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Those CRU emails expose Copenhagen as a farce
The facts are: ice coverage is unchanged while global temperatures are falling
Let us pass from Oslo where Obama went one better than Carter who, you may recall, proclaimed in 1977 that his crusade for energy conservation was "the moral equivalent of war". Obama trumped this with his claim that war is the moral equivalent of peace. As he was proffering this absurdity, Copenhagen was hosting its global warming jamboree, surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasising since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled for the Council of Nicaea in 325AD to debate whether God the father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and with the Holy Ghost.
Shortly before the Copenhagen summit the proponents of anthropogenic – human-caused - global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the web more than a thousand emails either sent from or received at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia headed by Dr Phil Jones, who has since stepped down from his post – whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen.
The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. At that time the supposed menace to the planet and to mankind was global cooling, a source of interest to oil companies for obvious reasons.
Coolers transmuted into Warmers and the CRU became one of the climate modeling grant mills supplying the often loaded data from which the UN's Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports which have been since their inception – particularly the executive summaries - carefully contrived political initiatives disguised as objective science.
The CRU emails undermine Warmers' claim to the moral high ground
Soon persuaded of the potential of AGW theories for their bottom line, the energy giants effortlessly recalibrated their stance, and as of 2008 the CRU included among its financial supporters not only Shell and BP, but also the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and UK Nirex Ltd, a company in the nuclear waste business.
After some initial dismay at what has been called, somewhat unoriginally, 'Climategate', the reaction amid progressive circles – 99 per cent inhabited by True Believers in anthropogenic global warming - has been to take up defensive positions around the proposition that deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate and, although embarrassing, the CRU emails in no way compromise the core pretensions of their cause.
Scientific research is indeed saturated with exactly this sort of chicanery. But the CRU emails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers – always absurd to those who have studied the debate in any detail – that they commanded the moral high ground.
It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the sceptics as intellectual whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate modeling enterprises. There's now a vast archipelago of research departments and "institutes of climate change" across academia, with a huge vested interest in defending the AGW model. It's where the money is. Scepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.
By the same token, magazines and newspapers, reeling amidst the deadly challenge of the internet to their circulation and advertising base have seen proselytising for the menace of man-made global warming as a circulation enhancer – a vital ingredient in luring a younger audience. Hence the abandoned advocacy of AGW by Scientific American, the New Scientist, Nature, Science, not to mention the New York Times (whose lead reporter on this topic has been Andrew Revkin, who has a personal literary investment in the AGW thesis, as a glance at his publications on Amazon will attest).
Many of the landmines in the CRU emails tend to buttress long-standing charges by sceptics that statistical chicanery by Prof Michael Mann and others occluded the highly inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, running from 800 to 1300 AD, with temperatures in excess of the highest we saw in the twentieth century, a historical fact which made nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilisation of the twentieth century.
Here's Keith Briffa, of the CRU, letting his hair down in an email written on September 22, 1999: "I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards 'apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data' but in reality the situation is not quite so simple... I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago."
Now, in the fall of 1999 the IPCC was squaring up to its all-important 'Summary for Policy-Makers' – essentially a press release, one that eventually featured the notorious graph flatlining into non-existence the Medieval Warm Period and displaying a terrifying, supposedly unprecedented surge in twentieth century temperatures.
Briffa's reconstruction of temperature changes, one showing a mid- to late-twentieth-century decline, was regarded by Mann, in a September 22, 1999, e-mail to the CRU, as a "problem and a potential distraction/detraction". So Mann, a lead author on this chapter of the IPCC report, simply deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of Briffa's reconstruction. The CRU's Jones happily applauded Mann's deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over "Mike's Nature trick". Like politicians trying to recover from a racist outburst, AGW apologists say the "trick" was taken out of context. It wasn't.
Other landmines include particularly telling emails from Kenneth Trenberth, a senior scientist and the head of the climate analysis section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. On October 14, 2009, he wrote to the CRU's 'Tom': "How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are nowhere close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!"
In other words, only a few weeks before the Copenhagen summit, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that "we are not close to knowing" how the supposedly proven AGW warming model might actually work, and that therefore "geo-engineering" – carbon-mitigation, for example - is "hopeless".
This admission edges close to acknowledgement of a huge core problem – that the "greenhouse" theory violates the second law of thermodynamics which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body without compensation. Greenhouse gasses in the cold upper atmosphere cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. Readers interested in the science can read mathematical physicist Gerhard Gerlich's and Ralf Tscheuchner's detailed paper published in The International Journal of Modern Physics, updated in January 2009: "Falsi?cation Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics".
"For the last eleven years," as Paul Hudson, climate correspondent of the BBC said on October 9, "we have not observed any increase in global temperatures". Recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com, show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly for the last eight years or so.
CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance. The average Arctic ice coverage has essentially remained unchanged for the last 20 years, and has actually increased slightly over the last three years. The rate of rise of sea level has declined significantly over the last three years, and its average rate of rise for the last 20 years is about the same as it has been for the last 15,000 years, since the last glacial cooling ended and we entered the current interglacial warming as the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska started to flood and became the Bering Straits.
In the early 1970s, the UN spearheaded the highly progressive notion of a new world economic order, one that would try to level the playing field between the First World and the Third. The neo-liberal onslaught gathering strength from the mid-1970s on destroyed that project. Eventually the UN, desperate to reassert moral leadership, regrouped behind the supposed crisis of climate change as concocted by the AGW lobby, behind which lurk huge corporate interests such as the nuclear power companies. The end consequence has, as represented by the power plays over "carbon mitigation" funding at Copenhagen, been a hideous travesty of the 70s vision of a global redistribution of resources.
The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith-based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by a man-made CO2 build-up and that human intervention – geo-engineering - could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it's a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it's a terrible tragedy. ·
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I would like to endorse Dave Bowen's comment (3.58pm Dec 18). I teach environmental science and try to make exactly the points he makes here.
Some of the comments, pro and anti, on this page (and on this topic generally) are quite disgraceful, in particular the labelling of sceptics as 'deniers' - a deliberate and egregious attempt to draw an analogy between climate change sceptics and Holocaust deniers. Isn't it the duty of science to be sceptical? Isn't that why we have null hypotheses, and demand that the experimental method allow us to see whether we can reproduce your results in our laboratories. Isn't the essence of peer review that only if we fail to prove you wrong, will we accept that you are probably right - for now.
The only other point I would add is that everyone viewing this post will be doing so on equipment designed in the US or Japan, but manufactured in China. The reason the Chinese are now the world's biggest polluters is largely due to the fact that the First World economies have exported their pollution to China, the supplier of all our consumer electronics. The credit crunch we're now experiencing is as much a part of the problem(s) that gave rise to Copenhagen and the 'cap and trade' charades so cogently summarised by Javier Novoa (9.47pm Dec 20) - a 'conspiracy against the public', if ever I saw one.
MichaelG - I am not at UEA and have never been at UEA. The 'coming of another ice age' you [I think] allude to was a journo invention cobbled from a lack of understanding of science [pretty common, don't read tabloids if you want information]. And your oft-repeated point has been answered so many times it's like deja vu, but I'll reiterate. Global warming is the process that is happening, and it IS happening, despite this repeated lie of cooling over the last decade, it's simply not true, there is ample data showing the warming has continued. Climate change is the EFFECT of global warming - energy gets stored in oceans, oceans give off more water vapour because of the [small] rise in temperature, resulting in more clouds, more rain, more floods.
Dear me , Holly Cox, you are fast becoming one of the boys ! And, jayprime, Peter Simmons is at UEA, surely he remembers global cooling , and global warming, then climate change , so named in case things do change..again. I do, and he is much brighter than all of us. Although not so bright as Al Gore who can smell a penny a mile off. He will make money no matter which way it goes.
jayprime and others: does the fact that scientists have occasionally been proven wrong mean that we should always ignore them? Should we ignore Darwin's theory of evolution because his grandfather believed in Lamarckian evolution? It's not a good argument, so can we drop it?
Twenty or so years ago this self same "Climate Research Unit" at the University of East Anglia were proclaiming that we were headed for a new Ice Age.
Am I the only one to remember that?
Do I just have a longer memory than most?
Surely not. There must be others who remember it.
But I suppose that was before researchers started getting large Grants to research "Global Warming"!
Prove there is no such thing as "Global Warming" caused by the activities of man and you lose your Grant.
Then what do you live on?
Tends to make one want to prove that human influence on "Global Warming" needs more investigation, doesn't it?
Cockburn's assessment of the catastrophic climate change case, and the dismal politicized state of this quasi-theological "science" is generally correct, although he should have been more careful and not dismiss the greenhouse effect based on the Gerlich's and Tscheuchner paper. I can't evaluate the paper, but it seems to run counter to the widely established notion that this effect is real. The vast majority of skeptics acknowledge it is real, but maintain (reasonably) that the thermal sensitivity to CO2 at current levels of increase is very small and no cause for alarm, and that the values imagined by the IPCC, based on completely conjectural feedback amplifications, are not to be taken seriously, and that even if they were true, the "mitigation" attempts through reduced CO2 emissions would have a negligeable effect on temperatures, if any. One thing most observers agree on, skeptics and believers alike, is that the carbon trading schemes proposed will serve only to create useless bureaucracies and widespread frauds and scams, since monitoring this on a global escale is essentially impossible. The fat cats pushing for such schemes know all this as well, but they keep pushing because many stand to gain a lot from it, and others simply want to keep their job. There are many reasons why trying to transition away from fossil fuels is a good idea, the most compelling of which is that their supply is limited. Pollution (real pollution) is also a real problem, but CO2 has nothing to do with it and none of these schemes address it. This whole thing is a crock and we would all be much better off if the IPCC and all related entities were dismantled. It won't be easy, though. These bureaucracies, once they develop, are extremely hard to eliminate. Even if their central reason for being were proved to be invalid, they would find ways to morph it into other reasons, before that happens, to keep justifying their existence.
So basically you takes your pick, one scientist says one thing then another says the opposite...then a lot of numptys write rubbish on this comment board citing their baseball bat of agreeing scientists and the rest of us are supposed to fall into one of two lines for or against.
The politicians love this, while you are all shouting at each other from your entrenched positions they are putting in place policies to milk us, if anyone thinks an estimate of $100,000,000,000 anywhere near covers their objectives they are living in 'cloud cuckoo land', talk in Trillions with the Billions merely covering the fraudulent conversion of this revenue to personal and unrelated gain. One day someone will predict the outcome correctly, probably by pure chance and probably too late to either change the result, or to stop us ordinary folks being 'robbed blind' but if it entertains you just you keep on shouting your personal beliefs 'cos thats all they are.
Obama flies to freezing Copenhagen while snow and ice blanket Washington, so he can look foolish and talk nonsense about "global warming". Gov. Sarah Palin advised him to boycott the climate-change charade. He should have followed her advice.
Truth is being lost in a sea of irrelevance.
I totally agree with Alex Cockburn article. There has always been an awful lot of fantasy about 'Global Warming'. I have analysed a lot of Data on this subject, and the figures can be manipulated into whatever you wish. I have always been sceptical of the fact that the Planet is significantly warming up, and indeed data that I have seen indicates that there has been some cooling. Between 1930 and 1970 there were records to indicate that the climate was fairly consistant, with no attributable rises in temperature. In fact it was shown that there was some small cooling. This was during a period of time of very high industrialisation throughout the developed world. This climate change conference in Copenhagen is an elaborate waste of time and money. It keeps certain people in some very well paid jobs. It is a great shame that so many people in the world have been totally misled. I would state that certain scientists should be ashamed of themselves.
Academic arrogance with the CRU et al, yep. Dead on. For Cockburn, maybe: love him or hate him. But to arrogate climate change on anthropogenic causation by our species in light of the growing Climategate data is the arrogance of faith, not science. Or have the alarmists infected us with a feeling of guilt. The guilt is proper re: the appalling damage we have inflicted on the environment. We can start with removing the small print in Hillary's $100B blackmail scheme to the 3rd World and use it to really begin to clean things up.
But we have made the villain CO2. CO2?? What a $cam. Environmentalists are usually pretty smart people, but to go along with the UN regarding evil CO2? In light of the cherrypicking by CRU et al, don't you feel like a sap in light of the betrayal? One of the horrid consequences of this line of policy: Eugenics. So go ahead, take it out on Cockburn, sure. I think he actually likes it. But please tell me the PR company that sold this "man-made CO2 is the problem" to you smart people. I need to get in touch with them. I have a bridge to sell. And yes, I am a scientist.
Magnificent article, Mr. Cockburn. Your allusion to the council of Nicaea isn't fanciful; AGW is indeed a religion and its followers, doubtless well-meaning, nonetheless duped. Anyone prepared to put in the effort to study the evidence, as I have been doing assiduously since Climategate broke, will see it is overwhelmingly against AGW.
I do not like the tone of some pro-AGW people: never discuss the science where ad hominem will do, as illustrated by more than one post above. The truth is the truth whoever discovers it, or funds it, provided evidence for it is independently validated by peers, including the sceptics.
Or, for that matter, if one's father is alleged to be a scoundrel. Incidentally, the theory of acquired characteristics, attributed to Lamarck, was perverted by Lysenko in the USSR, and anyone using that kind of notion to counter a rational argument may be saying more about themselves and their lack of scientific awareness than anything else.
Big Oil helped set up and fund the CRU, and the Climategate emails allude to that. But as I said, that wouldn't have mattered to me if only the science had been conducted with fairness, integrity, and dedication to the truth. Instead, it was shabby, cynical, mendacious, and quite possibly criminal.
Oh Dear,
Perhaps, like me you see nothing but partisan posturing and bombast from both"sides" of this argument.
The fact is that neither side is being in the least bit honest about the "truth".
Science is indeed prone to distortion and downright falsification of results. I have attended 4 Universities and seen research that was barely literate from a scientific viewpoint. There are two basic problems, the scientific method is dependent upon hypothesis testing and peer review. In the climate fraternities hypothesis testing often only involves seeking evidence that supports a creed. Peers are linked in like-minded belief groups so critical review is sometimes less than critical. This applies to both polarities in the climate debate, the nay-sayers and the doom-sayers.
As is often the case, the truth lies somewhere in between all this, and I know that this position will only incurr vitriol from both fraternities, there is little to be gained from saying it....but:
The Earth is warming, inpart due to insolation variation due to the solar "weather", in part due to orbiticity issues, and in part due to increases in "greenhouse gasses". The problem is we don't know how much is due to each effect.
Computer models are both always wrong and self fulfilling prophecies. They never generate the truth. It is impossible to model in all the critical issues in the climate , simply because many of them are "critical" in the mathematical sense, their behaviour tends to chaotic cascade events. In adition to thier chaotic nature, they all feed-back into each other to varying degrees - hence the comments quoted in this piece about reflectance (albedo) being not well understood currently.
So we don't "know", but we have ample evidence to suggest that there is a probability that AGW is real, and it is quite possibly a significant part of overall GW. The situation would benefit from an independent honest review with the error bars included. All the hype and hate does nothing to enhance our understanding of the issue and less for the reputations of those involved.
On one issue I agree wholeheartedly with the author - Climate politics has deflected almost all attention from the real environmental issues we face. GW will primarily effect the human populous, the Earth is not dying because of it and there is ample evidence of the climate being much hotter in the past (Cretaceous for example). What we are doing through massive input of pollutants, deforestation, human expansion and destruction of water resources, land reclaimation, etc is destroying biodiversity at a calamitous rate. This is not something we can recover from through Carbon-credits and the like, we need to address this issue ahead of climate change, but almost certainly won't.
I worry that with the UN spearheading the climate change issue as a South versus North, Third World versus First world issue, with the developed countries being asked to pay for the developing countries avoidance of the CO2 rich pursuit of wealth.
Biodiversity, on the other hand is almost wholy in the hands of the developing countries, with most developed countries actually having programmes of species re-introduction. Are we suffering from colective PC guilt in not pusuing this with more vigour, or is it because no one actually cares about the major extinction event we are currently resposible for? After all biodiversity cannot vote and has no money to influence us all.
Alexander, unlike the others who think all you write is crap, I am sometimes entertained by your words. In this instance this story is badly informed. The university of East Anglia is considered a very minor player in the climate debate, and as one of the commentators reports, has some very dodgy funders. The IPCC gets information from a huge range of scientists, not just UEA, as you assert, and is considered to be conservative, just like the IACC is conservative in cancer. It gathers its information very broadly from those studying the erotic life of plankton to those who measure fauna and flora and atmospherics.
The temptation is to focus on warming when its the climate chaos that is the risk.. and anyone who farms or fishes knows that is a reality. I worked with traditional fishers in Indonesia ten years ago and they were telling me then they could not read the weather. Potato farmers in South America are having to move to greater altitudes to get crops to grow. The big crisis in a 3 degree rise is that cereals will no longer grow easily. Thy daily bread may become as extinct as rice crops. Think on that carefully.
City dwellers whose food arrives neatly packaged in Glad Wrap can afford to poo poo the idea ..Those of you who are selectivists see little nuance and personal risk as you live in a global sheltered workshop. Not for long. For those who want to know, try the latest World Watch Institute reports. See also Seth Borensteins excellent analysis of the East Anglia theft. Its a million words so those that want simple recipes need not apply.
Seth - ad hominem attacks - still haven't mustered an actual argument, have we, hrm?
Copenhagen is the last gasp of the warmistas. They know the whole thing is collapsing and the game is up. Their Titanic is holed below the waterline, and they are squabbling about who is going to get the lifeboats. A large number of the most eminent scientists have always maintained AGW was a con, and now they have first-hand evidence that proves how and why their papers were kept out of the journals. They will now be able to say "I told you so", and folk will take notice. The warmistas will soon be seen as the con merchants that they are. The CRU emails show gross unprofessionalism, evil motives and agendas, and unethical behaviour - which in themselves are very damaging but not perhaps quite enough to sink the ship. The computer code released, however, is incontrovertible evidence of scientific fraud - they have faked their results. You can argue and disagree about ethics and motives, but you can't explain away the most transparent fraud. It's now only a matter of time before it is demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the warming and cooling trends in the past few hundred years are completely natural, and that any supposed anthropogenic signal superimposed was a purely statistical artifact created by clever cherrypicking and manipulating of the data for political reasons. The evidence for all this is growing daily, and will become a torrent that will sink this rotten ship. Soon the warmistas will be the denialists!
I see 2 things here. 1. These emails were the result of academic arrogance, an appalling trait Mr. Cockburn shares. 2. It is very important to see the forest in spite of the trees. Of course we are missing many details and have made errors. Of course there are other factors affecting climate change. But the forest of anthropogenic climate change is there. We humans, as the causal agents, must deal with it.
Anyone quoting Monckton and AA Gill to back up their argument has revealed the paucity of their intellectual case in a trice.
Readers may be unaware that Alexander Cockburn is the son of Claud Cockburn, who in the 1930s filed fantasy reports about Republican victories in the Spanish Civil War, and suppressed news of actual defeats, in the service of the Comintern approach to historical truth (which was that anything which served the Soviet cause was 'objectively true', even if factually not the case). Clearly, being in denial can be an hereditary condition.
At last! A mainstream media commentator, with a track record of telling the truth as he understands it through the medium of his ecellent journalism, tells it as it is. There is huge evidence emerging quite rapidly as to how deep the CRU scam. The Russians are the latest to discover that CRU scientists cherry-picked environmental data from Russian sites, leaving out the sites with a long continuity of readings and veracity and choosing sites which had short data runs and higher temps. The scam is on a worldwide scale, the UN is rotten to the core and I for one am delighted that Alex Coburn has done his research properly.
Attempting to 'disappear' the Medieval Warm Period' really instructs us as to how brazenly dishonest the CRU frauds have been. All scientists should have a sceptical attitude toward a thory until that theory is proven; turning the word 'sceptic' into a Pseudo-religious taunt, as the AGW camp has done, is grossly unethical and anti science.
Alex - well done. Glad to see TFP is on the side of rationality and genuine debate.
Seth - persuasive counter-argument.
Holly - see this Monckton presentation from 28' onwards for why you are wrong about heat being trapped in the atmosphere:
http://www.cfact.tv/2009/12/07/lord-monckton-on-climategate-at-the-2nd-i...
Finally, AA Gill sums it up depressingly well in the Sunday Times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6954...
Can anybody please say where we can get the truth in all this?
'Scientific research is indeed saturated with exactly this sort of chicanery.' I have never seen a more blatant anti-science stance; does he also reject medical science? Does he reject astrophysics? Were they lying about landing on the moon, were all those Hubble pictures cobbled together in Photoshop in order to get more grants? Cockburn is an idiot, I rarely glance at his scribblings from mainstreet Amurka any more than I bother with Fox news or the mouthings of Oral Roberts, HE's DEAD, halleluja, one less moron on the planet.
Cockburn has clearly had his brain softened since living in Amurka for so long, and oh how the epsillons love him for it. All happy idiots together, believing anything that saves them from having to change their juvenile 'I want it now' mentality. Of course Cockburn is a scientist as well as a journo isn't he? No? Oh well, never mind, neither are any of the denialista so he's amongst friends. The emails [Cockbum clearly hasn't read any of them] do no such thing, they show very little as anyone who HAS read them knows, he's just cobbled together a few lies copied from various sources and pasted them into a piece which is unprofessional even by his standards. And all the sad little retards gather here to cheer, really pathetic, so desperate for confirmation of your deranged non-thinking, you actually think this nonentity has added something to the debate.
It would take too long to unpick this sloppy, dashed off before lunch bit of journo tat, and I have far more important things to do like picking my nose. Who IS Cockburn exactly?
MJose - was that a typo? Did you mean mid 70s in you diatribe? " remember the mid-80s? Remember the 3-day week and the lights going out with national power cuts, remember the uncollected rubbish in the streets and the uncollected corpses in the hospital mortuaries with all the 'public' services on strike because the unions thought they could run the country so much better than anyone else? No? Well I do." No, akshally you don't, you phantasise them but, like Sunny Jim "What Crisis?" & your sainted Mrs T "No such thing as society", they were meeja beat-ups, never said the way claimed.
As for Cokburn, Claude who be disgusted.
Michael Jose: Sorry - you're looking for cold hard science from Horizon? The same series that gave us the supervolcano under Yellowstone that is long overdue a catastrophic, humanity threatening eruption. Oh and themega tsunami that is going to wipe out Western civilisation when a slice of the Canary Islands falls into the Atlantic. The fact they were predicting a new Ice Age back in the 1970s is quite funny, but sadly is not an effective argument against manmade climate change
Struggling with friends debating a skeptical position on 'climate change?' Had doubts for some years now about the veracity of institutionalised claims for 'global warming?' Wondering why the chatter is about carbon and not hunger, 'carbon credits' and not effective malaria control? Then follow the money as Mr Cockburn suggests in this succinct and definitive riposte to the CO2 brigade. Forward it to friends. Thanks Mr Cockburn.
By selectively quoting the figures that tally with his argument, Cockburn is doing exactly what he accuses the evil liberal AGW conspiracy of doing. Also, my highlight from the several bits of humanities student-level 'science': who said anything about CO2 transferring heat to the earth? The whole point of it being a greenhouse gas is that it keeps heat in the earth's atmosphere, rather like a greenhouse. And another thing: the energy giants didn't effotlessly recalibrate their stance on AGW - it took years of boycotts and campaigns.
Aha! At last the fact that everyone with a mature memory going back to mid-1970s is coming home to roost. All the scientific journals, pop mags like New Scientist, and the blessed old BBC in an Horizon special trumpeted global cooling and the possibilty of a new ice age (often portentously written New Ice Age). We were even overdue for one! Then CO2 gets politicized - Nigel Lawson let the cat out of the bag in his book 'A Cool Look at Global Warming' that Maggie Thatcher (bless) used CO2 as greenhouse gas as a weapon against the miners - remember the mid-80s? Remember the 3-day week and the lights going out with national power cuts, remember the uncollected rubbish in the streets and the uncollected corpses in the hospital mortuaries with all the 'public' services on strike because the unions thought they could run the country so much better than anyone else? No? Well I do. Then the rest of the century rode on and the fact that the whole of the 20th century had been fairly warm became unavoidably obvious and the global warming scareology became the flava of the day. It all boils down to carbontaxology and political control. Copenhagen is a big con, and I don't want to pay.
This is arrant nonsense, shame on you Alex.
Damnation! A librul who gets it. The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age makes a big fat camel out of the hockey stick. It is science that is on trial here. Glad you didn't fall into the political dualisms of the day. Huzzah: Corporations on the right; Corporations on the left. There's plenty else we could do with that $100B to repair our earthly damage without creating a new world government of carbon tax collectors. Great stuff.