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Green Hysteria, From Polar Bears To Puppies

The evolution of environmental hysteria has progressed another shameful step. The fear-mongers haven’t won enough converts to their cause with myths about dying polar bears, which we cover in our documentary Not Evil Just Wrong, so now they are drowning a puppy in a nationally televised bedtime story in the United Kingdom. The British government is spending the equivalent of nearly $9.6 million to run advertisements produced as part of the “Act On CO2” program. The story in the ad features an ominous carbon monster spewing black soot from the sky, a restaurant named “The World’s End,” a weeping bunny and an animated puppy that disappears underwater before a girl’s eyes. “There was once a land where the weather was very, very strange,” a father says as he reads the story to his daughter. “There were awful heat waves in some parts, and in other parts terrible storms and floods. Scientists said it was being caused by too much CO2, which went up into the sky when the grown-ups used energy.”

Not even Nature magazine is willing to defend such ridiculous scare tactics. It dubbed the story the “Worst. Climate. Campaign. Ever.” Matthew Sinclair of the Taxpayers’ Alliance decried the ad campaign. “This is a disgusting attempt to use taxpayers’ money to scare their own children, particularly when money is so tight following the recession,” he told The Register. “… The government should not be using taxpayers’ money to produce this kind of shock advertising, which would probably not even be allowed on TV if it was produced by an independent campaign.” The good news is that the more outrageous the scare tactics of environmentalists get, the more likely people are to realize that the theory of manmade global warming destroying the planet is a sham based on flawed science.

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Global blushing

It’s hard to be green when you’re red-faced all the time. It’s easy to be red-faced when your cause is global warming doomsterism.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 doomsters now dread to track the satellite data beamed down to us courtesy of the International Arctic Research Center and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency — you can see why they cringe each day by going to the satellite website and following the red line: http://www.ijis.iarc.uaf.edu/en/home/seaice_extent.htm.

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.

Why did the filmmaker back down, even though he had obtained permission for the interview? In legal proceedings, a well-heeled bully has no difficulty beating up a poor guy with only right on his side. Not that the gentleman lacked either spine or recourse. He then documented the bad behaviour of Stanford and Schneider by having an actor read Schneider`s words before a blank screen. After its release, on Oct. 18, the sky over Stanford will turn an even deeper hue of red.

This week of embarrassment for the global warmists does not look all that different from most weeks. Overzealous scientists and their enablers have a habit of selecting the data they like and setting the rest aside. Some — Schneider among them — have even justified exaggerating the dangers in the cause of making the public take note. When they get caught they often resort to obfuscations and cover-ups.

And red faces become the norm.

Financial Post
LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud. www.energyprobe.org.
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Scientist: We Need More Carbon Dioxide, Not Less

By Paul Bedard, Washington Whispers
A noted geologist who coauthored the New York Times bestseller Sugar Busters has turned his attention to convincing Congress that carbon dioxide emissions are good for Earth and don’t cause global warming. Leighton Steward is on Capitol Hill this week armed with studies and his book Fire, Ice and Paradise in a bid to show senators working on the energy bill that the carbon dioxide cap-and-trade scheme could actually hurt the environment by reducing CO2 levels.”I’m trying to kill the whole thing,” he says. “We are tilting at windmills.” He is meeting with several GOP lawmakers and has plans to meet with some Democrats later this week.READ THE REST HERE.

The hockey stick myth

By Lorne Gunter, National Post
In 2001, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued it third assessment of the research into global warming and other impending climate disasters. This is the UN report that first claimed there had been “unusual warming” in the 20th century and that man-made emissions were likely the cause. Featured prominently in that report was a hockey-stick-shaped graph showing flat temperatures for the 900 years from 1000 AD to 1900, followed by skyrocketing rises after that. The implication — that widespread industrialization had caused unprecedented heating — was so clear that the IPCC included the graph in its report in no fewer than five places. Environmentalist and politicians reproduced the graph, which had been created by scientist Michael Mann, everywhere. Then along came Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. After some hen’s-teeth pulling to get Prof. Mann to release his raw data, Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick found that 105 of 112 data sets he had used were incomplete, flawed or incorrect. For instance, while reliable temperature records for Central Europe exist back to the 1660s, Prof. Mann and his colleagues chose to use only data from 1730 onward. In at least three cases, the extra 70 years of data were contained in reports Prof. Mann had used, yet he and his co-authors declined to use them. Why? There could be several reasons, some legitimate. But one of the most likely reasons is that 1660-1730 were the coldest years of the Little Ice Age. If your goal is to produce a chart showing a calm, flat climate for 1,000 years, interrupted only by humankind’s bad influence in the last century, it helps to ignore the sharp upward and downward swings to which climate has been susceptible for thousands of years. Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick eventually determined that Prof. Mann’s formula had been set up so that nearly any set of numbers run through it produced a hockey stick. Still, devotees of the climate-change catastrophe theory told the Canadian duo it didn’t matter: There were two other sets of climate-history data that validated the claim of rapid, dangerous temperature rise in the 20th Century. Both were by British researcher Keith Briffa, one called the Polar Urals and the other Yamal Peninsula. Both were based on tree-ring cores drilled in Russian forests. Both replicated Prof. Mann’s hockey stick. The Polar Urals quickly fell by the way, though. To produce his hockey stick using the Polar Urals, Prof. Briffa used a very small sample of the trees from which he and his colleagues had taken ring samples. When one of those colleagues released a much larger sample via the Internet, the result was a fluctuating graph — warmer than today in the Middle Ages, very cold during the Little Ice Age — with unremarkable temperatures in the 20th-century. Still undeterred, climate alarmists fell back on Prof. Briffa’s Yamal numbers. He and others have produced at least eight additional hockey-stick papers since 2000 based on the Yamal data. Two by Prof. Briffa himself received very prominent circulation in the prestigious journals Nature and Science. But despite repeated requests by Mr. McIntyre for Prof. Briffa’s raw numbers — a standard courtesy most scientific journals adhere to — not one of the peer-reviewed journals would make the British academic give up his base data so others might try to reproduce his results … that is, until he published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society last year. Their editor followed up with Prof. Briffa, who very quietly last month finally released his data nearly a decade late. Mr. McIntyre has now discovered that Prof. Briffa kept reducing the number of trees from which he used results, so that after 1990, his calculations were based on just 10 trees from the whole of his sample of scores of trees. And after 1995, they were based on just five. This Prof. Briffa justifies on the need to standardize findings to make them comparable. He may be right. But when Mr. McIntyre plugged more of Prof. Briffa’s data into the calculations, the hockey stick broke again. The 20th century was not particularly warm. For fuller discussions on the Yamal controversy, visit climateaudit.org, wattsupwiththat.com or bishophill.squarespace.com. For a defence of Prof. Briffa’s numbers, visit realclimate.com.Source

Planet cooling says UN scientist

By Alan Nicholl

Recently some new information has become available which seriously questions the whole UN’s basis on climate change and its computer modelling work of future changes.

The week before the latest UN’s world leaders’ conference there was another UN climate conference in Geneva where one of the UN’s own leading climate scientists and computer modellers, Professor Mojib Latif from Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Keil University, stated that from recent research he has conducted he has had to conclude that global warming has ceased.

He added that the planet is currently cooling and will likely continue to do so for another 20 years.

This is a startling statement from a promoter of global warming and needs to be taken seriously.

It reinforces what others have been saying for a while now and questions the need for any action to be taken at all on combating global warming.

There is no need for carbon taxes, no need for an emissions trading scheme, no need to seriously undermine the country’s economy to combat something that is not happening.

The statement also acquits CO2 of the charges laid against it; as it is impossible for it to be forcing warming when actual temperatures are cooling and are predicted to continue, in spite of increasing CO2.

All of this begs the question . . . what actually causes temperature fluctuations on a global scale?

The obvious answer is solar variation, but this probably is only part of the answer. Climate is a far more complex scenario than we have been led to believe and one small contributing factor is outweighed by all of the more substantial contributors.

The concept that the science is settled is also refuted by this statement.

If a promoter of global warming has found evidence contrary to his convictions then it simply cannot be settled and obviously requires more study.

This sort of acknowledgement should make politicians question the path they are taking and maybe just come out and state that the whole business is shelved until clarification is confirmed one way or another, instead of relying on outdated and obviously unreliable information to justify their actions.

I congratulate our councillors who have decided not to sign the local government leaders’ position statement on climate change and especially applaud those who have spoken out against the supposed human causes of climate change; keep up the good work.

Gisborne might just lead the country on this rising tide of sensibility and hopefully our national politicians will soon follow us.

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Not 'Evil,' just 'Stupid'

The film Not Evil Just Wrong is far too politically incorrect to be feted in Hollywood or the politicos. This is the last movie they want anybody seeing.

By Peter Foster, National Post
I rish filmmaker Phelim McAleer pulled a Michael Moore at the recent New York “eco-premiere” of the environmental disaster movie The Age of Stupid. The film suggests that flying is one of the worst things you can do to the planet, so Mr. McAleer, microphone in hand, started asking those coming down the recycled green carpet how they’d travelled to the Big Show. Gillian Anderson, of X-Files fame, pronounced, “you know sometimes, sometimes people have to fly to make a stand in order to get peoples’ attention for these issues.” The film’s director, Franny Armstrong, evaded the question and claimed that the film had only generated the emissions of four average Americans over a year. Mr. McAleer persisted and soon found himself hustled outside the green velvet rope, insisting “I only want to ask celebrities difficult questions.”

Some hope.

Mr. McAleer was trying to drum up a little publicity for his own, very different, film, Not Evil Just Wrong, which has its world premiere on October 18. Only it won’t be at the World Financial Center. It will take place in homes, on campuses, and at privately-organized screenings across North America. (You can be part of the event by ordering a package complete with DVD, poster, and swatch of red carpet from www.noteviljustwrong.com.)

Mr. McAleer and his wife Ann McElhinney — who also made Mine Your Own Business, a documentary that fingered anti-development radicals and “the dark side of environmentalism” — have inevitably not attracted the kind of attention lavished on The Age of Stupid, which features a lone archivist looking back from a devastated world in the year 2055 and wondering how we could have allowed it all to go so terribly, terribly wrong.

It is surely worth noting that those who claim that there is “consensus” on global warming science being “settled” seem to imagine that this gives them licence to then compete with each other in producing eco-porn that goes far beyond anything in the very worst scenarios peddled by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Shouldn’t warmists stick to the script before they roll the carbon credits?

Not Evil Just Wrong in fact has a field day with apocalyptic science, particularly that peddled by Al Gore and his pet boffins. NASA’s James Hansen almost convulses onscreen at the mention of Canadian independent researcher Stephen McIntyre, the man who broke the IPCC’s iconic “hockey stick” temperature graph, and continues to hold alarmists to the highest standards. Meanwhile another of Mr. Gore’s gurus provides a parallel to Mr. McAleer’s being escorted off Stupid’s green carpet. The Not Evil team went to Stanford University to interview climatologist Stephen Schneider. It was apparently inconceivable to Professor Schneider that anybody in the film community could be anything other than a full warmist, so imagine his surprise when Messrs. McAleer and McElhinney were impolite enough to point out that in the 1970s he had been one of the leading proponents of catastrophic global cooling! Clearly Professor Schneider didn’t want his image attached to any such inconvenient recollections, so Stanford University’s lawyers withdrew permission for any shots of either the good professor or the campus to be shown.

Not Evil Just Wrong is far too politically incorrect to be feted in Hollywood, or welcomed by political elites. This is the last movie that those squabbling down the road to Copenhagen want anybody seeing or thinking about. That’s why it needs maximum exposure on October 18.

What is truly frightening is the slavish adulation that film makers such as Ms. Armstrong receive. While claiming to be “indie” and low-budget, and grassroots “crowd-funded,” Ms. Armstrong has the vast clout of environmental organizations such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth behind her, as well as billionaire George Soros’s Moveon.org. The New York premiere was beamed to numerous locations around the world. In Nigeria, the Governor of Lagos was an attendee. In Amsterdam and Copenhagen, membes of the Dutch and Danish Royal Families turned out. The New York premiere was followed by a question and answer session featuring Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United nations, and Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland and past head of the UN’s Human Rights Commission.

Stupid meanwhile had already been screened for “the United Nations, Center of American Progress, EPA, The World Bank, the UK Parliament, the European Union, and the Scottish, Welsh, Swedish, Australian and Dutch parliaments.”

The film’s London premiere early this year was attended by a bevy of politicos, including the Labour government’s Environment Minister, Ed Miliband, who was promptly ambushed by the film’s star, Pete Postlethwaite, over new coal plants. Mr. Postlethwaite threatened to hand back his Order of the British Empire if they weren’t stopped! That must have sent a shudder through Buckingham Palace.

Being a bit of calculated masochist, Mr. Miliband then agreed to debate Ms. Armstrong, whereupon she used the occasion to launch a “10 by 10” campaign, to cut carbon emissions by 10% by the end of 2010. Soon not only Mr. Miliband but Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the entire cabinet had signed on, plus the shadow cabinet, along with a raft of major corporations, municipalities, soccer clubs and other publicity seekers.

Messrs McAleer and McElhinney meanwhile have received death threats, been described as “stinking, selfish, sociopathic fascists,” and received wishes that their children be born handicapped. That’s what you get for asking “difficult questions.”
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EPA: The Blob that Ate America

By Alan Caruba

No single government agency has grown so big and so fast as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and no single agency threatens constitutionally guaranteed property rights and nationwide economic growth than the EPA.

It is the Blob that ate America.

Signed into law by Richard M. Nixon in 1970, the EPA has so consistently twisted the truth about the environment that its announcements must be dissected like a cadaver to find any verifiable facts.

This agency of the government is so brazen that it is currently trying to bully Congress, the seat of government, into passing the horrid Cap-and-Trade bill so that it might then regulate stationary sources that emit more than 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year.

In its endless quest for more and more power over all aspects our lives, the EPA wants to rewrite the 1970 Clean Air Act to include so-called greenhouse gases. That is why its Senate sponsors have obligingly renamed it a “Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act.”

It is based entirely on the global warming hoax.

The EPA has been the spear point for the global warming hoax, the creation of many worldwide and domestic environmental groups that continue to lie, saying it is caused by humans. There is, however, NO global warming. The Earth has been into a cooling cycle for the past decade. The current cooling is predicted to last for decades to come.

The platform for the global warming hoax has been provided by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The EPA is justifying its latest power grab claiming that the regulation of greenhouse gases will avoid a global warming that is NOT happening.

The EPA has such a disdain for real science that it wants to declare greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), as “pollutants” when in fact CO2 has nothing to do with either warming or cooling.

The simple truth is that water vapor constitutes 95% of all so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and CO2 represents an infinitesimal 3.616%. Man-made CO2 whether generated by industry or just a backyard barbeque is an even more miniscule 0.117%. CO2 molecules in the atmosphere are so diffuse as to render this gas unable to cause any climate change.

The EPA proposal reflects the effort of environmental organizations such as Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club to thwart the construction of any new plants to generate electricity. This is especially true of coal-fired plants that currently provide half of all the electricity used daily. Costly technology to capture and clean emissions is already in place wherever coal or other fuels are utilized.

All industrial activity is the ultimate target. What the nation’s industrial and manufacturing sector really generates are jobs, profits, stock dividends, and tax revenue.

The climate/energy bill has no basis in scientific fact. Despite a Supreme Court decision, CO2 can in no way be defined as a “pollutant.” CO2 is vital to all vegetation from backyard gardens to wheat fields to forests. Humans and other mammals exhale it. Vegetation absorbs and uses it. More CO2 would, in fact, mean more robust harvests and greater forest growth worldwide.

Simply put, the Clean Air Act was never intended to include greenhouse gases and that is the EPA’s dilemma as it seeks to do what it clearly was never intended to do.

The very idea that humans have any control over the climate is so absurd as to render the forthcoming UN climate conference little more than a gathering of liars and idiots.

The only good news is that Obama’s environmental czar, Carol Browner, now says that the cap-and-trade or pollution control act will not likely come to a vote until December. Then or ever, it would strangle economic growth in America at the same time such growth is taking place in the world’s emerging powers such as China and India.

While the rest of the world is encouraging industry to provide the jobs and revenue needed for their population, the United States President and Congress would hand the Greenhouse Gun to an EPA eager to pull the trigger on our own growth.

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. A business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

Alarmist of the Week: Bill Maher

By Thomas Richard

As part of a new weekly offering, Climate Change Fraud will be awarding the dubious honor of “Alarmist of the Week” to the one person or organization that symbolizes everything that’s wrong in the climate debate. This person or organization will have either spoken outright lies, half-truths, maligned other scientists, or used ad hominem attacks to further the cries of climate alarmism.

This week’s winner is the Chicken Little of Global Warming alarmists. Week after week on his show Real Time, he either devotes entire segments to worn-out ‘facts’ that even the IPCC has repudiated, or manages to squeeze in a bit of name-calling that makes little or no sense.

The good news is that Real Time is on HBO, so his viewership is extremely limited as compared to a network/cable channel. This week he said climate change skeptics are “so stupid they make me question evolution.” (see video) And for those who don’t remember, Maher also said the 9/11 terrorists were not cowardly. “We have been the cowards lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it’s not cowardly.”Source