent letters to institutions that employ or support climate change researchers whose work questions claims that Earth and humanity face unprecedented manmade climate change catastrophes.
The letters allege that the targeted researchers may have “conflicts of interest” or may not have fully disclosed corporate funding sources. They say such researchers may have testified before congressional committees, written articles or spoken at conferences, emphasizing the role of natural forces in climate change, or questioning evidence and computer models that emphasize predominantly human causes.
Mr. Grijalva asserts that disclosure of certain information will “establish the impartiality of climate research and policy recommendations” published in the institutions’ names and help Congress make better laws. “Companies with a direct financial interest in climate and air quality standards are funding environmental research that influences state and federal regulations and shapes public understanding of climate science.” These conflicts need to be made clear, because members of Congress cannot perform their duties if research or testimony is “influenced by undisclosed financial relationships,” it says.
The targeted institutions are asked to reveal their policies on financial disclosure; drafts of testimony before Congress or agencies; communications regarding testimony preparation; and sources of “external funding,” including consulting and speaking fees, research grants, honoraria, travel expenses and other monies – for any work that questions the manmade climate cataclysm catechism.
Conflicts of interest can indeed pose problems. However, it is clearly not only fossil fuel companies that have major financial or other interests in climate and air quality standards – nor only manmade climate change skeptics who can have conflicts and personal, financial or institutional interests in these issues.
Renewable energy companies want to perpetuate the mandates, subsidies and climate disruption claims that keep them solvent. Insurance companies want to justify higher rates, to cover costs from allegedly rising seas and more frequent or intense storms. Government agencies seek bigger budgets, more personnel, more power and control, more money for grants to researchers and activist groups that promote their agendas and regulations, and limited oversight, transparency and accountability for their actions. Researchers and organizations funded by these entities naturally want the financing to continue.
You would therefore expect that these members of Congress would send similar letters to researchers and institutions on the other side of this contentious climate controversy. But they did not, even though climate alarmism is embroiled in serious financial, scientific, ethical and conflict of interest disputes.
As Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT atmospheric sciences professor emeritus and one of Grijalva’s targets, has pointed out: “Billions of dollars have been poured into studies supporting climate alarm, and trillions of dollars have been involved in overthrowing the energy economy” – and replacing it with expensive, inefficient, insufficient, job-killing, environmentally harmful wind, solar and biofuel sources.
Their 1090 forms reveal that, during the 2010-2012 period, six environmentalist groups received a whopping $332 million from six federal agencies! That is 270 times what Dr. Willie Soon and Harvard-Smithsonian’s Center for Astrophysics received from fossil fuel companies in a decade – the funding that supposedly triggered the lawmakers’ letters, mere days after Greenpeace launched its attack on Dr. Soon.
The EPA, Fish & Wildlife Service, NOAA, USAID, Army and State Department transferred this taxpayer money to Environmental Defense, Friends of the Earth, Nature Conservancy, Natural Resource Defense Council, National Wildlife Fund and Clean Air Council, for research, reports, press releases and other activities that support and promote federal programs and agendas on air quality, climate change, climate impacts on wildlife, and many similar topics related to the Obama war on fossil fuels. The activists also testified before Congress and lobbied intensively behind the scenes on these issues.
Between 2000 and 2013, EPA also paid the American Lung Association well over $20 million, and lavished over $180 million on its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee members, to support agency positions. Chesapeake energy gave the Sierra Club $26 million to advance its Beyond Coal campaign. Russia gave generously to anti-fracking, climate change and related “green” efforts.
Government agencies and laboratories, universities and other organizations have received billions of taxpayer dollars, to develop computer models, data and reports confirming alarmist claims. Abundant corporate money has also flowed to researchers who promote climate alarms and keep any doubts to themselves. Hundreds of billions went to renewable energy companies, many of which went bankrupt. Wind and solar companies have been exempted from endangered species laws, to protect them against legal actions for destroying wildlife habitats, birds and bats. Full disclosure? Rarely, if ever.
In gratitude and to keep the money train on track, many of these recipients contribute hefty sums to congressional candidates. During his recent primary and general campaign, for example, Senator Markey received $3.8 million from Harvard and MIT professors, government unions, Tom Steyer and a dozen environmentalist groups (including recipients of some of that $332 million in taxpayer funds), in direct support and via advertisements opposing candidates running against the champion of disclosure.
As to the ethics of climate disaster researchers, and the credibility of their models, data and reports, ClimateGate emails reveal that researchers used various “tricks” to mix datasets and “hide the decline” in average global temperatures since 1998; colluded to keep skeptical scientific papers out of peer-reviewed journals; deleted potentially damaging or incriminating emails; and engaged in other practices designed to advance manmade climate change alarms. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based many of its most notorious disappearing ice cap, glacier and rainforest claims on student papers, magazine articles, emails and other materials that received no peer review. The IPCC routinely tells its scientists to revise their original studies to reflect Summaries for Policymakers written by politicians and bureaucrats.
Yet, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy relies almost entirely on this junk science to justify her agency’s policies – and repeats EPA models and hype on extreme weather, refusing to acknowledge that not one Category 3-5 hurricane has made U.S. landfall for a record 9.3 years. Her former EPA air quality and climate czar John Beale is in prison for fraud, and the agency has conducted numerous illegal air pollution experiments on adults and even children – and then ignored their results in promulgating regulations.
Long-time IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri has resigned in disgrace, after saying manmade climate change is “my religion, my dharma” (principle of the cosmic order), rather than a matter for honest, quality science and open, robust debate. The scandals go on and on: see here, here, here, here and here.
It’s no wonder support for job and economy-killing carbon taxes and regulations is at rock bottom. And not one bit surprising that alarmists refuse to debate realist scientists: the “skeptics” would eviscerate their computer models, ridiculous climate disaster claims, and “adjusted” or fabricated evidence.
Instead, alarmists defame scientists who question their mantra of “dangerous manmade climate change.” The Markey and Grijalva letters “convey an unstated but perfectly clear threat: Research disputing alarm over the climate should cease, lest universities that employ such individuals incur massive inconvenience and expense – and scientists holding such views should not offer testimony to Congress,” Professor Lindzen writes. They are “a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming,” says Dr. Soon. Be silent, or perish.
Now the White House is going after Members of Congress! Its new Climate-Change-Deniers website wants citizens to contact and harass senators and congressmen who dare to question its climate diktats.
Somehow, though, Markey, Grijalva, et al. have not evinced any interest in investigating any of this. The tactics are as despicable and destructive as the junk science and anti-energy policies of climate alarmism. It is time to reform the IPCC and EPA, and curtail this climate crisis insanity.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.
Watch EPA secretary demonstrate that she is in over her head.
cbdakota
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) predictions based upon the output of their climate models have a poor record for accuracy. Examples of zombies would be those that say Arctic sea ice will melt away completely by such and such date. The date came, it didn’t happen. But like a zombie, it comes back to life when another expert tells us the Arctic sea ice will melt away completely by some new date.
This posting will high light a few of the failed predictions.
Posted in AGW, Al Gore, Climate Alarmism, ClimateGate, CO2, Drought, Environment, Famine, glaciers, Global Temperatures, Ice Melt, IPCC, Sea Ice, Sea Level
(This 11/03/2013 posting is being updated to include more comprehensive information regarding non-governmental organizations environmental contributions. The updates will be obvious as they will be in color.)
It is misinformation, largely based upon purposeful lies, that a giant conspiracy funded by Big Oil is making people skeptical of the theory of man-made global warming. Accordingly, this supposed campaign has been so good that the majority of people do not think that global warming is a significant issue. Surely that must be the explanation, they say. How else could such an insignificant number of people (skeptics) be so persuasive?
Lets assume that the premise that enough money can buy opinion is factual. If so, who is getting the money? The skeptics or the warmers?
This posting looked at Federal Government funding of the Warmers. It also looked at funding by non-governmental groups. But a new book”Cracking Big Green” by Ron Arnold and Paul Driessen has more comprehensive information about non-government funding and I think the reader will understand how vast the funding for the Warmers is. The amounts of moneys that the Green Organizations have is breathtaking. One small section is lifted from the book to supplement my original information. It follows:
Cracking Big Green: to save the world from the save-the-earth money machine “This is where we open our inquiry in detail. More than 26,500 American environmental groups collected total revenues of over $81billion from 2000 to 2012 according to Giving USA Institute, with only a small part of that coming from membership dues and individual contributions.
Al Gore repeatedly said, in print, “the Arctic will be ice free by 2013”. Gore made this claim in print in 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009.
And it didn’t happen. In fact the Arctic ice cap’s surface area increased by more than 25% in 2012-2013. The much-larger Antarctic ice cap also increased, by about 5% using NASA data. NASA, which is a fully warmist institution peddling the “CO2 hypothesis”, has been forced to admit the Antarctic ice sheet is now at its largest since it started regular satellite monitoring in 1979.
Media spending on the permanent propaganda campaign has been massive, and a fantastic misappropriation of public money where this concerns state-owned media. Obsessionally and expensively filmed summertime-only shots of polar ice melting – which the “climate correct” media has stuffed down our throats for a decade – are however now likely to be retreating to where they belong. To the trashcan of history and to empty film theaters, and late night TV doc boredom for the almost-asleep.
The warmists set up and tirelessly milked the global warming cash cow for all it could yield, but now it is Game Over time. Their great scientific scam may now be what it always scientifically was, a Cuckoo Theory which evicted all other possible theories of why the climate changes.
The Latecomers and Still Hopefuls
As plenty of writers including myself have explained plenty of times, the “CO2 theory” is scientific folk history and was junkscience from the moment it started – in about 1795 with Joseph Priestley and his lurid vision of Phlogiston Terror. To him worse than Al-Qaeda or mustard gas in the trenches of World War I, Priestley thought “phlogiston” could cause a mass dieoff of English industrial workers exposed to woodburning and coalburning fumes! But nobody had to believe it.
Today, only the most primitive minded and witless “warmists” soldier along, spouting idiocies in the hope the under-informed and the lazyminded will continue to buy their junkscience.
If all goes according to plan, Hollywood icon Leonardo DiCaprio will blast into space on the maiden voyage of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic “spaceship” this year. Incredibly enough, Messrs. Branson and DiCaprio style themselves as environmentalist celebrities with the elite mission of warning us there is a “coming ecological catastrophe” if we fail to address the carbon crisis.
Simply because they have garnered a large amount of money over the years, one way and another, their “commitment to fighting climate change” is called praiseworthy by brain-dead media, committed to “celeb worship” even as it backs off and away from the Global Warming scam. Richard Branson, despite all his attempts, is still far behind Al Gore in “warmist” cash-grubbing so he is active wherever that might turn a penny.
Branson claims he was “turned on” to Global Warming by ‘Jim’ Lovelock in person – the same Lovelock who has abandoned the scam. Branson is the founder and CEO of the “Carbon War Room”, an outfit advocating punitive-high energy taxes, which therefore has fawning support from Big Energy and Big Government, but his big hope is that “low carbon space travel” can become his new profit center. His one-liner to critics that space travel and carbon hysteria do not seem to mix, is that his brand of space travel is (very) Low Carbon. Cited by Wall Street Journal, 7 January, he has claimed: “We have reduced the [carbon emission] cost of somebody going into space from something like two weeks of New York’s electricity supply to less than the cost of an economy round-trip from Singapore to London”.
As we know, this concerns low-orbital short-period flight in the upper atmosphere, and nothing to do with real space travel, but coming from a “Global Warming ikon” we must accept there is always massive exaggeration and distortion. It is New Normal. On the other hand, we do not need to accept the plain, straight lying.
According to the US FAA-Federal Aviation Administration, also cited by Wall Street Journal, its own environmental assessment of the launch and re-entry of Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft says that one launch-land cycle will emit about 30 tons of carbon dioxide, or about five tons per passenger. That is around five times more than the carbon footprint of a round-trip flight from Singapore to London. When the support and infrastructure energy costs of the entire Virgin Galactic operation are added, including high-atmosphere flights by tracker and support aircraft, the total carbon emissions rise to about seven times more than an average round-trip flight from Singapore to London. The FAA says that for each passenger on a single trip using Virgin Galactic their total energy burn will be at least twice the energy an average American consumes in a year.
When or if Branson’s tacky low-orbital “space” flights backed by the United Arab Emirates and their “low carbon” petrodollars ever get their celebrity cargoes out of the Earth’s gravity field, a trip to Mars will be obligatory. Here, they will find an atmosphere that is about 96% carbon dioxide (or 960 000 parts per million), and they will be able to smugly gurgle, for the short time they can still breathe: “We told you so!”. Back on Earth however, a little modesty, or at least the prospect of lawsuits for open lying – which is cited by observers as one reason ‘Jim’ Lovelock and his namesake James Hansen have backed away from the Warming scam – call on them to give us a rest and to please pipe down.
Keeping The Baboons Warm
Keeping the warmist gravy train rolling – whatever happens in the real world – is rapidly reverting to whence it came. Big Government, the UN system, the nuclear power and alternate energy industry, and financial opportunists always looking for a new scam. To this motley crew, we have two major bit-part players – government-friendly media and Mr and Mrs Average Informed Citizen – so well-informed they are both easy prey for the lying propaganda from the Carbon Purists. But neither, in fact, can be counted on by the warmists, as they will soon find out.
Baboons in an English wildlfe park searching hot potatoes (Source/ Guardian)
Any kind of historical perspective on atmospheric science and the origins of the “CO2 hypothesis” was until recently deliberately kept out of the media. Any reference to “alternate theories” was trashed by the media as negative, anti-science, badly-intentioned and probably corrupt. Global Warming of the Al Gore variety was to the west what Lysenko was to the USSR of Stalin. Any mention of the relatively large, sometimes outright large changes of world average temperatures over the last 1500 years was derided by warmists – because there was warming in 1980-2000, by a few fractions of 1 degree celsius, we have a crisis. Only “carbon effluent” in the atmosphere could have caused this! What else?
The media, like public opinion is doing what it always does – it moves slowly but surely like a Titanic-crushing iceberg, breaking up as it goes. The media at this moment is packed with scientifically flaky, superficially plausible stories about how global warming causes record cold and massive snowstorms in New York, but also that until the magic date of 2065 global warming will be “net positive” for human beings, while Mr Obama has told us (although we don’t have to believe him) 97 percent of scientists still think crisis-style warming is a reality.
In a late 2013 report, the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism said that most media coverage of climate change now emphasises uncertainty, and an increasing number (25%) focus on the “positive opportunities” global warming could or might bring. Global cooling, however, remains completely banned from mainstream media, except as freaky tidbit, despite it being at least as possible that we have cooling, as warming, in a time frame stretching to 2065.
Keeping The Baboons Stupid
Admitting that we don’t know what happens in the Earth’s atmosphere, therefore we can’t know how climate changes is affecting global temperature – is the ultimate blog-material. It is the no-no option and “just in case”, or “simply by precaution”, so we have to reject that possibility. Time is limited and Al Gore needs cash. Propaganda overkill arrived. Now Gore’s pews are empty, and we’re left with hit-and-run street preachers.
One key benefit of the comeuppance for global warming, losing its status of “unquestionable” except by misfits, psychotics and the badly-motivated, is that climate change will be able to emerge as the real subject of interest.
We are likely near the point, now, when the blindest and most faithful cult followers of global warming and the “CO2 hypothesis” will have to admit they’ve been sold a pup. The computer-modeled, science-correct, politically-correct theory of man-made CO2 causing global warming, or its second-best rebranded title of “climate change”, or its third-best of “extreme weather”, was a 10-year trip to oblivion along the well-trod path of Dumbing Down. Global Warming was Dumb with a capital D.
Gore-theory proved nothing at all. The sole benefit of the waltz down Propaganda Lane is that we know climate is changing but we don’t know why. Being able to admit that is difficult for high intellect baboons.
Baboons are in fact a lot more results-oriented, and have much less time to waste on trivial pursuits than human beings. For that reason they do not invent new enemies and they make do with ones they always have had and know well. Who are real. The Global Warming crisis movement – an example of mass hysteria – invented an all-new enemy for Mankind, called Mankind.
Also called misanthropy and being more than a little dated, the warmists pushed the misanthropy button so hard we were asked to think “we” are destroying our planet – unlike Al Gore with his personal Gulfstream 5 jet, his expanding waistline and penchant for fillet mignon and massage parlors with happy endings – and unlike Richard Branson and his Virgin jetliners, because average humans use far too much fossil energy, but Branson and his Hollywood playboy pal are apparently “saving the planet” for those of us who don’t own our own island in the Caribbean.
This mental constipation only has one logical readout – that human beings should operate a mass cull or Die Off, to prevent us from killing the planet – which belongs to very nice persons like Gore and Branson. Even low-IQ baboons would reject the embarked logic inside this mental masturbation. They would much prefer serious endeavors like looking for rapidly-cooling potatoes in the snow.
It’s officially an evolutionary crisis when the feral monkeys start looking smarter than our jet-setting monkeys in suits. Maybe it’s time to put the feral baboons in suits and ties, and let them realize their true Darwinian potential in Westminster, Brussels and Washington.
Posted in AGW, Al Gore, Climate Alarmism, Climate Models, CO2, Environment, EPA, Global Temperatures, IPCC, United Nations, Windpower
Who ever it is that broke into the files at East Anglia University back in 2009, has just released, to selected bloggers, a password to access some 220,247 new e-mails. The person that got these files says it is time to release the remainder of the ClimateGate documents. He says the task is too big for him to handle. He is not saying that these emails will have as big an impact as the first release back in 2009 did but he said there may be some big stories in this lot.
Not much is out in the public yet but you can bet that many folks will be working their way through these e-mails. So, to keep up to speed on them you might want to go to WattsUpWithThat: or
Tom Nelson http://tomnelson.blogspot.com
Climate Depot http://www.climatedepot.com
Junk Science http://junkscience.com/2013/03/13/climategate-3-0-220247-e-mails/
cbdakota
Posted in AGW, Al Gore, Climate Models, ClimateGate, CO2, EPA, fossil fuels, Global Temperatures, IPCC
Posted in AGW, Al Gore, Al Jazeera, CO2, Domestic Energy, fossil fuels, Fracking/Shale Gas, Media Bias
Climate Change Sanity 