Lawrence Solomon writing for the Financial Post exposes fibs and crimes in the global warming racket:

This week, the doomsters were embarrassed to learn, once again, that the planet was not in grave peril. Antarctica, their greatest candidate for catastrophe, was not melting at an ever-faster rate, according to a report in Geophysical Research Letters, but at the slowest rate in 30 years. To add to their frustration, they couldn’t even lash out at the lead author, Marco Tedesco of the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Department of City College of New York — the doomsters had praised his previous reports showing high rates of Antarctic melt.

The latest news from the Arctic — delivered daily via satellite — is no better. Two years ago with the Arctic ice in rapid retreat, the doomsters, convinced of the coming of an ice-free Arctic, could scarcely contain themselves. Now, with the Arctic ice in rapid return, their anticipation of disaster seems more a cruel hoax of Nature. …

The red faces aren’t all caused by Nature’s refusal to cooperate in Earth’s demise. The clean carbon folks have recently discovered that they’ve been in bed with organized crime. Scotland Yard and Europol, among numerous other law enforcement agencies across Europe, are hot on the trail of scam artists believed to have made off with £1-billion by illicitly trading carbon credits. In Australia, authorities are investigating claims that a supplier to Carbon Planet, a carbon trading business, has been using fake carbon trading certificates to persuade forest dwellers in Papua New Guinea to sign over the rights to their forests under a UN scheme called REDD, for “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation.’’ Australia’s REDD-faced Climate Change Minister Penny Wong may now be unable to tout Carbon Planet — about to list on the Australian stock exchange on the promise of A$100-million in REDD assets — at the upcoming climate change meetings in Copenhagen. Other dodgy carbon dealings led to the suspension of the UK branch of SGS, one of the world’s largest clean energy auditors, and of the Norwegian certification company DNV.

If universities could blush, Stanford would be setting the skies ablaze with its latest embarrassment, an attempt to censor a global warming documentary about to be released that had filmed one of its professors, global warming catastrophist Stephen Schneider. “You are prohibited from using any of the Stanford footage you shot, including your interview of Professor Stephen Schneider,” Stanford demanded in a letter. “Professor Schneider likewise has requested that I inform you that he has withdrawn any permission for you to use his name, likeness or interview in connection with any film project you may undertake.”

What caused Stanford and Schneider to go ballistic over the release of the documentary, Not Evil Just Wrong, by independent Irish filmmaker Phelim McAleer? He asked Schneider about his many predictions of global cooling catastrophe in the 1970s. …

Norman Borlaug saved uncountable human lives. Like the few others comparable to him, those who have given the world such gifts as vaccines and pesticides, he did it by means of science.

From Investor’s Business Daily:

Norman Borlaug has died at age 95… Borlaug did more for humanity than all of the government programs ever devised put together.

Borlaug was known as the father of the Green Revolution, but he was no environmentalist. Unlike the greens, he was actually concerned about the condition of man.

While misanthropes and neo-Malthusians were predicting mass starvation, Borlaug developed technologies that dramatically increased the yields of food crops and made them more resistant to disease. Between 1960 and 1990, the agronomist’s work was responsible for more than doubling world food production…

So, for all his contributions, what did Borlaug reap? Anonymity. While he did win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal — one of only five persons to have won all three — it was the Paul Ehrlichs and Lester Browns who won public notoriety for pessimistically predicting that food production would not be able to keep up with the growing global population.

The Ehrlichs and Browns were different from Borlaug in two important ways. First, they and their followers advocated policies based on radical social change that requires heavy government intervention into private affairs. Borlaug focused on science. Second, he was right; they were wrong.

From the Telegraph:

Creation, [a film] starring Paul Bettany, details Darwin’s “struggle between faith and reason” as he wrote On The Origin of Species. It depicts him as a man who loses faith in God following the death of his beloved 10-year-old daughter, Annie.

The film was chosen to open the Toronto Film Festival and has its British premiere on Sunday. It has been sold in almost every territory around the world, from Australia to Scandinavia.

However, US distributors have resolutely passed on a film which will prove hugely divisive in a country where, according to a Gallup poll conducted in February, only 39 per cent of Americans [according to whom?] believe in the theory of evolution…

The film has sparked fierce debate on US Christian websites, with a typical comment [by whom? when? where?] dismissing evolution as “a silly theory with a serious lack of evidence to support it despite over a century of trying”.

Jeremy Thomas, the Oscar-winning producer of Creation, said he was astonished that such attitudes exist 150 years after On The Origin of Species was published.

“That’s what we’re up against. In 2009. It’s amazing,” he said. “The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up. It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America. There’s still a great belief that He made the world in six days. It’s quite difficult for we [sic] in the UK to imagine religion in America. We live in a country which is no longer so religious. But in the US, outside of New York and LA, religion rules.”

Does it? It’s hard for us in the US to believe that only 39% believe in evolution. And they almost entirely confined to New York and LA? What rare birds we country-bumpkin atheists are, if that is so!

But the writer of the article, Anita Singh, seems rather too vague, lacking attribution, to inspire much trust in her report. And it has the ring of a typical piece of European anti-Americanism.

Anyway, someone should seize this entrepeneurial opportunity and screen the movie. We suspect that millions will want to see it as much as we do, whatever they believe about evolution.

From Investor’s Business daily:

The world has significantly cooled in the last decade, a period that corresponds to a decline and virtual halt in sunspot activity. Solar activity is in a valley right now, the deepest of the past century. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that in 2008 and 2009 the sun set Space Age records for low sunspot counts, weak solar wind and low solar radiance.

R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada’s Carleton University, has said that “CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet’s climate on long-, medium- and even short-time scales.”

Rather, he says, “I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet.”…

Current solar inactivity is similar to what scientists call the Maunder Minimum, a period of solar inactivity from 1645 to 1715 that spawned what is known as the Little Ice Age. At Christmas, Londoners could ice skate on the frozen Thames and New Yorkers could walk over the Hudson from Manhattan to Staten Island.

The NCAR study shows how complicated atmospheric and climate science really is and how many variables must be factored in to have even a basic understanding of all the components that make up and influence earth’s climate before the world commits economic suicide.

David Solway writes (read it all here):

Al Gore is among the most prominent of the ever-swelling herd of GW parasites and hypocrites. Fiona Kobusingye, coordinator of the Congress of Racial Equality Uganda, notes that Gore “uses more electricity in a week than 28 million Ugandans together use in a year” (Townhall.com., July 29, 2009. ) Gore is a partner in the venture capital investment firm Klein Perkins Caufield & Byers, which has recently floated a $500 million special fund for “green investments” from which Gore will profit handsomely—this is the same firm, incidentally, that is behind Terralliance, an “oil wildcatter,” which is about as nongreen as one can get (Fortune Magazine, Brainstorm 2008 and VentureBeat Clean Tech, July 16, 2008).

But it doesn’t stop there. According to several news outlets (The Tennessean, March 17, 2000, The Wall Street Journal for June 29, 2000 and March 19, 2007, USAToday, March 18, 2007, and many others), Gore earned $570,000 in royalties from Pasminco Ltd. for a highly toxic zinc mine on his property. Quantities of zinc, barium, arsenic, chromium, lead and trace amounts of cyanide were released into the adjacent Caney Fork River—which served as a backdrop to his film An Inconvenient Truth. The river and surroundings are plainly not “as pure as they came,” as Gore had insisted in his book Earth in the Balance that “the lakes and rivers [that] sustain us” should be.

There are also trace elements of pure insanity in Gore’s hypotheses. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January 2009, Gore suggested that the Earth was heading toward Venus-type CO2 levels. American Congressmen are obviously not aware that the atmosphere of Venus is made up of 97% CO2 while that of the Earth is .038%. But Gore continues to be coddled by the powers of officialdom…

But what is most distressing is the corporate and government resolve to monetize what we might call “climate consciousness” and to impose its radical agenda for increased social control, with all the power and profits that pertain thereto, upon the unsuspecting public. The totalitarian mindset, in whatever form and at whatever stage in its evolution, is a monstrous thing, and Climatocracy is one of its most arresting contemporary manifestations. Global warming, said Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London, “has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices” (Global Warming Politics, May 18, 2009). As Vaclav Klaus brooded in an article for the Financial Times (June 14, 2007), we might one day find ourselves living under a regime that would in many ways resemble the Communist nightmare from which half of Europe has only recently emerged.

The question of whether or not there is anthropomorphic global warming has decidedly not been settled, no matter how many scientists and politicians claim that it has.

The Freedom Society of  York University, England, is to hold a conference on climate change. One of the organizers is our British editor, Sam Westrop, founder of the Freedom Society,who writes this:

Thomas Jefferson once said that, “Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error.” And so, with that quote in mind, and the understanding that scientific theories must be falsifiable, the Freedom Society is hosting ‘Climate Week’, a five-day event from the 26th to 30th October at the University of York.

The week will question the politics and ethics of climate change science… We do not know if anthropogenic climate change is occurring or not, but in order for us to draw a conclusion – especially as non-scientists – it is vital that the science be liberal, objective and untainted by political pressure…

There have been many examples of ‘scientific consensus’. A useful illustration is the former fear of Global Cooling that gained momentum in the 1960s. The first paragraph of a New York Times article, from 30th January 1961, entitled SCIENTISTS AGREE WORLD IS COLDER; But Climate Experts Meeting Here Fail to Agree on Reasons for Change, read: “After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.“…

There are a growing number of cries that the IPCC has negated the traditional scientific method. The climatologist Roger Pielke, despite believing in anthropogenic climate change, has criticised the IPCC for its ill-gotten conclusions and has accused the scientific body of subjectively choosing data to support a selective view of climate change science…

Furthermore, the House of Lords Economics Committee has recently stated that, “We have some concerns about the objectivity of the IPCC process, with some of its emissions scenarios and summary documentation apparently influenced by political considerations.”

The IPCC has not just become a body of political scientists, but scientific politicians as well. These people’s professions have become adulterated with the idealism of environmental morality.

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York brought to light the “absolute horror stories” about how some scientific journals and political bodies have engaged in the suppression of climate-sceptic scientists trying to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals. This conference included many afflicted current and former IPCC scientists from all over the globe.

The IPCC is not the only culprit … Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist at NASA, resigned because of the agency’s lack of scientific freedom.

Miskolczi said he wanted to publish and discuss his new research that showed “runaway greenhouse theories contradict energy balance equations,” but he claims that NASA refused to allow him. He recently said that, “Unfortunately, my working relationship with my NASA supervisors eroded to a level that I am not able to tolerate. My idea of the freedom of science cannot coexist with the recent NASA practice of handling new climate change related scientific results.”

A consensus in one branch of science does not mean a consensus across all branches. For example, a recent survey of 51,000 scientists in Canada from the Association of Professional Engineers, Geologists and Geophysicists found that 68% of them disagreed with the statement that “the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled.” The survey also stated that only 26% of scientists attributed global warming to “human activity such as burning fossil fuels.” …

It becomes only too apparent that there is a desperate need for …  free debate, given the drastic choices that Governments are prepared to make. Whether such decisions involve the complete overhaul of our energy sources, or the (ethically questionable) prevention of industrialisation in developing countries, the need to end scientific censorship is vitally important…

The University of York Freedom Society’s ‘Climate Week’ will not try to cover the complicated and vast subject of the science itself; instead it will highlight the dangers of academic suppression and weigh the ethical questions involved when dealing with such proscription. …

Climate Week will see many scientists, politicians, journalists and environmentalists, from all over Europe and ever further afield, come together for the first time in the UK …

It promises to be an interesting event, where debate will be lively.

From The Washington Times:

The House-passed climate change bill, if enacted, would expand the federal government so much that it would take billions of dollars and thousands of new employees to implement.

Now-obscure federal agencies such as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would have to become mini-behemoths in order to handle their expanded responsibilities. Congress would have to appropriate billions of dollars for more bureaucrats, much of which is not reflected in the House bill…

The [Commodities Futures Trading] commission, which would police the new futures market for allowances, apparently would need to expand its work force by at least 31 percent initially to fulfill its obligations under the bill. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which would oversee the day-to-day trading of allowances, has estimated that it would have to expand by 20 percent or 30 percent.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which would oversee pollution regulation, also would balloon in size…

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the government’s expansion would cost $8 billion over a 10-year period. For the bill to operate effectively, nearly 1,500 regulations and mandates would have to be approved for at least 21 federal agencies. The rule-making process alone would take years.

And all to avert an imaginary disaster?

The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, demands world-wide redistribution of wealth and the curbing of economic activity in order to ‘save the planet’ from poverty, hunger, disease, and insecurity. This must be done within four months he says, or  else…

We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.

Any agreement must be fair, effective, equitable and comprehensive, and based on science. And it must help vulnerable nations adapt to climate change…

The science is clear… What is needed is the political will. We have the capacity. We have finance. We have the technology. The largest lacking is political will. That is why I will convey some meetings focused on climate change. I have invited all the leaders of the world … Two years ago, only a handful of world leaders could talk about climate change. Today, leaders of all the world, all the countries on every continent are aware of the threats we face now. This is great progress, for we need leadership of the very highest order. Awareness is the first step. The challenge now is to act. Since my first day as Secretary-General, I have spoken out about the grave climate change threat. My words, at times, have been blunt. When the leaders of the G-8 agreed in July to keep the global temperature increase within two degrees centigrade by the year 2050, that was welcomed and I welcome that statement. But I also said again, it was not enough. But leaders have agreed to cut green house gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. That is welcomed again. But that must be accompanied by the ambitious mid-term target by 2020 as science tells us to do. There I said, while I applaud their commitment, that is not enough. I called for matching these long-term goals with ambitious mid-term emission reduction targets.

Let me be clear about what we need to do.

There are four points [of] very important key political issues.

First industrialized countries must lead by committing to binding mid-term reduction targets on the order of 25 to 40 per cent below 1990 levels. Unfortunately, the mid-term emission targets announced so far are not close enough to this range…

Second, developing countries need to take nationally appropriate mitigation actions in order to reduce the growth in their emissions substantially below business as usual…

Third, developed countries must provide sufficient, measurable, reportable and verifiable financial and technological support to developing countries… Significant resources will be needed from both public and private sources. Developing countries, especially the most vulnerable, will collectively need billions of dollars in public financing for adaptation. I am talking here about new money – not re-packaged Official Development Assistance…

Fourth, we need an equitable and accountable mechanism for distributing these financial and technological resources, taking into account the views of all countries in decision-making.

Accomplishing all of this requires tough decisions. It will take flexibility and hard work to negotiate the most difficult issues. Trust between developed and developing countries is essential. When governments succeed in sealing a deal in Copenhagen, we will have shown the spirit of international solidarity. We will have shown leadership – political will…

Roll on, Copenhagen. Only, while they’re at it, why don’t they agree to make gold out of moonbeams? The science is clear.

From The Vancouver Sun:

Ian Plimer has outraged the ayatollahs of purist environmentalism, the Torquemadas of the doctrine of global warming, and he seems to relish the damnation they heap on him.

Plimer is a geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and he may well be Australia’s best-known and most notorious academic.[He] is an unremitting critic of “anthropogenic global warming” — man-made climate change to you and me — and the current environmental orthodoxy that if we change our polluting ways, global warming can be reversed. It is, of course, not new to have a highly qualified scientist saying that global warming is an entirely natural phenomenon with many precedents in history. Many have made the argument, too, that it is rubbish to contend human behaviour is causing the current climate change. And it has often been well argued that it is totally ridiculous to suppose that changes in human behaviour — cleaning up our act through expensive slight-of-hand taxation tricks — can reverse the trend. But most of these scientific and academic voices have fallen silent in the face of environmental Jacobinism. Purging humankind of its supposed sins of environmental degradation has become a religion with a fanatical and often intolerant priesthood, especially among the First World urban elites.

But Plimer shows no sign of giving way to this orthodoxy and has just published the latest of his six books and 60 academic papers on the subject of global warming. This book, Heaven and Earth — Global Warming: The Missing Science … presents the proposition that anthropogenic global warming is little more than a con trick on the public perpetrated by fundamentalist environmentalists and callously adopted by politicians and government officials who love nothing more than an issue that causes public anxiety [so that they can have yet another excuse to control our lives – JB].

 While environmentalists for the most part draw their conclusions based on climate information gathered in the last few hundred years, geologists, Plimer says, have a time frame stretching back many thousands of millions of years. The dynamic and changing character of the Earth’s climate has always been known by geologists. These changes are cyclical and random, he says. They are not caused or significantly affected by human behavior. Polar ice, for example, has been present on the Earth for less than 20 per cent of geological time, Plimer writes. Plus, animal extinctions are an entirely normal part of the Earth’s evolution.

 (Plimer, by the way, is also a vehement anti-creationist and has been hauled into court for disrupting meetings by religious leaders and evangelists who claim the Bible is literal truth.)

Plimer gets especially upset about carbon dioxide, its role in Earth’s daily life and the supposed effects on climate of human manufacture of the gas. He says atmospheric carbon dioxide is now at the lowest levels it has been for 500 million years, and that atmospheric carbon dioxide is only 0.001 per cent of the total amount of the chemical held in the oceans, surface rocks, soils and various life forms. Indeed, Plimer says carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a plant food. Plants eat carbon dioxide and excrete oxygen. Human activity, he says, contributes only the tiniest fraction to even the atmospheric presence of carbon dioxide.

There is no problem with global warming, Plimer says repeatedly. He points out that for humans periods of global warming have been times of abundance when civilization made leaps forward. Ice ages, in contrast, have been times when human development slowed or even declined.

 So global warming, says Plimer, is something humans should welcome and embrace as a harbinger of good times to come.

Notes on the ‘global warming’ scam.

Christopher Booker writes in the Telegraph: 

It was delightfully appropriate that, as large parts of Argentina were swept by severe blizzards last week, on a scale never experienced before, the city of Nashville, Tennessee, should have enjoyed the coolest July 21 in its history, breaking a record established in 1877. Appropriate, because Nashville is the home of Al Gore, the man who for 20 years has been predicting that we should all by now be in the grip of runaway global warming.

His predictions have proved so wildly wrong – along with those of the Met Office’s £33 million computer model which forecast that we should now be enjoying a “barbecue summer” and that 2009 would be one of “the five warmest years ever” – that the propaganda machine has had to work overtime to maintain what is threatening to become the most expensive fiction* in history.

* According to the Science and Public Policy Institute, ‘the US government has spent over $79 billion since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technologu research, administration, education campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks.’

Check out the full report at scienceandpublicpolicy.org