Radical Environmentalism & The Green Religion

What happened at the 2010 Copenhagen Climate Summit? Practically nothing. Copenhagen had long been hyped as the conference where a new set of stringent, binding, verifiable, and internationally enforceable greenhouse gas emissions targets were to be agreed upon for the decades ahead. The targets in the existing 1997 Kyoto Protocol--generally a 5 percent reduction below 1990 emissions levels for developed countries--are scheduled to expire in 2012. And in any event, global warming activists considered the Kyoto Protocol too weak to save the planet.Ben Lieberman, "The Copenhagen Conference: A Setback for Bad Climate Policy in 2010," Special Report, The Heritage Foundation, Jan. 2010.The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was forced to disavow its claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 and acknowledge that it had no scientific basis.Brett Schaeffer and Baker Spring, “National Security Goes Green,” National Review, Feb. 11, 2010.The Times Online reported that Prof. Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate-impacts team, could find nothing in the IPCC report to support its claim that ”global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change.” The QDR followed the IPCC on this error, too, claiming that climate change will impact food security.Brett Schaeffer and Baker Spring, “National Security Goes Green,” National Review, Feb. 11, 2010.More than 31,000 scientists signed a petition rejecting the theory of human-caused global warming. Numerous experts now claim the Earth is cooling.Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere. To assess whether the airborne fraction is indeed increasing, Wolfgang Knorr of the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol reanalyzed available atmospheric carbon dioxide and emissions data since 1850 and considers the uncertainties in the data. In contradiction to some recent studies, he finds that the airborne fraction of carbon dioxide has not increased either during the past 150 years or during the most recent five decades."No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years, New Research Finds," Science Daily, Dec. 31, 2009; The research is published in Geophysical Research LettersQUOTES"One of the elephants in the room here in Copenhagen has been Climategate - the release of emails and other documents evidencing gross misconduct amongst some of the key scientists involved in the main United Nations scientific report that was to be relied upon here. The fact that temperatures have been flat for over a decade only adds to the justifiably growing public skepticism whether global warming really is a crisis.""Live at Copenhagen: Try Again in 2010 - The Final Slogan from Copenhagen?" The Heritage Foundation, Dec. 18, 2009"It is hard to do any more wrong by the American people than cap and trade. Whether done by domestic legislation or international treaty, significant reductions in carbon dioxide emissions (like the 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050 in the House Waxman Markey bill which the Obama administration had hoped to match at Copenhagen or get done at a subsequent UN global warming treaty conference) would raise gasoline prices by 58 percent by 2035, electric rates by 90 percent, impose nearly $3,000 in total annual costs on a household of 4, and destroy over one million jobs."Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman, "How to Make a Bad Climate Deal Worse," The Heritage Foundation, Dec. 17, 2009"But Secretary of State Hilary Clinton is certainly trying to make a bad deal worse by pledging America’s support for a massive foreign aid package in the name of helping developing nations address global warming. ... By making such pledges in Denmark, the Obama administration is making the same mistake Bill Clinton and Al Gore did in 1997 - promising abroad what it can’t deliver at home. Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol, the existing global warming treaty whose expiring provisions were supposed to be extended at Copenhagen, knowing full well that the Senate would never ratify it. Now, this administration is making foreign aid promises in Copenhagen that it can’t deliver in Washington. It is hard to imagine the Congress signing off on such a massive aid package, especially given the still lingering recession and growing public doubts about global warming."Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman, "How to Make a Bad Climate Deal Worse," The Heritage Foundation, Dec. 17, 2009"Unscientific."Professor Richard Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, speaking of claims of "global warming""The assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable."Dr. Edward Wegman, professor at the center for Computational Statistics, George Mason University, and chair of the National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Applied Theoretical Statistics"The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is not a scientific institution: it's a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It's neither a forum of neutral nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and one-sided argument."Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, and economist, commenting on the IPCC's biases toward "global warming""After carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story told to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th century global warming."Dr. Nit Shariv, astrophysicist and associate professor at Hebrew University"All four agencies that track the Earth's temperature -- the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc. in California -- report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930."Phil Chapman, geophysicist, astronautical engineer, and NASA astronaut"Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the 'hockey stick' were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves 'the Hockey Team,' and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case."Christopher Booker, "Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation," London Telegraph, Nov. 28, 2009."There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws. They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based. This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence."Christopher Booker, "Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation," London Telegraph, Nov. 28, 2009."They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based. This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence. But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand."Christopher Booker, "Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation," London Telegraph, Nov. 28, 2009."The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports."Christopher Booker, "Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation," London Telegraph, Nov. 28, 2009.“A group called GenderCC (Women for Climate Justice) rejects using distractions like "numbers" and "target dates" to track and fight climate change, and doesn't appear very interested in the environment itself. Instead, it hopes to implement "gender-mainstreaming" and ensure that the U.N. guarantees the fullest participation of "feminist scientists" at every level.”Joseph Abrams, “Copenhagen ‘Cicus’ Turning into Feel-Good Jamboree, Critics Say,” Fox News, Dec. 8, 2009.