Global warming, a fossil fuel funded conspiracy … Why not?

Through Lubos Motl comes news of Novim, the group got BEST together, having won a $40,000 award. For making an app for the ipad. Funny you should make something of which there are close to 50 billion of, and win awards for it.

It is natural for interest groups to pat on the back those who help them for performing their role. Novim’s Michael Ditmore (pictured) picked up the award from a American Clean Skies Foundation, an outfit promoting natural gas. I’ve linked to the Board of Directors page. You can see they are either (a) natural gas and/or oilmen, or, (b) lawyers. The other thing is, if you want to be all green and kitsch … you’ve got to have a Burning Man-like icon as your logo.

A natural gas promoter would like millions of people learning about the global land thermometer record, wouldn’t it? Because natural gas is a ‘solution’ for global warming, right?

350.org. This segment was brought to you by the Rockefellers

Almost three years ago, I wrote about climate change propaganda websites. The first exhibit was the one shown below:

William McKibben’s ’350′ organization has received $10 million in funding over the past 8 years. These are people who make it their business to speak about your money, all the time.

McKibben ideas – which he has for about $25,000 a year – are to deceive people into thinking that fossil fuels are dangerous and should be given up.

McKibben’s hypocrisy, it appears, was well-known. This is David Kamp ‘doing the math’ on his first book (the one with the dead bird on the cover) in Spy magazine, in 1989:

When asked what he wants to do with oil companies, McKibben reportedly said: “I don’t think financially we can cripple them. They’re so big and so rich,”

A while back, he parasitically attached himself to the ‘Occupy’ movement. Get that. A paid shill of the Rockefellers, protesting against the ’1%’.

Activist trash going down the way of the activist trash.

Heartland: What is Judith Curry talking about?

Free speech is not a crime. Only when Greenpeace speaks

I don’t know. I am having a hard time understanding what she is saying.

Worstall and the carbon tax: Have you boiled your head yet?

earnshavian’s photostream

Imagine you are new to town. As you drive to the gas station, you are told that gas prices are 20 dollars a gallon.

The Silence of the Pandas

In June last year a 45 minute film ‘Der Pakt mit dem Panda’ (‘The Pact with the Panda’) was broadcast on German TV to a reported audience of 900,000. Made by by journalist and documentary film-maker Wilfried Huismann, it examines the two-faced nature of the World Wildlife Fund (examined briefly in an earlier post here). The WWF in Germany initially prevented the film from being broadcast in its original form from the advertisements for the film.

The WWF, REDD and Tanzania

At the peak of the claim and counter-claim thrown around over Amazongate Simon Lewis a forest researcher at the University of Leeds emerged briefly at its centre. Lewis’ defense of the actions of the IPCC helped the organization avoid confronting its use of advocacy and environmental pressure group material from the WWF. A little-examined fact at the time was that Lewis’ parent department was involved along with contributions from the University of East Anglia (UEA), the Royal Society, the David and Lucille Packard Foundation and other non-governmental organizations in a UN REDD+ pilot project in Tanzania. Called ‘Valuing the Arc’, it was designed to work out putting a ‘price on carbon’ to provide ”input to the policy process, … including PES mechanisms”. ‘PES’, is payment for ecosystem services, i.e., REDD. The most prominent NGO at the the centre of the project? WWF-Tanzania.

Roger Pielke Jr: When the debate gets over

Roger Pielke Jr: from the website of THE BEAST

Lot of people think the climate game is fun: caring for the planet, reading climate science papers, arguing about statistics, ‘sensitivitiy’, radiative physics and the like. Well, … let’s just leave that be for now. Behind the scenes, the climate game is played by ratfucking and retractions. People are not angling for ‘genuine debate’ or trying to ‘solve problems’, they are trying to shut the other guy down and have things their way.

GreenPCC

In 1994, Greenpeace produced a report called Climate Time Bomb: Signs of Climate Change from the Greenpeace Database. They are so proud of it, they have a short copy archived on their website [1]. Odd as it may seem, in those days, Greenpeace was not considered a source of scientific wisdom. Indeed at the time, Peter John Newell observed, the report was dismissed as “unscientific” in the media “via reference to the opinion of climate scientists” [2].

Greenpeace in the IPCC: the Edenhofer Excuse

IPCC WG-III Co-Chair Ottmar Edenhofer of the PIK, Germany

It has been a recurring pattern that the most dramatic of conclusions reached by the IPCC, are shown to arise from exaggerated claims in literature put out by environmental pressure groups. The latest addition to the list is the Greenpeace-generated factoid that ‘80% of the world’s energy demand in 2050 could be met by renewable sources’ which found its way onto the IPCC pedestal. For new readers, Climateaudit.org is an accessible source for much of the background and primary information (search for posts tagged ‘Greenpeace’ appearing in June 2011)

Many interested parties responded to the initial criticism which arose mainly in the climateaudit.org and environmentalist Mark Lynas blogs. The responses that issued from the IPCC official organ – via statements from Ottmar Edenhofer – followed particularly predictable lines. In a recent opinion piece in Nature Climate Change reiterates and expands the same points offered previously. Unoriginally one might add, writer Kyle Niemeyer in ArsTechnica paraphrases and reproduces exclusively ‘the Edenhofer Excuse’.

What is the Edenhofer Excuse?

Ottmar Edenhofer’s arguments defending the IPCC, though multifarious are plainly contradictory to each other and are easily seen to violate commonly-understood academic standards. It goes like this:

1. ‘the problem of conflict, if any, is very limited’, ‘Teske was just one author (and not the lead author)’, ‘it is a multi-authored report which went through ‘many’ rounds of review’, ‘the SRREN is a massive effort with hundreds of pages’
2. the Greenpeace’s scenario was ‘just one of one-hundred and sixty four scenarios’ evaluated
3. Sven Teske was just one of the authors of the Greenpeace scenario
4. The Greenpeace scenario was actually performed by the German Aerospace Agency DLR. Greenpeace only just commissioned it.

The IPCC’s assessment of the Greenpeace renewable energy scenario

Introduction

The following is discussion of what can be considered as serious systemic errors in the IPCC’s ‘SRREN’ – a report that examined ‘renewable’ energy usage scenarios into the future. It is divided into two serial parts (I & II) – one leading into another.

Greenpeace demands open data availability

Bad Influence: The Greenpeace report

In any game of make-believe, there is one basic rule. You just play along and dont ask logical questions. For instance, when Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council stated that ’80% of the world’s energy can be supplied by renewable sources’, you just suspend your disbelief and nod along. That’s how it works.

Now you know why the globe is warming up

The SEC has brought enforcement actions over failure to disclose aircraft usage. In January, it filed a civil case accusing a Kansas-based website provider, NIC Inc., of failing to disclose perks, including payments for its former CEO to live in a Wyoming ski lodge and commute to headquarters by private jet. NIC and three current and former executives paid a total of $2.8 million to settle, without admitting or denying the allegations.

This, from an article “Corporate Jet Set: Leisure vs. Business”. Google the phrase – you’ll get access to the full article in the Wall Street Journal. The article should be read in full: it is investigative journalism at its best.

Nisbet and tantric climate cuddling

There is a common phenomenon encountered in the climate debate. Those skeptical of the case made by the consensus, via various methods, arrive at certain conclusions fairly quickly. The same conclusions are eventually and much later reached by climate change professors and academicians, using the same methods.

From REDD to the Carbon Bubble

If you would think that the money-for-nothing scheme called REDD is an academic-originated exercise in ecofinancial fakery, then you must not be familar with the bizarre envelope-pushing inventiveness of …’forestry bonds’.

REDD: Indonesian forestry official sentenced to 3 years in prison

Readers might recall the story of Wandojo Siswanto, ‘Advisor’ to the Ministry of Forestry, Indonesia and Indonesia’s lead negotiator at the Copenhagen UN conference, who was a ‘key architect of REDD’ in Indonesia.

When we last left off (December last year), Wandojo was arrested and stood trial for a deal his division was involved in – the buying of Motorola communication handsets from a company PT Masaro for the Indonesian ministry, where it was alleged that he had recieved a $10,000 bribe.

Siswanto and family (c) Antara Photo

About ten days ago, Wandojo was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to 3 years in prison on charges of graft. Wandojo insists that he carried out the deal acting on orders from above, just as he did at the time of his arrest. It was he who turned over the $10,000 to the police, as well.

Incidentally, it is understood that Indonesia ‘lost’ $5.25 billion from to its Reforestation Fund during the period 1994-1998. It is unclear how many people have been arrested for this loss. Last September, the Jakarta Globe reported that the country’s anti-corruption organization KPK warned that the ’billions of dollars’ that Indonesia would make yearly in ‘climate-change deals’, could be put at risk if it failed to ’stamp out corruption in its forestry sector’.

Skeptics cruise on the Alaskan high seas learning about climate change

Sometimes you wonder where to bury your face. As you might know, the University of East Anglia recently refused to release climate data in its custody, when requested under FOI (in itself an embarrassment, but we’ll save that for later). When the world is coming to an end, the first thing to do is to use your secret climate data to write as many papers in high-impact journals as possible, I guess.

Tim Lambert: peaking at the right time

Tim Lambert, one of the world’s best science bloggers has a brief post. It looks like this:

REDD: Possibility of gaming the system is ‘massive’

You know how the climate community just loves uncertainty, it just loves creating and imagining ‘uncertainties’ where none exist.

A Reuters report states that ‘uncertainty’ about money from REDD progams reaching ’people on the ground’ is a ‘key challenge’.

HSBC speaks climate. We listen.

It is always important what is being said and who is saying it

So when HSBC says the following, it is time to listen.

Doubts about science have been replaced by the realities of extreme events and rising commodity prices.

‘Conservation Refugees’

Conservation Refugees

Where do conservation refugees come from? One answer is here.

Mad cow disease causes global warming

“To hold global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels deforestation must be cut to half by 2020…” —  so we are told by the the U.S.-based Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests (reported here).

If we believe some credible sources of information (and apply the half-and-half logic), a ’4 degree rise’ in globally averaged gridded temperatures will create hell on earth, which can only mean that a ’2 degree rise’ will create half that hell.

‘Clean Energy’: Santa’s coming tonight, tonight

Despoiling the countryside

(h/t Adam Gallon)

Marina Silva: Keith Kloor’s nightmare

Marina Silva

Marina Silva, senator from the Brazilian state of Acre, presidential candidate for 2010 coming in third but polling an impressive 19% of the votes, is a charismatic figure. An ardent environmentalist, she is popular and well respected in the movement.

She was environment minister for Brazil from 2003 to 2008 and is considered a key architect in Brazil’s changed stance in the UN climate talks and willingness to strike compromises.

In April this year, she gave what was termed a rousing speech at the National Mall, Washington DC. It is said that she used Facebook for campaigning and appealed to young voters on sustainability issues.

REDD: who are the Mercedes dealers?

mani bilang skai (c) Global Witness

North notes the $100 billion ‘jungle bunny bribe‘ ‘fund’ a.k.a Green Climate Fund, promised coming out from Cancun.

REDD: this is called environmentalism?

In the climate debate, we are told everyday that environmentalism and stewardship for the environment is a special type of thinking. This runs counter to the usual type of thinking – business-as-usual – your weekend game-watching on the big screen TV, driving around in your big SUV to local malls or drinking water in plastic cups and chucking cola cans into regular dustbins.

The story of ‘a key architect’ of REDD

You hear that Todd Stern, the United States envoy at Cancun is being ‘obstructionist’ and that he is harping on and on about transparency.

In October last year, the Indonesian government warned regents and mayors who have jurisdiction over local REDD programs in that country. It asked them to ‘carefully review all carbon brokerage firms offering incentives such as huge financial benefits from the forestry sector for engaging in carbon trading’, according to this report in the the Jakarta Post.

Who was the person who issued the warning? Wandojo Siswanto, ‘Advisor’ to tne Ministry of Forestry, Indonesia and Indonesia’s lead negotiator at the Copenhagen UN conference.

Why does sub-national REDD want to fly under the radar?

In March this year, Johann Hari was doing something George Monbiot did once upon a time ago – speak refreshingly on environmental issues. We learn what one of his interviewees told him:

Iowa saves us from global warming

Apparently, the Iowans are competing with Brazil. It looks like they don’t have to be worried for long.

You can’t drink, but you can drive.

(H/t Globalwarming.org)

‘Key architect of REDD’: Dan Nepstad

'key architect of REDD' - Dan Nepstad

At the national level, the US government wrote to appropriate ~2 billion USD towards the forest-protectionist REDD for 2011. The money would go to certain countries which  in return,would not do something, i.e., cut down trees, which they might do, if the money was not given to them.

Climate change denier senators seek to cut funds peddling myths

Facing a bill close to 2 billion dollars in ‘climate change related appropriations’, some US senators wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton asking for a ‘freeze further spending requests to implement international climate change finance programs’.