The Corporatization of the Environmental Movement

Peter Taylor from Ethos UK sketches in the background to Climategate

Peter Taylor from Ethos UK joins us to talk about The Corporatization of the Environmental Movement, The Fraud of Cap and Trade, Al Gore, the Computer Models Predicting Global Warming and his experience of how Greenpeace and other Environmental Organizations have been hijacked. Peter provides the ecological science background for the Ethos team. He has extensive experience of research and policy analysis across a wide field of environmental issues, having advised governments, the European Commission, and UN organizations. He has made a significant contribution to international treaties on ocean protection and the development of the precautionary principle. Recent work has included consultancy to UK government agencies and non-government organizations on renewable energy policy and rural issues (he sits on the National Advisory Group for the Community Renewables Initiative (a joint Countryside Agency and DTI program).

Listen or download the program here

Ethos

Visualising Renewable Energy in the Landscape
The Countryside Agency commissioned Ethos to produce a series of images using virtual reality software.
The project focussed on the kinds of choices faced by communities as Britain begins to take responsibility for sustainable energy supplies and efficient use of natural resources.
Ethos designed and produced a presentation pack which contained a multimedia CD with animated walk-throughs, fly-throughs, hi-resolution images and a Powerpoint presentation, and printed material outlining the issues and displaying the images.

Sustaining Upland Landscapes
ESRC trans-disciplinary seminar, Exeter University. February 2006 (File available for download).

Landscape, Climate and Renewable Energy
Envisioning future options: The use of virtual reality landscapes (paper available for download). Carbon offsets and sequestration in future landscapes (ECOS paper 2005 available for download)

Daring to Question Al Gore

The director of "Not Evil, Just Wrong," a documentary challenging Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth," dares to ask a question at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference. Apparently Mr. Gore only allows the 'right kind' of questions to be asked of him.





A feature length documentary which shows how extreme environmentalism
is damaging the lives of vulnerable people from the ban on DDT to the
campaigns on Global Warming.

Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told

Charge this charlatan with fruad

The uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story, writes Christopher Booker of The Telegraph.

If one thing more than any other is used to justify proposals that the world must spend tens of trillions of dollars on combating global warming, it is the belief that we face a disastrous rise in sea levels. The Antarctic and Greenland ice caps will melt, we are told, warming oceans will expand, and the result will be catastrophe.

Although the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) only predicts a sea level rise of 59cm (17 inches) by 2100, Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth went much further, talking of 20 feet, and showing computer graphics of cities such as Shanghai and San Francisco half under water. We all know the graphic showing central London in similar plight. As for tiny island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, as Prince Charles likes to tell us and the Archbishop of Canterbury was again parroting last week, they are due to vanish.

Gore has manipulated data and willfully deceived the world

But if there is one scientist who knows more about sea levels than anyone else in the world it is the Swedish geologist and physicist Nils-Axel Mörner, formerly chairman of the INQUA International Commission on Sea Level Change. And the uncompromising verdict of Dr Mörner, who for 35 years has been using every known scientific method to study sea levels all over the globe, is that all this talk about the sea rising is nothing but a colossal scare story.



Despite fluctuations down as well as up, "the sea is not rising," he says. "It hasn't risen in 50 years." If there is any rise this century it will "not be more than 10cm (four inches), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 10cm". And quite apart from examining the hard evidence, he says, the elementary laws of physics (latent heat needed to melt ice) tell us that the apocalypse conjured up by
Al Gore and Co could not possibly come about.

The reason why Dr Mörner, formerly a Stockholm professor, is so certain that these claims about sea level rise are 100 per cent wrong is that they are all based on computer model predictions, whereas his findings are based on "going into the field to observe what is actually happening in the real world".

When running the International Commission on Sea Level Change, he launched a special project on the Maldives, whose leaders have for 20 years been calling for vast sums of international aid to stave off disaster. Six times he and his expert team visited the islands, to confirm that the sea has not risen for half a century. Before announcing his findings, he offered to show the inhabitants a film explaining why they had nothing to worry about. The government refused to let it be shown.

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

One of his most shocking discoveries was why the IPCC has been able to show sea levels rising by 2.3mm a year. Until 2003, even its own satellite-based evidence showed no upward trend. But suddenly the graph tilted upwards because the IPCC's favoured experts had drawn on the finding of a single tide-gauge in Hong Kong harbour showing a 2.3mm rise. The entire global sea-level projection was then adjusted upwards by a "corrective factor" of 2.3mm, because, as the IPCC scientists admitted, they "needed to show a trend".

When I spoke to Dr Mörner last week, he expressed his continuing dismay at how the IPCC has fed the scare on this crucial issue. When asked to act as an "expert reviewer" on the IPCC's last two reports, he was "astonished to find that not one of their 22 contributing authors on sea levels was a sea level specialist: not one". Yet the results of all this "deliberate ignorance" and reliance on rigged computer models have become the most powerful single driver of the entire warmist hysteria.


Further reading:
Bjorn Lomborg
Global cooling continues

2009 International Conference on Climate Change

Al Gore doing what he does best..blowing hot air

Former Vice President Al Gore, the most prominent proponent of global warming alarmism, was the target of biting humor and ridicule Monday at the second International Conference on Climate Change.

U.S. Congressman Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) and scientist Arthur Robinson, who has assembled a list of more than 31,000 U.S. scientists skeptical of global warming alarmism, in separate speeches ripped what they saw as Gore's hypocrisy in urging energy conservation while expanding his own carbon footprint and with inconsistencies in Gore's popular movie "An Inconvenient Truth."

The conference, produced by The Heartland Institute and 60 co-sponsors, attracted about 700 scientists, economists, and policy experts to confront the issue, "Global Warming: Was it ever really a crisis?"

The congressman also noted that James Hansen, the notorious NASA astronomer who has urged that global warming skeptics face a Nuremberg-style trial for crimes against humanity, in 1971 warned of a coming deadly ice age, but lately has made front-page news by warning of a deadly global warming.

Robinson, who heads the independent Oregon Institute of Science & Medicine, dissected "An Inconvenient Truth" by noting contradictions, much to the delight of the audience.



For instance, he noted Gore produced a chart that he said showed computer models predicted a sharp rise in global temperatures years before computers capable of such projections existed. Another Gore graphic warned of species becoming extinct ... and illustrated the point with wooly mammoths and other species that disappeared eons ago. Robinson ridiculed Gore's contention that Pacific Ocean islanders evacuated their land for New Zealand as ocean levels rose 3 inches.

...Mr Gore

More than 50 presentations were made Monday, including:

* Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway, who noted that the composition of ocean water -- including carbon dioxide, calcium, and water -- can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans, a relatively new alarm raised by global warming alarmists as data mounts that global temperatures pose little risk.

* Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the University of Alaska, who said Earth's climate is presently in a period of long, slow recovery from the Little Ice Age that ran for 300 or so years and ended in about 1850. The data suggest a large-scale secular trend of about 0.5 degrees Celsius per century of linear rise, punctuated by multi-decade-long oscillations. He said his data suggest the warming may end soon, because by historical standards it should not last for more than about another 100 years.

* David Evans, former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, said computer models of human-caused global warming in models from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change clearly predict the emergence of a "hotspot" in the upper troposphere over the tropics. However, radio temperature data for the upper troposphere clearly show there is no hotspot. The IPCC's assertion of man-made global warming rests on this fundamental prediction, but, said Evans, the hotspot just isn't there.

Evans suggested "the science behind (human-caused global warming) is weak" and consists largely of 45 people peer-reviewing each other's papers, which tends toward groupthink on science questions.


Written By: Dan Miller
Publisher: The Heartland Institute

Further reading:
Bjorn Lomborg
Global cooling continues

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Bjorn Lomborg - The Rational Environmentalist

Bjorn Lomborg - The Rational Environmentalist

Lomborg, a boyish 43-year-old, first burst onto the intellectual scene in 2001 with his best-selling book The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. There the former Greenpeace member argued persuasively that most of the planetary doom scenarios imagined by ideological environmentalists were contradicted by the available ecological and economic data. The book provoked a furious green backlash, the low point of which was a 2003 ruling by the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty that "the publication of the work under consideration is deemed to fall within the concept of scientific dishonesty." Lomborg was vindicated later that year when the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation overturned the ruling, calling it "completely void of argumentation."




The author most recently of Cool It, Lomborg is also the force behind The Copenhagen Consensus, a path-breaking approach toward effecting efficient solutions to the planet's most pressing issues. "At the end of the day," says Lomborg, "this is about saying, Yes, global warming is real. It's often massively exaggerated, which is why we need smarter solutions.... Let's pick them smart, rather than stupidly. And also, let's remember that they are many other problems in the world that we can fix so much cheaper and do so much more good....If this is really a question about doing good in the world, then let's do real good—and not just make ourselves feel good about what we do."



Saving the planet became a specific job description six years ago, when Lomborg was appointed director of the Danish National Environmental Assessment Institute, a group whose explicit aim is to "get the most environment for the money." In 2004, under Lomborg's guidance, the institute convened the first Copenhagen Consensus conference, in which eight leading economists, including four Nobel laureates, were asked to allocate a theoretical $50 billion to solve the world's biggest problems. The panel was presented with 30 proposals from other researchers for ranking and evaluation. The top four priorities left standing at the end of the conference were: controlling HIV/AIDS, providing micronutrients to children, liberalizing trade, and rolling back malaria. Addressing climate change ranked near the bottom. This infuriated many environmentalists, but overall the meeting garnered favorable attention around the world.

Lomborg is Al Gore's nemesis - lets see a head to head!

In 2007, following with the Copenhagen Consensus theme of sensible policy prioritization, Lomborg published Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, in which he acknowledged that man-made global warming is a problem but challenged the notion that it is the biggest threat to human well-being. Instead of draconian and poverty-inducing cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, Lomborg argued, rich countries could more effectively tackle the problem through massive research and development into low-carbon energy technologies.

In May 2008, Lomborg convened the second Copenhagen Consensus Center conference. This time eight leading economists, including five Nobelists, considered how to allocate a theoretical $75 billion during the next four years to solve 10 of the world's largest problems. Would it be better, for example, to provide efficient stoves to poor people who are exposed to indoor cooking smoke, or supply middle-aged people in developing countries with cheap pills combining aspirin and cholesterol-reducing statins to prevent heart attacks? The panel's top four solutions: providing vitamin A and zinc supplements to poor children, liberalizing trade, fortifying salt and staple foods with the micronutrients iodine and iron, and expanding childhood immunization. Cutting greenhouse gases came in at the bottom, although another approach to global warming—R&D spending on low-carbon energy technologies—was a mid-list priority.

The Top Thirty Solutions to the World's Biggest Problems

Further reading:
Copenhagen Consensus
Reason TV
Reason online
Global Cooling

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