Author: admin

By Scott Thong
Bwah ha ha ha ha ha! Take that in your face, Gorezilla! If this keeps up, Al Gore and his hypocrite cronies could be conclusively debunked as utterly wrong and disowned as dishonest swindlers within my lifetime! Before allowing it to be shown in schools Britain-wide, the British government has officially tried AL Gore’s global warming propa-scam-da film, An Inconvenient Truth, in court… And have reached the following conclusions (bolding is mine): —————————— …the Court found that the film was misleading in 11 respects and that the Guidance Notes drafted by the Education Secretary’s advisors served only to exacerbate the political propaganda in the film. In order for the film to be shown, the Government must first amend their Guidance Notes to Teachers to make clear that 1.) The Film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument. 2.) If teachers present the Film without making this plain they may be in breach of section 406 of the Education Act 1996 and guilty of political indoctrination. 3.) Eleven inaccuracies have to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children. The inaccuracies are:

• The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro evidence global warming. The Government’s expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.
• The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 causes temperature increases over 650,000 years. The Court found that the film was misleading: over that period the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800-2000 years.

[See Climate Skeptic where you can find this outright lie to school children to spread global warming propaganda graph: And the actual facts graph: Teaching blatant, 180-degrees turned around untruths to kids… Can global warming fearmongers get any more intentionally, ethicslessly dishonest? Unfortunately, being comprised mostly of LIE-berals, I’m sure they can.]

• The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina and suggests that this has been caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that it was “not possible” to attribute one-off events to global warming.
• The film shows the drying up of Lake Chad and claims that this was caused by global warming. The Government’s expert had to accept that this was not the case.
• The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing arctic ice. It turned out that Mr Gore had misread the study: in fact four polar bears drowned and this was because of a particularly violent storm.
• The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream throwing Europe into an ice age: the Claimant’s evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.
• The film blames global warming for species losses including coral reef bleaching. The Government could not find any evidence to support this claim.
• The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.
• The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting, the evidence was that it is in fact increasing.

[See Irrefutable, It-Is-A-Fact Global Warming Causes ‘All-Time’ High Antarctic Ice.]

• The film suggests that sea levels could rise by 7m causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40cm over the next hundred years and that there is no such threat of massive migration.
• The film claims that rising sea levels has caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The Government are unable to substantiate this and the Court observed that this appears to be a false claim.

Learnt about at The Jawa Report, Climate Skeptic and Newsbusters which source from the original here. More related cartoons can be found at Al Gore 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Editorial Cartoons and Global Warming Editorial Cartoons.

Over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe challenged man-made global warming claims made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore.

This new 231-page U.S. Senate Minority Report — updated from 2007’s groundbreaking report of over 400 scientists who voiced skepticism about the so-called global warming “consensus” — features the skeptical voices of over 650 prominent international scientists, including many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN IPCC. (This entry is a summary of the U. S. Senate Minority Report)

Below is just a small selection of quotes and highlights from the updated 2008 Senate Minority Report featuring over 650 international scientists dissenting from man-made climate fears. The 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers. Note how many of these scientists have peer reviewed and published studies, are former IPCC members, are long term government scientists, even astronauts with scientific backgrounds. These opinions are shared by over 31,000 scientists who have signed a petition declaring that the man-made climate change theory is completely false and has no scientific merit. So the next time someone tells you that only crackpots deny that man is causing global warming print this out for them:

“CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another….Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so…Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.” – Dr. Takeda Kunihiko, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University in Japan.

“The [global warming] scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.” – Award-winning Paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.

“Whatever the weather, it’s not being caused by global warming. If anything, the climate may be starting into a cooling period.” Atmospheric scientist Dr. Art V. Douglas, former Chair of the Atmospheric Sciences Department at Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, and is the author of numerous papers for peer-reviewed publications.

“Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize Winner for Physics, Ivar Giaever.

“Many [scientists] are now searching for a way to back out quietly (from promoting warming fears), without having their professional careers ruined.” — Atmospheric physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh, Pa.

“Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense … . The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning.” — Environmental Scientist Professor Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the Numerical Weather Forecast group, has more than 150 published articles.

“Warming fears are the worst scientific scandal in history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization nor receiving any funding, I can speak quite frankly. The main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models. We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system” – Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a PhD in meteorology, and formerly of NASA, who has authored more than 190 studies and has been called “among the most preeminent scientists of the last 100 years.”

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” – Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet

“Real measurements give no ground for concern about a catastrophic future warming.” – Scientist Dr. Jarl R. Ahlbeck, a chemical engineer at Abo Akademi University in Finland, author of 200 scientific publications and former Greenpeace member.

“Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time.” – Solar physicist Dr. Pal Brekke, senior advisor to the Norwegian Space Centre in Oslo. Brekke has published more than 40 peer-reviewed scientific articles on the sun and solar interaction with the Earth.

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S Government Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

“Even doubling or tripling the amount of carbon dioxide will virtually have little impact, as water vapour and water condensed on particles as clouds dominate the worldwide scene and always will.” – . Geoffrey G. Duffy, a professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering of the University of Auckland, NZ.

“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.

“The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round…A large number of critical documents submitted at the 1995 U.N. conference in Madrid vanished without a trace. As a result, the discussion was one-sided and heavily biased, and the U.N. declared global warming to be a scientific fact,” Andrei Kapitsa, a Russian geographer and Antarctic ice core researcher.

“Nature’s regulatory instrument is water vapor: more carbon dioxide leads to less moisture in the air, keeping the overall GHG content in accord with the necessary balance conditions.” – Prominent Hungarian Physicist and environmental researcher Dr. Miklós Zágoni reversed his view of man-made warming and is now a skeptic. Zágoni was once Hungary’s most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol.

“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?” – Geologist Dr. David Gee the chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress who has authored 130 plus peer reviewed papers, and is currently at Uppsala University in Sweden.

“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” – Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.

“The quantity of CO2 we produce is insignificant in terms of the natural circulation between air, water and soil… I am doing a detailed assessment of the UN IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science.” – South Afican Nuclear Physicist and Chemical Engineer Dr. Philip Lloyd, a UN IPCC co-coordinating lead author who has authored over 150 refereed publications.

“All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead” – Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut, served as staff physicist at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

“The ‘global warming scare’ is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making. It has no place in the Society’s activities.” – Award-Winning NASA Astronaut/Geologist and Moonwalker Jack Schmitt who flew on the Apollo 17 mission and formerly of the Norwegian Geological Survey and for the U.S. Geological Survey.

“Earth has cooled since 1998 in defiance of the predictions by the UN-IPCC….The global temperature for 2007 was the coldest in a decade and the coldest of the millennium…which is why ‘global warming’ is now called ‘climate change.’” – Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado.

“I have yet to see credible proof of carbon dioxide driving climate change, yet alone man-made CO2 driving it. The atmospheric hot-spot is missing and the ice core data refute this. When will we collectively awake from this deceptive delusion?” – Dr. G LeBlanc Smith, a retired Principal Research Scientist with Australia’s Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Link to the full Senate report

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is Not Pollution

“CO2 for different people has different attractions. After all, what is it? – it’s not a pollutant, it’s a product of every living creature’s breathing, it’s the product of all plant respiration, it is essential for plant life and photosynthesis, it’s a product of all industrial burning, it’s a product of driving – I mean, if you ever wanted a leverage point to control everything from exhalation to driving, this would be a dream. So it has a kind of fundamental attractiveness to bureaucratic mentality.” – Richard S. Lindzen, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Science, MIT

Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is not pollution and Global Warming has nothing to do with pollution. The average person has been misled and is confused about what the current Global Warming debate is about, greenhouse gases. None of which has anything to do with air pollution. People are confusing Smog, Carbon Monoxide (CO) and the pollutants in car exhaust with the life supporting, essential trace gas in our atmosphere, Carbon Dioxide (CO2). Pollution is already regulated under the Clean Air Act and regulating Carbon Dioxide (CO2) will do absolutely nothing to make the air you breath “cleaner”. Regulating Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions through either ‘Carbon Taxes’ or ‘Cap and Trade’ policies will cause energy prices (electricity, gasoline, diesel fuel, propane, heating oil ect…) to skyrocket.

“CO2 is not a pollutant. In simple terms, CO2 is plant food. The green world we see around us would disappear if not for atmospheric CO2. These plants largely evolved at a time when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was many times what it is today. Indeed, numerous studies indicate the present biosphere is being invigorated by the human-induced rise of CO2. In and of itself, therefore, the increasing concentration of CO2 does not pose a toxic risk to the planet.” – John R. Christy, Ph.D. Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Alabama

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a naturally occurring, beneficial trace gas in the atmosphere. For the past few million years, the Earth has existed in a state of relative carbon dioxide starvation compared with earlier periods. There is no empirical evidence that levels double or even triple those of today will be harmful, climatically or otherwise. As a vital element in plant photosynthesis, carbon dioxide is the basis of the planetary food chain – literally the staff of life. Its increase in the atmosphere leads mainly to the greening of the planet. To label carbon dioxide a “pollutant” is an abuse of language, logic and science.” – Robert M. Carter, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental and Earth Sciences, James Cook University

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. On the contrary, it makes crops and forests grow faster. Economic analysis has demonstrated that more CO2 and a warmer climate will raise GNP and therefore average income. It’s axiomatic that bureaucracies always want to expand their scope of operations. This is especially true of EPA, which is primarily a regulatory agency. As air and water pollution disappear as prime issues, as acid rain and stratospheric-ozone depletion fade from public view, climate change seems like the best growth area for regulators. It has the additional glamour of being international and therefore appeals to those who favor world governance over national sovereignty. Therefore, labeling carbon dioxide, the product of fossil-fuel burning, as a pollutant has a high priority for EPA as a first step in that direction.” – S. Fred Singer, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia

“Carbon and CO2 (carbon dioxide) are fundamental for all life on Earth. CO2 is a colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas. CO2 is product of our breathing, and is used in numerous common applications like fire extinguishers, baking soda, carbonated drinks, life jackets, cooling agent, etc. Plants’ photosynthesis consume CO2 from the air when the plants make their carbohydrates, which bring the CO2 back to the air again when the plants rot or are being burned.” – Tom V. Segalstad, Ph.D. Professor of Environmental Geology, University of Oslo

“To suddenly label CO2 as a “pollutant” is a disservice to a gas that has played an enormous role in the development and sustainability of all life on this wonderful Earth. Mother Earth has clearly ruled that CO2 is not a pollutant.” – Robert C. Balling Jr., Ph.D. Professor of Climatology, Arizona State University

“Many chemicals are absolutely necessary for humans to live, for instance oxygen. Just as necessary, human metabolism produces by-products that are exhaled, like carbon dioxide and water vapor. So, the production of carbon dioxide is necessary, on the most basic level, for humans to survive. The carbon dioxide that is emitted as part of a wide variety of natural processes is, in turn, necessary for vegetation to live. It turns out that most vegetation is somewhat ‘starved’ for carbon dioxide, as experiments have shown that a wide variety of plants grow faster, and are more drought tolerant, in the presence of doubled carbon dioxide concentrations. Fertilization of the global atmosphere with the extra CO2 that mankind’s activities have emitted in the last century is believed to have helped increase agricultural productivity. In short, carbon dioxide is a natural part of our environment, necessary for life, both as ‘food’ and as a by-product.” – Roy Spencer, Ph.D. Meteorology

“I am at a loss to understand why anyone would regard carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Carbon dioxide, a natural gas produced by human respiration, is a plant nutrient that is beneficial both for people and for the natural environment. It promotes plant growth and reforestation. Faster-growing trees mean lower housing costs for consumers and more habitat for wild species. Higher agricultural yields from carbon dioxide fertilization will result in lower food prices and will facilitate conservation by limiting the need to convert wild areas to arable land.” – David Deming, Ph.D. Professor of Geology and Geophysics, University of Oklahoma

“Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is a colorless, odorless trace gas that actually sustains life on this planet. Consider the simple dynamics of human energy acquisition, which occurs daily across the globe. We eat plants directly, or we consume animals that have fed upon plants, to obtain the energy we need. But where do plants get their energy? Plants produce their own energy during a process called photosynthesis, which uses sunlight to combine water and carbon dioxide into sugars for supporting overall growth and development. Hence, CO2 is the primary raw material that plants depend upon for their existence. Because plants reside beneath animals (including humans) on the food chain, their healthy existence ultimately determines our own. Carbon dioxide can hardly be labeled a pollutant, for it is the basic substrate that allows life to persist on Earth.” – Keith E. Idso, Ph.D. Botany

“Atmospheric CO2 is required for life by both plants and animals. It is the sole source of carbon in all of the protein, carbohydrate, fat, and other organic molecules of which living things are constructed. Plants extract carbon from atmospheric CO2 and are thereby fertilized. Animals obtain their carbon from plants. Without atmospheric CO2, none of the life we see on Earth would exist. Water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide are the three most important substances that make life possible. They are surely not environmental pollutants.” – Arthur B. Robinson, Ph.D. Professor of Chemistry

– Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a natural part of Earth’s Atmosphere (NASA)
– Carbon Dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere have risen from 0.028% to 0.038% (380ppm) over the past 100 years (IPCC)
– Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is not toxic until 5% (50,000ppm) concentration (Source)
– Any detrimental effects of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) including chronic exposure to 3% (30,000ppm) are reversible (Source)
– OSHA, NIOSH, and ACGIH occupational exposure standards are 0.5% (5,000 ppm) Carbon Dioxide (CO2) (Source)

The Kyoto Protocol is a treaty to regulate ‘Greenhouse Gases‘ only:
– Carbon dioxide (CO2)
– Methane (CH4)
– Nitrous oxide (N2O) (Laughing Gas, Nitrous, NOS)
– Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs)
– Perfluorocarbons (PFCs)
– Sulphur hexafluoride (SF6)

Car Exhaust consists of:
Harmless:
– Carbon dioxide (CO2)
– Nitrogen (N2)
– Water vapor (H2O)
Some Pollutants:
– Carbon monoxide (CO) *
– Hydrocarbons or Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) *
– Nitric oxide (NO) *
– Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) *
– Particulate matter (PM-10) *
– Sulfur dioxide (SO2) *

* Your car’s Catalytic Converter removes about 95% of these pollutants by converting them to Water and Carbon Dioxide (CO2)

Smog consists of:
– Ozone (O3) * (formed from the photochemical reaction of Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) + Hydrocarbons)
– Particulate matter (PM-10) *
– Sulfur dioxide (SO2) *

* Air Pollution is already regulated in the: 1970 Clean Air Act (Amended: 1977, 1990)

– Since the mid-1970s, the fuel economy of SUVs and light trucks has improved by nearly 60%. (Source)
– Today’s SUVs are 50% more efficient than cars were a generation ago. (Source)
– The emissions from a new midsize SUV are cleaner than those of the average passenger car built just three years ago. (Source)
– All the cars and light trucks in the U.S. make up only about 2% of all man-made greenhouse gases worldwide. (Source)

– The United States has sharply reduced air pollution levels, despite large increases in nominally “polluting” activities (Source)
– Air pollution affects far fewer people, far less often, and with far less severity than is commonly believed. (Source)
– Areas in the United States with the highest pollution levels have improved the most (Source)
– Air quality in the United States will continue to improve (Source)
– Regulators and environmental activists exaggerate air pollution levels and obscure positive trends in the United States (Source)

Air Quality in America (PDF) (AEI)

Cap-and-Trade Could Cost Average Family $10,800 in Lost Income (US Newswire)
Duke Energy CEO: Cap-and-Trade Plan Would Raise Electric Rates 40% (The Wall Street Journal)
Cap & Trade Is Not A Market Solution (Robert P. Murphy, Ph.D. Economics)
Beware of Cap and Trade Climate Bills (The Heritage Foundation)

Source

By Harold Ambler, Huffington Post
You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore. Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

What is wrong with the statement? A brief list: 1. First, the expression “climate change” itself is a redundancy, and contains a lie. Climate has always changed, and always will. There has been no stable period of climate during the Holocene, our own climatic era, which began with the end of the last ice age 12,000 years ago. During the Holocene there have been numerous sub-periods with dramatically varied climate, such as the warm Holocene Optimum (7,000 B.C. to 3,000 B.C., during which humanity began to flourish, and advance technologically), the warm Roman Optimum (200 B.C. to 400 A.D., a time of abundant crops that promoted the empire), the cold Dark Ages (400 A.D. to 900 A.D., during which the Nile River froze, major cities were abandoned, the Roman Empire fell apart, and pestilence and famine were widespread), the Medieval Warm Period (900 A.D. to 1300 A.D., during which agriculture flourished, wealth increased, and dozens of lavish examples of Gothic architecture were created), the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850, during much of which plague, crop failures, witch burnings, food riots — and even revolutions, including the French Revolution — were the rule of thumb), followed by our own time of relative warmth (1850 to present, during which population has increased, technology and medical advances have been astonishing, and agriculture has flourished). So, no one needs to say the words “climate” and “change” in the same breath — it is assumed, by anyone with any level of knowledge, that climate changes. That is the redundancy to which I alluded. The lie is the suggestion that climate has ever been stable. Mr. Gore has used a famously inaccurate graph, known as the “Mann Hockey Stick,” created by the scientist Michael Mann, showing that the modern rise in temperatures is unprecedented, and that the dramatic changes in climate just described did not take place. They did. One last thought on the expression “climate change”: It is a retreat from the earlier expression used by alarmists, “manmade global warming,” which was more easily debunked. There are people in Mr. Gore’s camp who now use instances of cold temperatures to prove the existence of “climate change,” which is absurd, obscene, even. 2. Mr. Gore has gone so far to discourage debate on climate as to refer to those who question his simplistic view of the atmosphere as “flat-Earthers.” This, too, is right on target, except for one tiny detail. It is exactly the opposite of the truth.

Indeed, it is Mr. Gore and his brethren who are flat-Earthers. Mr. Gore states, ad nauseum, that carbon dioxide rules climate in frightening and unpredictable, and new, ways. When he shows the hockey stick graph of temperature and plots it against reconstructed C02 levels in An Inconvenient Truth, he says that the two clearly have an obvious correlation. “Their relationship is actually very complicated,” he says, “but there is one relationship that is far more powerful than all the others, and it is this: When there is more carbon dioxide, the temperature gets warmer.” The word “complicated” here is among the most significant Mr. Gore has uttered on the subject of climate and is, at best, a deliberate act of obfuscation. Why? Because it turns out that there is an 800-year lag between temperature and carbon dioxide, unlike the sense conveyed by Mr. Gore’s graph. You are probably wondering by now — and if you are not, you should be — which rises first, carbon dioxide or temperature. The answer? Temperature. In every case, the ice-core data shows that temperature rises precede rises in carbon dioxide by, on average, 800 years. In fact, the relationship is not “complicated.” When the ocean-atmosphere system warms, the oceans discharge vast quantities of carbon dioxide in a process known as de-gassing. For this reason, warm and cold years show up on the Mauna Loa C02 measurements even in the short term. For instance, the post-Pinatubo-eruption year of 1993 shows the lowest C02 increase since measurements have been kept. When did the highest C02 increase take place? During the super El Niño year of 1998. 3. What the alarmists now state is that past episodes of warming were not caused by C02 but amplified by it, which is debatable, for many reasons, but, more important, is a far cry from the version of events sold to the public by Mr. Gore. Meanwhile, the theory that carbon dioxide “drives” climate in any meaningful way is simply wrong and, again, evidence of a “flat-Earth” mentality. Carbon dioxide cannot absorb an unlimited amount of infrared radiation. Why not? Because it only absorbs heat along limited bandwidths, and is already absorbing just about everything it can. That is why plotted on a graph, C02’s ability to capture heat follows a logarithmic curve. We are already very near the maximum absorption level. Further, the IPCC Fourth Assessment, like all the ones before it, is based on computer models that presume a positive feedback of atmospheric warming via increased water vapor. 4. This mechanism has never been shown to exist. Indeed, increased temperature leads to increased evaporation of the oceans, which leads to increased cloud cover (one cooling effect) and increased precipitation (a bigger cooling effect). Within certain bounds, in other words, the ocean-atmosphere system has a very effective self-regulating tendency. By the way, water vapor is far more prevalent, and relevant, in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide — a trace gas. Water vapor’s absorption spectrum also overlays that of carbon dioxide. They cannot both absorb the same energy! The relative might of water vapor and relative weakness of carbon dioxide is exemplified by the extraordinary cooling experienced each night in desert regions, where water in the atmosphere is nearly non-existent. If not carbon dioxide, what does “drive” climate? I am glad you are wondering about that. In the short term, it is ocean cycles, principally the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the “super cycle” of which cooling La Niñas and warming El Niños are parts. Having been in its warm phase, in which El Niños predominate, for the 30 years ending in late 2006, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation switched to its cool phase, in which La Niñas predominate.
Since that time, already, a number of interesting things have taken place. One La Niña lowered temperatures around the globe for about half of the year just ended, and another La Niña shows evidence of beginning in the equatorial Pacific waters. During the last twelve months, many interesting cold-weather events happened to occur: record snow in the European Alps, China, New Zealand, Australia, Brazil, the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, the Rockies, the upper Midwest, Las Vegas, Houston, and New Orleans. There was also, for the first time in at least 100 years, snow in Baghdad. Concurrent with the switchover of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation to its cool phase the Sun has entered a period of deep slumber. The number of sunspots for 2008 was the second lowest of any year since 1901. That matters less because of fluctuations in the amount of heat generated by the massive star in our near proximity (although there are some fluctuations that may have some measurable effect on global temperatures) and more because of a process best described by the Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark in his complex, but elegant, work The Chilling Stars. In the book, the modern Galileo, for he is nothing less, establishes that cosmic rays from deep space seed clouds over Earth’s oceans. Regulating the number of cosmic rays reaching Earth’s atmosphere is the solar wind; when it is strong, we get fewer cosmic rays. When it is weak, we get more. As NASA has corroborated, the number of cosmic rays passing through our atmosphere is at the maximum level since measurements have been taken, and show no signs of diminishing. The result: the seeding of what some have taken to calling “Svensmark clouds,” low dense clouds, principally over the oceans, that reflect sunlight back to space before it can have its warming effect on whatever is below. Svensmark has proven, in the minds of most who have given his work a full hearing, that it is this very process that produced the episodes of cooling (and, inversely, warming) of our own era and past eras. The clearest instance of the process, by far, is that of the Maunder Minimum, which refers to a period from 1650 to 1700, during which the Sun had not a single spot on its face. Temperatures around the globe plummeted, with quite adverse effects: crop failures (remember the witch burnings in Europe and Massachusetts?), famine, and societal stress. Many solar physicists anticipate that the slumbering Sun of early 2009 is likely to continue for at least two solar cycles, or about the next 25 years. Whether the Grand Solar Minimum, if it comes to pass, is as serious as the Maunder Minimum is not knowable, at present. Major solar minima (and maxima, such as the one during the second half of the 20th century) have also been shown to correlate with significant volcanic eruptions. These are likely the result of solar magnetic flux affecting geomagnetic flux, which affects the distribution of magma in Earth’s molten iron core and under its thin mantle. So, let us say, just for the sake of argument, that such an eruption takes place over the course of the next two decades. Like all major eruptions, this one will have a temporary cooling effect on global temperatures, perhaps a large one. The larger the eruption, the greater the effect. History shows that periods of cold are far more stressful to humanity than periods of warm. Would the eruption and consequent cooling be a climate-modifier that exists outside of nature, somehow? Who is the “flat-Earther” now? What about heat escaping from volcanic vents in the ocean floor? What about the destruction of warming, upper-atmosphere ozone by cosmic rays? I could go on, but space is short. Again, who is the “flat-Earther” here? The ocean-atmosphere system is not a simple one that can be “ruled” by a trace atmospheric gas. It is a complex, chaotic system, largely modulated by solar effects (both direct and indirect), as shown by the Little Ice Age. To be told, as I have been, by Mr. Gore, again and again, that carbon dioxide is a grave threat to humankind is not just annoying, by the way, although it is that! To re-tool our economies in an effort to suppress carbon dioxide and its imaginary effect on climate, when other, graver problems exist is, simply put, wrong. Particulate pollution, such as that causing the Asian brown cloud, is a real problem. Two billion people on Earth living without electricity, in darkened huts and hovels polluted by charcoal smoke, is a real problem. So, let us indeed start a Manhattan Project-like mission to create alternative sources of energy. And, in the meantime, let us neither cripple our own economy by mislabeling carbon dioxide a pollutant nor discourage development in the Third World, where suffering continues unabated, day after day. Again, Mr. Gore, I accept your apology. And, Mr. Obama, though I voted for you for a thousand times a thousand reasons, I hope never to need one from you. P.S. One of the last, desperate canards proposed by climate alarmists is that of the polar ice caps. Look at the “terrible,” “unprecedented” melting in the Arctic in the summer of 2007, they say. Well, the ice in the Arctic basin has always melted and refrozen, and always will. Any researcher who wants to find a single molecule of ice that has been there longer than 30 years is going to have a hard job, because the ice has always been melted from above (by the midnight Sun of summer) and below (by relatively warm ocean currents, possibly amplified by volcanic venting) — and on the sides, again by warm currents. Scientists in the alarmist camp have taken to referring to “old ice,” but, again, this is a misrepresentation of what takes place in the Arctic. More to the point, 2007 happened also to be the time of maximum historic sea ice in Antarctica. (There are many credible sources of this information, such as the following website maintained by the University of Illinois-Urbana: http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/current.anom.south.jpg). Why, I ask, has Mr. Gore not chosen to mention the record growth of sea ice around Antarctica? If the record melting in the Arctic is significant, then the record sea ice growth around Antarctica is, too, I say. If one is insignificant, then the other one is, too. For failing to mention the 2007 Antarctic maximum sea ice record a single time, I also accept your apology, Mr. Gore. By the way, your contention that the Arctic basin will be “ice free” in summer within five years (which you said last month in Germany), is one of the most demonstrably false comments you have dared to make. Thank you for that!

THE FACTS

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is controlled by political hacks who override the scientists with a predetermined agenda. Calling it science is a fraud upon the public.
In spite of claims to the contrary, there is absolutely no consensus of scientists supporting the findings and recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On the other side, there exists a very large and vocal group of highly qualified dissenters (often denigrated as skeptics, deniers or worse). If there is any “consensus” at all, it is against the man-made global warming theory, not supporting it.
Published letters and opinions in the press suggest the scientific community is still divided and the community has not succumbed to the propaganda of human-caused global warming. Many in the community, with every justification, are awaiting more information about the costs and the economic and social impacts before lining up to march behind the government’s carbon dioxide reduction banner. As well, many so-called scientists are on government and UN payrolls which have vested interests in pushing the climate change propaganda on the world. Recently it was revealed that funding for “climate change science” and technologies has surpassed $79 BILLION. Yes, that’s billion with a big fat “B”. There are an awful lot of jobs and an awful lot of money at stake. It’s quite staggering. Compared to the paltry $20 million paid to skeptics by oil companies, it’s enormous. Big Environment, major politicians, and mega corporations everywhere are major players in this mother of all scams.
A widely accepted conviction that dangerous climate change is actually pending will be required before the community will support the government’s strategy to shut down fossil-fuel-dependent industries and willingly abandon the energy-dependent and satisfying lifestyle activities they enjoy. After all, in the cause of saving the planet we will all be required to give up a wide range of personal freedoms that we currently take for granted. We will want to be in full agreement that the alleged dangers are real and present, and that the course of government-imposed actions really will avert them.It’s an assertion repeated by politicians and climate campaigners the world over – ‘2,500 scientists of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agree that humans are causing a climate crisis’.

But it’s not true. And, for the first time ever, the public can now see the extent to which they have been misled. As far as lies go, it’s a whopper. Here’s the real situation:

Like the three IPCC ‘assessment reports’ before it, the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released during 2007 (upon which the UN climate conference in Bali was based) includes the reports of the IPCC’s three working groups. Working Group I (WG I) is assigned to report on the extent and possible causes of past climate change as well as future ‘projections’. Its report is titled “The Physical Science Basis”. The reports from working groups II and II are titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and “Mitigation of Climate Change” respectively, and since these are based on the results of WG I, it is crucially important that the WG I report stands up to close scrutiny.

There is, of course serious debate among scientists about the actual technical content of the roughly 1,000-page WG I report, especially its politically motivated Summary for Policymakers which is often the only part read by politicians and non-scientists. The technical content can be difficult for non-scientists to follow and so most people simply assume that if that large numbers of scientists agree, they must be right.

Consensus never proves the truth of a scientific claim, but is somehow widely believed to do so for the IPCC reports, so we need to ask how many scientists really did agree with the most important IPCC conclusion, namely that humans are causing significant climate change–in other words the key parts of WG I?

The numbers of scientist reviewers involved in WG I is actually less than a quarter of the whole, a little over 600 in total. The other 1,900 reviewers assessed the other working group reports. They had nothing to say about the causes of climate change or its future trajectory. And many have spoken out against the notion of humans causing any climate changes. Some have even resigned over it, and insist the IPCC does not listen to their opinions. Still, 600 “scientific expert reviewers” sounds pretty impressive. After all, they submitted their comments to the IPCC editors who assure us that “all substantive government and expert review comments received appropriate consideration.” And since these experts reviewers are all listed in Annex III of the report, they must have endorsed it, right?

Wrong.

For the first time ever, the UN had released on the Web the comments of reviewers who assessed the drafts of the WG I report and the IPCC editors’ responses. This release was almost certainly a result of intense pressure applied by “hockey-stick” co-debunker Steve McIntyre of Toronto and his allies. Unlike the other IPCC working groups, WG I is based in the U.S. and McIntyre had used the robust Freedom of Information legislation to request certain details when the full comments were released.

An examination of reviewers’ comments on the last draft of the WG I report before final report assembly (i.e. the ‘Second Order Revision’ or SOR) completely debunks the illusion of hundreds of experts diligently poring over all the chapters of the report and providing extensive feedback to the editing teams. Here’s the reality.

A total of 308 reviewers commented on the SOR, but only 32 reviewers commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented on all 11 chapters of the report. Only about half the reviewers commented more than one chapter. It is logical that reviewers would generally limit their comments to their areas of expertise but it’s a far cry from the idea of thousands of scientists agreeing to anything.

Compounding this is the fact that IPCC editors could, and often did, ignore reviewers’ comments. Some editor responses were banal and others showed inconsistencies with other comments. Reviewers had to justify their requested changes but the responding editors appear to have been under no such obligation. Reviewers were sometimes flatly told they were wrong but no reasons or reliable references were provided. In other cases reviewers tried to dilute the certainty being expressed and they often provided supporting evidence, but their comments were often flatly rejected. Some comments were rejected on the basis of a lack of space – an incredible assertion in such an important document. The attitude of the editors seemed to be that simple corrections were accepted, requests for improved clarity tolerated but the assertions and interpretations that appear in the text were to be defended against any challenge.

An example of rampant misrepresentation of IPCC reports is the frequent assertion that ‘hundreds of IPCC scientists’ are known to support the following statement, arguably the most important of the WG I report, namely “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.”

In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”. Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert reviewers who appear impartial.

Two of these seven were contacted by NRSP for the purposes of this article – Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand and Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Canada. Concerning the “Greenhouse gas forcing …” statement above, Professor McKitrick explained “A categorical summary statement like this is not supported by the evidence in the IPCC WG I report. Evidence shown in the report suggests that other factors play a major role in climate change, and the specific effects expected from greenhouse gases have not been observed.”

Dr. Gray labeled the WG I statement as “Typical IPCC doubletalk” asserting “The text of the IPCC report shows that this is decided by a guess from persons with a conflict of interest, not from a tested model.”

Determining the level of support expressed by reviewers’ comments is subjective but a slightly generous evaluation indicates that just five reviewers endorsed the crucial ninth chapter. Four had vested interests and the other made only a single comment for the entire 11-chapter report. The claim that 2,500 independent scientist reviewers agreed with this, the most important statement of the UN climate reports released this year, or any other statement in the UN climate reports, is nonsense.

“The IPCC owe it to the world to explain who among their expert reviewers actually agree with their conclusions and who don’t,” says Natural Resources Stewardship Project Chair climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball. “Otherwise, their credibility, and the public’s trust of science in general, will be even further eroded.”

That the IPCC have let this deception continue for so long is a disgrace. Secretary General Ban Kai-Moon must instruct the UN climate body to either completely revise their operating procedures, welcoming dissenting input from scientist reviewers and indicating if reviewers have vested interests, or close the agency down completely. Until then, their conclusions, and any reached at the Bali conference based on IPCC conclusions, should be ignored entirely as politically skewed and dishonest.
LETTER BY SCIENTISTS TO IPCC

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri
Chairman Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
c/o World Meteorological Organization
7bis Avenue de la Paix
C.P. 2300 CH-1211 Geneva 2,
Switzerland 14 April 2008 Dear Dr. Pachauri and others associated with IPCC We are writing to you and others associated with the IPCC position – that man’s CO2 is a driver of global warming and climate change – to ask that you now in view of the evidence retract support from the current IPCC position [as in footnote 1] and admit that there is no observational evidence in measured data going back 22,000 years or even millions of years that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures or climate change. If you believe there is evidence of the CO2 driver theory in the available data please present a graph of it. We draw your attention to three observational refutations of the IPCC position (and note there are more). Ice- core data from the ACIA (Arctic Climate Impact Assessment) shows that temperatures have fallen since around 4,000 years ago (the Bronze Age Climate Optimum) while CO2 levels have risen, yet this graphical data was not included in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers (Fig. SPM1 Feb07) which graphed the CO2 rise. More recent data shows that in the opposite sense to IPCC predictions world temperatures have not risen and indeed have fallen over the past 10 years while CO2 levels have risen dramatically. The up-dated temperature measurements have been released by the NASA’s Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) [1] as well as by the UK’s Hadley Climate Research Unit (Temperature v. 3, variance adjusted -Hadley CRUT3v) [2]. In parallel, readings of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have been released by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii [3]. They have been combined in graphical form by Joe D’Aleo [4], and are shown below. These latest temperature readings represent averages of records obtained from standardized meteorological stations from around the planet, located in both urban as well as rural settings. They are augmented by satellite data, now generally accepted as ultimately authoritative, since they have a global footprint and are not easily vulnerable to manipulation nor observer error. What is also clear from the graphs is that average global temperatures have been in stasis for almost a decade and may now even be falling.

A third important observation is that contrary to the CO2 driver theory, temperatures in the upper troposphere (where most jets fly) have fallen over the past two decades. [Footnote 2] IPCC policy is already leading to economic and unintended environmental damage. Specifically the policy of burning food – maize as biofuel – has contributed to sharp rises in food prices which are causing great hardship in many countries and is also now leading to increased deforestation in Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, Togo, Cambodia, Nigeria, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Benin and Uganda for cultivation of crops [5]. Given the economic devastation that is already happening and which is now widely recognised will continue to flow from this policy, what possible justification can there be for its retention? We ask you and all those whose names are associated with IPCC policy to accept the scientific observations and renounce current IPCC policy. Yours sincerely,

Cc: IPCC’s yu.izrael@— / christy@— / spencer@— / dy.pitman@— / Tim Yeo MP (Chairman Environmental Audit Committee) / Lord Martin Rees (President Royal Society) / Gordon Brown MP / David Cameron MP / Nick Glegg MP
SEE ALSO: More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims
SEE ALSO: Over 31,000 Scientists declare man-made global warming is a myth.

SEE ALSO: Our RESOURCE page for links to many more scientists speaking out.

OVERVIEW

“It could have killed someone,” said San Diego fire captain Jeff Carle. Three workers sleeping at a construction site were able to escape after the terrorist Earth Liberation Front (ELF) set fire to an unfinished, 200-unit condominium development late one night in August, 2003. A newspaper reported: “Flames leapt 200 feet into the air and could be seen for miles. Grapefruit-sized fireballs landed in courtyards and patios of adjacent buildings, and burning embers swirled in the night.” Nearby residents were evacuated and returned home to find their window blinds had melted from the heat. A 500-gallon fuel tank exploded. Damages were estimated at $50 million. One local resident described the event for San Diego’s NBC affiliate: “Smoke was just coming straight at you. The flames were just all over. It was just terror.” A construction worker remarked: “I’m out of work now. Thank you, arsonist.” A twelve-foot sign next to the arson site read: “If you build it — we will burn it — the E.L.F.’s are mad.” The Earth Liberation Front, along with its sister group, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), have taken responsibility for more than 600 crimes since 1996, totaling more than $100 million in damages. The Earth Liberation Front sprung from — and in many ways is still an arm of — Earth First!. Earth First! (EF!) is a “warrior society” that takes a “by any means necessary” approach to “defending mother earth.” The group declines to participate in the democratic process, preferring instead to damage, disable, and destroy the property of its ever-growing list of enemies. EF! targets include, but are by no means limited to, loggers, ranchers, and farmers — especially those who grow genetically modified crops. Earth First!ers’ crimes include assault, arson, and untold acts of sabotage. Before he quit in the late 1980s, the driving force behind EF! was a man named Dave Foreman. His book Ecodefense: A Field Guide To Monkeywrenching is a how-to for environmental saboteurs. It includes nine chapters of instructions on subjects ranging from tree spiking to destroying roads, from disabling equipment to making smoke bombs. Rodney Coronado, an Earth First! zealot who was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison following a string of arsons, calls the book “our bible.” A “Mainstream” Spin-off? The legend of EF!’s founding involves five friends hanging out in the desert, drunk and high. They were inspired by Edward Abbey’s book The Monkeywrench Gang, which chronicles a gang of environmental zealots who sabotage oil, mining, and farming interests. A different story, one that doesn’t get told as often or as gleefully, was outlined by author Ron Arnold in Trashing the Economy:

Defectors from the environmental movement have told us that Earth First! founder Dave Foreman was approached by the Sierra Club and his employer, the Wilderness Society, in 1979 with an offer to fund a new extremist point group for the movement. It would serve the function of making their own demands look more reasonable … Defectors say that Foreman made the deal by himself in a comfortable Wilderness Society office, and accepted the offer on the condition that funding would be steady and adequate, and that his participation was a limited 10-year deal.

While this story is almost impossible to confirm, there is evidence for its veracity. Dave Foreman did quit EF! after about ten years. And comments from Foreman himself are revealing. Smithsonian magazine writes:

“We thought it would have been useful to have a group to take a tougher position than the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society,” Foreman remembers. “It could be sort of secretly controlled by the mainstream and trotted out at hearings to make the Sierra Club or Wilderness Society look moderate.”

In his own book, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Foreman brags: “A major accomplishment of Earth First! … has been to expand the environmental spectrum to where the Sierra Club and other groups are perceived as moderates.” Foreman made the same point to Audubon magazine in 1982: “When I call the Sierra Club ‘namby pamby,’ that is done consciously to negate what [Secretary of the Interior James] Watt says when he calls them extremists.” In the same Audubon article, long-time Sierra Club executive director and Foreman mentor David Brower argued: “The people that are easily named extreme make the people who were extreme seem suddenly reasonable.” Brower told E magazine:

The Sierra Club made the Nature Conservancy look reasonable. I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We’re still waiting for someone else to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable.

The Earth First! Journal Every industry has its trade rags, and the leading magazine for the environmental fringe is the Earth First! Journal. Unsuspecting magazine browsers in mainstream bookstores might stumble across the Journal, which provides tactical information and motivation to saboteurs — while singing the praises of Earth First!ers who destroy fishing boats, genetically modified crops, and logging equipment. The Journal features articles by some of America’s most violent eco-terrorists. One issue, for example, included an essay by convicted arsonist Jeffrey Luers about “Why I set a fire at [Eugene, Oregon’s] Romania Chevrolet.” The same issue included a treatise titled “The Non-violent Use of Gunpowder.” “By every means necessary we will bring this and every other empire down! Mutiny and sabotage in defense of Mother Earth!” screamed another recent article condemning the war in Iraq. Elsewhere in that same issue: “A snitch is no longer entitled to basic expectations of safety. As such, it is righteous to hurt them, burn down their house or do similarly naughty things to them.” In 2000, the 20th Anniversary issue of the Earth First! Journal bragged: “The simple idea of putting the earth first had drawn expanding crowds of hippies, anarchists, animal rights activists and all sorts of riffraff.” The kind of people who “riff” alphabet songs like this one:

I is incendiary, like burning ‘dozers
J is for jail time, and other enclosures
K is for kill, what they’ll do if they catch you.

In 2002, the Earth First! Journal published a two-page spread called “Most-Wanted Eco-terrorists: the Biotechnology Industry.” Claiming that “everyone at Monsanto is an eco-terrorist,” it opened with a line that has become emblematic of green radicals everywhere: “The Earth is not dying, it is being killed by corporations such as the biotechnology industries, and the people who are killing it have names and addresses.” The article then went on to list names and addresses. “The Earth First! Journal Collective” wrote an open letter appearing in the Spring 2003 issue of the rag for Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). One of the most violent groups of animal-rights zealots, SHAC has incubated the technique of harassing, threatening, and in some cases physically harming people who happen to work for a company they don’t like. The open letter read:

SHAC’s tactics and strategies need to be analyzed and implemented by the environmental movement. The results generated by SHAC’s actions are awe-inspiring, and the environmental movement needs to start paying attention.

The letter went on to describe how Earth First!ers have begun harassing “an ecoterrorist in our eyes” whose job it is to remove tree sitters safely from their perch:

In recent months, activists haven’t waited for Climber Eric to show up in the forest. They have visited his home, business and insurance company. At home, Climber Eric was not the same confident, controlled person that he is in the woods, where he is usually protected by his crew and local police. In fact, he was visibly distraught. For Climber Eric, this is just the beginning.

Several newspapers reported Rodney Coronado boasting that he “was no pacifist hippie, my actions speak louder than my words.” What the papers didn’t report was that those words were directed at “Climber Eric,” and, according to his employer, Coronado continued: “I’m coming to your door. Hey, do you got any food in your house? Don’t worry, I’ll go to your house and ask your wife.” “Earth First! is a verb, not a noun.” EF! works very hard to convince the public that its activities are not governed by any formal institution. “Earth First! is not an organization, but a movement” is the constant refrain. “There are no members of Earth First!, only Earth First!ers.” There are practical as well as romantic reasons to downplay any organizational structure. According to the Earth First! Journal: “To avoid co-option, we feel it is necessary to avoid the corporate organizational structure so readily embraced by many environmental groups.” Of course, most green groups engage in legal activities — and therefore don’t fear “co-option.” While there is no primary EF! office, there are numerous incorporated Earth First! organizations, each with its own specific function. These include Daily Planet Publishing (which publishes the Earth First! Journal), the Fund for Wild Nature (formerly the Earth First! Foundation), the Trees Foundation, and the Earth First! Direct Action Fund. For the benefit of anyone who doubts that these are genuine, legal “organizations,” consider that the website of the Fund for Wild Nature once read: “The Fund relies on invididual [sic] contributors like yourself, and your friends. We accept donations of cash, stock or other financial assets.” Here is a tax-exempt foundation making a plea for corporate securities, on behalf of a group that claims to exist without any structure. This non-organization, which preaches “no compromise in defense of mother earth,” is very much aware of who pays the bills. The Washington Times reports that Atlanta media mogul Ted Turner, who has personally contributed to radical environmental groups, gets a free pass from EF! militants:

While a timber-cutting operation was under way on one of his [Turner’s] ranches in 1998, members of the radical environmental group Earth First! instead protested timber cutting on a nearby ranch owned by Zachary Taylor, said private investigator Barry R. Clausen, who spent a year undercover at EarthFirst.
He asked a protester why the group did not include take on [sic] Mr. Turner, Mr. Clausen said, and was told: “We cannot. That’s where our money comes from.”
Mr. Clausen, author of “Burning Rage,” an investigation of domestic terrorism, said environmental groups’ nickname for Mr. Turner is “Daddy Greenbucks.”
“Ted Turner has canned hunts where you can shoot a buffalo … and drilling … in New Mexico and clear-cutting trees and he never gets protested. And when you ask why, it’s because he is one of the biggest contributors to extremist groups,” Mr. Clausen said.

Interlocking, Interrelated Radicals If you want to contribute money to EF! and get a tax break on your donation, send your check to the Fund for Wild Nature (FWN). Formerly named the Earth First! Foundation, FWN serves as a tax-exempt pass-through for money to reach Earth First!ers. It has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to EF! organizations. FWN has doled out money to the Earth First! Journal, Mendocino Earth First! and North Coast Earth First! (California), Elaho Earth First! (Canada), Wild Rockies Earth First!, Arizona Earth First!, and many others. More often, though, the Fund gives to EF! groups that don’t have the words “Earth First!” in their names — like the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters (BACH). BACH’s leader is Karen Pickett, whose arrest record hasn’t prevented her from holding the purse strings for the Earth First! Direct Action Fund. Another FWN beneficiary is the Cascadia Forest Alliance (CFA). According to Bear Deluxe magazine, “Former Earth First! members conceived the CFA as a fresh organization for combating Salvage Rider cutting in Oregon. Since then, hundreds of people — including Portland’s Tre Arrow, who gained local fame when he spent 11 days protesting the sale from a second story ledge at the Forest Service headquarters in Portland — have occupied the tree-sits at Eagle Creek.” “Tre Arrow,” whose real name is Michael Scarpitti, graces the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in October, 2002 for a string of arsons, including the torching of three cement trucks. The government has offered $25,000 for information leading to his arrest. Although Scarpitti is still on the loose, law enforcement officers spotted him in 2003 near Arcadia, California — accompanied by none other than Rodney Coronado. Coronado argues that EF! is part of one big happy family, along with the FBI’s most feared domestic terrorist groups, the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front: “Whether a member of a Headwaters nonviolent affinity group, Cascadia Forest Defenders or the Earth Liberation Front,” Coronado wrote in a 2001 essay, “all Earth First!ers should recognize the positive value of each other’s contributions and exploit the leverage they create against our common opponent.” FWN provided the initial support for EF! spin-offs like the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and the Ruckus Society, both of which were started by Earth First! co-founder Mike Roselle. Indeed, FWN thinks of itself as the venture capitalist of radical environmental groups. The Fund for Wild Nature is by no means Earth First!’s only source of revenue. For example, the Dogwood Alliance, which claims to believe in “peaceful” tactics, has funneled money to Katuah Earth First! and other groups that work with Earth First!. Earth First! founders Dave Foreman, Bart Koehler, and Howie Wolke are now board members, officers and/or founders of other environmental organizations. Those include: the Alliance for the Wild Rockies (Wolke); the Ecology Center, Inc. (Wolke); the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance (Foreman); the Wilderness Society’s Wilderness Support Center (Koehler); and the Wildlands Project, a.k.a. North American Wilderness Recovery, which recently merged with the Cenozoic Society (Foreman). “Direct Action” on Your Dinner Plate In 1999 FWN began to bankroll “direct action” against biotech crops (although Earth First!ers began targeting them as early as 1987). The now defunct Bioengineering Action Network (BAN) received FWN money. When it was functioning, BAN served as a press-outreach service for the FBI-certified domestic-terrorist Earth Liberation Front (ELF), another Earth First! spin-off. BAN’s website featured a how-to guide for tearing out biotech crops (they call it “nighttime gardening”) and instructed saboteurs on how to “research your target.” 1999 was also the year that Al H. Jacobson, founder of the avowedly anti-biotech crops organic food line Garden of Eatin’, gave FWN $54,500. Jacobson’s Naturganic Foundation kicked in $200,000 to FWN for 2000. In those years, Jacobson was by far FWN’s biggest donor. Earth First! makes your dinner more expensive by practicing economic sabotage on cattle ranchers as well as farmers who raise genetically enhanced crops. The EF!-founded and FWN-funded Buffalo Field Campaign, for example, uses “direct action” to block government officials from keeping buffalo in and around Yellowstone Park from passing on the contagious disease brucellosis to nearby cattle. As of December 2002, at least 21 Buffalo Field Campaign activists have been arrested — quite a rap sheet for a tax-exempt group. But even EF! draws a line between the kind of illegal activities that can be funded with tax-exempt money, and those that are too violent for the Fund for Wild Nature to touch. Cash for these endeavors comes from the Earth First! Direct Action Fund. Bragging that “thousands of EF!ers have been arrested around the world,” the EF! Direct Action Fund’s website appeals for donations:

Direct action requires courage, commitment, training and the ability to focus on an urgent issue. Unfortunately, it also requires money. Since 1985, The Earth First! Direct Action Fund (DAF) has assisted in planning, coordinating, and funding activists on the front lines. These people are the backbone, indeed the heart and soul, of the Earth First! movement.

Earth First! co-founder Mike Roselle registered the Earth First! Action Fund as a California business in 1990, with the Action Fund’s address listed as “C/O Rainforest Action Network,” another Roselle creation. He lost control of the checkbook in settling his divorce from fellow Earth First!er Karen Pickett. But that hasn’t stopped Rainforest Action Network from supporting Earth First! groups. On one occasion, RAN donated “$10,000 of general support to Luna Media in their work with North Coast Earth First!.” Yet another Roselle group, the Ecology Center in Montana, is also active in funding Earth First! activities. In the 1990s the Ecology Center poured more than $20,000 into Earth First!’s Cove Mallard anti-logging campaign in Idaho. The Ecology Center also supports the Buffalo Field Campaign, the Earth First! Journal, and the legal defenses of Rodney Coronado and something called the Buffalo Action Project, or BAP! BAP! appears to be little more than a support system for a woman named Delyla Wilson. Wilson gained fame in 1997 after she dumped a five-gallon bucket of rotting bison innards on a panel of senior government officials who were discussing how best to manage Yellowstone Park’s buffalo herd. Her victims included Dan Glickman, then President Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture, Marc Racicot, then Governor of Montana, and Montana Senators Max Baucus and Conrad Burns. Another Fund for Wild Nature grantee is New West Research, a New Mexico anti-ranching group that produced the “Animal Damage Control Hall of Shame.” A more appropriate name would have been the “New Mexico Hit List.” New West Research sued the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the names and addresses of all New Mexicans who had petitioned the Wildlife Service to help control predators on their property. New West proceeded to post this information — 25 pages in all — on its website. At the top of this “Hall of Shame” was the familiar line: “The earth is not dying — it is being killed. And the people killing it have names and addresses.” When criticized for inciting violence against ranchers and farmers, New West responded: “That’s the same kind of whining we hear from pedophiles and crack dealers who don’t want their identities known to the public.” The Earth First! Octopus There are several hundred Earth First! organizations in America, and at least 50 in other nations. Most of them use the words “Earth First” in their title, but a cheat-sheet might be helpful for those Earth First! entities that go by other names. Bear in mind that many Earth First! organizations rapidly form around a cause, and then disappear. As a result, a complete list of Earth First! organizations is impossible to compile. However, when you see the following names, think Earth First!

Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project
Cascadia Forest Defenders
Coastwatch
Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers
Cove Mallard Coalition
Daily Planet Publishing, Inc.
Direct Action Fund
Earth Defense Education Project
End Corporate Dominance
Environmentally Sound Promotions
Friends of the Wolf
League of Wilderness Defenders
Redwood Action Team
Warrior Poets Society
Zero Xtract from Public Lands

The Earth First! Journal includes a section called “EF! Campaigns and Projects.” The following organizations have graced that list in recent years:

Bioengineering Action Network
Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers Video Project
Earth Liberation Prisoners
EF! Action Update
North American ALF Press Office
ELF Press Office
Earth Liberation Front
North American Earth Liberation Support Network

The Earth First! Journal has listed the following groups as “contacts”:

Arizona Wildlands Museum
Autonomous Zone
Biodiversity Liberation Front
Blue Mtns. Biodiversity Project
Boxcar Books and Community Center
The Brokedowns/Elgin Food Not Bombs
Cascadia Forest Alliance
Cascadia Forest Defenders
Church of Deep Ecology
Confluence/St. Louis IMC
Direct Action Network
Environmental Resource Center
Fairfax Action Team
Flagstaff Activist Network
Foghorn
Forest Ecosystems Action Group
Green Vigilance
Lawrence Grassroots Initiative
Liberated Zone Infoshop
Lost Cause Collective
Mass Direct Action
Mountain Eco-Collective
New Mexico Direct Action
Oceandream Media Foundation
Pink Planarians
Popular Power
Project Harmony
Rustic Revolt
Shuksan Direct Action
Slingshot
Solidarity Books
Stone Soup Collective
Tornado Alley Resistance
Unci Maka Uonihanpo (Honor Mother Earth)
Wild Wasatch Front
Wilderness Defense

The following EF!-named groups have been listed by the Earth First! Journal as contacts:

Alachua EF!
Allegheny EF!
Bay Area EF!
Big Bend EF!
Boundary Waters EF!
Buffalo Trace EF!
Croatan EF!
Dallas EF!
East Texas EF!
EF! Austin
French Broad EF!
Gainesville/Ichetucknee EF!
Houston EF!
Kalmiopsis EF!
Katúah EF!/River Faction
Katúah EF!/Tennessee Valley Faction
Katúah Foothills EF!
Kekionga EF!
Lake Erie EF!
Lake Worthless EF!
Loon Antics EF!
Love Canal EF!
Madison EF!
Maine EF!
OFF!
Olympia EF!/Cascadia Defense Network
Peninsular Ranges EF!
Phoenix EF!
Red Gate EF!
San Juan EF!
Santa Cruz EF!/EF! Radio
Seattle EF!
Shawnee EF!
Sonoma County EF!
Teewinot EF!
Tucson EF!
Two Rivers EF!
Uwharrie Earth First!
Wild Rockies EF!/Wild Rockies Review
Yellowstone EF!

MOTIVATION

Bomb-throwers have a funny way of making even the most radical spokespersons seem reasonable, and one of Earth First!’s main goals is to make green groups like the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth appear mainstream by comparison. Mission accomplished. EF! also claims some success at its other practical goal: inflicting economic damage on the industries that it opposes. In Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Earth First! co-founder Dave Foreman brags that “ecotage [economic sabotage] in the National Forests alone in the United States is costing industry and government $20-25 million annually.” Putting companies out of business through sabotage, Earth First!ers believe, will ultimately protect the earth from human beings. Which is really the point. Earth First!ers seek to destroy industrial civilization, if not humanity itself. Writing in the May 1987 issue of the Earth First! Journal under the pseudonym “Miss Ann Thropy,” Earth First! theorist Christopher Manes suggested that “if radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS.” The author of an article in the November-December 2001 Earth First! Journal proclaimed that he was jealous of Osama bin Laden, and that the al Queda mastermind “is riding an unstoppable current of history.” A speaker at Earth First!’s annual “Rendezvous” meeting once said that the “optimal human population” is zero. Dave Foreman describes the philosophy that motivates Earth First! in Confessions of an Eco-Warrior:

• “An individual human life has no more intrinsic value than does an individual Grizzly Bear life. Human suffering resulting from drought and famine in Ethiopia is tragic, yes, but the destruction there of other creatures and habitat is even more tragic.”
• “Ours is an ecological perspective that views Earth as a community and recognizes such apparent enemies as ‘disease’ (e.g., malaria) and ‘pests’ (e.g., mosquitoes) not as manifestations of evil to be overcome but rather as vital and necessary components of a complex and vibrant biosphere.”
• “An antipathy to ‘progress’ and ‘technology.’ We can accept the pejoratives of ‘Luddite’ and ‘Neanderthal’ with pride.”
• “There is no hope for reform of industrial empire.”
• “We humans have become a disease — the Humanpox.”

These are not just Foreman’s own idiosyncratic views, but the first principles of the EF! movement. The National Chamber of Commerce quotes John Davis, then editor of the Earth First! Journal, summing it up: “Human beings, as a species, have no more value than slugs.” And Earth First!ers reportedly sit around a camp fire, chanting, trancelike, for hours: “Billions are living that should be dead. Billions are living that should be dead. Billions are living that should be dead.” The Washington Post describes the Earth First! approach to earth worship:

In another clearing, a different group sat in a circle seeking other forms of magic. It was an exercise called a Council of All Beings, originated by Australian activist John Seed. At a Council of All Beings, you choose a nonhuman form of life and meditate upon that form — mouse or tree or stem of grass — until you seem to be that stem or mouse and then you tell the others in the circle about lawn mowers or traps and how it feels to be oppressed by humans.
The Council of All Beings reminded me of a form of religious worship that had taken place at the [Earth First!] Montana rendezvous I had also visited. There, the worshipers had evoked the presence of Gaia, a name for Earth as a being or a goddess, which is taken from the more scientific theory known as the Gaia hypothesis, in which Earth is described as an organism. The ceremony had been self-consciously pagan. “If you’re going to talk about Christianity,” a Montana worshiper had said, “please leave.”
When I asked Dave Foreman, still in vest and camouflage hat, what the Council of All Beings and Gaia-worship role was in Earth First!, he grinned. “That’s the woo-woo stuff,” he said. “It’s beyond me. But the diversity’s good.”

Earth First!ers, like their hero Dave Foreman, generally believe that “Mother Earth” is in some sense spiritual, and that monkey-wrenching is (in his words) “very much a sacrament.”
BLACK EYETheodore “the Unabomber” Kaczynski is the radical environmental movement’s biggest black eye. Conventional wisdom dictates that Kaczynski was merely an intellectual serial-killer, but his connection to Earth First! and the broader eco-terror movement is undeniable. When FBI agents raided Kaczynski’s Montana cabin in April 1996, they found copies of the Earth First! Journal, as well as an Earth First! affiliated publication called Live Wild or Die. This broadsheet, funded by Mike Roselle, included a now-famous “Eco-F*cker Hit List.” At the top of the Hit List was the California Forestry Association. In the middle was a prominent cartoon about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Kaczynski sent dozens of mail bombs; three were fatal. He killed an employee of the California Forestry Association, and a Burson-Marsteller PR executive named Thomas Mosser. Kaczynski (mistakenly) believed that Burson-Marsteller was responsible for rehabilitating Exxon’s public image after the 1989 Valdez oil spill. The source of that mistake? An essay in the Earth First! Journal, which the FBI says was one of Kaczynski’s “favorite” periodicals. A letter found in Kaczynski’s cabin — titled “Suggestion for Earth First!ers from FC” [“FC” was the Unabomber’s pseudonym] — read in part: “As for the Mosser bombing, our attention was called to Burston-Marsteller [sic] by an article that appeared in the Earth First! Litha.” The reference to “Litha” is in keeping with the Journal‘s habit of naming its issues after (pagan) lunar-calendar months. According to ABC News and other media outlets, the FBI also believes that Kaczynski attended an Earth First! gathering just one month before murdering Mosser. Ted Kaczynski did little more than follow what Earth First! openly advocates. The September 1989 Journal included an article instructing:

While Eco defenders are quick to point out that life is sacred and is not a target of Eco-Defense, many doubt that multinational takeover artists who liquidate old growth forests to pay off junk bonds qualify as Life-forms. Such Robotoids, they aver, should be classed with damns, dozers and drillers. A “Hit List” is available upon discreet inquiry.

For Earth First!, this kind of advice is (sadly) not a one-time thing. A cartoon in the 20th Anniversary issue of the Journal noted: “Trees are for hanging. Kill a developer.” And the Unabomber could easily have read Dave Foreman’s words: “The blood of timber executives is my natural drink, and the wail of dying forest supervisors is music to my ears.” Less Than Lethal, but Still Illegal Aside from the Unabomber’s victims, we know of no one else who has died at the hands of Earth First!ers. But these zealots have come awfully close. The following is from an interview with Earth First! co-founder Mike Roselle in the April 1993 issue of Playboy:

When I asked Mike Roselle to tell me about his favorite action, or ecodefense, he didn’t hesitate.
A band of desert saboteurs from Earth First! resolved in 1989 to put an end to the desert motorcycle race called the Barstow to Vegas, which ran through the East Mojave scenic area, a prospective national park and habitat of the desert tortoise, kangaroo rat and other creatures.
“The night before the race, we took a trailerload of railroad ties and four-by-eights down to the track,” remembers Roselle, a former oil- field roughneck and one of the five men who cooked up the idea for Earth First! on a camping trip to Mexico’s Sonora Desert in 1980. “See they had to go under Interstate Fifteen. There was this tunnel about six feet wide, eight feet high and one hundred fifty feet long that was made for water to go through. We built this cube to the size of the culvert, and at night we set it up in the middle of the tunnel.”
I want you to picture this,” snaps Rick Sieman, senior editor of Dirt Bike magazine and head of the Sahara Club, a race sponsor. “Here are top expert riders going a hundred and ten miles per hour down a sand wash at eleven o’clock, sun directly overhead, coalblack shadows, dust on their goggles, and they’re going to dart through this shadow, assumedly, and go to the other side. If our people hadn’t spotted that, they would have killed a half-dozen riders.”

“Though illegal, this strategic monkeywrenching can be safe, easy, and fun,” Foreman quips. Is this what he meant? In 1987, a 23-year-old mill worker was severely injured when his saw blade shattered after hitting a redwood tree that had been “spiked” with a long steel nail, following the standard Earth First! recipe. In 1990, Earth First!er Lyn Georges Dessaux was convicted of assault after stabbing two men with a ski pole in a save-the-buffaloes protest. Earth First!ers have set fire to a livestock auction. They’ve also torched logging equipment. Dave Foreman himself pled guilty in 1991 to conspiring to blow up electrical lines leading to an Arizona nuclear power plant (he wrote a check to pay for 50 grenades). While Foreman somehow got off with probation, his four co-conspirators landed in jail. And hundreds of other Earth First!ers have spent time behind bars. ALF and ELF “Earth First! has provided a vehicle for establishing a new generation of environmental leadership in this country,” EF! activist Darryl Cherney told interviewer Lori Rizzo. “Many Earth First!ers have actually gone on to start new organizations with much stronger ‘no compromise’ positions.” The FBI considers the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and its sister group the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) to be America’s most prolific and dangerous domestic terrorist organizations. And the ELF, it turns out, is just another Earth First! spin-off. The Earth First! Journal notes that “ELF solidified in 1992 at the first UK Earth First! gathering.” In 1994, Earth First! activist Judi Bari wrote:

England Earth First! has been taking some necessary steps to separate above ground and clandestine activities. Earth First!, the public group, has a non-violence code and does civil disobedience blockades. Monkeywrenching is done by Earth Liberation Front (ELF). Although Earth First! may sympathize with the activities of ELF, they do not engage in them.
If we are serious about our movement in the US, we will do the same. Earth First! is already an above ground group. We have above-ground publications, public events, and a yearly Rendezvous with open attendance. Civil disobedience and sabotage are both powerful tactics in our movement. For the survival of both, it’s time to leave the night work to the elves in the woods.

When longtime Journal editor Jim Flynn was asked by the Medford, Oregon Mail Tribune for his thoughts on ELF claiming credit for a 2001 fire that caused $400,000 in damage, Flynn responded: “I hope they aren’t caught. I applaud them for standing up and taking action.” Asked if he knew who belongs to ELF, Flynn said “I am clueless. It could be the person sitting next to me.” Flynn, it should be noted, is no stranger to criminal behavior. His rap sheet winds from New York to Oregon. In October 1998, ELF torched a Vail, Colorado ski resort, causing an estimated $12 million in damage. Predictably, the “above ground” counterpart to this arson consisted of an Earth First!-run “Coalition to Stop Vail Expansion.” After the Vail construction was burned to the ground, the London Times reported:

When members of the Earth Liberation Front burnt down $12 million-worth of mountaintop property belonging to the Vail ski resort in Colorado, [“Unabomber” Ted] Kaczynski applauded from prison — as did Theresa Kintz, the editor of the widely read Earth First! Journal. “It’s war,” she wrote.
Kintz knows Kaczynski well. As of March she was still the editor of Earth First! but when I tried to contact her the magazine claimed to be unable to reach her. This is unsurprising: like al-Qaeda, America’s hardcore environmentalists mistrust the mainstream press and operate in cells to evade detection.

The Journal regularly publishes articles by Earth Liberation Front criminals, and makes common cause with the Animal Liberation Front as well. In 1994 it ran a letter from ALF “spokesman” David Barbarash, who wrote from prison after being denied bail in connection with an “animal liberation” action. Addressed to “fellow Earth First!ers,” it read: “Prison sucks, no doubt about it, but you can live through it. The thought of spending time in a pit like this should not deter anyone from taking the action that this planet needs for its survival.” A 1999 Journal article was headlined “Feds Escalate Hunt For ALF.” It was written by Rodney Coronado, a convicted ALF/Earth First! criminal who knows a thing or two about being hunted by federal law enforcement. Coronado wrote:

Whether a member of a Headwaters nonviolent affinity group, Cascadia Forest Defenders or the Earth Liberation Front, all Earth First!ers should recognize the positive value of each other’s contributions and exploit the leverage they create against our common opponent.

In other words: EF!, ALF and ELF are all part of the same clan of violent vandals. Rodney Coronado Committed Earth First!er and Earth First! Journal editor Rodney Coronado has replaced Dave Foreman as the radical environmental and animal-rights movement’s most sought-after speaker. A convicted arsonist who has caused millions in damage to fishing ships, farms, and medical research labs, Coronado instructs his listeners on the fine points of firebombing. Celebrating “the sixty-eighth raid on fur farms since 1995,” in the 20th anniversary issue of the Earth First! Journal, Coronado wrote: “There have been nearly that many raids on genetically-engineered crops. All the federal agents in the United States will not stop more actions of this sort.” “No tactic that prevents environmental destruction — without loss of life — should be ruled out. Be it fire or an action at the homes of a corporate ecoterrorist,” Coronado wrote in a September, 2003 article for the Earth First! Journal. “Monkeywrenching is more than a tactic or strategy,” another Coronado article reads. “It’s the way of warriors. A way of life.” Coronado would know about that. He began spiking trees with Earth First! as early as 1987. And Earth First! has held him up as an example ever since. In Confessions of an Eco Warrior, Dave Foreman praised Coronado’s sabotage of the Icelandic whaling fleet as an example of effective property destruction. Paul Watson, who gave the young radical his blessing for the Iceland raid, described in lurid details Coronado’s handiwork for the Journal. Coronado himself wrote:

Co-founder Dave Foreman hoisted Icelandic saboteur David Howitt and myself up on stage to salute our [Iceland] raid, welcoming the new generation of eco-warrior, the young anarchistic animal liberationists who also embraced Deep Ecology.

In the spring and early summer of 1999, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) made three payments to the Earth First! Journal ($2,616.64 on March 23; $2,970.24 on May 18; and $1,485.12 on June 22). PETA records show no previous or subsequent grants to the Journal. So what piqued PETA’s sudden interest in radical environmental journalism? The Journal itself gave a plausible answer in its May-June 2001 issue:

Those familiar with our movement’s history will know that convicted monkeywrencher Rod Coronado was a catalyst, once released from prison, in getting the Journal moved to Arizona. Within days of his release from federal prison, Coronado became a short-term editor in Oregon, where he spent the spring and summer of 1999 … Following his return to Arizona, Coronado became active once again with Arizona Earth First!, while also traveling and lecturing about direct action in defense of the Earth and sharing stories of life in the Animal Liberation Front (ALF).

As recently as the spring of 2003, Coronado was working with Earth First! organizers Darryl Cherney and Karen Pickett to prevent logging in Northern California. The press reported Coronado threatening that he “was no pacifist hippie, my actions speak louder than my words.” Around the same time, Coronado was seen in Northern California with Michael Scarpitti, who is on the FBI’s most wanted list. Breakin’ the Law Law enforcement has always kept a careful watch on Earth First! and the violent groups surrounding it. A Department of Homeland Security panel, chaired by former Virginia governor James Gilmore, took special notice of this threat in early 2003. Agence France Presse reported that the “most dangerous” domestic groups mentioned in the report are “Earth First, the Animal Liberation Front, and the Earth Liberation Front.” The report notes (page 36):

The loose confederacy created is comprised of coalitions between socialists, environmentalists and anarchists. Earth First! — the radical environmental group founded by David Broder [sic] — has been particularly active collaborating with anti-globalists. Similar concerns emanate from other environmentalist special interest groups such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), who have committed over 600 criminal acts in the United States since 1996 …

Speculating on who vandalized 65 sport-utility vehicles in April 2003, Santa Cruz Police Lieutenant Joe Haebe told the San Francisco Chronicle:

It may have been ELF, but then, I sometimes get them confused with ALF, the Animal Liberation Front. And then there’s Earth First! and PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). There’s a lot of cross-pollination between them, and some people here are probably members of two of those groups, or more.

If the Gilmore commission observations seem extreme, and Lt. Haebe sounds uninformed, remember that the Earth First! Journal includes convicted cop-killer Leonard Peltier among its list of prisoners who deserve “support” (they insist he was framed). Until recently, the Journal also included Unabomber Ted Kazcynski on the same list. “They are in there for us,” the Journal notes. On September 6, 2003 the Chronicle quoted Earth First!er Tim Ream saying: “There is every indication that we will see more political violence.”

OVERVIEW

Founded in 1892 by John Muir to “make the mountains glad,” the Sierra Club is the oldest and arguably the most powerful environmental group in the nation. But its concerns are no longer limited to the happiness of the valleys. Once dedicated to conserving wilderness for future human enjoyment, the Sierra Club has become an anti-growth, anti-technology group that puts its utopian environmentalist vision before the well being of humans. This is not your father’s Sierra Club. Some of its leadership positions are held by activists with radical ties and even violent criminals. The Club has done well preserving a “mainstream” image, despite its increasingly radical bent. The Club’s new extremist priorities are best illustrated in the person of animal-rights extremist Paul Watson, elected to the Sierra Club’s board of directors in 2003. Watson founded the ultra-radical Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) in 1977 after being booted from Greenpeace (which he also co-founded) for espousing violence in the name of the environment. Watson and his Sea Shepherd pirates sail the high seas, terrorizing the fishing industry by sinking ships and endangering lives. “I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds,” says Watson (as quoted in Access to Energy, 1982). In 2003 Watson announced that he was openly “advocating the takeover of the Sierra Club,” claiming to be just three votes shy of controlling a majority of the group’s 15-member board. During the Sierra Club’s 2004 election season, Watson allied himself with candidates endorsing strict limits to legal immigration. Promising to “use the resources of the $95-million-a-year budget” to address both immigration policy and animal-rights issues, Watson actively promoted his chosen slate of candidates — and lost big in a record turnout. Nevertheless, Watson will remain on the Sierra Club’s board until 2006.
Bashing Food Technology Genetically modified food crops have been heralded for their environmental benefits, including the ability to grow more food on less land, and a decreased need for pesticides. Biotech crops are widely considered one solution for chronic food shortages and starvation throughout the world. Nobel laureates and green activists alike have praised agricultural biotechnology and encouraged its advancement. Despite all the promise that these revolutionary crops hold for the future, the Sierra Club demands “a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops and the release of all GEOs [genetically engineered organisms] into the environment, including those now approved.” This technophobic stance falls right in line with former Sierra Club executive director David Brower’s creed: “All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.” The natural conclusion of this flawed logic is the much-maligned “precautionary principle”; like many other green groups, the Sierra Club uses it to thwart technological progress in the biotech sector. The Club states its official policy on agricultural biotechnology on its website: “We call for acting in accordance with the precautionary principle … we call for a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops.” As international food policy expert Dr. Robert Paarlberg has noted in The Wall Street Journal, the “precautionary principle” has run amok, putting millions of lives at risk. “Greens and GM critics,” says Paarlberg, “argue that powerful new technologies should be kept under wraps until tested for unexpected or unknown risks as well. Never mind that testing for something unknown is logically impossible (the only way to avoid a completely unknown risk is never to do anything for the first time).” Anti-biotechnology zealot (and former Council for Responsible Genetics head) Martin Teitel candidly disclosed activists’ “precautionary” motivation in 2001: “Politically, it’s difficult for me,” Teitel told a scientific conference, “to go around saying that I want to shut this science down, so it’s safer for me to say something like, ‘It needs to be done safely before releasing it.'” Teitel added that implementing the precautionary principle really means: “They don’t get to do it. Period.” The Sierra Club united with Greenpeace and organic-only food activist groups in 1999 to sue the Environmental Protection Agency over its approval of genetically modified crops. In the same year, the Club joined the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Defenders of Wildlife in petitioning the EPA for strict regulation of corn modified to produce the bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin. Bt is a naturally occurring insect poison that protects plants from devastating pests like the European corn borer. The Sierra Club’s EPA petition was part of a coordinated campaign to convince the public that Bt corn posed a risk to the Monarch Butterfly. However, both the USDA and the EPA later concluded that Monarchs were never in any danger. This reinforced the findings of federal regulators who had performed a comprehensive safety review of Bt corn before it was allowed into the marketplace. Yet despite conclusive proof to the contrary, the Sierra Club continues to promote the false notion that biotech corn kills Monarchs. The Sierra Club is also a member of “Genetically Engineered Food Alert,” a PR campaign dedicated to demonizing genetically enhanced food products. In 2002 the Club co-hosted an event called “Reinventing the Meal: Ecological Food Choices for the 21st Century.” Attendees were urged to only “grow and buy organic food,” shun food from large, modern farms, and avoid foods produced through biotechnology. According to Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, widely acknowledged as the “father of the green revolution,” the reckless actions of groups like the Sierra Club may hinder our ability to feed future populations: “I now say,” Borlaug told a De Montfort University crowd in 1997 “that the world has the technology — either available or well-advanced in the research pipeline — to feed a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology. Extremists in the environmental movement from the rich nations seem to be doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks.” Bashing Modern Farming Biotechnology is just one of the food production practices in the Sierra Club’s crosshairs. The group pushes an animal-rights agenda and maintains a coordinated campaign against what it calls “the growing menace” of modern livestock farms. It’s clear that the Sierra Club is fond of putting its ideological cart before the scientific horse — if you can use that term without offending the growing animal-rights faction within the organization. Sierra Club activists in Florida endorse PETA’s mantra that eating meat is a form of animal abuse that contributes to world hunger. In 2002, the Broward Sierra News promoted “a vegetarian lifestyle as a way to counter the alleged abuse animals endure to feed a hungry and growing global population.” The newsletter plugged PETA and their message that meat-eating in general, and livestock operations in particular, are a cause of world hunger and animal abuse. Sierra Club chapters in New York and Michigan promote the “Vegetarian Starter Kit” distributed by the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (a PETA front group), as a way to fight “corporate greed.” These chapters also encourage people to sign EarthSave International’s “VegPledge” as a way to “save the Earth” by going vegetarian. The New York chapter of the Sierra Club cosponsored an event with People for Animal Rights in 2002 dubbed “Behind Closed Doors.” The purpose of the gathering was to vilify livestock operations, and appropriately featured Farm Sanctuary co-founder Gene Bauston. And the Sierra Club embraces those with designs on combining environmental activism with animal-rights dogma. The Club’s board of directors chair Lisa Renstrom explained: “The [Sierra] Club could begin to include animal rights positions in decades to come as members and the American public acknowledge the impact of our high animal protein diet on sustainability.” The Club’s “sustainable consumption committee” issued a report in 2000 that listed “eating less meat” as a “Priority Action for American Consumers,” right alongside “buying a fuel-efficient car.” Joan Zacharias, one of this committee’s leaders, is scheduled to address the “Animal Rights 2004” convention in Virginia. Her influence is seen in the committee’s stated goal of developing “stronger ties with vegetarian organizations.” The Club’s “Rap Sheet on Animal Factories” lists farms that the Sierra Club has targeted for “action.” What type of action? In the May 2000 issue of Sierra, the Club announced its intention to sue large-scale livestock farms across the nation: “No one [court] case,” wrote Sierra’s editors, “will be a magic bullet … You have to fight on multiple legal fronts.” On February 28, 2001 the Club announced an alliance with trial lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr.’s radical Waterkeeper Alliance as a “full partner in litigation” against pork companies. That same day, the Sierra Club declared that it had filed multiple lawsuits “across the United States” targeting Smithfield farms. One of the suits filed accused Smithfield of mafia-style racketeering — a charge that was ultimately laughed out of court. The Sierra Club has sued time and again in its war against farmers. Between 1998 and 2002 it joined multiple lawsuits to prevent the construction of dairy farms in California. In 2003 it filed suit in Nebraska to stop a new hog farm from opening. Filing lawsuits is cheap, especially for Sierra’s well-funded team of lawyers. Not Just a Club, But a Law Firm In 1971, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund was founded as a nonprofit law firm to serve as a legal arm to the Club’s grassroots operation. In 1998, its name was changed to the EarthJustice Legal Defense Fund. (It now operates simply as “EarthJustice.”) EarthJustice exists to use the courts as a weapon against businesses and public agencies, in the hope of forcing them to operate in a manner acceptable to the Sierra Club. EarthJustice’s aggressive legal posture regarding everything from livestock farms to mining doesn’t harm the Club’s reputation as much as it might, since few members of the public realize that the two groups work hand in glove. Earthjustice sued on behalf of the Sierra Club 38 times in 2003 alone. Not even something as critical as military training can escape the Earthjustice legal machine. In early 2004, Earthjustice filed suit to stop Marine training exercises in the Makua Valley (Hawaii) citing concern for supposed endangered species habitat. The Army issued a terse statement in response to Earthjustice’s irresponsible legal maneuver: “To win the war against terrorism and get ready for future battles, the U.S. military must be prepared. The conduct of realistic live-fire training in Makua is part of that preparation.” In 2000, Earthjustice also sued to stop military training on the small, uninhabited island of Farallon de Medinilla, citing concern for migratory birds. Bashing Ranchers Just as the Sierra Club is no friend of farmers, it has also made enemies of ranchers. Sierra Club board member Lisa Force once served as regional coordinator of the Center for Biological Diversity, which brags of prying ranchers and their livestock from federal lands. In 2000 and 2003, the two groups sued the U.S. Department of the Interior to force ranching families out of the Mojave National Preserve. These ranchers actually owned grazing rights to the preserve; some families had been raising cattle there for over a century. No matter. Using the Endangered Species Act and citing the supposed loss of “endangered tortoise habitat,” the Club was able to force the ranchers out. Not to be outdone by its former parent group, EarthJustice has sued the federal government to curb grazing on more than 13 million acres of public land in New Mexico and Arizona. Suing for Profit The Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology notes that one of Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope’s “major accomplishments” is his co-authorship of California’s infamous Proposition 65. “Prop 65” requires any product containing one of several hundred “known carcinogens” to bear a warning label — even if the chemical appears in concentrations so low that adverse health effects are essentially impossible. Prop 65 has a “bounty hunter” provision to encourage frivolous lawsuits by trial lawyers looking to cash in on any product containing a listed “carcinogen” and lacking a warning label. Prop 65 “violators” can be fined up to $2,500 per day, per violation, and plaintiffs can collect up to 25 percent of the total take. Between 2000 and 2002, one California group called As You Sow (AYS) reaped more than $1.5 million playing the Prop 65 lawsuit game. Sierra Club president Larry Fahn is also AYS’s executive director. A self-described “leading enforcer of Proposition 65,” As You Sow functions as a litigation machine, conjuring up lawsuit after lawsuit. The group has sued everyone from scuba gear manufacturers and retailers to the makers of nail care products. Under Fahn’s leadership, AYS routes its Prop 65 money to some of the most radical groups around, including the Rainforest Action Network and the Ruckus Society (both co-founded by Earth First! godfather Mike Roselle), as well as California affiliates of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Waterkeeper Alliance and David Brower’s Earth Island Institute. Another group funded by AYS is called Environmentally Sound Promotions — it’s run by Earth First! organizer Darryl Cherney. On a 1990 CBS broadcast of “60 Minutes,” Cherney made it clear where his Earth First! sympathies lead him. “If I knew I had a fatal disease,” Cherney said, “I would definitely do something like strap dynamite to myself and take out Grand Canyon Dam, or maybe the Maxxam Building in Los Angeles after it’s closed up for the night.” Despite this web of extremist connections, few seem aware that the Sierra Club has institutionally embraced the most radical side of the green movement.
MOTIVATIONThere was a time when the Sierra Club was almost entirely concerned with straight-ahead conservation of natural resources. But that time has come and gone. Today’s Club is more concerned with thwarting industry and obstructing technological progress than improving the environment. A clear indication of this can be found in former Sierra Club president Jennifer Ferenstein’s account of her weeklong trip to Cuba in 2002. Ferenstein returned from Cuba very impressed with the country’s “sustainable” way of life:

Faced with challenges, Cubans have proven to be survivors. With a meat shortage in the city, they’ve turned to raising guinea pigs in cramped urban backyards. When rural farms couldn’t provide enough food to Havana due to the lack of refrigerated transport as much as production problems, the government encouraged the cultivation of fruit and vegetable gardens in Havana’s abandoned lots. When pesticides became unavailable following the collapse of the USSR, worm bins and organic gardening were celebrated. I will never forget my trip to Cuba, the beauty of the landscape, the passion of the people for baseball, and above all, the fragility of an island country struggling to improve its quality of life in a sustainable manner.

Being forced to grow your own food and raise your own meat in order to feed your family probably seems archaic and depressing to most Americans, but not to Ferenstein. She told Range magazine in 2003: “I’m a big proponent of bio-regionalism. The closer you can live off the land and the products you can use, the better off we all are … Fact is, I think people in Montana can get along without strawberries in December.” She might be surprised, of course, to find out that the “sustainable” life of squalor and hardship hasn’t translated into ecological bliss for Cuba. Even the activist World Resources Institute has observed Cuba’s “enormous environmental pollution problems.” Deforestation, threats to biodiversity, air and water pollution all abound on the island. And Ferenstein’s compulsion toward an “organic” and “sustainable” food supply mirrors the Sierra Club’s policy on agricultural biotechnology: “We call for acting in accordance with the precautionary principle … we call for a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops.” The precautionary principle is consistently trotted out by environmentalists in their effort to paralyze progress when science isn’t on their side. It demands proof that there are no harms, or potential harms, whatsoever from a given product or action. In the words of former FDA official Dr. Henry Miller: “For fear that something harmful may possibly arise, do nothing.” Since it’s impossible to prove a negative — in the case of biotechnology, to prove that genetically enhanced crops pose zero consequences to human health or the environment — the Sierra Club is advocating that this potentially life-saving technology be put on hold forever. The fact that genetically modified crops have been safely produced in America for over a decade is of no concern to the Sierra Club. Nor do they care that the European Union has called genetically improved foods “even safer than conventional plants and foods.” In its seemingly endless quest to pry man from huge swaths of land, the Sierra Club also insists upon the application of the precautionary principle in as many policy arenas as possible — even regarding wildlife. In 1995, the Club’s legal arm wrote to elected officials: “We encourage Congress to keep this policy preference for the precautionary principle inherent in any Endangered Species Act [ESA] legislation it considers.” The Club uses the ESA in an ideological fashion to lock away as much land as possible from human use. In 2004, the Sierra Club petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the “greater sage grouse” as an endangered species. According to the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, such a listing could impede “millions of dollars of development plans, from ranching and farming to housing, mining and oil and gas production.” Listing the grouse as endangered would essentially put its “habitat” (a reported 110 million acres covering 11 states) off-limits. One example the Sierra Club’s blatant disregard for humanity en route to crippling industry occurred in 2001. The Sierra Club sued the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) claiming that they had illegally harmed young salmon during a severe drought that year. BPA has an enormous responsibility to distribute electricity to roughly half of the entire Northwest population. The emergency dry conditions forced BPA to halt the spilling of water over two of its power-generating dams — a function performed to help young salmon migrate to sea. But BPA didn’t turn its back on the little fish. Instead, the company used barges to transport the young salmon downstream. Incredibly, the Sierra Club sued BPA, claiming its decision didn’t properly balance power production with fish and wildlife conservation. Would the Sierra Club rather BPA shut off electricity to millions of homes? Thankfully, a federal judge sided with BPA and rejected the Sierra Club’s absurd claim. Though this wasn’t the first time the Club sought to deprive Westerners of vital resources. In 1995, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund sought to block a water diversion project for the Animas River in Colorado. The project was to bring water to the town of Durango, Colorado and a Ute Indian Reservation. Out West, dams and irrigation are literally matters of life and death in certain areas, and the Sierra Club knows this. After successfully getting the project slashed by more than 70 percent, and therefore depriving inhabitants of much-needed water, the Sierra Club lawyers moved the goalposts and demanded the project be cut by another 55 percent. This bad-faith dealing prompted an angry response from Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-CO): “The enviros have never been interested in a compromise. They just simply want to stop development and growth. And the way you do that in the West is to stop water.” And the chairwoman of the Ute Indian tribe lamented: “The environmentalists don’t seem to care how we live.” Board member and Sea Shepherd Conservation Society head “Captain” Paul Watson told the animal rights magazine SATYA his “ten commandments,” including Number One: “Don’t bring any more humans into being. There are enough of us.” Club founder David Brower was no more generous to the human species. He advocated a form of eugenics: “Childbearing [should be] a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license… All potential parents [should be] required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” How people live doesn’t figure in to the Sierra Club’s agenda — unless it’s preventing them from living in the first place. Their goal is to cripple business and impede technological progress at every turn — regardless of how their actions affect people and the environment. Dues-paying members of the Sierra Club who don’t want to support this sort of radicalism should start shopping for a new club.
BLACK EYE”There’s nothing wrong with being a terrorist, as long as you win. Then you write history.” These chilling words may sound like an Al Qaeda credo, but they aren’t. They are the words of Sierra Club board member Paul Watson. And there’s more. “Right now we’re in the early stages of World War III,” Watson wrote in the pages of the radical Earth First! Journal. “It’s the war to save the planet. This kind of action will be getting stronger. The environmental movement doesn’t have many deserters and has a high level of recruitment. Eventually there will be open war.” The Sierra Club’s increasingly radical stances can be attributed to extremist influences within the organization. The Club shares two directors — Paul Watson and Ben Zuckerman — with the violent Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS). Like it or not, Watson has engaged the Sierra Club in his own personal World War. His stated goal is to take over the Sierra Club board of directors and remake the Club in his radical image. At the Animal Rights 2003 convention, Watson announced that he was only three directors shy of accomplishing this mission. However, his plan to stack the Club’s board with like-minded radicals has fallen short so far — Watson-backed candidates were defeated in the 2004 Club elections. But he endorsed a slate of candidates in 2005 that includes Christine Garcia, a fellow activist who has gone to great lengths to hide her animal-rights beliefs from Sierra Club voters. A few weeks after announcing her candidacy, Garcia set up a personal website to tell Sierra Club members that she “work[s] full-time doing environmental and public interest free speech advocacy.” She neglected to mention her earlier self-description as a “vegan animal-rights attorney.” Also, Garcia’s Sierra Club campaign materials fail to mention her “Animal Law Office” or “Vegan Attorneys” websites — where you can read how she has “been doing 100% Animal Welfare related cases since August of 2001.” Garcia’s statement to potential Sierra Club voters says that she is an “environmental attorney.” Garcia is a rising star in the animal rights movement. She lectured protesters about “coping with law enforcement” at the “Animal Rights 2004” convention, and has herself defended the violent animal-rights group SHAC in court. At the 2005 Grassroots Animal Rights Conference in New York City, Garcia led a panel titled “Resisting State Repression: Knowing the Legal System and Importance of Prisoner Support.” Paul Watson sails the globe — armed with AK-47s and a cement-filled bow — in search of fishing vessels to sink. Since 1979 his band of pirates has claimed credit for sinking ten boats, including half the Icelandic whaling fleet. Watson has also mentored some of the nastiest animal-rights militants of our day. Former Sea Shepherd crewmember Rodney Coronado was convicted in the multimillion-dollar arson of a Michigan State University research lab. Watson protégé Josh Harper has been jailed for violent acts committed in the name of “animal liberation” (including assault on a police officer). An open advocate of “the complete collapse of industrial civilization,” Harper urges fellow animal rights terrorists to “go out and burn down” livestock farms. The Sierra Club has flirted with Watson-style radicalism before. Ron Arnold writes in his book, Trashing the Economy: “Defectors from the environmental movement have told us that Earth First! founder Dave Foreman was approached by the Sierra Club and his employer, the Wilderness Society, in 1979 with an offer to fund a new extremist point group for the movement. It would serve the function of making their own demands look more reasonable … Defectors say that Foreman made the deal by himself in a comfortable Wilderness Society office, and accepted the offer on the condition that funding would be steady and adequate, and that his participation was a limited 10-year deal.” Foreman served on the Sierra Club’s board of directors between 1995 and 1997. He hinted in the April 1990 issue of Smithsonian magazine that Earth First! may be “secretly controlled” by groups like the Sierra Club:

“We thought it would have been useful to have a group to take a tougher position than the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society,” Foreman remembers. “It could be sort of secretly controlled by the mainstream and trotted out at hearings to make the Sierra Club or Wilderness Society look moderate.

Longtime Sierra Club executive director David Brower once argued that Earth First! helped the Sierra Club accomplish its goals:

The Sierra Club made the Nature Conservancy look reasonable. I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We’re still waiting for someone else to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable.

The intermingling between the Sierra Club and Earth First! is common, according to Foreman. “The Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club regional reps were at the Northeast Earth First! Rendezvous last year,” he said in 1991. “We all work very well together.” Dale Turner, assistant editor of the Earth First! Journal, was conservation chair of the Sierra Club in Arizona at the same time. “I’m a member of the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society and the Nature Conservancy,” says Turner. Lisa Force, a current Sierra Club board member, began her activist career with the Center for Biological Diversity — another group started by Earth First! radicals. Force was a regional coordinator for the Center, which brags on its website of instances where it has pried ranchers and their livestock from federal lands. It seems just about every Sierra Club-Earth First! base is covered — even on the lawyer front. When Boise attorney Bernie Zaleha was featured in the Club’s magazine, The Planet, in 1999, the article noted: “In an early case he defended Earth First! activists sued by a logging-road builder and learned about the movement to end commercial logging on federal lands.” The Sierra Club-Earth First! ties are especially strong in Oregon. Mick Garvin, a self-described “long-time Earth First!er,” has chaired a local Sierra Club chapter in Oregon and currently serves as Oregon Chapter Executive Committee Delegate. Garvin was also an inaugural board member of The Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment. The Alliance was co-founded by former Sierra Club executive director David Brower, and has received funding from the Club. Garvin was a leader and spokesman at Earth First!’s nearly year-long blockade and protest of timber harvests at Warner Creek in Oregon. He is also a principal in the protest group Cascadia Forest Defenders, whose website boasts: “We participate in direct action campaigns [sic], including tree-sits.” On April 12, 2002, a 22-year-old woman protesting for Cascadia Forest Defenders plummeted to her death while tree-sitting. Another integral cog in the Sierra Club-Earth First! machine is Jim Flynn, who happens to serve on the board of the Cascadia Wildlands Project alongside Mick Garvin. Flynn serves as editor of the Oregon Sierra Club’s Conifer newsletter. He is also the sole officer of Daily Planet Publishing, the corporation that produces the Earth First Journal. In 2001, the FBI-classified “terrorist” Earth Liberation Front torched the offices of an Oregon timber company, causing $400,000 in damage. The Medford, Oregon Mail Tribune interviewed area environmental leaders to gauge their views about eco-terrorism. Jim Flynn was described by the Tribune as “an Earth First! activist for 12 years.” The editor of the Sierra Club’s state magazine told the paper: “We neither condemn nor condone what ELF is doing … There is [sic]definitely some younger people growing up today who feel Earth First! doesn’t go far enough … I hope they aren’t caught. I applaud them for standing up and taking action.” The Sierra Club’s immediate past-president, Jennifer Ferenstein, has long been active with radical groups in Missoula, Montana. There she’s worked as a campaign coordinator for the Wildlands Center for Preventing Roads and the Mike Roselle-founded Ecology Center, Inc. Roselle also co-founded Earth First!, where convicted eco-terrorist Rodney Coronado recently served as editor of the Earth First! Journal. Roselle’s Ecology Center also supported the legal defenses of Coronado. In 1997, Ferenstein and Roselle spent a month trekking through the Montana backwoods looking for grizzly bears.

OVERVIEW

Greenpeace is the largest environmental organization in the world, with an international membership of over 5 million and offices in over 20 countries. Forbes magazine once described it as “a skillfully managed business” with full command of “the tools of direct mail and image manipulation — and tactics that would bring instant condemnation if practiced by a for-profit corporation.” But Greenpeace has escaped public censure by hiding behind the mask of its “non-profit” status and its U.S. tax exemption.

Greenpeace was originally the brainchild of the radical “Don’t Make a Wave Committee,” a group of American draft-dodgers who fled to Vancouver in 1969 and, supported by money from anti-war Quaker organizations, got into the business of forcibly blocking American nuclear tests. Over the years the group has loudly made its feelings known on a variety of issues (nuclear testing, whaling, and global warming, for instance), and its Amsterdam-based activist moguls pull the strings on what is estimated to be a $360 million global empire.

Here in North America, however, Greenpeace is a relatively modest activist group, spending about $10 million per year. And the lion’s share of that budget in recent years has gone to outrageous attempts to smear agricultural biotech products and place doubts about the safety of genetically improved foods in the minds of consumers [and most of the rest goes towards their misleading climate change campaigns].

It was Greenpeace campaign director Charles Margulis who is credited with coining the term “FrankenFood.” It was Greenpeace activists who conspired with other tax-exempt groups (like Friends of the Earth and the Organic Consumers Association) to “expose” the supposed dangers of StarLink corn. Among Greenpeace’s recent innovations has been the creation of a “citizen’s labeling brigade” — basically a group of hooligans who take the law into their own hands by forcibly adding home-made, propaganda-laden “warning labels” (some complete with skull-and-crossbones artwork) to consumer food products on grocery store shelves. And it was Greenpeace that intentionally inflated the urban legend that biotech corn would place the monarch butterfly population in harm’s way. When your local news carries footage of protesters railing against genetically improved foods, look hard for the slogan-shouting troublemakers wearing monarch butterfly costumes. That’s Greenpeace’s handiwork.

Greenpeace USA has also been raising a stink about the growth of the biotech fisheries industry. A handful of innovative businesses have learned how to genetically improve certain salmon species to make them grow faster, and Greenpeace will have none of it. The group is doing all it can to frighten consumers of this new product, and working behind the scenes to have it banned before it can even reach to marketplace.

With each cry of “wolf,” Greenpeace seems to up the ante while ignoring the real-world consequences of its rhetoric. The group has warned that genetic crop engineering would cause new and horrible food allergies (it hasn’t), and that biotech corn would endanger monarch butterflies (whose numbers have increased substantially since the introduction of biotech corn). And completely forgotten by the “Frankenfood” protesters is the tremendous potential for biotech foods to solve many of the Third World’s famine-related problems. Tanzania’s Dr. Michael Mbwille (of the non-profit Food Security Network) said it best. “Greenpeace,” he wrote, “prints and circulates these lies faster than the Code Red virus infected the world’s computers. If we were to apply Greenpeace’s scientifically illiterate standards [for soybeans] universally, there would be nothing left on our tables.”

MOTIVATION

The “green” in Greenpeace, it turns out, stands more for money than for the environment. When its anti-biotech scaremongering drove consumers in Brazil away from genetically improved foods, Greenpeace swooped in with its own line of organic foods to fill the demand that its activists created. Greenpeace’s more recent reckless activism is a broader attempt to create the same sort of consumer shift here in the United States.

And why not? Greenpeace itself (as is the case with a variety of anti-biotech activist groups) is heavily invested in the organic foods industry. The International Foundation for the Conservation of Natural Resources noted in a November 2001 report that Lord Peter Melchett, the former leader of Greenpeace’s UK office “is one of the largest organic farmers in Europe.” So when Greenpeace campaigners send hundreds of threatening letters and e-mails, make phone calls by the thousands, and stage intimidating live protest “actions” against their corporate targets, their own bottom line (and that of their financial supporters) stands to benefit.

Even if you discount the impact of hidden financial motives, the more obvious ones are pretty convincing. Last year, Greenpeace USA raised over $8 million in cash, and its bean-counters know very well that the group isn’t completely immune from public backlash. In February 2001, Greenpeace issued a press release blasting genetically improved “golden rice,” the enhanced crop that could save hundreds of thousands of Third World children from blindness and death. In response, the biotech rice’s inventor went public with a scathing response, exposing the activists as “political extremists.” Within 24 hours, Greenpeace had backed down amid a slew of membership cancellations.

BLACK EYE

Patrick Moore [a supporter of this site] was one of a dozen or so activists who founded Greenpeace in the basement of a Unitarian Church in Vancouver. Within 7 years, the organization had footholds in over two dozen countries and a $100 million budget. As eco-activists in general found themselves suddenly invited into the meeting-places of business and government, Greenpeace made the decision to take even more extreme positions, rather than being drawn in to collaboration with their former enemies.

Moore broke with his comrades during this period, and has emerged as an articulate critic of his former brainchild. Referring to Greenpeace’s “eco-extremism” in March 2000, he described the group in Oregon Wheat magazine as “Anti-human”; “anti-technology and anti-science”; “Anti-organization” and “pro-anarchy”; “anti-trade”; “anti-free-enterprise”; “anti-democratic”; and “basically anti-civilization.”
Writing in Canada’s National Post in October 2001, Patrick Moore offered the following critique: “I had no idea that after I left in 1986 they would evolve into a band of scientific illiterates…. Clearly, my former Greenpeace colleagues are either not reading the morning paper or simply don’t care about the truth.”

UPDATE: Greenpeace caught red-handed lying about Arctic ice.

Source

15 COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING AND CLIMATE CHANGE
MYTH 1: Global temperatures are rising at a rapid, unprecedented rate. FACT: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8C over the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. However, the ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas (“heat islands”), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas (“land use effects”) i.e. local heat retention due to urban sprawl, not global warming…and it is these, ‘false high’ ground readings which are then programmed into the disreputable climate models used by your favourite enviro groups such as Greenpeace, which live up to the GIGO acronym — Garbage In, Garbage Out.
Looking at it from the long term, the planet has been gradually recovering from the Little Ice Age which ended in 1850. Our temps are in fact right where they should be. From a short term perspective, satellite measurements (which are far more accurate than land-based stations) are now showing a gradual decrease in global temperatures, and it is currently well accepted that temperatures have been slowly falling for over a decade now and cold records are being set far more often than warm records.
In summary, there has been no catastrophic warming recorded from either method whatsoever.
MYTH 2: It’s never been warmer in the past.FACT: We are in a relatively cool period and it used to be much warmer over countless periods in the past. Even just a few hundred years ago, the Vikings used to live in parts of Greenland without snow, and vineyards flourished in the North of London! There is nothing apocalyptic about warmer temperatures, in fact it’s quite the opposite. In the UK, every mild winter saves 20,000 cold-related deaths, and scaled up over northern Europe mild winters save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. ALSO, data from ice core samples shows that in the past, temperatures have risen by ten times the current rise, and fallen again, in the space of a human lifetime. Nothing is happening “faster than normal” with today’s weather/climate change/temperature variations, etc. MYTH 3: The “hockey stick” graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature decrease for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase. FACT: The hockey stick graph seen in An Inconvenient Truth and elsewhere has been completely debunked and proven fraudulent. It has airbrushed out the significant changes in climate which have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the “average global temperature” has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 – 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare. And now the temperatures are dropping once again, in fact they’ve been dropping since 1998.
The “hockey stick”, a former poster boy of both the UN’s IPCC and Canada’s Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and is proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It has now been quietly removed from the IPCC reports and thoroughly discredited throughout the scientific world and is well regarded as one of the biggest scientific hoaxes of our time, yet you can still find it being used today by organizations such as the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc. The chart is a computer construct and a very faulty one at that. But what else would you expect, seeing as it was created only to help perpetrate the climate change lie.
Speaking of computer generated scams, let’s not forget the drowning polar bears in Gore’s movie and the fraudulent claim that the bears are disappearing. In fact they are actually thriving. Polar bear populations are 500% larger than they were 50 years ago. Shame on you, Al Gore, for playing on people’s emotions to drive support for your enormous $45 trillion carbon tax hoax.
MYTH 4: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth. FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased. The RATE of growth during this period has also increased from about 0.2% per year to the present rate of about 0.4% per year,which growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years. However, there is no proof that CO2 is a measurable driver of global warming, let alone the tiny amount released by humankind. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming.
Effectively, the man-made global warming theorists have put effect before cause — this completely debunks the entire global warming theory and shows that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a futile King Canute exercise! Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth’s oceans expel more CO2 as a result.
MYTH 5: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas. FACT: Greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume. They consist of varying amounts, about 96.5% is water vapour and clouds, with the remainder being trace gases like CO2, CH4, Ozone and N2O. CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere. And then the human portion of that 0.037% is incredibly small.

But isn’t CO2 the most important of the greenhouse gases? Nope. Not even close. Most of the greenhouse effect is due to water vapor, which is about 100 times as abundant in the atmosphere as CO2 and thus has a much larger effect.

In summary, water vapour is by far the most important and overwhelming greenhouse gas. Those attributing climate change to CO2 rarely mention these important facts.

What’s next? A steam tax when you boil a kettle for your cup of tea?
MYTH 6: Computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming. FACT: The computer models assume that CO2 is the primary climate driver, when in fact CO2 does not drive climate, and they do not take into account the Sun, which has the most significant effect on climate. You cannot use the output of a model to verify or prove its initial assumption – that is circular reasoning and is illogical. Computer models can be made to roughly match the 20th century temperature rise by adjusting many input parameters and using strong positive feedbacks. They do not “prove” anything. Also, computer models predicting global warming are incapable of properly including the effects of the sun, cosmic rays and the clouds. The sun is a major cause of temperature variation on the earth surface as its received radiation changes all the time, This happens largely in cyclical fashion. The number and the lengths in time of sunspots can be correlated very closely with average temperatures on earth, e.g. the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. Varying intensity of solar heat radiation affects the surface temperature of the oceans and the currents. Warmer ocean water expels gases, some of which are CO2. Solar radiation interferes with the cosmic ray flux, thus influencing the amount ionized nuclei which control cloud cover. Again, models are in essence: GARBAGE IN = GARBAGE OUT. (Maybe they should also take note that when the Earth warms, so do other planets in our solar system. Now please explain how CO2 can cause that?!)
MYTH 7: The UN proved that man–made CO2 causes global warming. FACT: In a 1996 report by the UN on global warming, two statements were deleted from the final draft. Here they are:
1) “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases.”
2) “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to man–made causes”
Scientists draft reports for the IPCC, but the IPCC are bureaucrats appointed by governments, in fact many scientists who contribute to the reports disagree with the ’spin’ that the IPCC and media put on their findings. The latest report suggests that the next 100 years might see a temperature change of 6 Celsius yet a Lead Author for the IPCC (Dr John Christy UAH/NASA) has pointed out that the scenarios with the fastest warming rates were added to the report at a late stage, at the request of a few governments (to create urgency) — in other words the scientists were told what to do by politicians and many of them strongly disagree. This is not science. It’s political propaganda.To the present day there is still no scientific proof that man-made CO2 has any effect on global warming or can cause “climate change”. However, there is plenty of scientific proof that the Earth has been cooling while CO2 has risen, and that increased CO2 is very beneficial to our planet.
MYTH 8: Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is a pollutant. FACT: This is absolutely not true. Nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere. We could not live in 100% nitrogen either. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is. CO2 is essential to life on earth. It is necessary for plant growth since increased CO2 intake as a result of increased atmospheric concentration causes many trees and other plants to grow more vigorously. Unfortunately, the Canadian Government has included CO2 with a number of truly toxic and noxious substances listed by the Environmental Protection Act, only as their means to politically control it. In the US, president Obama is also trying to classify CO2 as a “pollutant” for the same political reasons. It’s really quite terrifying and is a slap in the face to science.

MYTH 9: Reducing car use will cut carbon dioxide levels and save the planet!

FACT: The planet does not need saving from this mythical problem of CO2 emissions from cars, but taking this on anyway, removing every car from every road in every country overnight would NOT produce any change in the carbon dioxide level of the atmosphere, and in any case it is pointless trying to alter climate by changing carbon dioxide levels as the cause and effect is the other way round! — It is changes in the activity of the Sun that cause temperature changes on earth, with any temperature rise causing carbon dioxide to de-gas from the oceans.
MYTH 10: Global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes. FACT: There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that supports such claims on a global scale. Regional variations may occur, and always do. Growing insurance and infrastructure repair costs, particularly in coastal areas, are sometimes claimed to be the result of increasing frequency and severity of storms, whereas in reality they are a function of increasing population density, escalating development value, and ever more media reporting. Weather records clearly show there has been a decrease in violent and extreme weather over the past century. Extreme weather correlates with the cycle of solar activity, not carbon dioxide emissions or political elections. The recent heavy rainfall in winter and spring is a perfect example of this — it occurred at solar maximum at a time when solar maxima are very intense — this pattern may well repeat every 11 years until about 2045. Furthermore, the hottest and coldest days on record occurred more than 60 years ago (before industry) and the wackiest most extreme weather recorded over the last 100 years, including the strongest hurricanes, and devastating droughts/floods, all occurred in the 1940’s. And guess what? They will always happen, every year, with new records set daily. Normal.

Contrary to media hysteria claiming increasing storm severities, scientists have studied this issue and come to the opposite conclusion: extreme events are becoming LESS common. Atlantic hurricanes were much more numerous from 1950 to 1975 than from 1975 to present. Hailstorms in the US are 35% less common than they were fifty years ago. Extreme rainfall in the US at the end of the 20th century is comparable to what it was at the beginning of the 20th century. Also, there is much empirical evidence to suggest that when global warming does happen from time to time, more warmth generally leads to a more stable climate with less weather extremes. Once again, the greenies got it backwards.

MYTH 11: Carbon taxes, petrol duty, and workplace parking charges are justifiable environmental taxes.

FACT: As carbon dioxide emissions from cars and factories does not have any impact on climate, these taxes are ‘just another tax’ on enterprise and mobility, and have no real green credentials. None.

MYTH 12: Global warming must be real since governments are trying to cover it up and I see protests all the time!

FACT: It’s exactly the opposite. Governments everywhere are not only active supporters of the climate change lie, they are promoters of it and massively fund it. And they’ve done an absolutely brilliant job of it by easily convincing the world’s alarmists and Earth-conscientious citizens of an impending catastrophe, thereby utilizing the protesters and subsequent immense political pressure to push through the very policies they aspire to implement on all of us. Governments have learned the power of activism ever since the days of the revolution, and they’ve managed to use it to their advantage. Extremist environmentalists have been duped into becoming a tool for the very governments they believe they’re “fighting” against. A recent example of this was the declaration by Al Gore and James Hansen which encouraged activists to consider civil disobedience to stop the construction of new coal power plants.

In defense of many environmentalists and “cause-jumpers”, quite often they simply do not know any better but are actually well intentioned.
MYTH 13: Receding glaciers, the calving of ice shelves, and the shrinking of snow on Mt. Kilimanjaro are proof of global warming. FACT: Glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for hundreds of years. Recent glacier melting is a consequence of coming out of the very cool period of the Little Ice Age. Ice shelves have been breaking off for centuries. Scientists know of at least 33 periods of glaciers growing and then retreating. It’s normal. Besides, glacier’s health is dependent as much on precipitation as on temperature. What you see on your television newscasts are images of the annual summer melt off, which happens every single year and is nothing to worry about.
Global warming is not melting Mt. Kilimanjaro’s alpine glacier. Temperatures at Mt. Kilimanjaro have been slightly cooling since at least the middle of the twentieth century, and those temperatures virtually never rise above freezing. Scientists have long known that deforestation at the base of the mountain is causing the mountaintop glacier to shrink, by reducing the moisture and resultant precipitation in mountain updrafts.
MYTH 14: The earth’s poles are warming; polar ice caps are breaking up and melting and the sea level rising.
FACT: The earth is variable. The western Arctic may be gotten somewhat warmer last century, due to unrelated cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. And now the western Arctic is cooling again. The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling. Ice thicknesses are increasing both on Greenland and in Antarctica. Sea level monitoring in the Pacific (Tuvalu) and Indian Oceans (Maldives) has shown no sign of any sea level rise.
MYTH 15: There are only a tiny handful of maverick scientists who dispute that man-made global warming theory is true.
FACT: There are literally tens of thousands of signatures from scientists worldwide on many petitions, ranging from the Oregon Petition Project, the Manhattan Declaration, all the way to the Leipzig Declaration which all state that there is no evidence for the man-made global warming theory nor is there any impact from mankind’s activities on climate. Many scientists are now dissenting against Al Gore and the IPCC and strongly believe that the Kyoto agreement is a total waste of time, expensive, dangerous and one of the biggest political scams ever perpetrated on the public … as H L Mencken said “The fundamental aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary” … the desire to save the world usually fronts a desire to rule it. Of the scientists who support the climate change theory, many are on payrolls of government agencies and others are simply securing their funding. The consensus is clear: Man-made climate change is a hoax.

THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT Over 95 percent of the Greenhouse Effect is the result of atmospheric water vapor in Earth’s atmosphere. But because water droplets held in suspension (clouds) make almost as good a reflector as they do a thermal insulator, there is little rise in daytime temperatures due to the Greenhouse Effect. Any greenhouse warming, if it does occur, is limited to primarily increasing nighttime temperatures, which provides beneficial moderation of nighttime low temperatures, but no increase in daytime high temperatures.

Did you know… Although the biggest source of greenhouse gas is our oceans, the world’s natural wetlands also produce more greenhouse gas contributions annually than all human sources combined. Furthermore, Animals and volcanoes produce so much CO2 that it completely dwarfs mankinds insignificantly tiny emissions.
To summarize what we have learned so far:

• Climate changes are not driven by CO2.
• Air pollution has nothing to do with CO2.
• Human-produced CO2 is a miniscule fraction of a percentage of greenhouse gases.
• 96.5% of all greenhouse gases emit from the oceans, naturally.
• The small amount of CO2 produced by humans is wholly beneficial to the planet.
• Without CO2, vegetation dies, herbivores die, you die.
• CO2 levels used to be much higher many times in the past.
• Higher temperatures from the sun result in CO2 levels rising long afterwards.
• Rising CO2 is an effect of global warming, not a cause.
• Global warming and cooling is a purely natural phenomenon.
• The higher the CO2 levels in the atmosphere, the greener our planet becomes.
• Forests and plant life growth has increased by approx 40% over the last 50 years, thanks to CO2.
• Increasing CO2 yields larger food crops. This is beneficial to a growing population.
• The Earth is not currently warming, it is in fact cooling.
• Temperatures in the past have often been much warmer than today.
• Even if it were to happen, a warmer Earth is far better than a colder one, for all life.
• Many scientists believe we are on the cuss of the next little ice age.
• When the planet warms and cools it is due to the sun. Not your car.
• Polar ice is now at record levels and still growing.
• Climate changes happen all the time, and have occurred much faster than anything in modern times.
• There has been no increase in extreme weather. In fact, records show the exact opposite.

So don’t panic. You’re NOT at fault!

“It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S. Atmospheric Scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.

Former President Clinton, Al Gore, Obama and others have often cited a letter signed by 2600 scientists that global warming will have catastrophic effects on humanity. Thanks to Citizens for a Sound Economy, we know now that fewer than 10 percent of these “scientists” know anything about climate. Among the signers: a plastic surgeon, two landscape architects, a hotel administrator, a gynecologist, seven sociologists, a linguist, and a practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine. We also now know that many of the few actual scientists on that panel are not asked whether they agree with the UN’s asessments, and many of them vehemently disagree and have thus asked to have their names removed from that fraudulent list. Global Warming Treaty is All Pain, No Gain — Malcom Wallop

“When a bureaucracy’s reason for existence is threatened, it typically generates new missions.” Desperately Seeking Mission: Why the State Department’s Gone Green — Peter VanDoren

With the release of Al Gore’s propaganda movie An Inconvenient Truth and with the help of the media the public has been driven into a mass hysteria based not on science but lies. The movie has been completely debunked and the junk science used by extremists is exactly that: junk. You will learn that there is no empirical evidence that man-made CO2 is a cause of temperature increases. It is, in fact, an after effect of temperature increases. Carbon Dioxide (CO2) is not a pollutant, pollution has nothing to do with global warming, politicians who support such absurd notions are a fraud, there is no “consensus” on global warming, the Earth has been far warmer in the past than it is today, polar bears are not endangered or dying, they are thriving, droughts and hurricanes are not caused or made worse by global warming, extreme weather events are decreasing, and there is extensive evidence of the factual natural causes of global warming when it really happens from time to time, pointing squarely at increased solar activity and orbital variations.Those who claim that skeptics are in bed with the oil companies or receive funding from questionable sources need to give their heads a shake and look at the facts. Funding and grants to PROMOTE the climate change myth are astronomical, while money for the skeptics is pocket change:
Debunkers of the global warming theory have received approx = $21M (Million).
Supporters of the global warming theory have received approx = $79B (BILLION!)
Many people want a piece of that $79 billion pie, and the figure will only get higher so long as these groups can continue to convince the populous that the end is near unless we all start paying to emit that evil CO2! Don’t you find it odd that nearly nobody ever accuses the giant Enviro groups of being in bed with the large Green Industry? Or that Al Gore has boatloads of his own cash on the line in these companies? Every environmental, political, and research group knows full well that in order to receive funding and grants they need to create urgency and panic. Money then flows in like a river, regardless of actual science. It’s a sad fact.

It is better to trust scientists than politicans. Do not let fear ruin your day. Learn the Facts.

There are several motives for the media and politicians to lie to you about global warming, aside from money and control.

~The media sells more papers, magazines, and television ratings soar when their audience is scared of some imminent catastrophe that your respective service is reporting on. Although, they can’t decide whether we’re going to burn to death, freeze to death, or drown. http://epw.senate.gov/speechitem.cfm?party=rep&id=263759

~Environmental organizations and some scientists will lie to you because their funding depends on it. If theres no crisis to work through, then they start losing funding. This is well documented.
http://meteo.lcd.lu/globalwarming/von_Storch/staged_angst/a_climate_of_staged_angst.html

~Foreign countries are lying to us (by means of the IPCC) because they wish to throw a monkey wrench into the inner workings of western economies, which are the strongest in the world. If our economy slows down, the economic standing of other countries improves because we will no longer dominate the markets.

~Development and industrialization of third world countries will be stamped out, along with hundreds of millions of lives, all under the guise of “saving the planet from climate change”. It’s absolutely sickening. So, who’s really on the “immoral” side? Us or the alarmists?

~Wanna talk about new taxes and restricted freedoms? Try carbon taxes on everything and strict regulations for everyone….all coming soon by convincing you that CO2 & greenhouse gases are somehow evil and you must pay to emit them. Too bad they can’t tax the oceans since they are the cause of 96.5% of all greenhouse emissions, naturally, eh! Also too bad they can’t go back in time and tax the dinosaurs since CO2 levels were MUCH higher back then and it must have been their fault.

The motives for deception are there. Do your part to fight alarmism!

– CO2 is NOT a pollutant!
– Educate yourself!
CLICK HERE and HERE.

Antarctica is getting colder and thicker: http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/12/05/sea-level-rise-not-from-antarctic-melting/ ), and we know that any fluctuating warming/cooling is due to natural occurrences, and not human activity.

MUST READ LINKS:

http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264777
http://globalwarminghoax.wordpress.com/2008/03/
http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20061121_gore.pdf
http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
http://www.junkscience.com/challenge.htm
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YmFiZDAyMWFhMGIxNTgwNGIyMjVkZjQ4OGFiZjFlNjc
http://www.cei.org/pdf/5331.pdf
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/04/06/nclim06.xml&sSheet=/news/2003/04/06/ixhome.html
http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm
http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060810-020342-6063r
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/07_1.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_theory_%28science%29
http://www.businessandmedia.org/specialreports/2006/fireandice/fireandice_execsum.asp
http://epw.senate.gov/searchresults.cfm?search=Global+Warming
http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=264777

The reason for warming:
http://www.research.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/spot_sunclimate.html
http://www.research.noaa.gov/spotlite/archive/images/sunclimate_3b.gif
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030321075236.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/56456.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/358953.stm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/18/ixnewstop.html
http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/09/sunwarm.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml&s
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation

If you’re still not convinced that scientists are capable of being slanted in their research, check out this article:
http://epw.senate.gov/pressitem.cfm?party=rep&id=263847

For those who believe environmentalists are innocent:
http://www.activistcash.com/organization_overview.cfm/oid/131
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/29/91422.shtml
http://epw.senate.gov/repwhitepapers/Political.pdf

For those who believe there is a consensus:
http://www.petitionproject.org/
http://www.sepp.org/policy%20declarations/LDrevised.html

To see what happened in a debate between alarmists and skeptics:
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=5ac1c0d6-802a-23ad-4a8c-ee5a888dfe7e

More FACTS and MYTHS? See what Professor deFreitas has to say. Click here.

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