Constructive Environmentalism CFACT Style

Many years ago, when I was working for an environmental information department at a large company, I was intrigued to discover that a colleague, putting together a data base with information sources, had created a sub category called “Anti Environmental Groups”. At a closer look, this turned out to be a listing of think tanks with a scientific, free market oriented approach to environmental issues (no doubt CFACT would have been on the list, had she found us). She claimed she couldn’t come up with any alternative name. Should be added that she was a very skilled and reasonable working mate, but apparently tricked by the mainstream propaganda in those days. As the main listing included both WWF and Greenpeace, a better division could have been between reasonable, militant and violent groups. No such luck.

The history and rhetorics of the radical green movement is not a sunny one, sometimes just ridiculous, on occasion rather sound. More often downright scary.

Peter C. Glovergoes through some of the often forgotten rethoric on the barricade, in a splendid article in The Commentator.

You should read thew article in full, but let me pick a few central passages and quotations:

Journalist Alex Lockwood (in the leftwing UK Guardian) proposes “the internet should be nationalised as a public utility in order to contain the superfluous claims of warming skeptics”. Fred Pearce (again in the UK Guardian) demands we “silence the doubters”. At the 2007 Live Earth concert, Robert F. Kennedy Jnr called for skeptics to be “treated as traitors” following this up with the demand that all coal execs “should be in jail for all eternity”.

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Alarmist high priest James Hansen has called for skeptics to be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity”.  Hansen has also endorsed a book by Keith Farnish that advocates sabotage and environmental terrorism by blowing up dams and demolishing cities to return us to an agrarian age.

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Kari Norgaard is professor of climate change at the University of Oregon. At a recent London conference she called

for skeptics to be viewed as “racists” and climate scepticism as a “sickness” needing to be “treated.

If I may pitch in, couldn’t we agree that environment is about what’s around us. Our living conditions. These, in my humble opinion, not only include, but are based on things like private property and common decency.

Only weeks after the peculiar, entirely symbolical and possibly dangerous Earth Hour gimmick, it’s now the 42′nd Earth Day. Hard to be against the Earth, but I’ve never understood the tendency to use these events to suggest an ongoing conflict between the earth and humanity.  

CFACT International President David Rothbard comments:

“Celebrate them all, we should. But as faithful followers of CFACT know, today’s environmentalism (at least the kind that gets all the attention) isn’t so much about reveling in the beauty of nature and its amazements as it is in using this lofty matter to hammer away at human productivity, prosperity, and plenty. Saddest and ironic of all, of course, is that people prospering is the very thing that helps us steward the environment the best.”

 You might add that without humans, there wouldn’t be an Earth Day, or that without human action, in the form of development and exploitation, there would be no humans. Ecological nostalgia is sometimes tempting to some, but I believe we all realize that if time travel was possible, none of us would survive even minutes in a prehistoric era.

 So, let’s take the opportunity to celebrate the innovations that increasingly is making it possible to lead a life even in areas still ridden by hardship. Not of prehistoric proportions, but at least with meagre possibilities to adjust housing and clothing to the weather, choose what we eat, or even have access to fresh drinking water.

Today’s sunny news is that Brittish scientists now have shown that hidden groundwater resources wating to be exploited in Africa, may amount to a hundred times the more shallow wells being used today.

  ”We estimate total groundwater storage in Africa to be 0.66 million km³ (0.36–1.75 million km³). Not all of this groundwater storage is available for abstraction, but the estimated volume is more than 100 times estimates of annual renewable freshwater resources on Africa. Groundwater resources are unevenly distributed: the largest groundwater volumes are found in the large sedimentary aquifers in the North African countries Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan. Nevertheless, for many African countries appropriately sited and constructed boreholes can support handpump abstraction (yields of 0.1–0.3 l s⁻¹), and contain sufficient storage to sustain abstraction through inter-annual variations in recharge.” (Environmental Research Letters)

Getting access to this life saving resource will require skill and technology. Luckily, both have been let to flourish in parts of the world, less hurt by dictatorships, wars, socialism and misguided green activism and legislation.

Click to play Methane Madness!

“Put a cork in it, Al!”

That’s the message students are sending Al Gore, radical climate campaigners and assorted other bohemians, grant-seekers and profiteers cashing in on the global warming craze.

Al Gore is calling on folks to make September 14th a day of climate action through a series of propaganda videos he will be broadcasting worldwide.  CFACT calls for a day of genuine “climate realism” instead. CFACT Collegians are spreading the word with a bit of online levity.

CFACT’s Methane Madness game trains online players to help “Pal Gore” control the climate by corking cows and watching them float away. Methane is more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas but less than 1% of atmospheric greenhouse gases come from cattle. Even so, radical climate campaigners call for shutting down our cattle and dairy industries along with much of the rest our economy. They’d like us to go vegan.

However, climate science IS NOT SETTLED; computer models are not all that; observations don’t fit the models; man’s impact on climate and atmosphere is dwarfed by nature’s; Climategate is just the tip of the corrupt science iceberg; more scientists find the courage to match their analysis every day and declare against the scare; offsets are a scam; alternative energy is inefficient; citizens can now spot warming propaganda; economies in crisis can’t afford the waste; carbon profiteers rake in tax dollars but don’t affect the climate; consensus is not science; there has never been a consensus; freedom and prosperity are the proven path to cleaner environments; our meat and dairy industries are home-based, thriving industries that feed multitudes and employ the nicest people you’ll ever meet; developed nations have enough to eat for the first time in history; etc; etc; etc; etc….

WHOA! All those dreary, inconvenient facts! Gore won’t enjoy those. As Scarlett O’Hara said, “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.”

If they succeed in corking all the cows, Methane Madness players can move on to further levels and put a cork in Gore and company’s hot air.

Don’t worry, CFACT’s always been about free speech. Corks come out. Gore and his celebrity buddies can go right back to spewing their hot air. It will take cold facts for realism to triumph over alarmism on climate. CFACT wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Jobs just aren’t waiting for us when we graduate the way they used to,” said Methane Madness player Josh Smith, a student at University of Wisconsin.  “Al Gore preaches we should live with less, while he flies from mansion to mansion.  I don’t even know how I’m going to pay my student loans.  Put a cork in it, Al!”

If levity’s not your bag, there’s always plenty of global warming facts and analysis debunking the scare here at www.CFACT.eu,  www.CFACT.org and at www.ClimateDepot.com.

Last Tuesday, University of Leipzig science faculty dean Prof. Dr. Jürgen Haase barred a climate seminar organized by (his own) geography professor Werner Kirstein, as well as the use of an auditorium of his own institute (!) and participation by European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) Vice President Michael Limburg as one of the the main speakers. Fortunately the ban was later relaxed and the seminar was allowed to go ahead.

The reason for originally having banned the seminar was a dissertation authored by Michael Limburg, which was critical of climate-science and was submitted to the faculty in March 2010. Two reviewers rejected the dissertation claiming, among other points, that it was inadequate. This is why Limburg was not welcome as a speaker, according to a letter from the Dean. The fact that the same dissertation had been recommended for acceptance by 4 other renowned professors went unmentioned by Haase. Limburg immediately challenged the ban.

What was so inconvenient about Limburg’s dissertation?

Under the supervision of Prof. Werner Kirstein, Limburg had written a dissertation that examined the quality of historical global temperature and sea level data in detail. His conclusions were damning. Using accepted rules for science and measurement, Limburg’s results showed that the datasets did not allow sea level and temperature change over the last 120-150 years to be determined anywhere near the alleged accuracies of millimetres or tenths of a degree Celsius respectively as claimed by the IPCC. The range of uncertainty, in both global mean temperature and sea level, is considerably greater than the total respective changes given by the IPCC. Every factor in attributing the possible causes of the changes was, at best, scientifically questionable.

Naturally, the faculty searched – and found – the “right” reviewers for assessing Limburg’s dissertation. In his decision to ban Limburg from speaking, Haase quoted only the objectively unfair and negative assessments. The fact that four other university professors had recommended the dissertation be accepted got no mention by Haase. Limburg officially contested the assessment delivered by the two reviewers, but they have taken their time to respond. Up to today there is still no response. Now a legal battle appears inevitable. Science has again been cast aside.

The high point of the whole affair is the open attempt by the University of Leipzig to silence Lim¬burg – even though he had been officially invited by a full professor. The Leipzig University faculty appears to be completely oblivious to this unworthy conduct.

Open debate is essential for the progress of science

This brings up Voltaire, the most famous philosopher of our time, and his words to his harshest opponent: ‘Sir, I do not agree with your opinion and I fully oppose you. But I would give up my life to assure that you will always be allowed to publicly express your opinion’. At the University of Leipzig, there has to be some colleagues among the philosophy faculty who are familiar with those words. But it looks as if the University leadership is not among them.

Sources: Press release by EIKE, www.eike-klima-energie.eu, originally translated from German by Pierre Gosselin, http://notrickszone.com

DAVID ROTHBARD & CRAIG RUCKER - The Washington Times

As the United Nations wrapped up its recent climate conference in Bonn, talks organizer Christiana Figueres proclaimed that climate change is the “the most important negotiation the world has ever faced.” Faced with real problems – financial meltdowns, unemployment, war and genuine human suffering – the world no longer agrees.

It’s a good thing human productivity doesn’t threaten the global thermostat the way the U.N. would have us believe. If it did, we’d be cooked. Countries rich and poor are backing away from commitments they made years ago during rosier economic times, before the public became aware of Climategate, renewable energy costs and genuine debate.

The Kyoto Protocol, the only binding international agreement signed since the global warming scare began, expires after 2012. Canada, Russia and Japan have declared they will not renew; China and the United States never signed it, and the U.S. has made it plain it is not about to. And poor countries are becoming less enamored about signing on, as they realize hard economic times mean there will be little climate “mitigation” and “restitution” money coming their way from (formerly) rich countries.

Even die-hard warmists increasingly recognize that bureaucratic solutions hatched at these conferences are rife with waste, fraud and abuse. They may enrich a few, but they are powerless to control Earth’s climate.

In March, German investigators reported that 850 million euros disappeared when shady companies swarmed into carbon trading, emissions and energy businesses.Criminal enterprises raked in tens of millions, fended off regulators with delaying tactics and then announced bankruptcy or vanished. An Italian sting operation resulted in arrests of wind-farm developers who billed the country for subsidies but never produced a kilowatt of electricity.

London’s liberal Guardian newspaper was aghast to learn that the World Bank’s Biocarbon Fund had arranged to pay European “entrepreneurs” $1 million to establish a system under which 60,000 Kenyans would restrict themselves to farming under rigidly controlled, inefficient, “sustainable” techniques. For that they will receive $1.4 million over 20 years.

That’s right, the beneficent World Bank will enrich more Europeans so 60,000 Kenyans can receive $23.83 apiece for 20 years of drudgery, poverty and misery – a princely $1.19 a year.

Even the European Union finally understands how little bureaucracy and energy deprivation dictates the climate. “It is not enough for the EU to simply sign up for another commitment period,” EU climate representative Jurgen Lefevere admitted. “We only represent 11 percent of global emissions.”

Burning fossil fuels contributes only a fraction of total annual atmospheric carbon dioxide buildup, and the EU contributes just 11 percent of that. The EU’s commitment to slashing CO2 emissions by 20 percent invites corruption, has no control over Chinese or Indian emissions and has no effect on the climate.

The biggest divide evident in Bonn was between the United States and large emerging economies. Even Obama administration officials who are thoroughly committed to man-made global warming catastrophe claims finally recognize the fraud problem. In Bonn, the U.S. insisted that all countries subject their emission reduction claims to verification.

However, China will accept only an agreement that lacks verification – and guarantees the right to cheat. Meanwhile, the Chinese are happy to be “the world’s leader” in manufacturing wind turbines – 95 percent – which they gladly sell to guilt-ridden Western countries.

China and other nations support the notion that prosperous countries owe the world restitution for the “sin” of engaging in the Industrial Revolution and becoming prosperous. We can only hope some nation’s representative will have the courage to remind China and its fellow climate travelers that the West never forced them to spend 50 years mired in communism, bureaucracy and stagnation.

While it is encouraging that the global warming camp no longer has things entirely its own way, celebration would be premature. For all the gnashing of teeth and complaining about corporate influence we hear from global warming bureaucrats and campaigners, the truth is that, today, the warmists are the establishment.

Billions are being redistributed to researchers, developing nations, carbon speculators, alternative energy investors and other carbon profiteers – who would like to turn billions into trillions. Pity the poor carbon traders whose markets expire with Kyoto. Not all have their villa in the sun yet.

But rest assured, they will do whatever is necessary to get theirs. Big Warming will not surrender its hold on Western taxpayers without a fight.

The warmist camp plans to retake the initiative at the December U.N. conference in Durban, South Africa. It intends to turn back the clock to the time when the media would attribute any weather or nature event to global warming, without question or critical examination. Al Gore’s recent RollingStone diatribe essentially calls on the media to censure climate disaster skeptics and adopt a one-sided man-made warming narrative.

The NewYorkTimes may go along, but the huge and growing alternative media will not. This week’s Heartland Institute international conference of climate-alarm skeptics in Washington will only reinforce the lack of evidence for man-made Armageddon, and the disastrous consequences of staying the current U.N. course.

Many believe the last-minute appearance by dozens of world leaders crippled the Copenhagen climate conference. But with the big names absent from Cancun, Mexico, and now Bonn, the U.N. wants them back.

Ms. Figueres capped the Bonn conference with a call for “high-level political attention.” If she succeeds, just imagine the mischief a gathering of heads of state, foreign ministers, bureaucrats, researchers, green campaigners and carbon profiteers can do at an African beach resort.

Then imagine how nearly impossible it will be to repair the harm they inflict. Action must be taken to avert such a result.

David Rothbard is president of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. Craig Rucker is CFACT’s executive director.

 It doesn’t help that the view is awesome or that the food is great, and that you are surrounded by great historic monuments, if you attend a 2-week-mega-meeting, and nothing happens. That is just boring. And that is in fact what you see if you come to the conference hotel of the UNFCCC Climate Conference in Bonn these days: bored delegates, sipping coffee with a sour face, sleeping somewhere in the corner on one of these red silk sofas, or surfing in the Internet. Delegates are so busy looking at their computer screens, any uniformed visitor of the conference would think he witnesses some kind of game convention. And – I repeat myself – close to nothing has been achieved so far.

Today, at a meeting of the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation” – one of the many sub-groups of the UNFCCC – a lot of dissatisfaction has been expressed. Even the representative of the over-optimistic European Union expressed concerns. The EU expected a road-map or something similar to enable the upcoming COP/MOP – another big climate conference foreseen for Durban, South Africa, for December this year – to adopt another Kyoto-styled agreement. But she had to admit, that the one and only result of many and endless “informal meetings” since Monday was the adoption of the agenda. Yes, that’s correct. The only item adopted too far in four days is the agenda! Which is neither sustainable nor eco-efficient? Another concern, this time expressed by a delegate for the “G77 plus China” group from Argentina was funding. His wording was very diplomatic, but the bottom line was, richer countries should enable developing countries to send large delegations to UN-meetings. Because only this would secure their participation. And yes, including “Palestine”.

Another concern was how to secure the financial and technical means of governments of developing countries to participate even before the UN-meetings – which they can better prepare themselves. But that was not all: The delegate also emphasized the importance the “Special Climate Change Fund”, the “Adaptation Fund” and quite a few other “financial mechanisms” allegedly needed to stop climate from changing, and last but not least, of having even more climate conferences before the end of the year. In 2001, some of the “financial means” allocated to the UNFCCC were used to set up an Executive Board supervising CDM-projects (clean development mechanisms). The objective is industrialized countries financing projects in developing countries of which the UN believes they would help to prevent carbon emissions. In return, they get “emission reduction units” helping them to achieve their own carbon reduction goals. But how, one wonders, do they find out how much CO2 was saved? The magic word is “baseline scenario”. In other words, the prevented CO2 emissions are hypothetical emissions, based on the imagination of green NGOs. Nobody knows if a coal fired power plant was really prevented by a wind park, or if it was just an idea of a smart government to get some project money.

At a presentation of CDM projects the audience was informed of thousands of such CDM projects supervised by the UN in 71 countries that helped saving 620 mio tons of CO2 (which were not there before either, but which were in the making, somehow…). The only observer organization skeptical of the entire agenda of the UNFCCC present at the Bonn Climate Conference was once more CFACT. At a press conference hosted by CFACT on Wednesday in Bonn, German scientists Prof. Friedrich Karl Ewert and Dr. Horst Borchert presented their latest research on the true driving forces of climate change, the sun and solar radiation. This research was after all not based on computer models and “baseline scenarios”, but long term measurements and thorough evaluation of data. During the press conference as well the updated NIPCCC report compiled by Prof. Fred Singer (Univ of Virginia) was presented as well, confirming that human activities can’t be the reason for climate change and that there is no effect that can be traced to greenhouse gases, such as CO2. In other words, any of the 3000 or so delegates and of the journalists at the UN-meeting eventually had the chance to listen to serious science. Unfortunately, few did, while many others preferred to sip coffee in the lobby of the hotel or to surf around in the World Wide Web.

A picture tells more than a thousand words, people say. And if you have something to say affecting scientific or political debates, a movie is even better. Thus, the European CFACT team believed it is a good idea to invite delegates, observers and media at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn, Germany, to a movie night on Saturday, June 11, 2011. The prior aim of this official UN side event was presenting the true driving forces behind climate change and our whether: solar and cosmic radiation.

 The movie presented by CFACT at was a documentary by Lars Oxfeldt Mortensen from Denmark titled “The Cloud Mystery”, telling the story of Danish Professor Henrik Svensmark. The physicist is the actual discoverer of the true forces changing the world’s climate. Further more he was able to deliver experimental evidence for is findings – in a ten years effort, sometimes without any funding. By this, he helped solving one of the most important questions of the climate debate, the mystery of cloud formation. The documentary also demonstrates that science is a rough place to be if you are in opposition to the established “truth”. During the research process, Svensmark started a collaboration with other distinguished scientists such as Prof. Jan Veizer (Ottawa, Canada) and Prof. Nir Shaviv (Haifa, Israel), delivering the empirical evidence for his theories.

Since then, non of these scientists has been spared of unsubstantiated criticism and ad hominem attacks by alarmists. Svensmarks findings – that the galaxy and the sun are the main driver of the world’s climate – is still ignored by large parts of the UN elites, even though the evidence is overwhelming and other researchers meanwhile support his conclusions. Already on June 8, at the CFACT press briefing during this year’s Bonn climate talks, German scientists Dr. Borchert and Prof. Ewert presented their research showing the significance of Svensmarks revolutionary approach. And in the last years, other scientists from Denmark, Israel, Canada, the USA, and Norway spoke out in favor of Svensmark. The movie was preceded by an introduction by Dr. Holger Thuss, Executive Director of CFACT Europe and followed by a reception. Again, CFACT provided an opportunity to learn and to discuss by hosting an UN side event. However, most of the UN crowd preferred to go to stay away – it was the night of the UNFCCC staff party (food and drinks!). But they can no longer say they haven’t had the opportunity to know the truth.

CFACT recently created a live video conference which linked our climate conference in Berlin to the UN conference in Cancun and Professor Roy Spencer in Huntsville, Alabama.  Lord Christopher Monckton and CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker reported from Cancun.  Participants in the Berlin conference, which CFACT co-sponsored with EIKE and other groups, have since described the video link as a “highpoint.”

Here’s an extensive report (auf Deutsch).   Berlin, Berlin, wir waren in Berlin.

CFACT thanks all of our friends in Europe for their hard work in making this conference a great success.  The continued opening of the European mind is one of the most hopeful signs that climate realism may yet win out.

Dr. Spencer’s books including his recent Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists are available from Amazon.

That the activities behind the scenes before, during and after last year’s circus in Copenhagen were everything from strange to dirty is no surprise. For example, CFACT Europe, together with the paper Berlingske Tiderne in Denmark, discovered the sudden shift in the official Danish attitude towards Dalai Lama, an apparent effort to offer the difficult Chinese delegation something to chew on.

With the recent publication of the eneourmos amount of documents at Wikileaks, even more light is shed on the power play and virtual extortion to get tax money in so called climate aid.

The UK paper, The Guardian – a publication which has, for some strange reason, always been very interested in CFACT – is one of the first to compile the climate related documents. Draw your own conclusions, but please admit that it’s entertaining reading. 

We learn why the Maldives was the island country most active. We find out the play between Bolivia and Denmark. And we get a glimpse of the power play, especially with regards to the US and China. In one of the dispatches from the US Embassy in Belgium, we also can read a first hand account of the frustration and anger displayed by the EU President, Herman van Rompuy over the chaotic negotiations and what he perceive as a play against the European Union.

Have fun and stay tuned.