Man-made(-up) global warming on trial 483

Race. Sex. Global warming.

The three planks in the platform of the Left.

And the greatest of these is global warming.

It is wicked of us human beings to cause it. We must do penance, and make amends.

James Delingpole writes at Breitbart:

The climate alarmists have finally got their day in court against those pesky free-thinking intelligent people they call “climate deniers”.

Big mistake. The overconfident alarmists appear to have bitten off more than they can chew. They imagined that they’d fool the world into thinking that this was a case about ordinary, wronged citizens – specifically the cities of San Francisco and neighboring Oakland – taking on the evil, sea-level-raising, planet-destroying might of Big Oil.

In reality, as is becoming clearer by the day, it’s the “science” of climate change which is really on trial here. And given that the “science” of climate change is so shaky that it might as well be called “witchcraft” this is not a discussion that’s likely to end well for the shysters who are promoting it …

The cities of San Francisco and Oakland are suing five Big Oil firms – Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, BP, and Royal Dutch Shell – alleging that they have conspired, Big-Tobacco-style, to conceal the harm of their products. Apparently, these oil majors ought to be compelled to pay billions of dollars in compensation for the damage they have done, inter alia by causing sea levels to rise.

Already the plaintiffs have run into a major problem. Judge William Alsup – who by rights really ought to have been one of their guys, given that he’s a Clinton appointment who lives in California – turns out to be the real deal. … [He]  has pretty much dismissed the … conspiracy theory. “From what I’ve seen, and feel free to send me other documentation, but all I’ve seen so far is that someone [from an oil major] went to the IPCC conference and took notes. That’s not a conspiracy,” he said.

This does not augur well for the plaintiffs.

The oil majors have been about as helpful as a chocolate fireguard in this case. You’d think that with all those billions, they’d have a little to set aside to make a decent fight in defense of their own industry. But in fact, for reasons ranging from cowardice to convenience to cynicism, most of them are heavily invested in the alarmist cause. Exxon’s Rex Tillerson wanted the U.S. to stay in the Paris Climate Accord; Shell’s CEO Ben Van Beurden is a veritable Uriah Heep when it comes to grovelling about the evils of his industry; BP once tried to rebrand itself “Beyond Petroleum” lest anyone confuse it with a company whose business model depended on extracting sticky black stuff from the ground.

When the judge asked the various parties to give him a tutorial on climate change, only Chevron bothered to do so. Instead, most of the best scientific arguments have been made for them by skeptics offering amicus curiae – “friends of the court” – briefs. Despite what you hear claimed by climate alarmists, skeptics receive little if any financial support from the oil industry because the oil industry just doesn’t want the flak – and it knows that skeptics are so committed to their cause they’re prepared to say this stuff for free, so why bother?

One amicus curiae team, supported by the Heartland Institute, comprises Christopher Monckton, Willie Soon, David Legates and William Briggs. … Here … is a short summary [of their  brief]:

There is no “consensus” among scientists that recent global warming was chiefly anthropogenic, still less that unmitigated anthropogenic warming has been or will be dangerous or catastrophic …

Even if it be assumed [for the sake of argument] that all of the 0.8 degC global warming since anthropogenic influence first became potentially significant in 1950 was attributable to us, in the present century little more than 1.2 degC of global warming is to be expected, not the 3.3 degC that the  IPCC had predicted.

The other team comprises William Happer, Steven Koonin and Richard Lindzen. Here is a summary of their argument:

The climate is always changing; changes like those of the past half-century are common in the geologic record, driven by powerful natural phenomena.

Human influences on the climate are a small (1%) perturbation to natural energy flows.

It is not possible to tell how much of the modest recent warming can be ascribed to human influences.

There have been no detrimental changes observed in the most salient climate variables and today’s projections of future changes are highly uncertain.

[The plaintiffs] have two major problems: a) they’re not intellectually in the same league as the skeptics and b) the science just doesn’t support them.

The Warmist team’s leading academic is Professor Myles Allen of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University. This sounds impressive. But he didn’t do himself many favors when at one point, he told the court “Now oxygen is almost 29 percent of the atmosphere.” OK, so perhaps he was just having a Condor moment (the correct figure is 21 percent). His bigger difficulty is that his argument for the existence of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory is riddled with omissions and inaccuracies which are cruelly exposed.  Allen’s presentation, for example, made much of Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish chemist who posited that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations would cause “global warming” (though Arrhenius considered this to be a good thing, not a bad thing). But our understanding of climate change has moved on since then, not least in the recognition that water vapor is a far more significant greenhouse gas than CO2.

As [an] anonymous demolisher notes …

Myles Allen points out that CO2 is potent relative to the non-GHGs of O2 and N2, but fails to address H2O. That is like claiming an aspirin cured the pain AFTER being given a huge dose of morphine, and never mentioning the morphine.

There is much more in this scathing vein, such as this dismissal of Allen’s claim to the court that carbon dioxide is rising to levels not seen for 20 million years.

Cherry picking at its best. CO2 has been as high as 7,000 ppm and NEVER caused catastrophic warming or ocean acidification. Life has thrived through all levels of atmospheric CO2. Coral  Reefs formed during periods where there was much higher CO2. The globe fell into an ice age when CO2 was 4,000 ppm, 10x what it is today. BTW, plants die when CO2 falls below 180 ppm.We are near the lowest level in geological history for CO2, and we are dangerously close to the level where plants starve to death.

Warming is infinitely preferable to an ice age.

Funny how Dr. Myles Allen forgot to include the longer-term CO2 graphic [which] follows standard of living far better than temperatures.

The bottom line is, if you’re going to duke it out on the science, you’d better make damn sure that your science is better than your opponent’s science. In the Alarmists’ case this just isn’t an option.

Up till now the Alarmists have understood this. It’s why they roll the way they do, preferring to use the Appeal to Authority (and underhand bullying and smearing attacks) rather than engage skeptics in public debate. Whenever they’ve done the latter, they’ve tended to lose – as Tony Thomas notes at  “Do not debate!”, that has been warmist policy  ever since their talent was trounced by the sceptic team in a two-hour New York public debate at Radio City Hall in 2007.

The audience initially polled 57.3% to 29.9% for a “Global Warming Crisis”, but after the debate that flipped 46.2% to 42.2% in favour of the sceptics. US warmist “experts” subsequently refused even to share platforms with sceptic rivals if informed critics of their shtick are given equal standing.

In March, 2013, Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA/GISS climate group, fled the TV interview room when he learned Roy Spencer, an expert on earth temperature readings from satellite, was arriving and would subject him to questions. A year later Dan Weiss, the director of climate strategy at the liberal Center for American Progress, did an equivalent runner rather than face sceptic Marc Morano in debate, as did Hollywood icon and “Titanic” director James Cameron in 2010.

In a recent exception, warmist Jon Christensen (UCal LA) and sceptic Willie Soon (Harvard) went head to head at a Comedy Club in Los Angeles in January. The result was not scored but the audience jeered whenever Christensen denied California’s soaring power prices were hurting low-income families.

This attempt by alarmists to take on five oil majors smacks of hubris. Or desperation. Or suicidal complacency. Or perhaps a mix of all three. Because the alarmist position happens also to be the longstanding establishment position, it’s possible that they have been lulled into forgetting the trial belongs to another era: the one before Donald Trump came along and drove a coach and horses through the so-called climate “consensus”.

This cannot end well for the Alarmists who brought this dishonest, vexatious, and expensive case.

What did they think they were playing at?

And wasn’t it all drummed up for political ends? That at least was the understanding among the Nomenklatura who orchestrated it all.

From our post Turning point (April 4, 2016]:

If they were honest, the climate alarmists would [all] admit that they are not working feverishly to hold down global temperatures — they would acknowledge that they are instead consumed with the goal of holding down capitalism and establishing a global welfare state.

Have doubts? Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015:

One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.

For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said:

The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.

Mad as they are, Edenhofer’s comments are nevertheless consistent with other alarmists who have spilled the movement’s dirty secret. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made a similar statement in anticipation of last year’s Paris climate summit. [From which President Trump sensibly withdrew the United States.]

This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution. This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.

So world-wide redistribution is the aim. Global Communism dictated by those who know how the world should be managed.

And must manage it. To avert planetary disaster. It’s that big a crisis and only they can save us. Because … global warming.

The big green lie and the merchant of hot air 98

People who do not believe in global warming have been told to shut up. No public debate, no contradictory discourse. No articles in scientific journals. They simply have been told that the case is proven.

That’s from a CNS News report on October 29, 2015.

Seven months ago. Now non-believers are not just told to shut up – they can be charged with committing a crime.

Sultan Knish writes:

Big Green is big business. The global renewable energy market is estimated at over $600 billion. Obama’s stimulus boondoggle alone blew around $50 billion on green energy. Annual spending is somewhere around $39 billion a year and that’s just the tip of the Big Green iceberg.

California carbon auctions are climbing into the billions. And the endgame is a national and a global carbon tax that will allow Big Green to take money out of the pockets of every single human being.

Environmentalism isn’t a hippie with a cardboard sign. It’s multinational corporations and big banks. It’s environmental consultants padding the bill for every government project. It’s subsidies that get carved up ten different ways into highly profitable investments at taxpayer expense. It’s brand greenwashing and useless recycling programs. It’s a dime, a dollar or a hundred dollars added to every bill.

Big Green is booming business.

But it can’t succeed on its own. Without public policy based on the hoax that the planet is going to be destroyed unless Big Green gets more green cash, the scam collapses.

Even as the science behind the conspiracy theory that claims humans are warming the planet continues to fall apart, Big Green is escalating its crackdown on climate science. If you are going to falsely claim that 99.99% of scientists agree with you, the best way to ensure that is by criminalizing scientific dissent.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for punishing and imprisoning dissenters. Bill Nye endorsed such a call …  And while it’s easy to dismiss Kennedy and Nye as famous crackpots, Attorney General Loretta Lynch admitted that there had been discussions about prosecuting climate dissenters. And that materials had been passed along to the FBI.

California Attorney General Kamala Harris, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and 14 other Democratic attorney generals have begun working the more profitable corporate angle by targeting Exxon Mobil, hoping to cut off researchers and activists from their funding.  The agenda was blatantly on parade right from the start at a press conference of attorney generals under the banner of “AG’s United for Clean Power”. Imagine a group of attorney generals banding together under the name “AG’s United for Pepsi” to sue Coca Cola. That’s exactly what this was. The attorney generals were announcing that they are targeting one industry on behalf of a rival industry.

The Big Green group of prosecutors was launched by Al Gore, whose Big Green investments have made him a very rich man. Gore is the chairman of Generation Investment Management, a UK investment management firm that focuses on environmental investments. Its funds are valued at $7.3 billion.

Gore’s Inconvenient Truth ecohoax flick was financed by the head of the Capricorn Investment Group. Al Gore invests in Green Energy and then runs campaigns urging government Green investments. Now Gore has moved beyond that blatant conflict of interest to trying to criminalize rival industries. …

Big Green and its big Democratic backers claim that they are only targeting industries. Their goal is to bankrupt gas and oil just like they bankrupted coal, leaving Americans with no choice except overpriced and unreliable Big Green energy. But their targets aren’t just industries and the people who work for them. They have their sights set on eliminating dissenting ideas that make their fraud possible.

The campaign against Exxon Mobil seeks to treat the funding of dissenting ideas about Global Warming as fraud. It’s impossible to escape the [Galileo-like] implications of climate heresy trials in such a move. But the subpoena against the Competitive Enterprise Institute targets critics of Big Green’s climate fraud more directly and is a major step in the suppression of free speech.

This campaign shows that the wealth of men like Gore or the Rockefellers isn’t only going to be built on crushing coal miners, depriving the elderly of heat in the winter and running up energy costs for working families. It also requires silencing and suppressing those people still willing to speak out against the Big Green fraud.

There’s nothing natural about our “transition” to Big Green. It’s the greatest financial fraud of our time. It makes no sense either economically or technologically. Instead Big Green profiteers had to invent a crisis, lie about the science, shake down governments and bribe everyone in sight. If the sky isn’t falling and the ice hasn’t vanished, as Al Gore claimed, then Big Green loses all its big wads of green cash.

Big Green’s big investors are riding a tiger. They can’t get off or they’ll be eaten alive. They have no choice but to destroy their rivals and theirs critics. And ordinary people, from coal miners to working families to scientists, have no choice but to resist.

NONE of Al Gore’s dire prophecies made in his film An inconvenient Truth – released on May 24, 2006 – have come true. Nor will they. The only dangerously hot air threatening us is coming out of his lying mouth.

The is from Truth Revolt:

In honor of the upcoming 10th anniversary of the release of former Vice President Al Gore’s blockbusting, influential documentary An Inconvenient Truth, The Daily Caller News Foundation re-watched the lucrative propaganda film to see how closely Gore’s fearmongering about climate disaster matches up with reality.

Below are the highlights, or lowlights perhaps, of the Daily Caller’s conclusions about Gore’s convenient untruths:

1) Kilimanjaro? Still Snowy

Gore claimed that Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s tallest peak, would be snow-free “within the decade.”

Wrong. There’s still snow there year-round, and ecologists monitoring Kilimanjaro’s snowpack found that it may have shrunk a little, but they are confident it’s not going anywhere soon. “Preliminary findings show that the ice is nowhere near melting,” said Imani Kikoti, an ecologist at Mount Kilimanjaro National Park. “Much as we agree that the snow has declined over centuries, but we are comfortable that its total melt will not happen in the near future.”

2) Global Warming? Not Happening

Gore claimed that a rise in temperature due to man-made carbon dioxide emissions was “uninterrupted and intensifying.”

Wrong. Global temperatures showed little-to-no warming after Gore released his film. In fact, as the Daily Caller notes, “surface temperature data showed no significant global warming for a period of about 15 years, starting in the early 2000s. Satellite-derived temperature data showed, until the recent El Niño, no statistically significant warming trend for more than 21 years”.

3) Storms Aren’t Stronger

“And of course when the oceans get warmer, that causes stronger storms,” Gore said in the film. “That same year that we had that string of big hurricanes, we also set an all-time record for tornadoes.”

Gore’s film came out just after Hurricane Katrina. He mentions that the U.S. was hit with a string of severe storms in the early 2000s and that Japan saw a record number of typhoons. “The insurance industry has actually noticed this,” Gore said. “Their recovered losses are going up.”

But even findings from the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization with which Gore shared the 2007 Nobel Prize, show that storms aren’t more extreme since 2006. The IPCC reported in 2103 that there “is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century”. The IPCC also found “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century” and “no robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin”.

4) North Pole? Still Cold

Gore claimed that the Arctic could be ice-free “within the next 50 to 70 years,” threatening extinction of polar bears and other Arctic animals.

But Chip Knappenberger, a climate scientist at the libertarian Cato Institute, states that the Arctic is almost completely surrounded by land, so the ice that forms there tends to stay there. Arctic ice coverage has shrunk in recent decades, but “I doubt the Arctic will be free of all ice in any summer, although the total area may well be greatly reduced in the future if it continues to warm there… Such a situation should not be overly worrisome, as there is ample evidence that it has occurred in the past and clearly, polar bears and everything else up there managed to survive.” ​Polar bears are actually thriving despite the slightly shrinking ice coverage.

5) New Ice Age? Also Not Happening

Gore warned that “At the end of the last ice age, as the last glacier was receding from North America, the ice melted and … an ice dam on the eastern border formed and one day it broke.” Fresh, cold water bled out into the North Atlantic, he claimed, causing the Gulf Stream to stall and sending Europe into another ice age. Gore then suggested that another Ice Age could begin if Greenland’s ice sheet melts and brings more cold water into the North Atlantic,

Australian scientists have since totally debunked this theory that the Gulf Stream, or AMOC, is weakening. “Claims of strengthening or reducing of the AMOC are therefore pure speculation,” they wrote in a paper published in March.

So, global warming isn’t swelling the seas, but alarmism about it has certainly swelled Al Gore’s bank account.

Has anyone since the medieval popes made as much money out of absurd rumors as this man has?

Truth Revolt titles its article: Being a Liberal, a Liar and a Horse’s Ass Means Never Having To Say You’re Sorry.

Here’s a picture of the liberal lying horse’s ass, looking very pleased with himself. And why should he not? He got away with the biggest scam of modern times and became a billionaire by lying.

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Hot air billionaire Al Gore