By Christopher Booker,
UK Telegraph

Cold comfort: If the present trend continues, the world will be 1.1C cooler in 2100
Considering how the fear of global warming is inspiring the world’s politicians to put forward the most costly and economically damaging package of measures ever imposed on mankind, it is obviously important that we can trust the basis on which all this is being proposed. Last week two international conferences addressed this issue and the contrast between them could not have been starker. The first in Copenhagen, billed as “an emergency summit on climate change” and attracting acres of worldwide media coverage, was explicitly designed to stoke up the fear of global warming to an unprecedented pitch. As one of the organisers put it, “this is not a regular scientific conference: this is a deliberate attempt to influence policy”. What worries them are all the signs that when the world’s politicians converge on Copenhagen in December to discuss a successor to the Kyoto Protocol, under the guidance of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there will be so much disagreement that they may not get the much more drastic measures to cut carbon emissions that the alarmists are calling for.

Thus the name of the game last week, as we see from a sample of quotations, was to win headlines by claiming that everything is far worse than previously supposed. Sea level rises by 2100 could be “much greater than the 59cm predicted by the last IPCC report”. Global warming could kill off 85 per cent of the Amazon rainforest, “much more than previously predicted”. The ice caps in Greenland and Antarctica are melting “much faster than predicted”. The number of people dying from heat could be “twice as many as previously predicted”.

None of the government-funded scientists making these claims were particularly distinguished, but they succeeded in their object, as the media cheerfully recycled all this wild scaremongering without bothering to check the scientific facts.

What a striking contrast this was to the second conference, which I attended with 700 others in New York, organised by the Heartland Institute under the title Global Warming: Was It Ever Really A Crisis?. In Britain this received no coverage at all, apart from a sneering mention by The Guardian, although it was addressed by dozens of expert scientists, not a few of world rank, who for professional standing put those in Copenhagen in the shade.

Led off with stirring speeches from the Czech President Vaclav Klaus, the acting head of the European Union, and Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the most distinguished climatologist in the world, the message of this gathering was that the scare over global warming has been deliberately stoked up for political reasons and has long since parted company with proper scientific evidence.

Nothing has more acutely demonstrated this than the reliance of the IPCC on computer models to predict what is going to happen to global temperatures over the next 100 years. On these predictions, that temperatures are likely to rise by up to 5.3C, all their other predictions and recommendations depend, yet nearly 10 years into the 21st century it is already painfully clear that the computer forecasts are going hopelessly astray. Far from rising with CO2, as the models are programmed to predict they should, the satellite-measured temperature curve has flattened out and then dropped. If the present trend were to continue, the world in 2100 would not in fact be hotter but 1.1C cooler than the 1979-1998 average.

Yet it is on this fundamental inability of the computer models to predict what has already happened that all else hangs. For two days in New York we heard distinguished experts, such as Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, former director of the International Arctic Research Center, Dr Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, authoritatively (and often wittily) tear apart one piece of the scare orthodoxy after another.

Sea levels are not shooting up but only continuing their modest 3mm a year rise over the past 200 years. The vast Antarctic ice-sheet is not melting, except in one tiny corner, the Antarctic Peninsula. Tropical hurricane activity, far from increasing, is at its lowest level for 30 years. The best correlation for temperature fluctuations is not CO2 but the magnetic activity of the sun. (For an admirable summary of proceedings by the Australian paleoclimatologist Professor Bob Carter, Google “Heartland” and “Quadrant”).

Yet the terrifying thing, as President Klaus observed in his magisterial opening address, is that there is no dialogue on these issues. When recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, he found the minds of his fellow world leaders firmly shut to anything but the fantasies of the scaremongers. As I said in my own modest contribution to the conference, there seems little doubt that global warming is leading the world towards an unprecedented catastrophe. But it is not the Technicolor apocalypse promised by the likes of Al Gore.

The real disaster hanging over us lies in all those astronomically costly measures proposed by politicians, to meet a crisis which in reality never existed.

By Tom Stacy, NewAmerican.com

According to California Congressman Tom McClintock, the world’s six billion humans breathe out 2.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. His state has a goal of reducing emissions by 170 million tons of carbon dioxide to meet legislative requirements. Simple mathematics shows if we can just “do away” with 425 million of Earth’s inhabitants, we can help Governor Schwarzenegger meet his bogie. Congressman McClintock was one of 80 presenters at the 2009 International Conference on Climate Change held this week in New York City.

For the 800 scientists and interested parties at the second annual conference sponsored by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, this was a moot point. Virtually all of the attendees from 40 countries are quite certain that carbon dioxide emissions from any source — natural or as a function of human activities — have very little, if any, effect on global temperatures.

These 800 participants were not a stereotypical group of chanting protesters gathered for a publicity stunt, as seen with the estimated 2,500 mostly student demonstrators — led by chief climate alarmist James Hansen — who participated in a “stand-in” last week under conditions of record-breaking snowfalls and unseasonable low temperatures in an attempt to shut down the coal-fired plant that supplies heating and cooling for the Capitol building and other federal offices. (One might wonder how our legislators would have been able to bear the low temperatures — perhaps by burning hundred dollar bills in their office stoves?)

In contrast, the Heartland Institute’s climate-change summit was forged around a cadre of professional climatologists, atmospheric physicists, and economists who see the effects of a global-warming “hoax” as the death knell for scientific inquiry and the capitalist system of free enterprise. Many, if not most, were hoping that they could lend themselves in a fight for scientific truth and against an egregious global-warming scam. As MIT Professor of Meteorology Richard Lindzen put it: “There is no organized movement [of climate realists] — only many individuals who are appalled at bad science and ‘consensus.'” The Alfred P. Sloan professor lamented, “We are asked to undergo much pain for no gain.” In reference to the number of academic and government scientists who adhere to the global-warming model, Lindzen stated: “Embracing global warming makes every scientist’s and politician’s life easier.”

Australian scientist David Evans elaborated on the clear evidence that there is no connection between the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the warming trend seen since the end of the “Little Ice Age” that most agree ended in the late 19th century. A former “believer” in human-caused warming and the model builder for the Australian Greenhouse Office, Dr. Evans observed that all computer models — on which predictions of climate catastrophe are based — showed a “hot spot” about 10 kilometers above the equator. When thousands of radiosonde and satellite measurements detected no such fingerprint, he resigned his government position and has become a “climate realist.”

While the New York Times took stabs at climate realists for some internal scientific squabbles, the Chicago-based conference host, Heartland Institute, reminded attendees and the media that predictive climate science is in its infancy and is on the frontier of the unknown. Combing through and modifying models that attempt to multiply hundreds of complex and dynamic inputs necessitates argument. Only “celebrity science” would invoke public fear by boasting “indisputable” facts or unbending “conclusions” about what drives global temperatures and where they are headed.

Conference speakers generally agreed that carbon dioxide regulations are a clever segue to controlling the world’s energy. Renewable energy incentives/requirements work together with carbon-dioxide regulations to do just that.

March 10, 2009 (Excerpted from EIR report)

“The environmental movement has to be outlawed, because their policies have murdered 40 million people, mainly children, with the ban on DDT. They have caused mass starvation and food riots with their nonsensical drive for bio-fuels. The forces of darkness in the environmental movement want create a new dark age in which humanity is pushed back to the Stone Age and without the right to light a fire.” – Lord Christopher Monckton

Yesterday, Dr. Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine and the originator of the petition against Al Gore’s global warming hoax which as of now 32,000 scientists have signed, told the 2nd International Conference on Climate Change, that the people like Al Gore who promote global warming alarmism are committing genocide by the withdrawal of technology from the developing world. Speaking at the conference hosted by the Heartland Institute in New York City, he said, “there is a current example of genocide by the removal of technology, and that is the ban on DDT, and that has resulted in the deaths of 30 to 40 million people and has left half a billion infected with malaria.”

The three-day conference is the second annual event sponsored by The Heartland Institute. The speakers include Lord Christopher Monckton, who prepared the “Global Warming Swindle” video tape, MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen, and Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist.

Dr. Lindzen said that “the process of co-opting science on behalf of a political movement has had an extraordinarily corrupting influence on science—especially since the issue has been a major motivation for funding. Most funding for climate would not be there without this issue. And, it should be added, most science funded under the rubric of climate does not actually deal with climate, but rather with the alleged impact of arbitrarily assumed climate change.”

Dr. Robinson also said that policies promoted by propagating alarmism, are much worse than the ban on DDT, because they will lead to rationing of energy. This rationing of energy will have the biggest impact on the Third World populations, who are trying to uplift their standard of living by the application of energy and technology. He noted, “that the billions of people who live at the lowest level of human existence will suffer greatly from the rationing of energy, and this, in turn, will lead to the death of hundreds of millions, or possibly billions.”

Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, gave a keynote address to conference, in which he accused the European Union governments of being global warming “alarmists,” while hiding their actual intentions. “They probably do not want to reveal their true plans and ambitions—to stop economic development and return mankind several centuries back,” said Klaus. “It is evident that the climate change debate has not made any detectable progress. It reminds me of the frustration people like me felt in the communist era.”

Like Klaus, Lindzen pointed to the evil political intentions: “Once it is understood, the silliness of the whole issue becomes evident—though those who are committed to warming alarm as the vehicle for a postmodern coup d’etat will obviously try to obfuscate matters.”

In his presentation to the conference, Lord Christopher Monckton used ridicule and humor in his attack on the genocidal fraud of global warming. Monckton said, “that the global warming alarmists should be referred to as bedwetters.”

Monckton said, “There never was a climate crisis, there is not a climate crisis, and there will be no climate crisis. Since there is no climate crisis, the leaders of the world must have the courage to do nothing.”

Monckton told the conference that the environmental movement has gone too far. “The environmental movement has to be outlawed, because their policies have murdered 40 million people, mainly children, with the ban on DDT.” He added, “They have caused mass starvation and food riots with their nonsensical drive for bio-fuels. The forces of darkness in the environmental movement want create a new dark age in which humanity is pushed back to the Stone Age and without the right to light a fire.”

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IN RELATED NEWS TODAY:

The President of the Czech Republic slams environmentalists and declares that global warming is being used as a vehicle to suppress human freedom. Watch the video:

In a world that has been proven to actually be cooling and extreme weather decreasing for over half a century, and as tens of thousands of scientists around the world and more everyday are now publicly dissenting against the man-made climate change myth, it’s becoming ever more important that high-profile leaders such as Vaclav Klaus are joining the ranks of those scientists and speaking out more often. Perhaps then we will have a chance to not only save our own freedoms here in the western world, but much more importantly we can save countless lives worldwide from the UN’s disgusting ideals.

If we limit the third world to using only the most expensive and currently inefficient forms of electricity – such as solar – we are really telling them “You can’t have electricity. You can’t develop.” It’s ridiculous that we in the western world want the poorest nations to invest in the highest priced energy, yet we all use the cheapest energy by far. I say NO, this cannot be allowed. Africa, for example, has tons of coal and oil. They have the ability and resources to lift themselves out of poverty and develop. Then, and only then, should they also consider experimenting with new technologies, once they can afford it, and once those technologies develop. As it stands now, massive amounts of land needs to be clearcut and laid aside for huge solar and bird-killing wind farms. Same with bio-fuel crops, which by the way, 1) overall end up producing more of those so-called “evil” emissions than regular fuel does, and 2) contribute to the global food crisis already happening by replacing food farmland with much larger bio-fuel farmland.

Al Gore and the herds of greenies who jump on anything that brands itself as “green” are morally repugnant to me as they have become, in my opinion, morally responsible for preventing development in the developing nations and should be held responsible for the imminent deaths of many more millions who can’t even turn on a light or heat their homes.

– Justin C, ilovecarbondioxide.com

By Peter Foster, Financial Post
Voters should ask politicians one simple question: ‘Why do you want to raise my energy prices?’

One young radical turned up at the Heartland Institute’s climate change skeptics’ conference in New York this week to declare that he had never witnessed so much hypocrisy. How, he asked the panelists of a session on European policy, could they sleep at night? Clearly puzzled, one of the panelists asked him with which parts of their presentations he disagreed. “Oh,” he said “I didn’t come here to listen to the presentations.”

The conference — titled “Global Warming: Was it ever really a crisis?” — attracted close to 700 participants. Most of those I met displayed almost joy at being among people who dared to stand up to the mindless climate “consensus” and the refusal to debate, or even look at, the facts, as typified by that righteous young radical.

President Obama is considering a cap-and-trade system with which Canada would be forced to co-ordinate its own policies. The conference made clear how damaging and pointless such a policy would be.

Vaclav Klaus, the professorial president of both the Czech Republic and the European Union, pointed out at the conference’s first session on Sunday evening that the global political establishment was still in the grip of thinking reminiscent of the Communism under which he once lived. He noted that few if any politicians seemed even aware of, or interested in, either the shortcomings of officially cooked climate science, or the potential disasters of climate policy.

Professor Richard Lindzen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, also stressed that climate alarmism was a political and not a scientific matter. Particular worrying, he said, was that various scientific bodies had been seized by alarmists, who now issued statements without polling the members. This played into the appeal to authority rather than science. He called climate modelling “unintelligent design” and global warming a “postmodern coup d’état.” He stressed that “Nature hasn’t followed the models” used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There has been no global warming for 10 or 15 years.

Countering all the blather about Exxon’s (former) support for Heartland that appeared in coverage of the conference by climate-change cheerleaders at The New York Times and The Guardian, he noted that skeptics in fact had minimal resources to rectify the incipient policy horrors.

Asked why the skeptics had so much trouble in presenting a unified front, Professor Lindzen stressed that there was no “skeptical solidarity.” But Joseph Bast, head of the Heartland Institute, pointed out that such diversity was a sign of free inquiry, as opposed to bogus claims that the science was “settled.”

The sessions indicated the huge potential costs of the Obama administration’s commitment to cap and trade, regulation and the promotion of renewables, effectively rationing energy as a way of grabbing revenue. Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who takes pride in having been dubbed a “climate criminal” by Greenpeace, noted that the political struggle had to keep the message simple. Voters should ask politicians one simple question: “Why do you want to raise my energy prices?” Since the one issue on which there truly is consensus is that Kyoto would have had little or no impact on global temperatures, it is a question for governments around the world, not least that of the government of Ontario, which has just introduced its draconian Green Energy Act.

Indur Goklany, an expert on globalization and a contributor to the IPCC, noted, using the UN’s own figures, that global warming was by no means the threat conventionally portrayed. Indeed, the UN even acknowledged its benefits, although to establish that fact you had to read the documents “like a lawyer.”

The session interrupted by the callow youth outlined the disaster of the EU’s emissions trading system, and of its climate change policies in general. The good news, as Benny Peiser of John Moores University in Liverpool, and editor of the influential CCNet science network, suggested, was that the green movement was collapsing in Europe and becoming increasingly unpopular, as its enormous costs and minimal results were becoming apparent. The attempt to “rebrand” Europe as the “Environmental Union” had fallen apart and was now causing increasing discord both between and within countries.

Europe was now desperate for the United States, China and India to share its self-inflicted pain in time for the next great UN expense-fest in Copenhagen, but it was unlikely to happen.

One of the most devastating presentations came from Gabriel Calzada, a Spanish economist who indicated how Spain’s “leadership” in subsidizing wind and solar power — which had been praised by President Obama — had produced enormous costs, no benefits and was now falling apart. “Green jobs” were calculated not only to cost around half-a-million Euros a pop, they came at the expense of two “normal” jobs. And they were now disappearing as the renewables bubble collapsed.

A questioner asked why European governments continued to promote such destructive and pointless policies. Roger Helmer, a member of the European Parliament, said it was a matter of inertia, plus the fact that there was no “Plan B.”

The task of the brave skeptics who appeared at Heartland this week is to find out how to ditch Plan A. There could be no better stimulus to the global economy.

NATIONAL POST

The Heritage Foundation
The Obama Administration’s recent budget has some of the most revealing text in the smallest font. Put on your green eyeshade and get out your wonk decoder ring. We’re heading down into the weeds to hunt budget big game. Footnote 5 of Table S-6 starts off “Shown here are those proceeds from auctioning emission allowances that are reserved for clean energy technology initiatives and to compensate families through the Making Work Pay tax cut.” This is in reference to “Total, climate revenues” of $645,711,000,000 which are to come from the President’s cap-and-trade restrictions on carbon dioxide.The implication in the table is that total climate revenues would be $645,711,000,000. But this is not the total, it is just what’s spent for two items—the energy technology initiatives and Make Work Pay.

Any question about this is cleared up later in the footnote, “All additional net proceeds will be used to further compensate the public.”

How large might be those “additional net proceeds?” In very round numbers, try $1,000,000,000,000. That’s right one trillion dollars. Though, it will likely be much more.

The Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation analyzed the economic impact of the less aggressive Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade. We found that total value of the allowances (the government auctioned permits whose cost is passed along to energy consumers) would be at least $1,622,848,000,000 for the years 2012 to 2019.

This is a $1.6 trillion tax for just eight years. Note, the Congressional Budget Office, then headed by Obama’s OMB director, Peter Orszag, scored this revenue as a tax, not a “dividend” or an “investment.”

So, this tax brings in over $1.6 trillion. It returns $0.5 trillion in dubious tax cuts and spends $0.12 trillion on picking technology winners. What happens to the remaining $1.0 trillion?

It will be used “to further compensate the public.” Translated this means Washington awarded itself a bonus trillion bucks to spend however it wants. We get an unprecedented tax-and-spending spree masquerading as climate policy.

Mi Kai Lee, Columbia Valley News
The only global warming we are likely to see any time soon is the heat of battle as the nefarious proponents of the great green hoax face off against the laser minds of scientific truth. The thinkers of the planet have long known that the sun has far more influence on climate than human activities, that climate change is a natural phenomenon, that earth has always gone through cycles of warming and cooling, and that CO2 increases following warmer periods. It is now well established that in the past decade the earth has been cooling, not warming. Global warming is over and we are now starting down the other side of the hill. This, of course, means that any attempt to subdue global warming is bound to succeed, as the problem (if it is a problem) is already resolving itself. At the other end of the field we have the inventors of the great scam called climate change and global warming. These are the great financial and political minds who see much advantage in hijacking a naturally occuring event for their own purposes.

What better plan could there be than using the excuse of stopping climate change and its companion global warming as justification for imposing all kinds of crazy rules to control just about anything in the name of ‘protecting’ the earth — which in this case doesn’t need protecting and is taking care of its own climate just fine.

This Sunday, March 8, the scientific team will make their next move, to be followed no doubt by an immediate move from the political team in the form of loud uproars, further alarmism and denial of the real facts in favor of invented ones. Beginning Sunday, some 500 top climatologists will meet for 3 days in New York to discuss climate change and the global warming hoax. Neither the conference nor its organizer, the Heartland Institute, has received any corporate money to put on this event. In other words, they are not paid to lie and are not prostituting their scientific minds on the street corners of capitalism. The keynote speaker will be the president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, who is also the current rotating chair of the European Union. Klaus recently spoke at Davos about the crisis of (the hoax of) climate change. He has also written a book, Blue Planet in Green Shackles, in which he warns that ‘climate change’ has “become a symbol and example of the clash between truth and propaganda.” The 67-year-old economist blames Al Gore for creating unnecessary alarm and has declared,

“The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy, and prosperity at the end of the 20th and at the beginning of the 21st Century is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism.”

According to the New York Times, the Environmental Protection Agency is now poised to regulate carbon dioxide. Think about the implications of that. Think about what could be regulated to control CO2 — literally everything! Controlling ‘climate change’ is an excuse to do just about anything they want. But it’s all based on a lie, a lie that everyone plays along with because no one wants to stand out. But after the dust settles very few will actually believe it. The events of 2001 were a coup against freedom and what semblance of ‘democracy’ we had. It is a perfect example of how a big, well orchestrated hoax can serve to steal many things from us. There is no reason to believe it would be any different with the climate-change agenda. Here at home, the New Democrats have climbed aboard the bandwagon and are putting all their energy behind ‘green’, ’sustainable’ development. Just how they figure any development can be green is a deep mystery in which only a climate-change guru could reach enlightenment. Ok, maybe I can clarify the ’sustainable’ mystery — perhaps it means that development can be continued endlessly without interruption — a developer’s dream. The BC Conservatives describe their stance toward development as “a balanced approach to protecting the environment while allowing economic activity to take place”. The Liberals have clearly been on the climate-change bandwagon for some time, busy evangelizing such nice wholesome ’solutions’ as compact fluorescents, and diverting rivers to make the fish happier. And if this mother of all protection rackets should accidentally manage to actually reduce CO2, what harm will that do to a planet whose ecosystem already has CO2 in natural balance? What kind of long-term devastation might such meddling cause?

More info on the conference currently taking place can be found HERE.