Agenda 2030

Tom Harris Accurately Describes the Gov’t’s Behavior, Re: Climate Agenda!

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Climate Debate Dominated by ‘Duckspeakers’

TIME TO RELEARN THE LESSONS OF NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR

by Tom Harris, Executive Director, ICSC, ©2016

(May 28, 2016) — In Oceania, the dystopian society of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, a new language was created by the government to control the thinking patterns of the populace.  Officially labeled ‘Newspeak’, it was the first language that, when fully adopted, was meant to limit the range of human thought. Concepts such as freedom, skepticism, and debate would be virtually unthinkable since no words existed to describe them, aside from the generic term ‘thoughtcrime.’

Perhaps most insidious was ‘duckspeak,’ a form of speech consisting entirely of words and phrases sanctioned by the party, language that conveyed politically correct messaging only. Someone who had mastered duckspeak could fire off ideologically pure assertions like bullets from a machine gun without thinking at all. Their words merely emanated from the larynx like the quacking of a duck.

Being called a ‘duckspeaker’ was considered a sincere compliment since it indicated that you were well-versed in the official language and views of the state.

More than ever before, we are now in an era of climate change duckspeak. Rather than being merely ridiculous or social satire, the apparent underlying purpose of climate duckspeak is ominous: to convince opinion leaders and the public to think about climate change only as the government wants. To consider alternative points of view is ‘climate change denial,’ today’s version of thoughtcrime, punishable by excommunication from responsible citizenry. If AGs United for Clean Power, a coalition of sixteen Democratic state Attorneys General (AG), has their way, speaking out on the other side of the climate debate could soon result in civil or criminal charges.

President Barack Obama sets the stage for climate change duckspeakers, often reassuring us that “the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.”

But, as Carleton University Earth Sciences Professor Tim Patterson points out, “Climate is and always has been variable. The only constant about climate is change; it changes continually.” So Obama’s claim, and that of other opinion leaders who say the same, appears to be a self-evident, but trivial, truth like ‘sunrise is real’.

But it is much more than that. Intentionally or otherwise, the President is using a strategy right out of Nineteen Eighty-Four. His statements imply that experts have concluded that unusual climatic events are happening, and that government must save us.

Obama strengthens this perception with dramatic assertions such as that in the “Cutting Carbon Pollution in America” section of the White House web site: “I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that’s beyond fixing.”

Referring to greenhouse gases (GHG) as “carbon pollution,” as the White House does twelve times on their climate change Web page, is pure duckspeak. This conjures up subconscious images of dark and dangerous emissions of soot, which really is carbon.

What Obama and others are actually referring to is carbon dioxide (CO2). But were they to call it that, most people would be unconcerned, remembering from grade school that the trace gas is essential for plant photosynthesis. So climate campaigners mislabel it ‘carbon’ to frighten the public and to discourage further thinking, closely following ‘Big Brother’s’ strategy in Orwell’s classic.

Similarly, referring to low CO2 emitting energy sources as clean or green is a mistake since the gas is in no way unclean. But the label promotes an image of environmental wholesomeness, hiding the true ineffective and damaging nature of many alternative energy sources.

Finally, the “97% of experts agree” phrase is, using Oceania’s vernacular, ‘doubleplusgood’ duckspeak, designed to suppress debate and boost the party line. After all, who would dare contest experts about such a complicated issue?

But ‘appeal to authority,’ and ‘appeal to consensus’ are logical fallacies that prove nothing about nature. And, even if such surveys were taken seriously, one would have to ask: Do these experts study the causes of climate change? What did they agree to?

In fact, none of the surveys that are used to back up the consensus argument are convincing. They either asked the wrong questions, asked the wrong people, or polled mostly those who would obviously agree with the government’s position.

Independent reports such as those of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change show that the science is highly immature with wide-ranging opinions about the future of climate change.

Although first published 67 years ago, Nineteen Eighty-Four is now more relevant than ever. University of Florida linguist M. J. Hardman summed up the important role language plays in societal control when she wrote in her paper Language and War (2002), “language is inseparable from humanity and follows us in all our works. Language is the instrument with which we form thought and feeling, mood, aspiration, will and act[ion], the instrument by whose means we influence and are influenced.”

It is not surprising, then, that language tricks like Orwell’s duckspeak are being used to justify the unjustifiable in the war of words over global warming.

___________

Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (www.ClimateScienceInternational.org).

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“Government-induced Climaphobia”….a Money-Grabbing Hoax!

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Founder of Weather Channel Claims Global Warming Is A Hoax

April 22, 2016 Christopher Kemmett

John Coleman, Founder of The Weather Channel, 60 years a Meteorologist, Claims “Global Warming is a Hoax”.

Zero Hedge: “If Bill Nye had his way, Weather Channel founder John Coleman would be heading for jail. Having spent more than 60 years as a meteorologist, Coleman penned a pointed rebuke to “the science guy’s” vehement faith in the ‘science’ of climate change, exclaiming that “science has taken a back seat at The UN… get politics out of the climate debate.”

 

From USATODAY:

With the Obama administration set to commit the U.S. to the Paris climate agreement by signing our nation onto the document Friday, it is obvious that science has taken a back seat at the United Nations.

The environmentalists, bureaucrats and politicians who make up the U.N.’s climate panel recruit scientists to research the climate issue. And they place only those who will produce the desired results.  Money, politics and ideology have replaced science.

U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres has called for a “centralized transformation” that is “going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different” to combat the alleged global warming threat. How many Americans are looking forward to the U.N. transforming their lives?

The former head of the U.N. climate panel also recently declared that global warming “is my religion.”

When all the scare talk is pushed aside, it is the science that should be the basis for the debate. And the hard cold truth is that the basic theory has failed.

 

 

Wind Energy is NOT Suitable for Prime Time!

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The Cruel Hypocrisy: West Drops Wind Power as it Forces ‘Fake Electricity’ on the World’s Poor

December 18, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Eiffel Tower Night

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After the Paris Climate Jamboree, the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers are licking their chops at the prospect of having the rich world fund the construction of millions of these things in the dark corners of the Planet. Sensible first world economies have tumbled (albeit, belatedly) to the fact the wind power is patent nonsense.

Paris, aka ‘The City of Light’ has been lit up by nuclear power for over 50 years, and that’s not about to change any time soon.

9-400

Britain has seen the light and has scrapped subsidies to wind power, with the number of threatened wind farms going from a roar to a whimper:

UK Wind Industry Collapses as David Cameron Slashes Subsidies for Wind Power

The Spanish were beguiled for a while by the wind industry’s promises of millions of jobs and free power, in exchange for the €billions in subsidies thrown in hope at the four winds. But, funnily enough, reality has eventually caught up.

Spain slashed its massive wind power subsidy scam back in 2014, with retrospective and crushing effect. Since that change, during the whole of 2014 there was a piddling 27MW of wind power installed (think nine 3MW whirling wonders) and NO new wind power installed during 2015 at all:

Spain Puts its Economy Destroying Wind Industry to the Sword: ZERO MWs Installed in 2015

The wind industry’s Nordic ‘heroes’ have followed the same trend, with ‘investment’ in wind power collapsing this year; and the ‘trend’ means nothing short of inevitable doom:

Wind Power Investment Collapses in Sweden, Denmark, Finland & Norway

nordic wind power investment

And the Germans, early and once eager wind voortrekkers, are back-pedalling fast, as this piece from the Australian shows.

German renewables revolution a ‘lesson in what not to do’
The Australian
Sid Maher
10 December 2015

As he pushes for Australia to rush towards a 90 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, Greens leader Richard Di Natale cites Germany as a “powerhouse” example.

Speaking from the Paris climate conference, his message was clear: Australia’s emissions reduction target is inadequate, coal is a fringe issue in terms of support for cutting poverty in developing countries, and renewable energy is the path to the future. Germany had “become a powerhouse because they’ve embraced the transition towards renewables. It’s jobs rich, it attracts international investment”.

Brett Hogan, the director of energy and innovation policy at the Institute of Public Affairs, says: “Yes, Australia should look to Germany — but as an example of what not to do in the electricity space.” He says Germany’s renewables revolution will cost at least €1 trillion by 2030 (after subsidies to solar and wind), but its electricity system is becoming more expensive and less reliable.

The Economist reported last week that in the first half of this year households in Germany paid €0.30 for a kilowatt hour of electricity whereas the French paid a mere €0.16. It cited a report from McKinsey that said Germany was likely to miss its self-imposed target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions because it had dropped a bid to regulate brown-coal-burning power stations out of existence.

Germany’s use of brown coal could well increase because it is phasing out nuclear power.

Other European countries that have embraced renewables are also less than economic powerhouses. Finland is finishing its fourth year of negative growth and Norway’s economy expanded its fastest pace in three years last quarter largely driven by higher petroleum exports.

One of the key problems faced by any large-scale move to renewables is wind and solar power are intermittent. This is why battery storage is a potential gamechanger. But after the cost of building them, which is subsidised by the government, the marginal cost of generating power is nearly free. This undercuts coal and gas power stations.

“Germany’s major energy companies are now losing billions of dollars each year as subsidised wind and solar power destroys returns on capital and the incentive to invest in more modern, less emissions intensive generators,” Hogan says. He also disagrees with Di Natalie on the future of coal.

“The consumption of coal, to make steel, and electricity, will continue to increase over the next 25 years,” he says.

“With 2.5 billion people expected to move from rural areas to cities in the developing world between now and 2050, coal will continue to be needed to build the homes, factories, roads, buildings and cars that these people are entitled to demand.”
The Australian

Sid Maher’s talk about battery storage being a ‘gamechanger’ and with it, the cost of wind and solar power undercutting conventional generation is childish nonsense.

As we’ve pointed out before – the wind industry’s claims about cost-effective storage of bulk electricity is pure fantasy:

The Patent Nonsense of ‘Storing’ Wind Power Smashed

Even Bill Gates has pointed to the bleeding obvious:

“There’s no battery technology that’s even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables,” he said, pointing out – aswe’ve noted on these pages before – that it’s necessary “to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it’s cloudy and you don’t have sun or you don’t have wind.”

Germany is re-commissioning coal-fired plant and constructing new coal-fired plant as fast as it can. And, the Germans too have slashed subsidies for wind, with the same halt on wind power ‘investment’ as elsewhere:

Rocketing Power Prices see Subsidies Slashed, Bringing Europe’s Wind Industry to its Knees

By no stretch of the imagination can wind power be called a ‘system’ – it’s ‘chaos’, pure and simple. Here’s the output of Australia’s wind farms connected to the Eastern Grid (a notional capacity of 3,669MW spread over NSW, VIC, TAS & SA) during June.

June 2015 National

With Westerners a wake-up to the wind power fraud, the wind industry is praying on the Third World as its next gullible target.

The real story behind the Paris global warming hysteria is that the wind and solar industries are looking to feast on the $100 billion designed to be ripped from the rich; and purportedly destined for the poor.

But the catch is that the currently unlit homes of Africa and India are going to be stuck with “fake electricity” and deprived of “real electricity”.

poverty india

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Bjorn Lomborg made the point in a recent piece in The Australian, ‘Politicians in pursuit of the impossible‘, which included this tale about solar power being thrust upon unwilling Indians:

“[D]ishing out solar panels is a poor use of aid money. And it’s immoral that to make up the much-vaunted $US100bn fund, many governments, including Britain and Australia, are diverting money from existing development budgets.

Let’s look at a real-life example of climate aid in eastern India — not one involving governments but the international environmental group Greenpeace. On its website Dharnai Live, we see smiling people and solar-panel-covered roofs, and we’re told that after “30 years of darkness” green energy came to the rescue.

But here’s what really happened: last year, under the slogan “Energy access simplified”, Greenpeace supplied Dharnai with a solar-powered micro-grid — not connected to India’s central grid. Greenpeace writes that “Dharnai refused to give into the trap of the fossil fuel industry”. That is a somewhat loose paraphrasing of what the people who lived there wanted for themselves.

Back in 2010, Dharnai’s inhabitants had collected $US680 in the hope of buying their way into the power grid, which in most of India is supplied by coal-fired power plants. Four years later, still with no electricity, Greenpeace swooped to the rescue with a solar system.

The day the electricity was turned on, the batteries were drained of power within a few hours.

A boy from Dharnai remembers wanting to do his homework early in the morning before leaving to work in the fields, but there wasn’t enough power for the family’s one lamp.

Today, power from the solar system costs up to three times as much as power from the central power grid, and it also requires the use of energy-efficient light bulbs, that cost 66 times more than normal light bulbs.

But fortunately for the people of Dharnai — if not for the Greenpeace narrative — the town today is connected to the central power grid. You see, Greenpeace invited the state chief minister to the inauguration of the solar system so he could meet the grateful inhabitants. When he showed up, he was met by a large crowd of people, with signs and songs demanding “real electricity” (the kind you can use to run the stove and the refrigerator) and not “fake electricity” (meaning solar energy).

A week later, a 100kWh transformer was installed, and Dharnai received modern electricity.

Today, two-thirds of the original recipient households have opted out of the solar-panel scheme, and the rest use it primarily as a backup when the central power grid fails.

This is a part of the story you won’t hear from Greenpeace — but it shows why it’s necessary to question when well-meaning people tell us that dishing out solar panels is a good way to spend development money.

And it points to a broader problem with the state of green energy.

Here in Paris, there are many well-meaning people who argue that we need strong carbon cuts and green-energy production subsidies now and for many years to come, to get the world to move towards tackling climate change.

But at the same time, these same people argue that solar and wind is already competitive and effective, or that this moment is just around the corner. The strange thing is that those two arguments are incompatible.

We are often told that green energy is competitive in developing countries, and particularly Africa. Green energy, especially wind, can indeed help African countries, for example, to get electricity to remote, rural areas.

But that is only a small part of the big picture. As we saw in Dharnai, the grid will do by far the most good for the most people. According to a 2011 World Bank study, renewable energy “will be the lowest cost option for a minority of households in Africa, even when likely cost reductions over the next 20 years are considered”.

Popular solar lights cost almost $US2 per kilowatt hour. Using hydro, gas and oil, the grid cost for the main population centres in Ethiopia, Ghana, and Kenya will likely be US16c to US25c a kilowatt hour. In South Africa, where coal powers 90 per cent of electricity, the cost is just US9c a kilowatt hour.

Green energy costs $US168bn in subsidies right now each year, and by 2040 we’ll be paying even more at $US206bn a year.

However, it is also interesting — and surprising to many — to note that even with these massive subsidies and green policies, doing everything governments are now promising, we’ll get just 2.4 per cent of our energy from green sources in 2040, according to the International Energy Agency.

You really have to put on a pair of green-tinted spectacles to see a world in which renewable energy is about to become competitive or already is.

It is for that reason that the Paris Treaty — to be signed today, if all the talking has gone to plan — will cost a fortune and do very little. Until there is a breakthrough that makes green energy competitive on its own merits, massive carbon cuts are expensive and extremely unlikely to happen.
The Australian

Greed and avarice among wind and solar power profiteers are driving the greatest wealth transfer in history. The concept of forcing electricity on impoverished nations of the kind that can’t be delivered on demand to millions of people, who have none, is not just cruel, it’s criminal.

To force taxpayers in developed Nations to fund such a monumental fiasco, only adds to the obscenity. For a handful of human-hating ideologues to determine that the poorest in the world will never have access to that which we take for granted can’t be explained as good intentions being lost in translation.

The West is abandoning wholly weather dependent wind power, for the obvious reason that it is meaningless as a power source; and, no matter how munificent the subsidies, will never have any commercial value simply because it cannot be delivered on demand.

And yet, the West’s leaders slap themselves on the back for a job well done: US Secretary of State, John Kerry calling what they’ve cynically conjured up “the most extraordinary market opportunity in the history of humankind”. Indeed it is, but for all the wrong reasons.

What Kerry and his ilk are crowing about is using other peoples’ money (ie yours) to enable wind turbine and solar panel manufacturers in America to profit to the tune of $billions, while delivering “fake electricity” to millions of people who are desperately crying out for the real stuff.

india wind farm

‘Climate criminal’ blows whistle: ‘It’s just about the money!’

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WND RADIO

‘CLIMATE CRIMINAL’ BLOWS WHISTLE: ‘IT’S JUST ABOUT THE MONEY!’

‘Wealth transfer’ is ‘gesture to redesign the global economic system’

Published: 12/12/15

image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2014/02/gcorombos_avatar-96×96.jpg

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Secretary of State John Kerry told the Paris climate conference that ending all U.S. carbon emissions, or even those in all the industrialized world, would do nothing to impact the climate, leading one of the top critics of the climate-change movement to call the speech additional proof that the effort is all about wealth redistribution.

In another major development, the latest draft of the climate agreement does not include the creation of the International Climate Justice Tribunal, which would have been a U.N. agency that billed industrialized nations for the cleanup of natural disasters around the world.

In Kerry’s address to the conference, he made a push to get developing nations to make major commitments in reducing carbon emissions. However, his comments also gave considerable fuel to those who believe Kerry and others are on a fool’s errand.

“The fact is that even if every single American citizen biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated all our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what? That still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution from the rest of the world,” Kerry said.

He took a step further.

“If all the industrialized nations went down to zero emissions, remember what I said all the industrialized nations went down to zero emissions, it wouldn’t be enough, not when more than 65 percent of the world’s carbon pollution comes from the developing world,” Kerry added.

Christopher C. Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and author of multiple books challenging the basis for the climate-change movement. He is in Paris as an observer at the conference, where he has been branded a “climate criminal.”

Horner said Kerry accidentally lurched toward the truth in trying to implore global cooperation.

“What he’s doing is inadvertently pointing out that this is all pain, no gain,” Horner said. “He won’t admit to the pain. They still say that if the state uses its coercive power and forces you into energy rationing and so on … it still wouldn’t impact the climate.”

Kerry used the hypothetical of zero carbon emissions, which is a far cry even from the hotly contested Obama environmental regulations calling for major carbon reductions by 2030. Horner said the real goals go much further and are plenty frightening.

“They’re talking 70-95 percent reductions in this document,” Horner said. “They really do think that they can bring us back to the renewable age, which we left over 100 years ago because we could. Suddenly we liberated hydrocarbon energy. We didn’t have to live on hydro power or solar power.”

While going back to renewables is the stated goal of climate-change activists, Horner said there’s a good reason we moved away from it generations ago.

“We’re not going back to that,” he said. “We left it. It was a time of much-shortened lifespans, disease, drudgery and mortality, crop failures leading to catastrophe and so on.”

Meanwhile, the scrapping of the International Climate Justice Tribunal marks a win on one of Horner’s highest priorities since he envisioned the panel blaming the U.S. and other advanced nations for the severe weather events throughout the world. It’s a charge he believes would have stuck at the tribunal because signatories at the conference will be expected to confess their responsibility for climate change in any final agreement.

But while Horner is thrilled, he said many others in Paris are not.

“It’s clearly going to leave the greens upset and some countries upset because it’s kicking the can down the road on a few issues,” Horner said.

Persistent sticking points are leading some climate-change activists to call for Pope Francis to come and demand unity in advancing a climate deal. Horner said the pontiff had better be ready for a debate.

“He’s going to couch this in terms of social justice, and as I have mentioned to you, that is truly perverse,” he said. “I’m not saying the pope knows this, but social justice, as they see it, is killing tens of thousands of the most vulnerable in every country.”

Listen to the WND/Radio America interview with Christopher C. Horner:

Horner said the explanation for that charge is simple. Implementing emissions reductions places major costs on energy providers, which pass the costs on to consumers. Soaring utility rates will then impact the poor most negatively and European nations that already do this see people having to choose between buying food and paying to heat or cool their homes.

As for the logistics of the conference and any forthcoming agreement, Horner said officials are twisting themselves in legal knots to avoid this being a treaty since they know Congress won’t approve it.

“The buzz here in Paris is that the U.S. Congress is the greatest obstacle to them obtaining the treaty they refuse to call a treaty,” Horner said. “That means the democratic process. There’s nothing democratic about this. If you allow Congress to get a crack at this, it’s over.

“Under Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, this would never fly. No free society would ever do to itself what they’re demanding of us,” he said.

Horner is one of seven activists opposed to any deal to have their face plastered around Paris on posters branding them climate criminals. After, first joking that activists could have picked a better picture of him, Horner said there is a message of intimidation involved with the posters.

“It’s getting a little long in the tooth, putting up all the bad guys’ pictures so everybody knows what they look like,” Horner said. “We can play the ‘What if Sarah Palin Did It’ game if you want, but they really want everybody here to now what we look like.”

In the end, Horner said the activists’ definition of climate criminal is really an indictment on those working to preserve freedom.

“We point out the policies, history, that it won’t effect the climate, that’s it’s about a wealth transfer, that it will kill the most vulnerable, that it’s a gesture about clearly what they’re openly acknowledging here – to redesign the global economic system,” he said. “When you point those things out, because they aren’t popular in the United States, you are a criminal.”

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GREENPEACE….Sworn enemy of all life on earth!

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Greenpeace Founder Reports It to the FBI Under RICO and Wire-Fraud Statutes

December 8th, 2015 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

Here is the article I was referring to in today’s post, Whose Supported Policies Kill More People: ISIS…or Greenpeace? It is by Dr. Patrick Moore.

Greenpeace has made itself the sworn enemy of all life on Earth

By Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace

Greenpeace, in furtherance of what is in effect its war against every species on the planet, has now turned to what, on the face of things, looks to me like outright breach of the RICO, wire-fraud, witness-tampering and obstruction-of-committee statutes. I have called in the FBI.

Greenpeace appears to have subjected Dr. Will Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University, to a maladroit attempt at entrapment that has badly backfired on it.

Greenpeace used this dismal rent-by-the-hour office block in the Beirut souk for its entrapment scam.

The organization I founded has become a monster. When I was a member of its central committee in the early days, we campaigned – usually with success – on genuine environmental issues such as atmospheric nuclear tests, whaling and seal-clubbing.

When Greenpeace turned anti-science by campaigning against chlorine (imagine the sheer stupidity of campaigning against one of the elements in the periodic table), I decided that it had lost its purpose and that, having achieved its original objectives, had turned to extremism to try to justify its continued existence.

Now Greenpeace has knowingly made itself the sworn enemy of all life on Earth. By opposing capitalism, it stands against the one system of economics that has been most successful in regulating and restoring the environment.

By opposing the use of DDT inside the homes of children exposed to the anopheles mosquito that carries malaria, Greenpeace contributed to the deaths of 40 million people and counting, most of them children. It now pretends it did not oppose DDT, but the record shows otherwise. On this as on so many issues, it got the science wrong. It has the deaths of those children on what passes for its conscience.

By opposing fossil-fueled power, it not only contributes to the deaths of many tens of millions every year because they are among the 1.2 billion to whom its campaigns deny affordable, reliable, clean, continuous, low-tech, base-load, fossil-fueled electrical power: it also denies to all trees and plants on Earth the food they need.

Paradoxically, an organization that calls itself “Green” is against the harmless, beneficial, natural trace gas that nourishes and sustains all green things. Greenpeace is against greenery. Bizarrely, it is opposed to returning to the atmosphere a tiny fraction of the CO2 that was once present there.

In November 2015, out of the blue, Professor Happer received an email from “Hamilton Ellis”, a soi-disant “business consultancy” operating out of rent-by-the-hour offices in a crumbling concrete block in the Beirut souk.

The bucket-shop “consultancy’s” email said that a “client”, an energy and power company “concerned about the impacts of the UN climate talks”, wanted to commission Professor Happer to prepare a “briefing” to be released early in 2016 “which highlights the crucial role that oil and gas have to play in the developing economies, such as our client’s Middle East and North Africa region”.

The email smarmed on: “Given your influential work in this area and your position at Princeton we believe a very short paper authored or endorsed by yourself could work strongly in our client’s favour. Does this sound like a project you would be interested in discussing further?”

Will Happer replied enclosing a white paper written, with major input from him, by the CO2 Coalition, a new group that he had helped to establish earlier in 2015. He also sent a copy of testimony on the “social cost of carbon” that he had given at a regulatory hearing in St Paul, Minnesota. Crucially, he added: “I would be glad to try to help if my views, outlined in the attachments, are in line with those of your client.”

In short, he was not prepared to be bought. He would help the “client” of the “business consultancy” if and only if he was not asked to attest to anything that he did not already believe.

The “consultancy” replied: “It certainly sounds like you and our client are on the same page.” It went on to ask whether Professor Happer’s two papers had been “part of the same initiative on CO2 reported on [by Matt Ridley] in the London Times recently, and added: “The focus we envisage for this project comes from a slightly different angle. Our client wants to commission a short briefing paper that examines the benefits of fossil fuels to developing economies, as opposed to a switch to so-called clean energy.”

The “consultancy” also wanted to know whether it “would be able to reference you as Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University if this project were to go ahead?”

It also tried to smoke out the identity of Professor Happer’s contacts in the U.S. media, and ended with a classical entrapment line: “It would be useful to know, in your experience, whether you would need to declare the source funding when publishing research of this kind”.

Professor Happer said: “The article … mentions Patrick Moore, like me a member of the CO2 Coalition, and my friend from Princeton, Freeman Dyson, who shares our views.”

He confirmed that his official title is Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Emeritus. He also reinforced his earlier message indicating he could not be bought by stating, very clearly:

“To be sure your client is not misled on my views, it is clear there are real pollutants associated with the combustion of fossil fuels, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen for most of them, fly ash and heavy metals for coal, volatile organics for gasoline, etc. I fully support regulations for cost-effective control of these real pollutants. But the Paris climate talks are based on the premise that CO2 itself is a pollutant. This is completely false. More CO2 will benefit the world. The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”

Professor Happer added that he no longer had external funding following his retirement, and went on: “My activities to push back against climate extremism are a labor of love, to defend the cherished ideals of science that have been so corrupted by the climate-change cult. If your client was considering reimbursing me for writing something, I would ask that whatever fee would have come to me would go directly to the CO2 Coalition. This was the arrangement I had with the attorneys representing the Peabody Coal Company in the regulatory hearings in Minnesota. The fee I would have received was sent instead to the CO2 Coalition, a 501(c)(3) tax exempt educational organization. The CO2 Coalition covers occasional travel expenses for me, but pays me no other fees or salary.”

The “consultancy” replied that the “client” was “completely comfortable with your views on fossil-fuel pollution”. It asked whether Matt Ridley might “help to disseminate our research when it is ready”, and whether the briefing could be peer-reviewed. “On the matter of reimbursement, we would of course remunerate you for your work and would be more than happy to pay the fee to the CO2 Coalition.”

Then another classic entrapment line: “Our client does not want their name associated with the research as they believe it will give the work more credibility. What provisions does the CO2 Coalition provide? Would this be an issue?”

Professor Happer replied that he was sure Matt Ridley would be interested in the briefing and that Breitbart would be among blogs and syndicated columnists that could also be interested.

As for peer review, he explained that “this normally refers to original work submitted to a scientific journal for publication, and not to the sort of articles that Ridley writes for the media, or what I think you are seeking to have written. If you like, I could submit the article to a peer-reviewed journal, but that might greatly delay publication and might require such major changes in response to referees and to the journal editor that the article would no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly your client would also like.”

He said his fees were $250 per hour, and that his Minnesota testimony had required four eight-hour days, so that the total cost was $8000. He said that, if he wrote the paper alone, he did not think there would be any problem stating that “The author received no financial compensation for this essay”. He added that he was pretty sure that the “client’s” donation to the CO2 Coalition would not need to be public according to US regulations of 503(c)(3) educational organizations, but that he could get some legal advice to confirm this if asked.

The “consultancy” replied: “The hourly rate works for us and, as previously discussed, we are happy to make a direct donation to the CO2 Coalition, providing it is anonymous. We can look into the official disclosure regulations, but it would be useful to know whether the CO2 Coalition voluntarily discloses its funders? Presumably there are other donors in a similar position to us?”

They added: “With regards to peer review, I raised this issue because Matt Ridley’s article on Dr Indur Goklany’s recent CO2 report said that it had been thoroughly peer reviewed. Would it be possible to ask the same journal to peer review our paper given that it has a similar thrust to Goklany’s? It’s not a deal-breaker, but I felt that it helped strengthen that piece of work.”

Professor Happer replied that early drafts of Goklany’s paper had been reviewed by him and by many other scientists; that he had suggested changes to which the author had responded; and that, although some members of the academic advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation might have been too busy to respond to a request to comment on the first draft, “The review of Golkany’s paper was even more rigorous than the peer review for most journals”. Professor Happer said he would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything he wrote for the “client”.

He said he would double-check on the regulations, but did not think the CO2 Coalition, a 501(3)c tax-exempt educational organization, was required to make public any donors, except in Internal Revenue Service returns.

He checked with the CO2 Coalition, which replied that the Coalition was not obliged to identify any donors, except to the IRS, who would redact the list of donors if it received a request for the Coalition’s form 990.

On December 7 he received an email from one Maeve McClenaghan of Greenpeace, telling him that they had conducted what she grandiosely described as an “undercover investigation” – actually a criminal entrapment scam contrary to the RICO and wire-fraud statutes, and a flagrant attempt both to tamper with a Congressional witness (he is due to testify today, 8 December) and to obstruct committee proceedings – and that they intended to publish a “news article … regarding the funding of climate sceptic science.
She said: “Our article explores how fossil fuel companies are able to pay academics to produce research which is of benefit to them” and added that the story would be published on a Greenpeace website and “promoted widely” in the media. She gave Professor Happer only hours to respond.

Many of the points she said she proposed to include in the article were crafted in such a way as to distort what the above correspondence makes plain were wholly innocent and honest statements, so as to make them sound sinister. The libels Ms McClenaghan proposed to circulate will not be circulated here.

I shall, however pass on a comment made to me by Professor Happer: “I was suspicious about the email exchange from the start, so I wrote every response assuming that it might be public someday. But what I wrote expressed exactly what I believed to be true.”

That is the comment of one of the most transparently honest scientific colleagues I am honoured to know. I am, therefore, profoundly dismayed that the organization I founded – an organization that once did good work addressing real environmental concerns – has descended to what I consider to be criminality and now also proposes to descend to libel.

Accordingly, I have decided to inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation of Greenpeace’s dishonest and disfiguring attempt at entrapment of Professor Happer, whom I know to be a first-rate scientist, colleague and friend, one of the world’s half-dozen most eminent and experienced physicists, and one who would never provide any scientific advice unless in his professional opinion that advice was correct.

The organization’s timing was clearly intended to spring the trap on Professor Happer hours before he was due to appear in front of Congress. This misconduct constitutes a serious – and on many counts criminal – interference with the democratic process that America cherishes.

I have reported Greenpeace to the FBI under 18 USC 96 (RICO statute); 18 USC 1343 (wire fraud); 18 USC 1512 (attempting to intimidate a witness due to appear at a Congressional hearing); and 18 USC 1505 (obstruction of proceedings before committees).

I shall also be asking the Bureau to investigate Greenpeace’s sources of funding. It is now an enemy of the State, an enemy of humanity and, indeed, an enemy of all species on Earth.

Stop the Climate Insanity….It’s a HUGE Scam!

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Bjørn Lomborg: Wind Power ‘Tree’ Symbolises Futility of Paris Climate Jamboree

December 8, 2015 by

wind tree paris

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As a baggage train of some 40,000 climate-cultists get set to jet their way home from Paris – burning up a gazillion gallons of (what they normally rail about as being atmosphere incinerating) kerosene – the fair question has to be asked: ‘and all for what?’

The belief that China and India were going to sign up to terms guaranteed to keep more than a billion people (between them) locked in permanent Stone Age poverty was pure infantile nonsense.

Pragmatist, Narendra Modi is quite right to care a whole lot less about Western anti-humanity, eco-zealots, and a whole lot more about the 300 million or so of his constituents who subsist in world of dirt-floored shanties, without so much as the hope of enjoying an affordable supply of around-the-clock electricity.

poverty india

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The cultists fumed in Paris, as India and China put the needs of their people ahead of demands from selfish lunatics; equipped with little more than ideology, Macbook Airs and Twitter, as an outlet for their self-possessed rantings. So much easier to pontificate about how the poorest in the world should live (now and forever) with a belly full of Veuve Clicquot and Foie Gras while sitting in 5 star, centrally-heated comfort.

China and India aren’t about to deprive their people of an opportunity to have light at the flick of a switch; and they aren’t about to entertain the insane costs of solar and wind power to get there (save at the symbolic margins): between them, India and China are building, and planning to build, hundreds of new coal and nuclear power plants; designed to drag their people out of the darkness and into well-lit homes and bustling new factories (see this article).

Back in reality land, the childish symbolism that is wind power, copped a spray from the wind industry’s loudest critic, Bjørn Lomborg.

STT takes a different view to Bjørn about the ‘connection’ made between wind power and CO2 emissions:

Bjørn Lomborg: Believe in the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy? Then You’ll Probably Believe Wind Power Replaces Fossil Fuels, Too

He also falls for the lazy-language trap of referring to CO2 gas (a naturally occurring trace gas essential for life on Earth) as ‘carbon’: the black sooty stuff that makes a mess of white linen.

But Lomborg is right on the money where he points out the ludicrous costs and pointlessness of a wholly weather dependent power source.

Blowing a chance to help the planet
The Australian
Bjørn Lomborg
5 December 2015

‘Wind tree’ sums up the futility of the Paris climate talks

Outside the Paris climate conference centre, organisers have erected a “wind tree” (arbre a vent), which produces electricity using the power of the breeze. In doing so, they have summed up exactly what is wrong with the conference.

The tree will only produce 3500 kWh a year and it costs about $37,100. So, at a production price of about 11c a year, it will take 89 years to make up just the capital cost. Or, put differently, the cost is 300 per cent more expensive than even traditional wind power, which still struggles without subsidies.

The Conference of Parties (COP21) is about feeling good: spending a lot of money to do very little good, and not about making the choices that will make any difference.

This summit is “the last chance” to avert dangerous temperature rises, if we listen to the Earth League or a bunch of others. It’s going to be “too late” if a meaningful treaty isn’t negotiated here in the next few days, says the French President. It’s a familiar script. Doom-laden warnings about the “last chance to save the planet” date as far back as the earliest climate summits 20 years ago. Time magazine declared 2001 “a global warming treaty’s last chance”, and in 1989 the UN Environment Programme’s executive director warned that the planet faced an ecological disaster “as final as nuclear war” by the turn of the century.

Amid this alarmism, for 20 years well-intentioned climate negotiators have tried to do the same thing over and over and over again: negotiate a treaty that makes an impact on temperature rises. The result? Twenty years of failure with no significant effect on climate change.

These summits have failed for a pretty simple reason. Solar and wind power are still too expensive and inefficient to replace fossil fuels. The Copenhagen-Paris approach requires us to force immature green technologies on the world even though they are not ready or competitive. That’s hugely expensive and inefficient.

Thanks to campaigning non-governmental organisations, politicians and self-interested green energy companies that benefit from huge subsidies, many people believe that solar and wind energy are already major sources of energy.

The reality is that even after two decades of climate talks, they account for a meagre 0.5 per cent of total global energy consumption, according to the International Energy Agency.

And 25 years from now, even envisioning everyone doing all that they promise in Paris, the IEA expects we will get just 2.4 per cent from solar and wind. That tells us that the innovation that’s required to wean the planet off reliance on fossil fuels is not taking place.

That’s why the one glimmer of hope in Paris has been the announcement by Bill Gates, along with Australia, China, India and the US, of a multi-billion-dollar fund for green R&D.

The $27 billion fund is just a first step, but it’s a vitally important one. Just as massive support for research and development got us to the moon, the aim is for a massive focus on green research and development to make climate-friendly forms of energy competitive. This is precisely what the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and I have been arguing for more than eight years.

In a recent peer-reviewed research paper, I looked at all the carbon-cutting promises countries committed to ahead of Paris (their so-called intended nationally determined contributions, or INDCs) for the years 2016-30.

These are what the Paris global treaty will be based on (along with a lot of claims about what might happen outside those dates — something that’s easy for politicians of today to talk about, but that we just can’t take seriously).

What I found when I looked at the national promises was that they would cut global temperatures by just 0.05C by 2100.

And even if every government on the planet not only keeps every Paris promise, reduces all emissions by 2030 and shifts no emissions to other countries, but also keeps these emission reductions throughout the rest of the century, temperatures will be reduced by just 0.17C by the year 2100.

And let’s be clear, that is incredibly — probably even ridiculously — optimistic. Consider the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, never ratified by the US, and eventually abandoned by Canada and Russia and Japan. After several renegotiations, the Kyoto Protocol had been weakened to the point that the hot air left from the collapse of the Soviet Union exceeded the entire promised reductions, leaving the treaty essentially toothless.

The cost of these policies? Extraordinarily, UN officials provide no official estimated costs for the likely treaty. So we are left to make an unofficial tally, which we can do easily enough by adding up the costs of Paris promises submitted by the US, European Union, Mexico and China, which together account for about 80 per cent of the globe’s pledged emissions reductions.

In total, the Paris promises of these four countries/groupings will diminish the global economy by at least $1 trillion a year by 2030 — and that is in an ideal world, where politicians consistently reduce emissions in the most effective, smartest possible ways.

But that won’t happen. It never has in history.

Politicians have a habit of wasting money on phenomenally inefficient subsidies for solar and biofuels. And based on the EU experience, such waste can double the costs of carbon-cutting policies to $2 trillion. That’s $1 to $2 trillion that won’t be spent on global challenges such as malnutrition, poverty and communicable diseases.

We are spending a fortune to make ourselves feel like we are saving the planet. The “wind tree” is an excellent symbol of what’s wrong with Paris.

Bjorn Lomborg is an adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School and directs the Copenhagen Consensus Centre.
The Australian

Earlier in the week, The Australian’s Editor had the following take on Lomborg’s message on energy innovation; a message that makes it fairly clear: wind power is an abject failure – for fairly obvious reasons – here’s the output from all wind farms connected to the Eastern Grid (installed capacity of 3,669MW – spread over NSW, VIC, TAS & SA) during June:

June 2015 National

And, if there is to be a true alternative to fossil fuel power generation sources, then we should stop praying to the Wind Gods, and find something that’s recognizable as a ‘system’, rather than a lesson in total ‘chaos’.

Climate change demands innovation, not subsidy
The Australian
2 December 2015

Faith in clean energy technology has a long pedigree

No need to get hot under the collar — Malcolm Turnbull’s climate policy is fundamentally the same as Tony Abbott’s. The targets that the Prime Minister took to Paris — emission reductions of 26-28 per cent by 2030 — are those adopted by Mr Abbott in August.

These targets are proportionate to Australia’s economic weight and our small contribution to the world’s greenhouse gases. They are consistent with the precautionary principle that Australia should not get ahead of the northern hemisphere’s big polluters. It’s true that Mr Turnbull has left open the possibility in the future that Australia would concur in a collective agreement to pursue deeper cuts. By definition, this would not involve Australia going it alone.

There is a pseudo controversy over climate mitigation and foreign aid. In Paris, Mr Turnbull announced a five-year diversion of at least $1 billion from the foreign aid budget to climate mitigation projects in the Pacific. Labor’s complaints ring hollow. Only last month Bill Shorten toured the Pacific (remember the prophesied climate refugees?) to talk up the threat of climate change.

Now, in consultation with Pacific nations, Australia is dedicating funds to climate mitigation projects in the region. As for the effect on foreign aid spending more generally, it was Labor that inflated the budget to win a seat on the UN Security Council.

On climate change Mr Turnbull’s point of difference with Mr Abbott is his emphasis on innovation as a tool for mitigation and adaptation. Innovation is a theme of the Turnbull government but it takes on special significance at the Paris climate meeting. Australia has promised to double its clean energy research and development as part of the 20-nation project known as Mission Innovation.

In his Paris speech, Mr Turnbull said: “We firmly believe that it is innovation and technology which will enable us both to drive stronger economic growth and a cleaner environment. We are a highly social and innovative species and so the more we share innovative technologies, the better they will become.” This commitment coincides with the unveiling in Paris of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition spearheaded by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and other entrepreneurs. They will invest in clean energy projects in sectors such as electricity generation and storage.

As Macquarie University’s Jonathan Symons says, the impetus to innovate sometimes has been misrepresented by environmentalists as a manifesto for inaction. “It is true that the cost of wind and solar are falling rapidly and both can now be competitive at low levels of grid penetration,” Dr Symons says. “However, associated system costs and technical challenges increase with the market share of intermittent energy. Without accelerated innovation, it is clear that existing renewable technologies will not support deep decarbonisation of the global economy.”

He also points out that notwithstanding Mr Turnbull’s timely gospel of climate innovation, this has been a faith subscribed to by figures as diverse as John Howard, Barack Obama, British economist Nicholas Stern and commentator Bjorn Lomborg.

In 2005 Mr Howard joined the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. Known as AP6, this was an initiative of George W. Bush and one that emphasised voluntary climate mitigation through the sharing of clean energy technology. It shows that the conservative side of politics has long recognised the need for climate mitigation by innovation.

Dr Lomborg’s championing of innovation is central to his view that the Paris meeting, like the meetings before it, is likely to generate alarmist rhetoric (anyone like another last chance to save the planet?) but fail to advance the cause of climate mitigation.

“For twenty years, we have insisted on trying to solve climate change by supporting production of mainly solar and wind power,” he says in a blog for this newspaper. “The problem with this approach is that it puts the cart in front of the horse.

Green technologies are not yet mature and not yet competitive, but we insist on pushing them out to the world. Instead of production subsidies, governments should focus on making renewable energy cheaper and competitive through research and development. Once the price of green energy has been innovated down below the price of fossil fuels, everyone will switch.”

Dr Lomborg greeted the Mr Gates-led coalition as a positive sign confirming innovation as the key to climate mitigation. But he points out that today’s favoured subsidies do not encourage innovation, instead making companies stick to inefficient but subsidised technologies such as solar and wind power.

After two decades of climate talks, solar and wind account for just 0.5 per cent of global energy. “And 25 years from now, even with a very optimistic scenario, envisioning everyone doing all that they promise in Paris, the International Energy Agency expects that we will get just 2.4 per cent from solar and wind,” Dr Lomborg says.
The Australian

wind turbines