Global warming! Here!

[kwhilden]

Bob,

*You* are the one who consistently attacts the people who comment on this thread. Based on your stated history as a PR expert, I can understand why you take that approach. You certainly display an impressive expertise at disguising your personal attack as dispassionate statement of fact (e.g. your last post). Bravo!

At some point, I'll be up in Portland to visit friends and former colleagues. If you can stand to have a beer with a fellow SUP fanatic with slightly different points of view on other issues. I'll let you know.

Cheers,
Kevin

[Weasels wake]

Surpried there hasn't been any mention of the recent scandals here. Seems like its being blown a bit out of proportion but there certainly are some damning emails coming to light.

Okay,,,,,, here's the latest that I find fascinating~
From the Wall St. Journal, two days ago.

How to Forge a Consensus
The impression left by the Climategate emails is that the global warming game has been rigged from the start.

The climatologists at the center of last week's leaked-email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the wording of the some of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science, which is as certain as ever.

"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into something nefarious."

Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.

We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. His May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report: "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" does not "read well," it's true. (Mr. Mann has said he didn't delete any such emails.)

But the furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or even whether climatologists are nice people in private. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at in the first place, and how even now a single view is being enforced. In short, the impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.

According to this privileged group, only those whose work has been published in select scientific journals, after having gone through the "peer-review" process, can be relied on to critique the science. And sure enough, any challenges that critics have lobbed at climatologists from outside this clique are routinely dismissed and disparaged.

This past September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who fact-checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds—including some in Mr. Mann's work—on his Web site, Climateaudit.org. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more-famous papers.

As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted to several colleagues in an email from March 2003, when the journal "Climate Research" published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal!"

The scare quotes around "peer-reviewed literature," by the way, are Mr. Mann's. He went on in the email to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board." In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, re-define what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views. It's easy to manufacture a scientific consensus when you get to decide what counts as science.

The response to this among the defenders of Mr. Mann and his circle has been that even if they did disparage doubters and exclude contrary points of view, theirs is still the best climate science we've got. The proof for this is circular. It's the best, we're told, because it's the most-published and most-cited—in that same peer-reviewed literature.

Even so, by rigging the rules, they've made it impossible to know how good it really is. And then, one is left to wonder why they felt the need to rig the game in the first place, if their science is as robust as they claim. If there's an innocent explanation for that, we'd love to hear it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To me, trying to control or influence the peer review is no different than jury tampering, plain and simple.  And in the real world, that's illegal.

[kwhilden]

Here's the statement from the Climate Research Unit that was hacked. Anyone who bothers to read this thread can decide for themselves whether the stolen emails taken completely out of context suggest that *all* scientists are conspiring to fool the world.

CRU statement

Recently thousands of files and emails illegally obtained from a research server at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have been posted on various sites on the web. The emails relate to messages received or sent by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) over the period 1996-2009.

A selection of these emails have been taken out of context and misinterpreted as evidence that CRU has manipulated climate data to present an unrealistic picture of global warming.

This conclusion is entirely unfounded and the evidence from CRU research is entirely consistent with independent evidence assembled by various research groups around the world.

There is excellent agreement on the course of temperature change since 1881 between the data set that we contribute to (HadCRUT3) and two other, independent analyses of worldwide temperature measurements. There are no statistically significant differences between the warming trends in the three series since the start of the 20th century. The three independent global temperature data series have been assembled by:

• CRU and the Met Office Hadley Centre (HadCRUT3) in the UK.
• The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Asheville, NC, USA.
• The Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), part of the National Aeronautic and Space Administration (NASA) in New York.

The warming shown by the HadCRUT3 series between the averages of the two periods (1850-99 and 2001-2005) was 0.76±0.19°C, and this is corroborated by the other two data sets.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 4th Assessment Report (AR4) published in 2007 concluded that the warming of the climate system was unequivocal. This conclusion was based not only on the observational temperature record, although this is the key piece of evidence, but on multiple strands of evidence. These factors include: long-term retreat of glaciers in most alpine regions of the world; reductions in the area of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) snow cover during the spring season; reductions in the length of the freeze season in many NH rivers and lakes; reduction in Arctic sea-ice extent in all seasons, but especially in the summer; increases in global average sea level since the 19th century; increases in the heat content of the ocean and warming of temperatures in the lower part of the atmosphere since the late 1950s.

CRU has also been involved in reconstructions of temperature (primarily for the Northern Hemisphere) from proxy data (non-instrumental sources such as tree rings, ice cores, corals and documentary records). Similar temperature reconstructions have been developed by numerous other groups around the world. The level of uncertainty in this indirect evidence for temperature change is much greater than for the picture of temperature change shown by the instrumental data. But different reconstructions of temperature change over a longer period, produced by different researchers using different methods, show essentially the same picture of highly unusual warmth across the NH during the 20th century. The principal conclusion from these studies (summarized in IPCC AR4) is that the second half of the 20th century was very likely (90% probable) warmer than any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely (66% probable) the warmest in the past 1300 years.

One particular, illegally obtained, email relates to the preparation of a figure for the WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1999. This email referred to a “trick” of adding recent instrumental data to the end of temperature reconstructions that were based on proxy data. The requirement for the WMO Statement was for up-to-date evidence showing how temperatures may have changed over the last 1000 years. To produce temperature series that were completely up-to-date (i.e. through to 1999) it was necessary to combine the temperature reconstructions with the instrumental record, because the temperature reconstructions from proxy data ended many years earlier whereas the instrumental record is updated every month. The use of the word “trick” was not intended to imply any deception.

Phil Jones comments further: “One of the three temperature reconstructions was based entirely on a particular set of tree-ring data that shows a strong correlation with temperature from the 19th century through to the mid-20th century, but does not show a realistic trend of temperature after 1960. This is well known and is called the ‘decline’ or ‘divergence’. The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste. CRU has not sought to hide the decline. Indeed, CRU has published a number of articles that both illustrate, and discuss the implications of, this recent tree-ring decline, including the article that is listed in the legend of the WMO Statement figure. It is because of this trend in these tree-ring data that we know does not represent temperature change that I only show this series up to 1960 in the WMO Statement.”

The ‘decline’ in this set of tree-ring data should not be taken to mean that there is any problem with the instrumental temperature data. As for the tree-ring decline, various manifestations of this phenomenon have been discussed by numerous authors, and its implications are clearly signposted in Chapter 6 of the IPCC AR4 report.

[PonoBill]

Bob,

*You* are the one who consistently attacts the people who comment on this thread. Based on your stated history as a PR expert, I can understand why you take that approach. You certainly display an impressive expertise at disguising your personal attack as dispassionate statement of fact (e.g. your last post). Bravo!

At some point, I'll be up in Portland to visit friends and former colleagues. If you can stand to have a beer with a fellow SUP fanatic with slightly different points of view on other issues. I'll let you know.

Cheers,
Kevin

Actually, I'm Bill. Bob is my neer-do-well brother.

I really don't have a position on Global Warming. I wish I did. What I do have is an understanding that ALL of this is politics--both sides. Be glad to have a beer someday, but I live in Hood River and Maui, not Portland anymore. Both are fine places for a beer though.

[stoneaxe]

Jeez...I get slammed erroneously and I'm a neer-do-well? WTF...

[kwhilden]

Bill... sorry to confuse your name. There are many good reasons to visit Hood River, not the least of which is washing down hot air with cold beer. 

[log man]

hey weasel , greetings from Australia . You mentioned Steve Fielding . Every country has a Steve Fielding. A born again , bible bashing nincompoop, floundering in the 21st century, desperately trying to find a soap box to stand on , just  think of a dangerous Ned Flanders and you've got Steve.  Oh! and the reference to the Australian parliament rejecting the carbon taxes is not accurate at all . members of our old guard Liberals(republicans) have dug their heels in and are about to tip out their leader (a global warming believer). Anyhow it's a bit immaterial ,the liberal party support has hit rock bottom and support for action on carbon seems to be very well supported out in voter world. Also, did hear on the radio that New Zealand had passed legislation on carbon credits. Weasel, I'm not sure your representing things as they really are

[kwhilden]

An interview with Dr. Michael Mann, who is the lead author of one of the most controversial aspects of the climate change.... and who is one of the scientists most prominently attacked by the stolen emails taken out of context. This explains how the out-of-context attacks worked.

Michael Mann Responds to CRU Hack
by DarkSyde
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/11/26/807934/-Michael-Mann-Responds-to-CRU-Hack
Thu Nov 26, 2009 at 02:30:04 PM PST

Rush Limbaugh says the climate scientists should be 'drawn and quartered'. Glenn Beck touts stolen emails as evidence for a 'scam,' and the Moonie Times says, well who the hell cares. The Moonies are down to 45,000 uber-wingnut subscribers. Last week we explained the story behind one of the stolen emails. Paleo-climatologist Micheal Mann of Realclimate, who was intimately involved in the issue discussed in some of the emails in question, was kind enough to take time out of his holiday week to provide further clarification.

DS: When Phil Jones wrote in 1999, "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i. e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline," what did he mean?

Michael Mann: Phil Jones has publicly gone on record indicating that he was using the term "trick" in the sense often used by people, as in "bag of tricks", or "a trick to solving this problem ...", or "trick of the trade". In referring to our 1998 Nature article, he was pointing out simply the following: our proxy record ended in 1980 (when the proxy data set we were using terminates) so, it didn't include the warming of the past two decades. In our Nature article we therefore also showed the post-1980 instrumental data that was then available through 1995, so that the reconstruction could be viewed in the context of recent instrumental temperatures. The separate curves for the reconstructed temperature series and for the instrumental data were clearly labeled.

The reference to "hide the decline" is referring to work that I am not directly associated with, but instead work by Keith Briffa and colleagues. The "decline" refers to a well-known decline in the response of only a certain type of tree-ring data (high-latitude tree-ring density measurements collected by Briffa and colleagues) to temperatures after about 1960. In their original article in Nature in 1998, Briffa and colleagues are very clear that the post-1960 data in their tree-ring dataset should not be used in reconstructing temperatures due to a problem known as the "divergence problem" where their tree-ring data decline in their response to warming temperatures after about 1960.  "Hide" was therefore a poor word choice, since the existence of this decline, and the reason not to use the post 1960 data because of it, was not only known, but was indeed the point emphasized in the original Briffa et al Nature article. There is a summary of that article available on this NOAA site.

There have been many articles since then trying to understand the reason for this problem, which applies largely to only one very specific type of proxy data (tree-ring wood density data from higher latitudes).

As for my research in this area more generally, there was a study commissioned by the National Academies of Science back in 2006 to assess the validity of paleoclimate reconstructions in general, and my own work in specific. A summary of that report, and link to it, is available here. And the New York Times (6/22/06), in an article about the report entitled "Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate" had the following things to say:

    A controversial paper asserting that recent warming in the Northern Hemisphere was probably unrivaled for 1,000 years was endorsed today, with a few reservations, by a panel convened by the nation's preeminent scientific body...At a news conference at the headquarters of the National Academies, several members of the panel reviewing the study said they saw no sign that its authors had intentionally chosen data sets or methods to get a desired result. "I saw nothing that spoke to me of any manipulation," said one member, Peter Bloomfield, a statistics professor at North Carolina State University. He added that his impression was the study was "an honest attempt to construct a data analysis procedure."

DS: You wrote, "Perhaps we'll do a simple update to the Yamal post. As we all know, this isn't about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations," what's the story there?

MM: This refers to a particular tree-ring reconstruction of Keith Briffa’s. These tree-ring data are just one of numerous tree-ring records used to reconstruct past climate. Briffa and collaborators were criticized (unfairly in the view of many of my colleagues and me) by a contrarian climate change website based on what we felt to be a misrepresentation of their work.  A further discussion can be found on the site "RealClimate.org" that I co-founded and help run. It is quite clear from the context of my comments that what I was saying was that the attacks against Briffa and colleagues were not about truth but instead about making plausibly deniable accusations against him and his colleagues.

We attempted to correct the misrepresentations of Keith's work in the "RealClimate article mentioned above, and we invited him and his co-author Tim Osborn to participate actively in responding to any issues raised in the comment thread of the article which he did. 

DS: Phil Jones again wrote "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment -minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."

MM: This was simply an email that was sent to me, and can in no way be taken to indicate approval of, let alone compliance with, the request. I did not delete any such email correspondences.

DS: You wrote, "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal"?

MM: This comment was in response to a very specific incident regarding a paper by Soon and Baliunas published in the journal "Climate Research". An editor of the journal, with rather contrarian views on climate change, appeared to several of us to be gaming the system to let through papers that clearly did not meet the standards of quality for the journal. The chief editor (Hans von Storch), and half of the editorial board, resigned in protest of the publication of the paper, after the publisher refused to allow von Storch the opportunity to write an editorial about how the peer review process had failed in this instance.

Please see e.g. this post at RealClimate. Especially the 3rd bullet item -- see the various links, which lead to letters from chief editor Von Storch, and an article by the journalist Chris Mooney about the incident.

Scientists all choose journals in which we publish and we all recommend to each other and our students which journals they should publish in. People are free to publish wherever they can and are free to recommend some journals over others. For an example of this behavior in daily life, people make choices and recommendations all the time in their purchasing habits. It is highly unusual for a chief editor and half of an editorial board to resign and that indicates a journal in turmoil that should possibly be avoided. Similarly, authors are allowed to cite any papers they want, although usually the editor will note incorrect or insufficient citing.

I support the publication of "skeptical" papers that meet the basic standards of scientific quality and merit. I myself have published scientific work that has been considered by some as representing a skeptical point of view on matters relating to climate change (for example, my work demonstrating the importance of natural oscillations of the climate on multidecadal timescales). Skepticism in the truest scientific sense of the word is good and is indeed essential to science.  Skepticism should not be confused, however, with contrarianism that does not meet the basic standards of scientific inquiry.

DS: "It would be nice to try to contain the putative "MWP".

MM: In this email, I was discussing the importance of extending paleoclimate reconstructions far enough back in time that we could determine the onset and duration of the putative "Medieval Warm Period". Since this describes an interval in time, it has to have both a beginning and end. But reconstructions that only go back 1000 years, as most reconstructions did at the time, didn't reach far enough back to isolate the beginning of this period, i.e. they are not long enough to "contain" the interval in question. In more recent work, such as the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report published in 2007, the paleoclimate reconstructions stretch nearly 2000 years back in time, which is indeed far enough back in time to "contain" or "isolate" this period in time.

[Weasels wake]

hey weasel , greetings from Australia . You mentioned Steve Fielding . Every country has a Steve Fielding. A born again , bible bashing nincompoop, floundering in the 21st century, desperately trying to find a soap box to stand on , just  think of a dangerous Ned Flanders and you've got Steve.  Oh! and the reference to the Australian parliament rejecting the carbon taxes is not accurate at all . members of our old guard Liberals(republicans) have dug their heels in and are about to tip out their leader (a global warming believer). Anyhow it's a bit immaterial ,the liberal party support has hit rock bottom and support for action on carbon seems to be very well supported out in voter world. Also, did hear on the radio that New Zealand had passed legislation on carbon credits. Weasel, I'm not sure your representing things as they really are

Hea Log man, greeting right back at ya, from the left coast of the USA 

Alrightythen, I'm willing to throw out Steve Fielding,,,,,,,, along with Dir. Phil Jones and his cohort Mike Mann, and we got a deal.

But to tell you the truth, what worries me is this kind of behavior which does nobody any good at all~

The Sunday Times UK
November 29, 2009

Climate change data dumped
Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.”

The CRU is the world’s leading centre for reconstructing past climate and temperatures. Climate change sceptics have long been keen to examine exactly how its data were compiled. That is now impossible.

Roger Pielke, professor of environmental studies at Colorado University, discovered data had been lost when he asked for original records. “The CRU is basically saying, ‘Trust us’. So much for settling questions and resolving debates with science,” he said.

Jones was not in charge of the CRU when the data were thrown away in the 1980s, a time when climate change was seen as a less pressing issue. The lost material was used to build the databases that have been his life’s work, showing how the world has warmed by 0.8C over the past 157 years.

He and his colleagues say this temperature rise is “unequivocally” linked to greenhouse gas emissions generated by humans. Their findings are one of the main pieces of evidence used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says global warming is a threat to humanity.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
This is just begining, we're going to be hearing about this controversy for sometime to come.

Keep sweeping, you got summer now,,,,,,,,,,,, 
But watch out for the drifting iceburgs, they're commin' for ya. 

[PonoBill]

Wow, Kevin, did these guys ever work for Enron? The very best way to hide bad intentions is to swamp it with facts. I am a master of it, did it once a week when I was in charge of media relations for the Trojan Nuclear Plant. One of my best friends is one of the guys that brought Enron down, and they were absolute supreme masters at it. You'd ask for a page of figures and get 25,000.

That post was only about a page and I couldn't make it through that winding BS.

But just like Enron's cash flow, I see somewhere swimming in the middle "can you delete email..." Oops.

I think I've said this before, but I'll say it again. I'm very worried that climate change is the real deal, and we have political babes in the woods, political scum and opportunists heading the charge.

I'm also worried that it's overblown and bad science, and that we will spend trillions and undergo economic warfare that will cost millions of lives in the name of something that can't be changed or doesn't matter.

I have no idea how to get to the bottom of all this, and I'm not a stupid guy. If you're completely comfortable with your position then I say more power to you, but I find that hard to believe. I'll bet somewhere deep in your mind you're wondering if you've been duped.

[log man]

Hi weasel , Just another thought on this whole shebang. If global warming is a hoax, what sort of hoax is it?. Are the scientists lying in an orchestrated world wide scam. just think of it , all those nerdy uni professors with bifocals and leather patches on their elbows getting together in some sort of secret society?, to do what?..... trick us? What is they're motivation , what drives them to keep this going year after year? the usual motivations , money, sex, power, don't seem to apply here. Where's the money in science, are there rich scientists,I don't think so. As for sex, have you seen some of these people?most scientists haven't had sex and probably shouldn't try. Power? um I just can't see it. I return to my point ,why are they doing this . Look don't get me wrong, I love a good conspiracy theory . If there's a 2 hour special on UFO's on the telly, I will watch it ,  on a recent trip to New York I was slipped a DVD on the world trade centre conspiracy , it was very compelling but I know it's false, but strangely engaging and entertaining . Why do some people seem to need this sort of stuff . Do they think they are saving us from a gigantic mistake, are they the sort of people who "Aren't going to be told by anyone" and why not pick a subject like smoking / does it really cause cancer?

[Weasels wake]

Hea Log~
That question is an easy one!
They did it for the money,,,,,,,,,, lots of money.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Detroit News: Climategate prof raked in $22.6 million in grants

University of East Anglia Professor Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit that fudged data in order to con people into believing Global Warming, raked in £13.7 million ($22.6 million) in grants, Frank Beckmann of the Detroit News reported.

Beckmann wrote:

As Jones wrote to one-time United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author John Christy in one of his e-mails, “I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”

He had 22.6 million reasons to write that.

Jones, Gore and their ilk deserve to be discredited.

But they should join Americans and the world in celebrating the week that claims about manmade global warming — a kind of environmental Berlin Wall — came crashing down.

Al Gore laughs at his foolish followers as he goes to the bank. How did I know it was a fraud? Gore kept trolloping around the Earth with the biggest carbon footprint imaginable.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And
By Jennifer Harper INSIDE THE BELTWAY

ALAPALOOZA

"Meet Al Gore in Copenhagen." The official announcement from this fair Danish city says it all. The former vice president is getting star treatment when he arrives with an entire swarm of green-minded gadflies for the United Nations' global warming extravaganza, which begins on Dec. 7.

"Have you ever shaken hands with an American vice president? If not, now is your chance. Meet Al Gore in Copenhagen during the UN Climate Change Conference," notes the Danish tourism commission, which is helping Mr. Gore promote "Our Choice," his newest book about global warming in all its alarming modalities.

"Tickets are available in different price ranges for the event. If you want it all, you can purchase a VIP ticket, where you get a chance to shake hands with Al Gore, get a copy of Our Choice and have your picture taken with him. The VIP event costs DKK 5,999 and includes drinks and a light snack."

Wait, what? How much is that in American dollars? The currency conversion says it all, too: 5,999 Danish kroners is equivalent to $1,209.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And I should also add, it's also about power, money & power
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Gore: U.S. Climate Bill Will Help Bring About 'Global Governance'  
Climate Depot Exclusive

Friday, July 10, 2009By Marc Morano  –  Climate Depot
Former Vice President Al Gore declared that the Congressional climate bill will help bring about “global governance.”

“I bring you good news from the U.S., “Gore said on July 7, 2009 in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by UK Times.

“Just two weeks ago, the House of Representatives passed the Waxman-Markey climate bill,” Gore said, noting it was “very much a step in the right direction.” President Obama has pushed for the passage of the bill in the Senate and attended a G8 summit this week where he agreed to attempt to keep the Earth's temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C.

Gore touted the Congressional climate bill, claiming it “will dramatically increase the prospects for success” in combating what he sees as the “crisis” of man-made global warming.

“But it is the awareness itself that will drive the change and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governance and global agreements.” (Editor's Note: Gore makes the “global governance” comment at the 1min. 10 sec. mark in this UK Times video.)

Gore's call for “global governance” echoes former French President Jacques Chirac's call in 2000.

On November 20, 2000, then French President Chirac said during a speech at The Hague that the UN's Kyoto Protocol represented "the first component of an authentic global governance."

“For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance,” Chirac explained. “From the very earliest age, we should make environmental awareness a major theme of education and a major theme of political debate, until respect for the environment comes to be as fundamental as safeguarding our rights and freedoms. By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of an authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace,” Chirac added.

Former EU Environment Minister Margot Wallstrom said, "Kyoto is about the economy, about leveling the playing field for big businesses worldwide." Canadian Prime Minster Stephen Harper once dismissed UN's Kyoto Protocol as a “socialist scheme.”

'Global Carbon Tax' Urged at UN Meeting

In addition, calls for a global carbon tax have been urged at recent UN global warming conferences. In December 2007, the UN climate conference in Bali, urged the adoption of a global carbon tax that would represent “a global burden sharing system, fair, with solidarity, and legally binding to all nations.”

“Finally someone will pay for these [climate related] costs,” Othmar Schwank, a global tax advocate, said at the 2007 UN conference after a panel titled “A Global CO2 Tax.”

Schwank noted that wealthy nations like the U.S. would bear the biggest burden based on the “polluters pay principle.” The U.S. and other wealthy nations need to “contribute significantly more to this global fund,” Schwank explained. He also added, “It is very essential to tax coal.”

The 2007 UN conference was presented with a report from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment titled “Global Solidarity in Financing Adaptation.” The report stated there was an “urgent need” for a global tax in order for “damages [from climate change] to be kept from growing to truly catastrophic levels, especially in vulnerable countries of the developing world.”

The tens of billions of dollars per year generated by a global tax would “flow into a global Multilateral Adaptation Fund” to help nations cope with global warming, according to the report.

Schwank said a global carbon dioxide tax is an idea long overdue that is urgently needed to establish “a funding scheme which generates the resources required to address the dimension of challenge with regard to climate change costs.”

'Redistribution of wealth'

The environmental group Friends of the Earth advocated the transfer of money from rich to poor nations during the 2007 UN climate conference.

"A climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources,” said Emma Brindal, a climate justice campaigner coordinator for Friends of the Earth.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
So yeah, you could say that I believe there is a conspiracy going on, but it has nothing to do with wanting the earth to warm up, in fact it has nothing to do with climate at all, just power and money, and lots of both.

[PonoBill]

Hi weasel , Just another thought on this whole shebang. If global warming is a hoax, what sort of hoax is it?. Are the scientists lying in an orchestrated world wide scam. just think of it , all those nerdy uni professors with bifocals and leather patches on their elbows getting together in some sort of secret society?, to do what?..... trick us? What is they're motivation , what drives them to keep this going year after year? the usual motivations , money, sex, power, don't seem to apply here. Where's the money in science, are there rich scientists,I don't think so. As for sex, have you seen some of these people?most scientists haven't had sex and probably shouldn't try. Power? um I just can't see it. I return to my point ,why are they doing this . Look don't get me wrong, I love a good conspiracy theory . If there's a 2 hour special on UFO's on the telly, I will watch it ,  on a recent trip to New York I was slipped a DVD on the world trade centre conspiracy , it was very compelling but I know it's false, but strangely engaging and entertaining . Why do some people seem to need this sort of stuff . Do they think they are saving us from a gigantic mistake, are they the sort of people who "Aren't going to be told by anyone" and why not pick a subject like smoking / does it really cause cancer?

First of all, it doesn't require a conspiracy, at least not a grand one. People jump on bandwagons because they are going in a direction they like. The current furor over mammography is a fine example. the medical establishment has known all the limitations for decades, but in the face of 175 million pink ribbons no one could be comfortable saying "mammograms are ineffective as screening tools" even if they know they are.

Secondly, politics in academia are famously vicious: "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small” attributed to Henry Kissinger and others.

Thirdly, the stakes are huge. Trillions of dollars.

"We're going to ruin the planet and it's the rich people's fault."

[kwhilden]

Hey all...

I agree with the premise that the trail of money leads to the most likely location of corruption.

As someone who spent many years immersed in the academic environment (M.S. in Geology studying climate change in Antarctica from '95-98)... I can assure you that scientists are not getting rich. Far from it. A university professor's salary is between $40-80k /yr, with the majority below $60k.  All of that grant money goes to paying for research, and does not go into the individual pockets of scientists. The annual USA geoscience budget is around $750M/yr, and only about a third of that goes towards climate change research.

Now on the other hand... the people getting rich on fossil fuels are an entirely different story. Most of that money goes in the pockets of just a few powerful people.  Exxon Mobil made $45B in profit on top of $300+ billion in revenue.... and that's just one petroleum company that produces 3% of the world's oil. They are also not involved with coal production. Globally, the total fossil fuel market is well above $10 trillion/yr, although hard data on this is very hard to find for some reason. So if the trail of money leads to the location of corruption on the CO2/Climate Change debate... I think we know where it's located.

Bill... there's no doubt in my mind that climate change is occurring, is caused by humans, and is a grave threat. I would enjoy explaining this over an oregon microbrew sometime... In fact, all of my research places the doubt on whether society will be able to understand just how serious the threat truly is, in time to do something about it. The famous quote applies here most assuredly: "we can bear neither our ills, nor their cures".

[SchUP]

I happen to work with predictive computer modeling to a certain extent, and I for one will always question any prediction.  There's always an error bounds and it always tends to increase throughout time.   Just as the weather can be predicted with 80% certainty tomorrow, but 75% the next day, and so on...  So, I wouldn't personally pick one model to lean on, but maybe a whole slate of models. 

Also, "garbage in, garbage out" -- a great model is still limited by the quality/quantity of the data.   A hard problem with climatology is that there are not that many sources of long term data from which to compare.  That said, there are a lot of good studies showing that man does indeed impact the planet, even with this limited data. 

DS