Saturday, December 26, 2009

Environmentalists are not scientists

One of the greatest mix-ups of our times is to confuse environmentalists with scientists.This of course is abetted wholeheartedly by the media who take up every green cause with a gusto, citing some or the other dubious but inevitably alarmist "study".And the confusion suits the greenies very well -their agenda takes on the prestige of science.

Jon Basil Utley reminds us that the green agenda is  impervious to science or facts. The sheepskin of "science" is being used by the wolf of green ideology.That ideology at root is totalitarian.


However, there were some real brains with other motives for promoting the lies. Extreme environmentalism has become the new socialism, an excuse for dictatorial rule to limit consumption and justify highly centralized government power “to save humanity.” Below is a list of quotes from leading leftists. There were brains behind it all, the old socialists looking for a new justification for government takeover of the economy, for a “planned” economy which they would plan and manage. Man-made global warming became the substitute agenda for Leftists who had been discredited by Reaganomics and the collapse of communism.
He then quotes from the environmentalists(from the wolves' mouths, so to speak) -
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” Timothy Wirth, President of the U.N. Foundation and former Democratic U.S. senator from Colorado.


No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” Christine Stewart, former Canadian minister of the environment who led that country’s delegation to Kyoto.
 
“A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States,” John Holdren (Obama’s Science Czar) wrote in a 1973 book he co-authored with Paul R. Ehrlch and Anne H. Ehrlich. “De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation.”  See also John Holdren and the Anti-Growth Malthusians for interesting links and quotations.
 

“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the U.S. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” Michael Oppenheimer, Princeton professor and member of Environmental Defense Fund.

Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” Maurice Strong, a native of Canada considered by some to be one of the leading environmentalists in the world. He is an official at the U.N.
“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” Paul Watson, co-founder of the environmental group Greenpeace.

“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with its full complement of species, returning throughout the world.” Dave Foreman, U.S. environmentalist and co-founder of radical environmental group Earth First.

The sheepskin of "science" imparts credibility to the greens -but it deducts the same from the science. And that is really sad.
Vimal Chander Joshi does a puff piece on Rajendra Pachauri's baby -TERI. Did Joshi used to copywrite product brochures? The piece does read like an amateurish advertisement draft -so much so that Joshi was probably fired and became a journalist.Ads require more honesty, I suppose.

Pachauri tries fiction in a new genre

A creative person likes to change tack - even if his earlier formula is hit, a certain ennui sets in.

So with Pachauri. His earlier forays into fiction -IPCC presentations- have been so successful that the West nearly gave away trillions on his word at Copenhagen. But like a true artist, he is now shifting gears-
Tired of RK Pachauri lecturing us on how to save the world from global warming? Well, the man’s coming out with a novel that has nothing to do with climate change. Return to Almora is about a chap caught up in the banalities of his life when his past life comes calling.

The good news - the fiction this time will be admitted and overt.But I do hope Christopher Monckton will write his own novel refuting Pachauri's.

 Update-
Two men of great imagination- a certain resemblance 
 
Pachauri and Shakespeare

Friday, December 25, 2009

Europe's old soul makes way for another

The Europe is changing drastically.But it's a reincarnation unlike others -where a soul leaves a body and is born into another.In Europe the body for the time being remains the same but its old soul is leaving making way for another.


In the church in Bellinzona (Ticino), the traditional nativity crib with the Child Jesus, is surrounded by minarets


Switzerland: Minarets in manger, schools respect Muslims


The unusual scene is supposed to make people reflect about brotherhood and human rights, after 57% of the Swiss (and 68% in Ticino) recently voted against minarets on mosques. On the crib are verses from the Bible and the Koran on the topic of water.

-------------

The education department in the canton of Zurich adopted new guidelines which take the religious feelings of children of other faiths into account. Activities and songs with religious content, for example those that refer to Jesus as the Son of God, are not allowed. In Islam, Jesus is a prophet but not the Son of God.

What will Europe's new soul do to it? As a libertarian my concern is preservation and expansion of liberties.There I'm not too optimistic about this on-the-spot reincarnation of the continent.

Lord Monckton: Rajendra Pachauri is going to jail for fraud

"I'm now going to turn that letter over to the Indian Police and I'm going to say that Rajendra Pachauri is a fraudster on one of the biggest scales I've ever seen in the world."

He also said -"He is going to jail for fraud. You heard it here first."


Video -Lord Monckton on ForaTV


The video is from COP15, before the Pachaurigate revelations in the Daily Telegraph.

New comments added-
If Lord Monckton comes to India to file a case of fraud against Pachauri, that would make compelling drama.
But will the Indian government allow it? Pachauri is the cherry on the cream of the Indian elite and the Indian state is a plaything of this elite.
Is Lord Monckton being optimistic? He doesn't know Indian police. It is as independent of its political masters as a shoe on the foot of its owner.
Let's see....


Update -
   Was going to provide a partial transcript but realized that it would take much more time than I'm currently able to put in. My apologies. Just watch the video -it's riveting stuff.

Update 2 - post expanded with some new comments

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Bismarck Pachauri won't sink

Pachauri is not going to go down easily, no way. He is the Bismarck of climate change.


Battleship Pachauri fires back at the allegations made in the Daily Telegraph-

Making a point-by-point rebuttal of allegations of financial impropriety against its director general R K Pachauri, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) on Wednesday said the charges published in London’s Sunday Telegraph were “unfounded and false” and demanded an immediate apology from the newspaper.

TERI listed all payments received by it from organisations worldwide for ‘services’ rendered to them by Pachauri, who is also chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

--------------------

“We demand an unqualified apology from the Telegraph for this libelous piece of journalism or else we would take recourse to other measures as we consider appropriate and necessary,” TERI said.

TERI’S REBUTTAL

Allegation: Pachauri has business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

Response: IPCC makes no policy recommendations. There is nothing in these reports that could have any proprietary benefit.


Allegation: Pachauri was trying to favour Tatas, which “exercises enormous political power”, that Tatas continue to be associated with TERI.

Response: Tata group has no relation with TERI even though it set it up originally. In no way is TERI responsible for the work of the Tata group just as the Tata group is in no way responsible for the functioning of TERI.


Allegation: TERI does not publish its accounts.

Response: TERI has tax-exempt status in every country it operates in. Such status is granted on the basis of proper auditing of accounts and proper scrutiny of documents


Allegation: Pachauri holds posts in a number of organisations, including Credit Suisse Bank, and is silent about the money he earns, “which must run into millions of dollars”.

Response: All payments due to Pachauri are made to TERI, a non-profit organisation, and not to him as an individual. Received no money from Risk Governance Council in Geneva, New York Investment Fund Pegasus or Chicago Climate Exchang.

Some of the payments made to TERI for services rendered by Pachauri: Deutsche Bank Euros 100,000; Credit Suisse $25,000; Toyota Motors $80,000; Yale University $48,750; Asian Development Bank $ 4425; EDF Euros 1200 .


Allegation: TERI benefitting from UN contracts, for example from one in Kuwait.

Response: TERI has developed unique technique for cleaning oil spills in an environment friendly way. It would be happy to supply this technology to any part of the world, including Kuwait.



Presented here without my own comments.
I will have something to say on this later.

Understanding "conflict of interest" is not climate science

The Pachaurigate rolls along in the media and things are getting hotter(pun intended)-
 In a rejoinder(to the accusations in the daily Telegraph), nine Fellows of the TERI.....demanded an unqualified apology from the newspaper for the “libellous” piece of journalism, failing which the institute would take recourse to other measures it would deem appropriate.

To similar threats one-half of the Booker-North team had earlier replied -
The second word of the response I have in mind is "off".
The IPCC must put it's best minds to solve that one.Maybe they can come up with a hockey stick for Pachauri to defend himself.


TimesNOW TV had a small report -
Who is gunning for Pachauri?



That makes it sound as if a shadowy group of international hackers has let loose a hit team after him. I suppose that's the way Pachauri feels nowadays.
The embedded video from that site is not working.Here is the link.


As EUreferendum pointed out, he also appeared on NDTV to put up a totally unconvincing defence-





Video -Pachauri defends himself on NDTV

His basic case remains that -
1) every single penny he received (and some of his remunerations are "generous", he admitted)went to his institute TERI.
2) this is a plot by "skeptics" to demolish climate science(he didn't say "hackers" this time, at least in the portion shown)
3) the "skeptics" are being paid lot of money by "vested interests" who don't want to do anything about climate change.

The interview was incomplete - we were obviously shown a part only. Whether the anchor asked any tough questions or not remains a mystery. Pachauri by the way is deeply enmeshed in the NDTV's green initiatives.

Pachauri was also on TV yesterday saying something like,"I know something about English language" -this was in context of interpretation of the Copenhagen agreement.Now that he has admitted to understanding English, then surely he knows what "conflict of interest" means.Denying it is like denying that the sun rises in the east or that Angela Jolie's lips are God created strawberries.

It is as simple as ABC-
A) He is the head of IPCC which has been promoting climate alarmism and recommending drastic policy measures on a global as well national and local scales.Those policy changes will obviously hurt many and benefit some(as always happens when the state mandates something)- and companies and organisations are jostling to be among the winners.They stand to make a killing in the artificially created carbon "market" that is expected to be in trillions.The taxpayers the world over will be among the losers -but who cares about them? Not Pachauri and his ilk.

B)Pacahuri is advisor etc. to these concerns which are drooling at the thought of making a killing. They of course, fully expect that with Pachauri on board they will succeed and how!


C)This is classic conflict of interest. Pachauri by his enormous influence creates new policy environment.Pachauri as adviser helps organizations take advantage of those policies and make hay while Pachauri shines.

And this is irrespective of whether Pachauri makes a personal fortune out of it or not.
So what's so difficult to understand about this "conflict of interest" thingamijig? It's not as if it's climate science.

As for Pachauri giving all his wealth selflessly away to TERI, his organization -I definitely answered that here.

To repeat myself partially-
The excuse that he did it for TERI, a non-profit, does not wash. Top-notch non-profits are a very far cry from some local outfit of salvation army type misty-eyed stragglers.They have lavish offices all over the world and their budgets run in tens and sometimes hundreds of millions.Their top honchos are wined and dined and awarded in the highest places and palaces.

The big non-profits are the new elites.
 
And Pachauri is the top of this heap.Playing the saint won't wash. No sir,
IT WON"T WASH!

We need accountability, transparency, an impartial investigation of his affairs and better excuses that won't insult our intelligence.

Mao in the White House

Remember how anybody who suggested during the presidential campaign that Obama was a Marxist or a radical was vilified as a 'right-wing' hatemonger?( In the MSM 'right-wing' is a pejorative while 'left-wing' means idealistic).Then came all those extreme left-wing nuts that Obama appointed to crucial positions -from eco-nut John Holdren (who is obsessed with "the rates at which people breed")to the communist and 9/11 truther Van Jones to the Mao admirer Anita Dunn.

The media, of course made no noise. In fact when some of these nuts were quietly fired, the MSM dutifully played dead.


It has now become very hard to deny that Obama's heart lies to the very,very left of the scale.So I'm not at all surprised by this-

Why let a holiday season come between the White House and making some political statements? The White House pegged controversial designer Simon Doonan to oversee the Christmas decorations for the White House. Mr. Doonan, who is creative director of Barney’s New York has often caused a stir with his design choices. Like his naughty yuletide window display of Margaret Thatcher as a dowdy dominatrix and Dan Quayle as a ventriloquist’s dummy. For this year’s White House, he didn’t disappoint.
So he has, as decorations, images of the legendary transvestite Hedda Lettuce, President Obama onto Mt. Rushmore(wait - I thought these arty-sharties were supposed to speak truth to power, not go all oozy and sycophantic) and an image of - MAO, who "like Stalin, indisputably murdered more people than Hitler"!(Some say 70 million- but what's a few million people here and there when the ideals are noble and the heart pure? e.g. see  Mao: The Unknown Story)





But hey, Mao was for hope and change -in his own way. So a left-wing mass murderer's image in Obama White House doesn't seem so out of place.
Jerz has some interesting observations-

It's been interesting watching the way journalists (some of them committed environmental activists) have constructed the public understanding of the scientific debate. Politicians, business executives, and leaders of environmental groups can all be excused for their rhetorical excesses, but not the reporters.

Does the emotionally loaded term "global warming" mean "Humanity is recklessly endangering the environment by releasing excessive greenhouses gases into the air," or does it mean "The earth is now warmer than it was when glaciers covered most of Europe and North America"?

Good question.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

From the LNC Quote Shop

Ace-

I think we can establish a general rule that Obama doesn't like anyone who doesn't polish his ass to a high sheen.

someone we know, surely…

This -
TinTin _The Shooting_Star

reminds me of someone.....someone.....who could it be?
 TinTin _The Shooting_Star_Pachauri


Image from - The Shooting Star (The Adventures of Tintin) by Hergé

See also -Hergé on climate change?
              and
              Dr.Doom melts ice

The knife twists -but does it hurt?

I'm beginning to doubt if Richard North is a nice person. First he and Christopher Booker wallop Rajendra Pachauri just when he is back from Copenhagen,all weak and pooped from trying to save this sinful world, and so least expecting a blow. Now North twists the knife-


Not only has Dr R K Pachauri, chairman of the UN's IPCC been developing a very significant portfolio of private interests, evidence is mounting that he has been carrying out his business activities for these organisations under the guise of his UN duties, and charging the expenses to the UN.

This has emerged in part from an official document published by the IPCC Secretariat late August 2008 in response to public questions about Pachauri's "carbon footprint" arising from his globe-trotting activities.

Under the title "Outreach activities carried out by the IPCC Chairman", covering his itinerary for January 2007 to July 2008, the main purpose was to reassure the public that, while engaged on UN activities he had indeed flown many miles, in each case the UN had paid "carbon offsets" for the flights – details of which were listed against each "official" engagement.

However, unwittingly, this document has revealed more than either the UN – and certainly Dr Pachauri – had intended. It provides effective proof that, on more than one occasion Pachauri was indeed using UN funding for his own commercial interests.

One egregious example of this comes on 7 July 2008, when – in amongst his 443,243 miles flown in the 19-month period - Dr Pachauri is recorded by the UN as having travelled 1,432 miles from Abu Dhabi, where he was attending the Zayed Future Energy Prize Award, to visit Delhi for what is officially described as "Visit of Basque delegation to TERI".

There, he meets José Antonio -Tontxu- Campos Granados, Minister Of Education, Universities And Research and Esther Larrañaga Galdos, Minister Of Environment And Land Use Planning, both from the Basque Government. No other business is recorded that day, or at all until 14 July when, at the UN's expense, he flies 3,446 miles to Vienna for a UN ceremony.

However, while the UN records this as official business, the Basque delegation is perhaps unaware of this. On one of its own official websites, it records that the delegation visited the TERI offices to meet its Director General, Dr RK Pachauri, in order to sign a collaboration agreement between TERI and their own research institute, the Basque Institute Centre on Climate Change (BC3) – which had only been set up the previous April.

---------------------------------------

Another "partner" to the programme is, incidentally, the University of East Anglia, home of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of Climategate fame.

Whatever the finer details of the arrangement with the Basques might have been, however, what is amply clear is that their official visit to Delhi on 7 July to meet Pachauri in Delhi had nothing whatsoever to do with UN business – and everything to do with Pachauri's personal position as Director General of TERI.

For that, at UN expense, Pachauri took a 1,432 miles from Abu Dhabi to get to Delhi and then a 3,446-mile trip to Vienna, totalling 4,878 miles. The direct route from Abu Dhabi to Vienna is 2,637 miles, with Pachauri's private business adding over 2,000 miles to his journey.

----------------------------------

In most jurisdictions, this kind of deception is regarded as theft and most employers treat gross misuse of expenses as a sackable offence. For the gifted and so far untouchable Dr Pachauri, however, this seems to be just another perk of the job.



Read the whole thing.


There are simply too many revelations now out for Pachauri to continue at the helm of the IPCC.Even if we assume that he did not amass a fortune(a big if) using his influence inappropriately, his conflicts of interests are glaring and undeniable.The excuse that he did it for TERI, a non-profit, does not wash. Top-notch non-profits are a very far cry from some local outfit of salvation army type misty-eyed stragglers.They have lavish offices all over the world and their budgets run in tens and sometimes hundreds of millions.Their top honchos are wined and dined and awarded in the highest places and palaces.

The big non-profits are the new elites.

Pachauri lives the life of a king - king of influence. He may sleep on a hard bed and get by on broccoli and water(not bottled water, I hope) and otherwise live the life of a saint -though I doubt it, it is all irrelevant.His game is power,his drug is the adrenalin rush of trying to save the planet by remaking it drastically in the image of his dharma -radical environmentalism.He is the Guru of the World. Presidents and prime ministers seek him for his "wisdom", as he seeks them to impart it.It's heady stuff.

That is why he appears testy and flustered when confronted firmly- as North and Booker have now done.

The heat is on(and I don't mean global warming) -the challenge is not to let it cool down, or the most dangerous man in the world will get away.

Hindi media catches on to Pachaurigate

The fire has now spread to the local press. The first reports from the Hindi media are in and surprisingly they are all pretty straightforward. I suspect the instinctive bias and the protect-our-nation's-hero kind of vews(news slanted with views or vice-versa)will kick in a day or two as the initial shock wears.

Here they are(I have translated the headlines only)-


Patrika.com -"Serious allegations against Pachauri"






Webduniya -"Pachauri accused of making money out of companies"



NDTV Khabar -"Pachauri accused of making money out of carbon companies"



Interestingly, NDTV Khabar is part of the NDTV media empire that likes to tomtom itself as greener than thou.It has a separate media division NDTV Green where R.K.Pachauri plays an important role. NDTV organizes bollywood dance shows it calls  greenathons where money collected is used to buy solar-powered CFL lamps for Indian villages with no access to electricity. I suppose a greenathon to build a power plant is a bit too much.And against Pachauri's principles too,perhaps.



Dainik Jaagran -"Pachauri's competence and honesty challenged"




Navbharat Times, one of the best known Hindi dailies, has a small paragraph tagged to the bottom of an article on Copenhagen- "Pachauri accused of making money"

Lets see if the fire continues to spread or if the Indian media gives it the climategate treatment -nothing to see, get lost!

Yipee yo!

Oh, wow! I'm on EUrerendum, one of my favorite blogs-




Thanks, Richard!

I wholeheartedly recommend his excellent book(written along with Christopher Booker)-
Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth





Not to be missed is the Chapter 14, Saving the planet.It's so good I wish Richard North would just post it online -as a pdf perhaps, or at least large excepts from it.

Do buy the book-


Scared to Death: From BSE to Global Warming: Why Scares are Costing Us the Earth at Amazon.

(Disclosure in fine print- if you do click on the above link -as you should- and purchase this fine book, a very small percentage of the sale will go to support Liberty News Central. This helps keep us alive. Thanks.)

A disturbing messianic complex?

Monte Kuligowski-

Politico reported that, “President Obama and world leaders are on the verge of finalizing a climate deal that caps the global temperature rise at 1.5 degrees,” just before the “Copenhagen Accord” was confirmed.

My first thought was: That sounds like something from the Justice League cartoon. After accepting that this lunacy is real life stuff, my second was: I have never read a more arrogant statement in my life.

While they were at it maybe they should have agreed to keep the earth on its orbit. Or perhaps they should have agreed to prevent the sun from having its violent outbursts.
And-
After all, these were Obama’s words on the campaign trail:

I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment . . . when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal. This was the moment - this was the time - when we came together to remake this great nation.

That’s what all the fawning and fainting produced: A disturbing messianic complex.

I suspect Rajendra Pachauri suffers from the same messianic complex - as he jet sets all over the globe endlessly giving off gases(not from his immediate person, thankfully) in large dollops(443243 miles on IPCC business in 19 months!)-the same gases that he wants the rest of us to drastically reduce by not eating meat, not flying, not drinking ice-water,not living like civilized people in general.Maybe he really does think he is a sort of prophet and his exertions will save the mankind from it's own sins.Megalomaniacs are generally unaware of their own smallness.A possible case for psychoanalyst's couch then.



Related -
From Instapundit -
".......the National Institutes of Health issued a statement saying that one researcher who claimed that EMFs and cancer were related had falsified data.” Then he went into climate research, presumably.

Heh,heh.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Richard North to Pachauri-"Up yours"

Take that, Pachauri!
Demi-god Rajendra Pachauri yesterday condescended to respond to allegations (some would say eye-popping revelations) against him in a now famous article in the Daily Telegraph by mere mortals in pajamas Richard North and Christopher Booker.

Pachauri defended himself-
‘‘These are a pack of lies from people who are getting desperate. They want to go after the guy whose voice is being heard. I haven’t pocketed a single penny from my association with companies and institutes. All honoraria that I get goes to TERI and to its Light a Billion Lives campaign for reaching solar power to people without electricity. All my dealings are totally above board.’’

Pachauri pointed out that the previous IPCC chairman was in the World Bank and the one before that was a professor. ‘‘Can you then say the university benefsited(sic) from his association with IPCC? The people who have flung these charges are part of the same vested interest group which hacked the server of UK’s East Anglia University. They are getting desperate because the world is now serious about moving away from fossil fuels. I want to ask them how much money they spent in the operation? Hacking a server is a costly exercise,’’ he said.


Richard North counters on his blog-
The poor man is having a little trouble with setting out his case though. He points out that the previous IPCC chairman was in the World Bank and the one before that was a professor. "Can you then say the university benefited from his association with IPCC?"

And the point is? In addition to his paid post as Director-General of TERI, Pachauri has taken on over twenty additional posts since becoming chairman of the IPCC – another of his paid posts.

On links with the TATAs, Pachauri says-
On TERI’s links with the Tata group, Pachauri said, ‘‘Our ties ended when Darbari Seth, who was on our board, died in 1999. We haven’t received a single penny from Tatas for years and have no ties with them.’’ He added that TERI submits its yearly accounts to the government under Section 12 of the income tax law. ‘‘We fully comply with all government laws,’’ he said.


North comes up with many serving and recent links with the TATAs-
Then, as we recalled, TERI's own communication manager Annapurna Vancheswaran said nothing had really changed. "We have not severed our past relationship with the Tatas. It's only (the change of name) for convenience," was the official line, four years after Pachauri says he has severed all ties with them.

Then there is the little matter of one of the Tata group of companies being listed currently as a corporate sponsor. To add to that, TERI has two ongoing projects with Tata, one which started in January and the other in July, plus eight completed projects from 2001-2007. That sort of suggests not only a link, but an ongoing relationship (screen grab - one of many - below).

and several more.

Dr. Doom has been easily found out.
North then says-
Our Dr Pachauri is not only a liar - he is not even a very good liar.


So will Pachauri take legal action to save his reputation from these......these desperate hackers?

On whether he intends to take legal action against the report, Pachauri said he hadn’t made up his mind. ‘‘Action against these people only gives dignity to these guys,’’ he added.

North responds-

But he dare not. If he chose to sue, we could demand full disclosure of his financial affairs, through the courts. And then the millionaire businessman would have some explaining to do – not least how he is booking his business expenses to the IPCC. And yes, I do have the evidence.

and then he delivers,um....what shall I say, coup de grâce?

Up yours, Pachauri, you are a thief as well as a liar.

My comment on Pachaurigate at Indian Express

On an article on the sensation created by the allegations leveled against Dr. Pachauri in the Daily Telegraph, I left this comment-



International Khiladi

The conflicts of interest listed in the article are simply too many to be brushed away. IMO, the main conflict of interest is not even the profit motive -even if he has not taken a penny from any of his posts(so what does he live on then -bhiksha(charity)?), he as the head of the IPCC is in a powerful position to influence policies of most countries in the favor of entities where he is the 'adviser'.

He is thus, for such companies and organizations, a 'fixer' of the greatest effect.Power lust is a motive sometimes far greater than mere lucre.

He is, as we say in India, an International Khiladi(player) and that is his reward.

Note -the formatting is slightly modified here for clarity.


Update -
       another commentator on the same article-
The article also states that he founded Glorioil. This is confirmed by online company information and he is still listed as a scientific adviser to them. According to the Glorioil website their corporate vision and mission are: "Our vision is to be the leader in bio-technology solutions to the global oil and gas industry and service provider of choice to both independent and major oil and gas producers. Our mission is delivering state of the art bio-technology solutions to improve and increase recovery from mature oil wells and to solve complex problems associated with the production of oil, gas and water." Founding a company which aims to maximise the extraction of oil and be a "partner of choice" to international oil producers does not seem to sit well with his position as Chair of the IPCC and its concerns about climate change due to GHG emissions!

Hanging polar bears

When the greens get mean -they hang polar bears!

 

hanging polar bear

Related -did you hear about Dr Mitchell Taylor, Polar Bear biologist, whose views on global warming’s alleged threat to polar bears run counter to the climate orthodoxy-
More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
and -

Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".

 

Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

Whatever this is, it's not science.It appears that only one narrative is allowed.No wonder then that study after dodgy study comes out screaming that climate change is worse than we thought,that the world is ending soon (by teatime latest)-scientists' funding could very well depend on pushing the scare.

Collectivism vs. freedom - an age old battle

OBAMANATION101

You will notice that most of the global warming alarmists are ideologically leftists and most of the skeptics are ideologically inclined towards freedom. The climate change debate is more than science -it is two opposing schools of philosophy, two mutually exclusive world-views.Which perfectly explains why so many socialists and communists gravitate towards environmentalism, why Chavez got a huge applause at Copenhagen and why the collectivists were present in full strength.

 

Video -Communists at Copenhagen -feeling at home

 

Note- due to formatting problems with the video this post had to be published twice. The first one was deleted.

2035 or 2350, who cares?


But for the fact that they want to loot trillions in the name of climate change(and make themselves millions in the process), this bunch of baboons are turning the whole field of climate 'science' into a farce. Facts, shmacts -who cares? 2035 or 2350, how does it matter,as long as the media poodles keep hiding the ball and stick to the narrative?

 BBC reports-

The UN panel on climate change warning that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035 is wildly inaccurate, an academic says.

J Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University, says he believes the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

He is astonished they "misread 2350 as 2035". The authors deny the claims.

Leading glaciologists say the report has caused confusion and "a catalogue of errors in Himalayan glaciology".

-----------------------------------

In its 2007 report, the Nobel Prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said: "Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.


"It is not plausible that Himalayan glaciers are disappearing completely within the next few decades"
Michael Zemp,
World Glacier Monitoring Service

--------------------------------------

"Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2035," the report said.

----------------------------------------But Professor Cogley has found a 1996 document by a leading hydrologist, VM Kotlyakov, that mentions 2350 as the year by which there will be massive and precipitate melting of glaciers.

"The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid, catastrophic rates - its total area will shrink from 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometres by the year 2350," Mr Kotlyakov's report said.

Mr Cogley says it is astonishing that none of the 10 authors of the 2007 IPCC report could spot the error and "misread 2350 as 2035".

"I do suggest that the glaciological community might consider advising the IPCC about ways to avoid such egregious errors as the 2035 versus 2350 confusion in the future," says Mr Cogley.

------------------------------------
When asked how this "error" could have happened, RK Pachauri, the Indian scientist who heads the IPCC, said: "I don't have anything to add on glaciers."

The IPCC relied on three documents to arrive at 2035 as the "outer year" for shrinkage of glaciers.

They are: a 2005 World Wide Fund for Nature report on glaciers; a 1996 Unesco document on hydrology; and a 1999 news report in New Scientist.

Incidentally, none of these documents have been reviewed by peer professionals, which is what the IPCC is mandated to be doing.

Murari Lal, a climate expert who was one of the leading authors of the 2007 IPCC report, denied it had its facts wrong about melting Himalayan glaciers.

But he admitted the report relied on non-peer reviewed - or 'unpublished' - documents when assessing the status of the glaciers.



There's more.

But this is amazing -not only did the l'affaire climategate show the the peer-review process has been corrupted, but now we know that such deafening scaremongering is also based on non-peer reviewed studies.Who could have thunk that?

Also read Dr. Madhav Khandekar's take on the Himalayan glaciers.

Can we just call the whole nightmare joke off?

Copenhagen was a success

(from economic destruction)

Cover your climate sins

I hope all the preachers of climate doom who flocked to Copenhagen have got this to cover their sins-




(via Amy Ridenour)

The heavy artillery of silence

Warmer winters in Delhi, we are told, means -help!we are dying of global warming!

But what about this-




All the experts say the effects of climate change will be felt most in Alaska, home of the ex-governor who contends climate change is no big deal.

Good thing she wasn't in Valdez this week when the citizenry got buried under a record snowfall.
-------------------
Yes, you read right.
Five feet, 8 inches; over the head of your average American woman

Obama, who escaped grim weather in Copenhagen, arrived to a warm welcome in Washington-





Record snowfall totals were reported Saturday afternoon at Washington Dulles and Reagan National airports -- and snow was still falling. Accumulation at Dulles reached 16 inches, breaking the old record of 10.6 inches set December, 12, 1964; 13.3 inches was reported at Reagan. The old record there was 11.5 inches set December 17, 1932.


Powerline has more images of global warming from Europe-




We 'skeptics' understand that the weather is not climate -unfortunately the greenies and their media-poodles don't. But even here they are dishonest in terms of their own premises.Every warmer than usual event means global warming, but record cold events - well, they are just ignored.Silence is a weapon- a heavy artillery- in this war. And the media uses it all the time.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Environmentalism -wrecking young brains

What the environmentalists are doing to the children(with dollops of help from the media and the state) is nothing short of child abuse.Frank Furedi-

Turning children into Orwellian eco-spies
Frank Furedi recalls being educated through fear in Stalinist Hungary, and is disturbed that the same tactics are now used by environmentalists.
----------------------------
If you want to know how it works, watch the official opening video of the Copenhagen summit on climate change (see below). Titled ‘Please Help The World’, the four-minute film opens with happy children laughing and playing on swings. A sudden outburst of rain forces them all to rush for cover. The message is clear: the climate threatens our way of life. It then cuts to a young girl who is anxiously watching one TV news broadcaster after another reporting on impending environmental catastrophes. Then we see the young girl tucked into bed, sweetly asleep as she embraces her toy polar bear… but suddenly we’re drawn into her nightmare. She’s on a parched and eerie landscape; she looks frightened and desolate; suddenly the dry earth cracks and she runs in terror towards the shelter of a distant solitary tree. She drops her toy polar bear in a newly formed chasm and yells and screams as she holds on to the tree for dear life. The video ends with groups of children pleading with us: ‘Please help the world.’ You get the picture.

Although this video is a product of the gathering at Copenhagen, it is typical of the kind of propaganda that is constantly directed at children these days. In a world where moral education seems to be exhausted, where teachers are reluctant to judge or to explain the difference between right and wrong, environmentalism has become one of the few values that educators feel comfortable with. Which is why environmentalism and its values now saturate the school curriculum in Britain and some other countries, too.

In medieval times, religion was central to the teaching of virtually every subject. Students were left in no doubt where the church stood on the smallest details of every topic they were learning about. Today, environmental concerns have been integrated into the curriculum, to the point where they often dominate subjects like geography, science and Personal Health and Social Education and intrude into history and literature, too. The growing significance of environmental issues in the school curriculum is directly proportionate to society’s broader moral illiteracy and loss of purpose. Today, even religious studies often appears as a sub-branch of the dogma of environmental alarmism.
----------------------------------

By transmitting their values to children, the scaremongers hope to channel children’s indignation into hostility towards older generations that are apparently destroying the planet. In the Copenhagen video we hear a child talking about her ‘anger’. When she says ‘I am only a child’, the implication is clear: adults have let children down.

Others go a step further and blame older generations for destroying the environment to such an extent that the survival of future generations is put in jeopardy. The message is that adults are greedy or stupid, or both. This downbeat assessment of adults’ behaviour has mutated into outright hostility towards the moral status of the older generations and their so-called ‘wisdom’. ‘Adults have ruined our world’, says the headline to an article in an online magazine targeting children.

------------------------


In previous times, it was only totalitarian societies that mobilised children to police their parents’ behaviour. It was Orwellian, Big Brother-style states that tried to harness youngsters’ simplistic views of good and evil to reshape the outlook of adults. But who needs Big Brother when the former prime minister of Britain, Tony Blair, can openly assert that ‘on climate change, it is parents who should listen to their children’? It appears that preying on children’s fears and exploiting their anxiety is now considered to be a form of enlightened education. Yet the future of our children demands that we provide them with existential and moral security. Instead of feeding them on a steady diet of scaremongering, we need to inspire them about our potential to improve the future of our world.





Read the whole thing.

As I have pointed out, the media (see my  case-study of the Hindustan Times) are shamefully fully involved in giving children nightmares and turning them against adults.

Pachauri - eating away at the civilization


Indian media caught with it's pants and panties down again.Firangs(foreigners) doing the job they should.

I don't know why but  Rajendra Pachauri has a demi-god status among the media types here.The few times I have seen him on Indian T.V, the anchors(I remember well the expression on Prannoy Roy and Vikram Chandra's faces, both of NDTV) behave as if they are just about to tipple over, fall at his feet and say-
"Sirjee, joote polish kar doon?" (Won't you let me polish your shoes, sir?)




I'm glad that the Daily Telegraph is not in such a masochist mode. It has an article today by Christopher Booker and Richard North(of EUreferendum) on the amazing(really amazing) conflicts of interest of Dr.Doom-




Apart from the infamous TATA-Corus-1700 jobs lost connection(which, again, foreigners had to discover and report), it has much more. Eye-opening stuff for those in awe of Pachauri. Excerpts-


-----------------------

Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.



What has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.

Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.

------------------------------------




Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India(sic-Indian) Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer.

In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.

However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.

Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.

Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.

Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.

TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international ‘carbon market’, between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.

All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.

Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their ‘carbon limits’ by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up ‘carbon credits’ for every renewable energy source they develop – or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own ‘carbon emissions’.

It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).

-------------------------------------

But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’.

In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’,

In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.

In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe’s largest electricity firms, to promote ‘bio-energy’. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a ‘strategic adviser’, and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.
-----------------------------------------------

As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India’s 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.

One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials.

As for TERI itself, Dr Pachauri’s main job for nearly 30 years, it is so coy about money that it does not even publish its accounts – the financial statement amounts to two income and expenditure pie charts which contain no detailed figures.

---------------------------
But whether those 1,700 Corus workers on Teesside will next month be so happy to lose their jobs to India, thanks to the workings of that international ‘carbon market’ about which Dr Pachauri is so enthusiastic, is quite another matter.


Wow! What a global web of influence this spider weaves.Like a seepage that keeps spreading over time and eventually destroys a building, I'm afraid Pachauri is playing the same role with respect to the industrial civilization.

There is much more.Go read the whole damn thing and weep over the fallen panties of the Indian media.

My 2nd comment at Carbon Footprint

Just left another comment at Carbon Footprint, a Hindustan Times blog by Samar Halarnkar. My previous comment here.

Samar,
as a journalist(and not an activist -I say this because the tenor and content of your 'reporting' is indistinguishable from reports put out by environmental organizations), could you have a look at satellite temperatures and see if you can make out runaway global warming?

The satellite measurements are here-
http://motls.blogspot.com/2009/12/uah-msu-temperatures-for-2009-and.html
with the conclusion-
"A global warming trend continues to be absent despite the very strong El Nino episode that has been affecting the weather for more than half a year and that may match the 1998 El Nino of the century in the near future."

And could you also look into Pachauri's HUGE, way huge, conflicts of interests as reported in today's Daily Telegraph-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227/Questions-over-business-deals-of-UN-climate-change-guru-Dr-Rajendra-Pachauri.html

On the one hand,as the chairman of IPCC he has almost godly powers to influence the artificially created carbon markets.On the other, he has his fingers in the carbon pie at umpteen number of funds and organizations.

As the article in the Daily Telegraph put it-
"One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials. "

So much for accountability and transparency.

I know, rich countries are your bugbear but-
could you play the journalist - and not the activist- and investigate Pachauri's affairs?

And I haven't yet asked you to report on climategate- which your newspaper so partisanly dismissed . An event that caused furor in scientific and political circles is not to be dismissed by a newspaper -you know, "news"+paper.Your job is to report-whether you agree on one side of the issue or not.

Your(and your newspaper's) job is to report, not take sides.And even if you do take sides, that cannot be at the expense of blacking out the facts that support the other side. Am I right, Samar?

I hope you will make a start by publishing the incriminating emails.

I write this as a long-suffering reader.

Cheers and regards

Not yet published pending moderation.

Update -
  Not yet published even after about 20 hrs or so. So I have re-submitted it with the following preface-
Samar, you did not publish my comment -it was neither off-topic nor offensive, unless you consider certain opinions not in line with yours as one. So let me in good faith try again-


Update 2-
    Goodie good - now published.
From a generally kind review of Avatar by Chris Hewitt-
As he proved with "Titanic" and his graceless Oscar acceptance speeches, Cameron is a better director than writer. There are some cringe-worthy moments and a general lack of humor in the "Avatar" script. Plus, I'm always suspicious of people like Cameron, who probably lives in a mansion with hot-and-cold running champagne, telling me that I need to appreciate the simple things in life. (How about this, Jim: I'll reduce my carbon footprint when you stop acquiring a new wife every five years.)

Lessons so simple that even an environmental reporter can savvy

I think our friends in the media, who on this blog are lovingly called 'environmental poodles', can do with some educating - a look at satellite temperatures and other temperature anomalies:

UAH-MSU temperatures for 2009


------------------------
Among these 15 years, 2009 will be cooler than 1998, 2005, 2002, 2007, 2003, and maybe 2006, so it will be just the 6th or 7th warmest year - pretty much exactly in the middle of the last 15 years' scoreboard. A global warming trend continues to be absent despite the very strong El Nino episode that has been affecting the weather for more than half a year and that may match the 1998 El Nino of the century in the near future.

--------------------------
If there were some significant or urgent global warming, you would expect the record to be broken almost every year: that's what increasing functions like to do. However, it's been the 11th year in a row when the record reading wasn't rewritten. And according to UAH, 2009 was 0.25 °C below 1998. Because the 1979-2009 warming trend indicated by UAH is 0.13 °C per decade, we will need roughly 20 more years to return back where we were in 1998, assuming that the warming observed in the last 30 years will continue (it didn't exist between the 1940s and 1970s).

Even if there were a warming issue worth talking about, it doesn't sound terribly urgent given these numbers, does it?


And this is interesting-

As a bonus, I will list you the UAH warming trends (recalculated to temperature changes in °C per century) for various intervals:

1995-2009: +0.95 °C/century
1996-2009: +0.89 °C/century
1997-2009: +0.41 °C/century
1998-2009: -0.24 °C/century
1999-2009: +1.22 °C/century
2000-2009: +0.53 °C/century
2001-2009: -0.78 °C/century
2002-2009: -1.56 °C/century
2003-2009: -1.43 °C/century
2004-2009: -1.43 °C/century
2005-2009: -3.70 °C/century
2006-2009: -2.30 °C/century
2007-2009: -1.00 °C/century
2008-2009: +21.0 °C/century

Of course, the last one must be taken with a big grain of salt. ;-) Otherwise, you can see among these 14 trends, 6 are warming (generously counting the huge 2008-2009 trend as well) while 8 are cooling! ;-) I could be more quantitative but this is roughly what we mean by saying that there has been no statistically significant warming in the last 15 years.

For some reason you won't see this reported in your daily newspaper. I guess, their environmental poodles reporters are too busy copying Greenpeace's press releases into their 'reports'.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Copenhagen-world's most corrupt dictators and regimes extorting the developed world

LORRIE GOLDSTEIN on Copenhagen-
A good definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

In that sense, the approach of the United Nations in Copenhagen to addressing climate change has been insane.

As they did 12 years ago in Kyoto, Japan, world leaders have apparently jammed together an eleventh-hour deal in an atmosphere of manufactured hysteria and artificial deadlines.

This is a farcical way to deal with what these leaders claim is an existential threat to mankind. Whatever they've agreed to has nothing to do with cooling our planet.

It has everything to do with some of the world's most corrupt dictators and regimes extorting billions upon billions of dollars from the developed world -- us -- which they will then spend not on reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), but in any way they please.

Never mind that the European cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions spawned by the Kyoto accord and financed by carbon credits, is riddled with profiteering, fraud, corruption and has been infiltrated by organized crime, which has already stolen billions of dollars.

Never mind that cap-and-trade -- soon to go global -- has done nothing for the environment, while driving up the cost of energy for consumers and funneling billions in undeserved profits to hedge funds, speculators and energy companies.

Remember -the greenies and their media-whores are blind to all this.Like a junkie who is beyond caring for any consequence, they want more of it.

An open letter to Damini Purkayastha

An open letter to Damini Purkayastha, who has an utterly clueless article, CITY CRIBS - A GLOBAL WARNING, in the city supplement of the Hindustan Times today.Normally I would not be moved to react, but her photo is cho chweet that I could not help myself but respond.
DAMINI PURKAYASTHA
Cannot find the article online but here is it-


My letter-

Dear Ms. Purkayastha

I was going to write a long rebuttal but what the heck! there are so many things to do and so little time. So, in brief -

1) WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE-
so the warmth you perceive outside your window proves nothing, nada, zilch about global temperatures.If it did, then from the following you would have to conclude that the world is cooling-

In a strange twist, a Washington snowstorm is forcing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, to make an early departure from a global warming summit here in Denmark.


Due to weather complications #Obama leaves #Copenhagen before #cop15 concludes. Oh - the irony

and he (Obama)landed in washington He had raced back to Washington to avoid the worst of a winter storm barreling through the northeastern United States that threatened to dump up to two feet (61 centimeters) of snow on the last weekend of the Christmas holiday shopping season.


All of which, as I said, says nothing about Global temperatures -because WEATHER IS NOT CLIMATE


2) DISEASES AND CLIMATE CHANGE-
This article by Paul Reiter, a professor of medical entomology might be instructive-The inconvenient truth about malaria. Summary - environmentalists claim malaria is moving higher up in latitude where it had not been present before due to global warming. Conclusion -wrong!



As Prof.Reiter says-

The disease was present as high as 2,500m above sea level; the mosquitoes were observed at 3,000m. And Nairobi? 1,680m.


These details are not science. They require no study. They are history. But for activists, they are an inconvenient truth, so they ignore them.


3) AH, THOSE HIMALAYAN GLACIERS, the poster boy of global warming, like Kilimanjaro earlier.

Kilimanjaro snow melting due to GW, as claimed by Al Gore,refuted here(Kilimanjaro's shrinking snow not sign of warming -reuters), but does it matter? Environmentalists and their sleeping partners(ideologically speaking) journalists keep parroting the same lies anyway.



Let me not delve into V.K. Raina's inconvenient study of these glaciers that caused Pachauri to have a fit.
A recent Nasa study-

New Study Turns Up the Heat on Soot's Role in Himalayan Warming





A new modeling study from NASA confirms that when tiny air pollution particles we commonly call soot – also known as black carbon – travel along wind currents from densely populated south Asian cities and accumulate over a climate hotspot called the Tibetan Plateau, the result may be anything but inconsequential.

----------------------------
"Over areas of the Himalayas, the rate of warming is more than five times faster than warming globally," said William Lau, head of atmospheric sciences at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "Based on the differences it’s not difficult to conclude that greenhouse gases are not the sole agents of change in this region. There’s a localized phenomenon at play."

Conclusion -climate science is complex.Very complex. What is not known far,far outstrips what is, though Pachauri and Al Gore(both famous climate scientists, I'm sure) may disagree




4) YOUR FILM RECOMMEDATIONS-

 What to say.

35 Inconvenient Truths -The errors in Al Gore’s movie



A judge in Britain's High Court has ruled that Gore's apocalyptic movie on climate change, An Inconvenient Truth, should come with a warning that it promotes "partisan political views" and is riddled with errors.

Wish you would inform your readers about it.


For balance (journalists are supposed to maintain balance,right?)you might recommend -

The Great Global Warming Swindle

and Not Evil Just Wrong




No, Damini, my head is not in the sand or in the media bubble in which everything is the fault of America, West, Bush, neo-conservatives and where Obama, Gore, U.N. and Pachauri are gods.But last time I was in the sand I did glimpse a pretty face looking very anxious about the weather outside of it.

Cheers and regards,
gurmeet





Update-
             corrected a couple of spellings

Half-full or half-empty?

The Guardian-



(via Watts up with that)


The Hindustan Times (today, Delhi print edition)-


How to create man-made global warming

Man made global warming? Sure looks like it, at least in this case.

Look at the blue graph -that is the raw temperature data from the surface station at Darwin Airport, Australia. Do you see a warming?

Now look at the red and the black graphs.The black line is the adjustments that had been applied to that data, and the red line is the result following the adjustments-the 'adjusted' data used by CRU and reported by IPCC. Do you see a warming? Sure you do.And as surely, there is some 'man' involved in creating that warming.



Adjusting temperature data at Darwin- producing man-made warming

Read the full details here. As Willis Eschenbach puts it-

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around.


Update-
    The Economist critcizes Willis Eschenbach's work and he responds here.


Update 2-
     In Willis Eschenbach's response there is this zinger-

And while I am sorry to hear of the lacunae in your math education, please don’t make the foolish assumption that others are similarly limited. I have no problem with the GHCN math. If you truly have no idea on the question as you say … then why are you excoriating my ideas on the question?

-----------------------------
Next you say: “Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand.”

Your understanding of statistics is as poor as your understanding of chronology. The statistics used by GHCN are average college level tools. You are dazzled by the fact that you don’t understand them, so you make the incredibly foolish assumption that no one without “a PhD in a related field” can understand them either. Some of us actually paid attention in class, you know.

            A gem!


Update 3 -
        Cleaned up some confusing language