Global Warming Hysteria (cooled)

Ah, how our superstars tend to let us down when we get to know their dirty little secrets...This time its dear Julia. Late spokeswoman for Earth Biofuels (the current push for which is slowly wrecking the planet) and for all celeb green causes, Julia R. has been spotted alighting from an SUV at a local restaurant.

It appears that unlike other moralities with EnviroMENTALISM it is acceptable to play the Moral Hypocrite Pass Card, take the night off from saving the planet and do your bit to wreck it again.  Ah, how the might are fallen. Here's Julia in happier times - picking up the Most Beautiful Environmentalist Award and here travelling by the eco-bus she wants the rest of us to use.

For more go here.  

Al 'I-am-definitely-not-standing-as-a-candidate-for-the-presidency' Gore jetted in to the UK to warn us about something called climate change. Britain, currently - and contrary to climate predictions - is suffering one of the most changeable and wettest summers for a while. (Odd that Gore's message should be a warning about climate change then...). Now I have to say the timing of his visit could have been better. Haven't we in the Isles suffered enough terrorism these past days without hosting the world's no 1 Climate Terrorist?

The Ego now having landed I guess his visit has something to do with this weekend's global Live Earth Concert. For anyone that doesn't know what Live Earth is, it is where  the world's leading pop and rock star 'intellectuals' queue up to parade their ignorance of life, love and the pursuit of happiness - oh yes, and how the climate works.

Newspaper reports suggest that choosing Shanghai to kick the global concerts off this weekend was an inspired - well the al-Guardian owned Observer did any way - choice. (Presumably that has something to do with the Chinese being a world leader in the leftwing propagandist stakes?)  Gore expects around 2 billion people will be reached with his apocalyptic visions - wow, that's even more than suffered the Black Death (only 75 million).

In any event,  no one has got around to calculating the CO2 emissions jetting all of these super stars around the globe and moving around countless hundreds of thousands to concerts will pump into the atmosphere. But they, all 2 billion, having a greater insight into the future, are more important than the rest of us (who should sit still and breathe only when we simply must).

The National Center for Public Policy Research is challenging Greenpeace and its affiliates to disclose the sources and amounts of its 2006 donations exceeding $50,000. If it does so, The National Center for Public Policy Research will do the same.

We're making this challenge in light of allegations in Greenpeace's May 17 report, "ExxonMobil's Continued Funding of Global Warming Denial Industry," which suggests that it is improper for 41 groups, including The National Center for Public Policy Research, to accept contributions from ExxonMobil because the positions of at least some of them on climate issues is not precisely in accordance with those of Greenpeace.

Most of the groups singled out for criticism in the Greenpeace report work on a wide variety of public policy issues. For most of the groups, climate policy is just a small fraction of their portfolio. Greenpeace - perhaps based on its own behavior - assumes that donations influence the stands groups such as ours take. They do not. So that the public can judge for themselves, we're challenging Greenpeace to complete transparency through disclosure of major gifts.

Funding from energy companies is not what is fueling the vigorous climate debate. What is fueling the debate is genuine, sincere belief that great uncertainties remain - both on the science and on the appropriate public policy response.

As the stakes, and the costs, of the climate debate are immense, it is entirely proper that many voices and perspectives be considered - not just those of Greenpeace and its allies. If Greenpeace disagrees with others, it might more productively use its resources debating the issue itself, rather than focus on the fact that certain groups also addressing climate issues receive less than 1% of its revenue from ExxonMobil -- as ours did. Greenpeace has profited more from corporate largesse than The National Center for Public Policy Research and similar groups ever will.

Although Greenpeace has a policy against accepting direct corporate donations, the group just received a $27 million bequest from the heir of a major shipping company, a company which emitted 7.13 million tons of CO2 in 2005 (about .12% of ALL U.S. CO2 emissions).

Further, Greenpeace Executive Director John Passacantando's compensation is three times - perhaps more - the total amount of corporate contributions The National Center for Public Policy Research received in 2006. Perhaps that fact puts things a little more into perspective.  If Greenpeace expects its call for public disclosure of grants of other groups to be taken seriously, they should lead by example.

If not, they're the real "denial industry."

Source: National Center for Public Policy Research press release 

A new book Cape Wind: Money, Celebrity, Class, Politics and the Battle for America's Energy Future on Nantucket Sound by Wendy Williams and Robert Whitcomb has just been published. It chronicles the tawdry hypocrisies of the Kennedys and others who want the rest of the world to make green sacrifices - to avoid them having to do it.

 Here's a taster from Alex Beam's review article : Wind, Sand, and Stars : Or, the NIMBYs of Nantucket Sound.

On page one, McCullough is fulminating about Cape Wind, the 24-square-mile, turbine-powered electrical power project that energy entrepreneur Jim Gordon wants to build in Horseshoe Shoal, not far from McCullough's Martha's Vineyard home. McCullough sputters in fine company, with Walter Cronkite, Rachel "Bunny" Mellon, and all manner of Kennedys. Because, as everyone knows, it is one thing to speak out in favor of homeless shelters, affordable housing, and "clean" energy projects. It is quite another thing to gaze at them from your front door.

Al Gore, it seems, is still tearing up the jet-setting miles and pumping vast quantities of CO2 emissions into the environment on his quest to inform each member of the human race, personally, that they should be flying, driving and emitting less. 

What a fascinating moral code Gore lives by. It is a bit like Jesus Christ giving the Sermon on the Mount - and then beetling off for a dirty weekend with someone else's wife at the King Herod Brothel.

Source:  Canada's News Talk 980.

A December 2006 survey of the offset business, compiled by a team of specialists in the field, criticized the majority of the companies hawking the product. "There are no widely accepted standards...as to what qualifies as an 'offset' for purposes of making consumers carbon neutral," notes the report, titled A Consumer's Guide to Retail Carbon Offset Providers. "Almost anyone can offer to sell you almost anything and claim that this purchase will make you carbon neutral." Commissioned by Clean Air-Cool Planet, the study looked at thirty firms and gave the majority of them poor marks.

Whatever their intentions, these companies operate in an accountability vacuum. While the Kyoto Protocol established widely accepted guidelines for countries looking to offset their greenhouse gas emissions, at the consumer level there's little agreement about anything--no universal standards for estimating a person's carbon footprint, no agreement on the technologies that are most helpful in reducing global warming and no regulatory body to oversee the industry.

"It's like the Wild West out there," comments Anja Kollmuss, a member of the Climate Initiative team at Tufts University, which has studied the difference between the regulated and unregulated carbon markets.

Source: Center for Investigative Reporting as covered in this article published at The Nation.

Greenpeace is accusing the World Bank of playing a duplicitous game by acknowledging the threat of climate change while also supporting various fossil fuel energy projects. Here's the article:

Greenpeace has argued that in spite of an acknowledgment from the World Bank's President, Paul Wolfowitz, that climate change is a serious issue, the bank continues to fund fossil fuel projects and fails to prevent forest destruction-- the very causes of the problem. The World Bank's current spending on fossil fuels continues to dwarf its comparatively miniscule investments in sustainable renewable energy-- a mere USD 153 million in 2006.

In its recently published report, "Energy Revolution", Greenpeace has shown that with proper investment equivalent to current fossil fuel subsidies of around USD 300 billion a year-- renewable energy along with energy efficiency would deliver the 50 per cent reduction of global emissions by 2050 needed to avert the potentially apocalyptic scenarios presented by the inter-governmental panel on climate change last week.

Greenpeace also launched a new report "Carving up the Congo" on the logging sector in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) this week. The report calls for the Bank, the largest funder of the DRC Government, to urgently act to stop the expansion of the logging industry in the country, as logging is a key driver of deforestation, which causes climate change.

Greenpeace is of course at the forefront of the movement pushing for the mass switch to biofuels. This alarmist driven rush means that deforestation - to clear the enormous land masses needed to grow the 'food' crops  from which biofuels are largely made (and isn't this food more important to feed the world's poor?) - is currently rampant and proving an enormous headache on its own. Greenpeace don't seem to care that their appalling one-dimensional policies are causing some of the very problems they seek to help. 

But then facts, logic and reason have never been Greenpeace's strong suit.  Recently they were chastised for calling carbon dioxide a pollutant - which it isn't.  Self-righteous moral' lynch-mobs are always been difficult to engage with.  Just look what one achieved on Good Friday.

One of the more sickening aspects of eco-fundamentalism is the murky trade in carbon offsets to assuage private guilt. Fine for the rich, lousy for the poor who can't afford to buy off their consciences  (that's if you consider carbon emitting 'sinning' at all...). 

Anyway here's Earth Day founder Dennis Hayes (did you know we needed to celebrate/worship the Earth?) commenting on one toff who is doing his bit to offset his jet-set lifestyle (if only I had one to offset): 

"I find it slightly offensive that somebody who literally goes on two safaris a year, drives a Rolls-Royce, has at least three houses, and offsets his carbon emissions for $85 can brag about it," he said. "It's doing some good, but it doesn't in any way compensate for his impact on global warming."

The European Union and Australia have started a war of words over climate change, with Canberra calling on Brussels to live up to its own global warming promises before lecturing others.
"You've got the spokesman for a group of countries lecturing us about not having signed Kyoto, yet the great bulk of the countries on whose behalf he speaks are falling well behind their Kyoto targets and are doing less well than Australia in meeting them," Australia's prime minister John Howard said on Monday (2 April), reacting to critical comments made by EU environment commissioner Stavros Dimas the same day.

Source: extract from article at European Observer. 

You see, this is the problem.  When you commit yourself to a worldview belief system - and that is what the modern environmental movement's 'pattern of faith' is - the real test is whether you "live it" and don't just "talk it". As a practising Christian I should know - take a step out of line and the world and his brother are on your back.

In this article US 'Green cities' are being criticized for being 'all talk and no action' on carbon cutting. The criticism is valid as this is what we in the real world call: hypocrisy.  If you are going to publicly proclaim your belief in GW catastrophe, then, for it to mean anything, you have to act upon your belief - or no one will take you seriously.

It's Easter, so I can say this ...Jesus 'lived it' and paid the penalty for doing so. That's what's required of all Christians. I accept that. So should my fellow Christians - and without complaining too. NB. So why mention faith here at all when we should be talking about science? Well that is entirely my point. Much science and GW belief is - and must be - predicated on faith.  In the absence of empirical proof it is necessary to employ some degree of faith and that's what so many Greenies are in denial about.

It is obvious that Gore doesn't live it. Neither it seems do many other Green adherents unless, like the Hollywood glitterati, they can afford to pay up for carbon offsets - or 'moral offsets' as they should be called.  Christians used to call this technique 'Indulgences'. The medieval church dumped the practise when it was seen for what it was - an immoral alternatives.

Happy Easter! 

Al Gore is by no means alone in his evangelistic moral hypocrisy as the diplomat charged by the British Government with lecturing the world on global warming has been revealed as one of the biggest contributors to it.

John Ashton, whose role is to persuade other countries to reduce CO2 emissions, has made so many foreign trips by air in his job that his carbon footprint is already 30 times bigger than the UK average.  Figures obtained under Freedom of Information legislation show he has flown more than 80,000 miles since his appointment last June.

It is becoming a little tempting to suggest that the most appropriate song for the Gore-radical Climate Change movement ought to be '(I'm) Leaving' On a Jet plane'.   

For more go here.  

You too can be 'carbon neutral' - if you can afford it. Oh it doesn't mean you actually commit to giving up any carbon emissions to actually help the environment 'directly' it just means, if you have enough money, you can buy carbon 'offsets' to assuage moral guilt and personal responsibility.

This was what tripped Al Gore up in the GW hearing this week. Essentially, at least on the issue of GW and by his own objective reasoning he is a moral cripple.  The medieval Catholic Church fell for this kind of lame thinking when its increasingly liberality (i.e. making void the actual the historic teachings of the church)  introduced Indulgences.The real world was rightly appalled at the ethical vacuity of this kind of practice.  If you've got enough money you can buy back your sin and guilt - as for the poor, well tough...Not exactly the kind of self-sacrificing morality that Jesus taught was it?

Here's an excellent piece by Terry Keenan at Fox News yesterday which sets out exactly why the new Green Morality isn't worth the ideology its rooted in.  Carbon offsets are already popular and big business, they are going to be around for a while. Don't miss your opportunity to show disgust at even the mere thought of it.

And here's more from the National Post on Gore's recent 'rough ride'  over his peculiar brand of Green Morality.

SMEAR ALERT: And finally, there's nothing quite like the smell of yet further moral hypocrisy whenever leftwhinger (sic) liberals cry of "foul!" in order to divert attention from the real issue - whenever their moral hypocrisy has been brought up. Here they are, after the recent assault on Mr Gore's personal ethics - something Gore of course makes an issue, don't forget - accusing Senator James Inhofe and his right hand man Marc Morano of masterminding a  'smear campaign' against Gore. 

For the record, I and this site works closely with Senator James Inhofe's office, particularly with Marc Morano. I find that working with men of integrity is a great help whenever Truth becomes an issue, don't you? (I just hope my Vast Rightwing Conspiracy check is in the post...)

The critical heat is certainly growing on Al Gore not least for his patent moral hypocrisy and failure to live the lifestyle he is urging on others. But, in addition, Gore is becoming known for avoiding real debate on the issues. Last week saw three anti-alarmist speakers defeat three GW alarmists in a straightforward genuine debate on the issues in New York City.

Gore himself turned down an opportunity for public debate with Professor Bjorn Lomborg on a visit to Norway.   And this week has seen an open invitation from Viscount Monckton which proposes an internationally televised  debate with Gore in Oxford on any date of Gore's choosing. The proposal is worth reading for its flamboyant medieval character with overtones of chivalry and honor - not something Gore is becoming known for. Here's an excerpt:

"The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley presents his compliments to Vice-President Albert Gore and by these presents challenges the said former Vice-President to a head-to-head, internationally-televised debate upon the question "That our effect on climate is not dangerous", to be held in the Library of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History at a date of the Vice-President's choosing.

"Forasmuch as it is His Lordship who now flings down the gauntlet to the Vice-President, it shall be the Vice-President's prerogative and right to choose his weapons by specifying the form of the Great Debate. May the Truth win! Magna est veritas, et praevalet. God Bless America! God Save the Queen!"

We should not hold our breath however for we should realize that Gore's newfound fame and riches depend not on reason but on cant and propaganda.  Gore is becoming increas9ingly well known for not only avoiding debate but for refusing to answer questions after public appearances too.

Gore simply cannot afford to be engaged upon genuine debate on the science facts as he understands only too well - the facts are not on his side but, for the time being, the media hype is.  To be an also-ran in the race for the planet's top job might be considered bad luck. But to also be outed as the 'deceiver-in-chief' on the top global issue of our age (top issue, only because he made it so) now that's just plain bad  moral judgment and a mark of a wholly unchivalrous character.

And read about the 'heat'  Gore took up on Capitol Hill yesterday.  

Members of the black leadership network Project 21 urge elected representatives to use Al Gore's appearances today before the House Energy and Commerce Committee and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee to ask the former Vice President about his own lavish energy consumption -- and his advocacy of a society in which only the wealthy could enjoy amenities most Americans currently take for granted, like home heating. Gore's proposals would result in a society in which the rich get warmer and the poor get colder.

While Gore is a long-time proponent of personal energy conservation and draconian regulations to mandate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research revealed that Gore's mansion in the exclusive Belle Meade neighborhood of Nashville uses more than 20 times the national household average of electricity.

In response, Gore's office said the Gores "do the carbon emissions offset" -- such as making environment-related investments -- that allegedly neutralize the environmental harm related to their extraordinarily-high energy use.

Gore receives his offsets as a benefit from a company that he co-founded -- Generation Investment Management -- and reportedly does not pay for them himself. Interestingly, Carbon Neutral Company, which provides Generation Investment Management with its offsets, says its offsets "will be unable to reduce greenhouse gas emissions... in the short term."

If Gore's "buying offsets" strategy were to be adopted nationally, the average consumer would essentially be expected to pay twice for heat and power: first for the energy itself, then for offsets to atone for them.

Source: National Center for Public Policy Research press release. 

Al Gore's attempt at the World's Worst Polluter record is well on course with yet another upcoming jet trip, this time to Chile on May 11 and for just a few hours.  But, we are told, Mr Gore will be making this a strictly "carbon neutral" trip. So that's alright then, no hurt to the environment in this trip.

It is not that he won't be polluting the atmosphere with jet fuel  et al you understand - merely that he is rich enough to pay for trips that he doesn't want you and me to make (unless we can afford to make it "carbon neutral" too, that is). It is a strange - and expensive world, this world of the New Morality. But then when you can make a cool $200,000 for just a few hours work you too can afford to "carbon neutral"?

I must be in the wrong business. According to Greenpeace and Leo di Caprio, all of us who are non-alarmist and speak out in the GW debate are "in the pay of the oil companies"...yet how is it that GW alarmism clearly pays so well?  There is your conundrum for the day.

NB. Gore's film 'An Inconvenient Truth' has been called "science fiction" in a new paper prepared for Congress. "Al Gore put global warming on the map," said Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, at a Capitol Hill press conference on Friday. He called "An Inconvenient Truth" the "most politically influencing documentary."

But Lewis added: "Nearly every significant statement that Vice President Gore makes regarding climate science and climate policy is either one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative or wrong." Lewis outlines these arguments in a 140-page congressional working paper released Friday, ahead of Gore's trip to Washington, D.C., to provide congressional testimony on global warming.

He said the movie "purport[s] to be a non-partisan, non-ideological exposition of climate science. In reality, the film is a computer-enhanced lawyer's brief for global warming alarmism and energy rationing."

Al Gore has profited from zinc mining that has released millions of pounds of potentially toxic substances near his farmstead, but there is no evidence the mine has caused serious damage to the environment in the area or threatened the health of his neighbors.

Two massive white mountains of leftover rock waste are evidence of three decades of mining that earned Gore more than $500,000 in royalty payments for the mineral rights to his property. For the full article go here.

And here is a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece which today poitns out how the broader media has caught up with many of Al Gore's blatant hyocrisies.  

So when you buy your first carbon offsets - just exactly where does the money go?  One psychotherapist (!) Greenie found herself not a little shocked...

...and as carbon offsets could take a year to kick in at all, the argument advanced for their benefit won't make any difference to those of us currently arguing the case - one way or the other.  

It seems that GW alarmists don't like it when freedom of speech is exercised and the mainstream media, for once, actually gives a platform to those of the world's leading climate scientists who do not agree with the prevailing view constantly delivered in the mass media that purports to suggest a science consensus on clime where none really exists.  In short, they didn't like Martin Durkin's ''The Great Global Warming Swindle. So let;s quickly review their chief complaints.

1. Professor Carl Wunsch was "misrepresented". Actually he wasn't. He just thought he would be taking [part in a programme that was showing how complex and impossible it is to be clear about predictions. This of course does not put Prof. Wunsch in the alarmist camp at all but merely suggests he was misled about the nature of the programme - that is indeed regrettable and should not happen. Now set this instance against the fundamental fraud of the administrator's at the UN who put the name of dissenting scientists on their IPCC reports. Which do you think is worse?

2. They are complaining about the above (at 1) when, in fact, the complaint of those taking part in Durkin's documentary have had to suffer  years of not being able to gain a platform for their views at all to speak in any documentary or by having their work published in 'science' magazines.  Bearing this in mind then, which of these amounts to 'propaganda', years of denying a voice to other views in countless doumentaries and news stories - or those who have been allowed a single programme to put their case? Take your time...no rush...

3. Most important of all however, is the core point of the programme...that there is an entirely different - and much more obvious - cause for the small amount of global warming the earth has undergone. That is the clear complexity over the role of clouds in warming and cooling cycles and the role of solar activity as the chief cause which is the chief purpose of this documentary. The fact that they are picking holes in the minor issues and leaving the main issue entirely unanswered is highly revealing.

NB. The following was sent to me by 'Jon' and taken from the Daily Telegraph website:

"Among those who attempted to prevent the film being shown at all was the Liberal Democrat spokesman on the environment, Chris Huhne, who, without having seen the programme, wrote to Channel 4 executives advising them in the gravest terms to reconsider their decision to broadcast it."

Ed. Notice how it is usually 'liberals' wo are consistently behind the closing down of debate and free speech these days?  And I haven't even gotten around to mentioning the threats and death threats...