"Extreme" weather? You mean like this?

[ncsonde]

Jan 23, 2013 18:44:38 GMT jean said:

Jan 23, 2013 12:54:52 GMT ncsonde said:

Mine is factually accurate, that's the difference...

No it isn't.

"In the United States, we have to first convince the American people and the Congress that the climate problem is real." (Bill Clinton, 1997 address to the UN meeting to discuss the latest IPCC report that had concluded that there was no discernible evidence that there was any "climate problem".)

"Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous global warming is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are." (VP Al Gore - now founding chairman of a business that has made hundreds of millions of dollars selling carbon credits.)

"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." Stephen Schneider, leading advocate of the global warming theory, Discover magazine interview, 1989.)

"Scientists who want to attract attention, who want to attract grant funding, have to find a way to scare the public...and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are." Petr Chylek, Prof of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie Uni, Halifax, in interview about research showing that many of Greenland's glaciers are not melting from increased temperature but from wind patterns.)

"Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing (by saying it's happening) in terms of economic and environmental policy." Tim Wirth, leading advocate of AGW (as current Pres of the UN Foundation), then UN Under-Sec for Global Affairs.

"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits....Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." Christine Stewart, Minister of the Environment of Canada, in interview with the Calgary Herald.

The only part of this that does have some smidgeon of truth in it is this:

...we fiddle with the science a bit to make people believe it's worse than it is...

and even that is based on a genuine belief on the part of those doing the fiddling that things really are very bad and people must be made to pay attention.

It's no part of science to do any fiddling, whatever the supposed reason. In the old days, before this corruption became commonplace, such falsification and manipulation would have got any scientist summarily dismissed, and his career effectively concluded.

It's a very foolish and misguided strategy, and I and all the GPEW people I know would be absolutely opposed to it.

Every time I see that ludicrous woman Caroline Lucas in a television interview she trots out the same old line: the science is settled, the world is going to warm up by two degrees by the end of the century, it's a proven fact and the vast majority of scientists agree, therefore we have to do blah blah blah. If she had a fraction of the awareness of the science she pretends, she'd know that was all complete rubbish - simply not true, any of it. So is she merely ignorant, has she been deceived, or is she what she claims, au fait with the science but nevertheless deliberately deceiving the public for her own ends?

It is also quite true that people on the 'right', like Delingpole, have indulged in electoral skulduggery on behalf of the anti-AGW lobby.

What "lobby"?

I started a thread about that, but the marchesa persisted in thinking it was about something else.

You probably didn;t bother to explain yourself properly, I expect.
Too busy to articulate clearly, no doubt?

If you can find me an example of a Green Party member who admired Saddam Hussein I'll be interested, but I won't regard them as typical.

You're saying the Green Party is not leftwing? Dear me. I don;t know what's happened to the great international socialist brotherhood these days.

Many people of all political persuasions thought the invasion of Iraq was at worst illegal and at best unwise, but that's not the same thing as admiring its leader.

You socialists don't approve of the Ba'ath Party any more? I'm shocked - what on earth has happened to so disillusion you all? Something dreadful like the falling of the Berlin Wall and the betrayal of all those stalwarts behind the Iron Curtain was it? Still - at least you've still got China and Vietnam to look up to when dreaming of the sunlit future...oh no, they've gone all capitalist, haven't they? In the despicable interests of making money and feeding themselves. And Cuba! What on earth is happening to the glorious revolution there? The population have been allowed their passports back! Oh no - they're all going to escape to the Great Satan, like millions already have done...Thank goodness you've still got North Korea.

[aubrey]

Right - back to saying that everyone on the left supports all supposedly left wing dictators. Pathetic. Like saying that conservatives all support Hitler.

Aubrey on the other hand is totally unable to demonstrate his attempted insult whatsoever, other than to point out that Nigel Lawson is a Conservative, and that a few "rightwing" newspaper columnists have had the temerity to question the political manouevrings of the liberal-Left by claiming to take the AGW thesis seriously.

It is the right wing - Republicans, Conservatives, UKIP who make the most anti AGW noises. And there are many anti AGW lobbying groups. It is very naive of you to imagine that there aren't.

I don't see why you regard Right Wing as an insult (unless it's because you regularly use Left Wing as an insult); but in any case, a right wing person reading a lot of right wing blogs would naturally think of them as neutral.

[visitor]

Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science

Audit trail reveals that donors linked to fossil fuel industry are backing global warming sceptics


Steve Connor

Thursday, 24 January 2013

A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.

Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

Some commentators believe that such convoluted arrangements are becoming increasingly common to shield the identity and backgrounds of the wealthy supporters of climate scepticism – some of whom have vested interests in the fossil-fuel industry.

The Knowledge and Progress Fund, whose directors include Charles Koch and his wife Liz, gave $1.25m to Donors in 2007, a further $1.25m in 2008 and $2m in 2010. It does not appear to have given money to any other group and there is no mention of the fund on the websites of Koch Industries or the Charles Koch Foundation.

The Donors Trust is a "donor advised fund", meaning that it has special status under the US tax system. People who give money receive generous tax relief and can retain greater anonymity than if they had used their own charitable foundations because, technically, they do not control how Donors spends the cash.

Anonymous private funding of global warming sceptics, who have criticised climate scientists for their lack of transparency, is becoming increasingly common. The Kochs, for instance, have overtaken the corporate funding of climate denialism by oil companies such as ExxonMobil. One such organisation, Americans for Prosperity, which was established by David Koch, claimed that the "Climategate" emails illegally hacked from the University of East Anglia in 2009 proved that global warming was the "biggest hoax the world has ever seen".

Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has estimated that over the past decade about $500m has been given to organisations devoted to undermining the science of climate change, with much of the money donated anonymously through third parties.

The trust has given money to the Competitive Enterprise Institute which is currently being sued for defamation by Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania University, an eminent climatologist, whose affidavit claims that he was accused of scientific fraud and compared to a convicted child molester.

Dr Brulle said: "We really have anonymous giving and unaccountable power being exercised here in the creation of the climate countermovement. There is no attribution, no responsibility for the actions of these foundations to the public.

"By becoming anonymous, they remove a political target. They can plausibly claim that they are not giving to these organisations, and there is no way to prove otherwise."


From www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-billionaires-secretly-fund-attacks-on-climate-science-8466312.html?origin=internalSearch#

[visitor]

How the 'Kochtopus' stifled green debate

Behind the climate 'countermovement' are two billionaire brothers


Steve Connor

Thursday, 24 January 2013
Even by the standards of the super-rich, Charles and David Koch are extraordinarily wealthy. Together they own most of Koch Industries, one of the largest private conglomerates in America with annual revenues of around $100bn (£62.5bn), and interests as diverse as energy, petrochemicals, pulp and paper.

The two brothers share a similar political outlook. They are right-wing libertarians who believe in minimal regulation of industry, smaller government, lower corporate taxes and less generous social services. They are also closet "sceptics" when it comes to climate science.

Charles, 77 and the elder of the two, has effectively run the family business since the death of their father, Fred, in 1967. He is described as a hands-on executive, whereas David has played a more junior role. Nevertheless, the spectacular growth of the family firm has put them both among the richest men in America – and the world.

Each of the Koch brothers has his own charitable foundation and they have given generously to organisations that share their free-market outlook. They have both funded opposition campaigns to many of the policies of the Obama administration – so many, in fact, that their opponents have dubbed their ideological network "The Kochtopus".

Together, the two brothers have given millions of dollars to non-profit organisations that criticise environmental legislation and support lower taxes for industry.

The Kochs have also contributed vast sums to promote scepticism towards climate change, more even than the oil industry according to some estimates. Greenpeace, for instance, has calculated that ExxonMobil spent $8.9m on climate-sceptic groups between 2005 and 2008; over the same period the Koch brothers backed such groups to the tune of nearly $25m.

Americans for Prosperity, a group established by David Koch, did much to foment public outrage over the "climategate" emails stolen from the computers of the University of East Anglia (UEA) in 2009. The organisation claimed the emails proved that global warming was the "biggest hoax the world has ever seen".

Meanwhile, Charles and his wife Liz have established a little-known organisation called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, which appears to have been set up to channel Koch money into a third-party organisation called the Donors Trust.

The Donors Trust is a "donor advised" fund, which means it has special status under the US tax system. One of the benefits of donor-advised funds for billionaires such as Charles is that their names are not linked to funds given out by the Donors Trust to other organisations.

Among the beneficiaries of Donor Trust money is the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is being sued for defamation by Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania University, an eminent climatologist, whose affidavit claims that he was accused of scientific fraud and compared to a convicted child molester.

Professor Mann was one of the scientists named in the stolen emails from the UEA and has been a target of climate sceptics keen to rubbish his work on temperature records, which produced the now famous "hockey stick" graph showing a rapid temperature rise in the 20th century.

According to Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Donors Trust and its sister organisation Donors Capital Fund have become key players in the climate "countermovement", which he says is dedicated to maintaining the status quo on energy policy.

For instance, in 2003 Donors received just 3 per cent of the funding that eventually went to climate sceptic groups such as the ultra-conservative Heartland Foundation, which has led the attack on climate scientists. Professor Brulle said this had risen by 2009 to about a quarter of the total funding of the climate countermovement dedicated to denying the link between greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and global warming.

The link between the Koch family and Donors was discovered by Professor Brulle and John Mashey, a retired software engineer living in California, who has trawled through hundreds of official tax records, including the US Inland Revenue Service's "990" forms of the Knowledge and Progress Fund, which mention that it had given Donors millions of dollars for "general support".

"The Kochs decided it was better to go underground and foster all these think-tanks. Charles Koch has often said publicly that anyone should be able to give money to anyone without having to make it public," Dr Mashey said. "The point of all this is that Koch wants to anonymise his giving as much as possible."

Whitney Ball, the chief executive of Donors Trust, said the fund has given more than $400m to about 1,600 beneficiaries since it began in 1999 but that only a few of them are involved in promoting climate scepticism.

"We don't disclose our list of donors, any more than other donor-advised funds… We are not legally required to do so. We have been referred to as a black box but this is a misleading and unfair characterisation. We are no different from any other donor-advised fund," she said.

"There are all kinds of reasons why people want to be anonymous. Imagine you lived a fairly modest lifestyle and you wanted to give charitably. You could do it through a donors-advised fund and no one would treat you differently," she said.

Asked whether the Donors Trust or Donors Capital Fund have any connection with the Koch family, Ms Ball said: "I wouldn't say we have a relationship. We are knowledgeable about some of the groups that they fund and we are ideologically sympathetic."

Asked if she could explain how the money from the Knowledge and Progress Fund was spent, she said: "There's been a lot of hyperventilating about this… Like other donor-advised funds, we don't disclose that information."

The Charles Koch Foundation and Koch Industries declined to comment.

Lawson's sceptics double secret donations in a year

Anonymous donations to Britain's leading climate-change sceptic organisation have more than doubled over the past year – but the registered charity has consistently refused to comment on the identity of its backers.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was set up in 2009 by Lord Lawson, pictured, the former Conservative Chancellor, received £408,641 from anonymous donations in 2012, compared with £158,008 in 2011.

The foundation has repeatedly refused to name its financial supporters, although a leaked email last year suggested that Michael Hintze, a wealthy Tory donor and philanthropist, was one of its main backers.

Benny Peiser, a founder member of the foundation, said the charity does not receive any corporate money from the fossil-fuel industry, but denied it is being secretive about its backers.

"Our concern is about transparency of the science, not the funding. We don't take funding from vested interests and we make sure there is no conflict of interest before accepting donations," Dr Peiser said. "The main reason why they want to remain anonymous is so that people like you [the media] don't harass them," Dr Peiser explained.

www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/how-the-kochtopus-stifled-green-debate-8466316.html#

[jean]

Jan 24, 2013 14:37:27 GMT ncsonde said:

"In the United States, we have to first convince the American people and the Congress that the climate problem is real." (Bill Clinton, 1997 address to the UN meeting to discuss the latest IPCC report that had concluded that there was no discernible evidence that there was any "climate problem".)

"Nobody is interested in solutions if they don't think there's a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous global warming is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are." (VP Al Gore - now founding chairman of a business that has made hundreds of millions of dollars selling carbon credits.)

"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we may have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." Stephen Schneider, leading advocate of the global warming theory, Discover magazine interview, 1989.)

"Scientists who want to attract attention, who want to attract grant funding, have to find a way to scare the public...and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are." Petr Chylek, Prof of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie Uni, Halifax, in interview about research showing that many of Greenland's glaciers are not melting from increased temperature but from wind patterns.)

"Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing (by saying it's happening) in terms of economic and environmental policy." Tim Wirth, leading advocate of AGW (as current Pres of the UN Foundation), then UN Under-Sec for Global Affairs.

"No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits....Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." Christine Stewart, Minister of the Environment of Canada, in interview with the Calgary Herald.

None of these carefully-marshalled quotes gives any hint that the people quoted don't actually believe in an impending catastrophe.

Preventing that is the end they think justifies the highly dubious means they have chosen to adopt, which all Green Party spokespersons that I know would distance themselves from.

You have not been able to produce any evidence at all that their purpose in scaremongering is actually to make vast profits for themselves by trading in carbon credits, or satisfying their lust for power.

Every time I see that ludicrous woman Caroline Lucas in a television interview she trots out the same old line...

Caroline Lucas has never advocated making statements we know to be false or exaggerated in the in interests of getting people to sit up and listen.

She isn't a scientist, true. But then, neither are you. She considers the evidence, assesses it, and decides what to believe.

Just like you.

[marchesarosa]

BBC newsreaders have been heard describing the recent few inches of snow as "extreme weather". On Question Time last night it was revealed that schools in Weymouth had been closed courtesy of a few millimetres of snow. The College in which the show was held was also closed EXCEPT FOR A-LEVEL STUDENTS WHO HAD EXAMS TO SIT WHO WERE PRESUMABLY IMMUNE FROM H&S RISKS.

Snow was never called "extreme weather" when I was a kid. Neither was it treated as a national tragedy just a rather regular inconvenience.

But I guess the BBC is sticking to the IPCC Global Warming/Climate Change/Weird Weather/Weather Disruption/Extreme Weather song sheet.

See also radio4scienceboards.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=hobnobbing&action=display&thread=1769

By the way, Nick and I are still waiting for our cheques from the Koch Bros/BIG OIL. And so all are all the other contrarians I know.

Hypotheses are either confirmed or falsified by EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE, by the correctness of their PREDICTIONS and by the REPLICABILITY of their results NOT according to WHO funds the research. But what would a trick cyclist know about the scientific method? They make it up as they go along, don't they, just like the IPCC's pet "climatologists"?

[aubrey]

By the way, Nick and I are still waiting for our cheques from the Koch Bros/BIG OIL. And so all are all the other contrarians I know.

You're the best kind - you give it up for nowt. Who pays for the blogs etc that you get your information from? Who pays for that research? Do they use the same methodology as Pharmaceutical companies do in testing new(ish) drugs?

It's happened before: who paid for the research that blocked the removal of lead from petrol for - what was it, 30 years? 50 years? - after it was discovered to be harmful?

No one even noticed the snow in 1963 or 47 (was it?), much less allowed it to change their daily routine.

Schools never closed in those days either, did they? I don't remember them closing, so they can't have done.

[aubrey]

Memory's a wonderful thing, though: people have remembered seeing Bugs Bunny in Disney Land, and children have remembered seeing video nasties that didn't exist.

Hey up, Marchesa. How goes it?

[marchesarosa]

My school never closed in 1963, I can assure you of that Aubrey. And i never failed to get to it either. neither did the rest of the staff and pupils. How inconvenient for you and some of the junior members of the BBC that YOUR memories do not extend quite so far.



"Who pays for the blogs etc that you get your information from"

I do, amongst many others, with regular contributions to the tip jar.

My beneficiaries over the years - WUWT, Bishop Hill, Prof Tim Ball, Climate Audit, Jo Nova and the Chiefio, . I am happy to support blogs that are struggling to provide information and publicise the academic research that contradicts the AGW scam. The blog owners I know are self-supporting. They have jobs and businesses and are not dependent upon some patron. This year I will be supporting in a small way a sun/climate conference being organised in Leeds by Tallbloke.

Inaugural Conference 2013: The Solar-System Dynamic Theory of Climate tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/01/18/inaugural-conference-2013-the-solar-system-dynamic-theory-of-climate/


(Until I wised up in 2007 I supported Greenpeace with regular monthly direct debits for years, too.)

If you weren't on the poverty line, aubrey, I dare say you would put your money where your mouth is, too. Do you think there is a problem with people supporting their chosen "causes"?

Trouble is, as taxpayers in a nation where all but 3 MPs voted though the Climate change Act 2008 on the nod, we don't have any choice whatsoever in where the government spends our "climate" money. In a more or less free society, I am, however, able to spend my OWN money where I see fit.

You political partisans would lurve to stop that, wouldn't you? Hence the constant harping on BIG OIL and BIG THIS, THAT and the OTHER. You just lurve a juicy conspiracy. And the ammunition thrown by you and your trick cyclist friend consists entirely in the ad hominem. Neither of you have a clue about the extent of the climate research being undertaken round the world.

Science knows no partisanship, aubrey. Predictions based on scientific hypotheses are either correct or not. Time will reveal all. In the meantime, temperatures and just about every other indicator are at a bit of a standstill ordistincly unalarming.

So chill out man or apply for a special needs grant to pay your fuel bills.!

[aubrey]

Interpretations of science are political, though: Govts interpret the science on illegal drugs entirely politically: IE, they pretty much ignore anything that doesn't support what they want to do.


Do you think that the Koch brothers are not involved in secret funding? Like the big oil companies were involved in keeping lead in petrol for years after it was known to be dangerous? I know that it's a vaguely liberal newspaper that has reported this, but politics shouldn't matter, should they?

The thing is, who stands to make most money out of abandoning AGW policies? Who pays to lobby Govts so that pretty much bugger all progress is made on worldwide policies? There are many, many lobbying groups who are paid to do this stuff, and it works - look at all those conferences where nothing much is ever decided on.

And why, if the science is so obvious, so incontrovertible, do so many people not agree with you?

[aubrey]

How inconvenient for you and some of the junior members of the BBC that YOUR memories do not extend quite so far.

I remember '63, just. My mother has a picture on her bedroom wall of me and my brother and the neighbour's kid standing in front of a verge covered in snow (with "God" written in it: we lived at a Methodist college), and looking at it I sometimes get a sense of what it was like on that day. I would have been 4 then, so not old enough for school (I think I started later in the year - Spring or Summer, probably). My mother says that she doesn't remember how we managed - we lived in the Peak District, and away from the nearest village. Maybe it would have been possible to get down there, though. The road we lived on was/is about as wide as a car, and unless the college got the students to clear it I don't see how it would have been passable.


The BBC (and the rest) did exaggerate the weather last week, but only because they were covering large areas; the Met office website was more nuanced, and in the end was pretty accurate, at least for Thurnscoe. I was worried about buses not running etc, or having difficulty getting down to the bus stop if they did run, but in the end it was ok. (My real worry was running out of drugs, and having to get a special prescription, which would have been difficult in itself).


This is where we lived in 1963 (I think our door might have been the one just before that lean-to affair):



And this is the road, a few yards down from our house:

[marchesarosa]

"And why, if the science is so obvious, so incontrovertible, do so many people not agree with you?"

Because they misunderstand the nature of the phenomena they are scaremongering about, aubrey. Simple.

It is not a matter of "politics interpreting science" it is quite the other way round in "climatology". One day in the not too distant future it will be laughed out of court with the other pseudo sciences of psychology, psychiatry and sociology where "findings" are also subject to the ideological bias of their proponents! Scientists who don't understand the difference between objectivity and advocacy do not deserve the name.

[aubrey]

They're scientists, Marchesa. They're no more political than anyone else in this.

Why are they called scaremongerers? Why aren't the people who disagree with them called the opposite of whatever scaremongering is? (Is there a word for pretending that there's nothing wrong, despite the evidence? Oil companies and car manufacturers have form in this, remember.)

[marchesarosa]

Here's the low down on one of the "Climate scientists" you choose to defer to, aubrey, written by donna Laframboise.

Meet ‘One of the World’s Foremost Climate Scientists’

January 25, 2013 at 1:33 pm
nofrakkingconsensus.com/2013/01/25/meet-one-of-the-worlds-foremost-climate-scientists/
Andrew Weaver: climate modeler, Green Party deputy leader, Greenpeace promoter.

Andrew Weaver is a climate modeler. Which means he spends his time messing about with computers. His “research” takes place in a virtual, imaginary, speculative world. Decades or centuries from now his climate predictions may turn out to be correct. Or they may be forgotten because they were spectacularly wrong.

What’s important is that, at this moment in history, Andrew Weaver is one of the world’s foremost climate scientists and a leading expert on global warming…He is Canada Research Chair in climate modeling and analysis at the University of Victoria, and has authored or coauthored nearly two hundred peer-reviewed studies in climate, earth science, policy, and education journals. He was chief editor of the Journal of Climate from 2005-2009.

Those lines are from his bio at the Lavin Agency, which helps Weaver acquire paid speaking gigs. That bio twice mentions his involvement with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – and that the IPCC won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

So, to sum up, Weaver is:
- a “foremost climate scientist”
- “a leading expert on global warming”
- the author of nearly 200 scholarly papers
- an IPCC author
- a former chief editor of a respected scientific publication called the Journal of Climate
- linked to a Nobel Peace Prize

In other words, he sounds utterly eminent, respectable, authoritative, and trustworthy.

But as fellow blogger Hilary Ostrov has been writing recently, if you peer the slightest bit beneath the surface you discover that this “foremost climate scientist” has strong political views that call his scientific objectivity into question.

Much of Weaver’s professional life involves interpretation and judgment. If that judgment is coloured by an activist worldview the uncomfortable conclusion is that the journal he used to edit may have been making biased decisions when it decided which research deserved a place in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and which research should never see the light of day.

While we might wish otherwise, Weaver is not the sort of scientist who stays above the fray, who leaves politics to the politicians. Rather he is, himself, an overt political actor. At the moment he is deputy leader of British Columbia’s Green Party. Ostrov’s post here includes a Twitter screen capture of Weaver, last October, accepting that position and telling the world how honoured he is.

Earlier this week, Ostrov penned a post about Weaver titled "IPCC Lead Author is Greenpeace PR Agent?" pointing out that he recently promoted a new Greenpeace publication via Twitter.

With the oh-so-understated title, "Point of No Return: The massive climate threats we must avoid", this publication talks about an “unfolding global disaster” and “catastrophic climate change.” It warns of “untold human suffering” and “the deaths of tens of millions.” That’s just on page one of the executive summary.

On the following page, Greenpeace tell us that:

climate scientists are increasingly linking alarming extreme weather events to climate change.

What proof does it offer? A peek at endnote #9 reveals a reference to a single newspaper opinion piece written by the notorious drama queen James Hansen. Unlike environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr. – who says the exact opposite – Hansen has no natural disaster extreme weather expertise.

Greenpeace then tells us that:

These extreme weather events include Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, droughts in the US in 2012 and 2011, heat waves and forest fires in Russia in 2010, and the European heat wave in 2003 that killed tens of thousands.

Endnotes #10 to #14 reveal that Greenpeace is basing these claims on four newspaper articles, a “news briefing” published in Nature, and a journal article that discusses heatwave deaths. In other words, these sources merely establish that bad things have happened. They do not begin to provide scientific evidence that such events are the result of human-induced climate change.

Nevertheless, believing that a sheaf of news clippings equals a persuasive scientific argument (just like you, in fact, aubrey!), Greenpeace concludes that:

The disasters the world is experiencing now are…just a taste of our future if greenhouse gas emissions continue to balloon.
This is scaremongering, plain and simple.

So why is “one of the world’s foremost climate scientists” and “a leading expert on global warming” promoting it? Can he not tell the difference between solid data and green propaganda?

But perhaps we should give the man a break. A few months ago, the Lavin Agency bio claimed that Weaver was a “Co-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.”

Weaver has since been demoted. The IPCC has issued a statement saying it’s improper for any of its personnel to describe themselves as Nobel laureates. In response, Weaver’s bio now claims he’s a “Member of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Panel.”

Unfortunately that, too, is erroneous. Countries are members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Individuals are not.
Read Ostrov’s latest blog post on Andrew Weaver here hro001.wordpress.com/ and here hro001.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/ipcc-lead-authors-passion-for-politics/

---------

Read Donna's article on her blog for all the links.

[marchesarosa]

And as for billionaires funding climate propaganda what about Jeremy Grantham who funds AGW Alarmism HQ at the LSE and Imperial College?

Has he no axes to grind? Wiki describes his funding of the LSE AGW Propaganda School as "philanthropic". But then, wiki, would, wouldn't it?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Grantham

It's amazing really, with all the billionaires, governments, banks, investors, media, google and wiki backing the AGW scam that there are still folk who keep the principles of scientific scepticism, enquiry and objectivity alive, isn't it? And what is more, they are gaining ever more attention and credibility.