For her 2006 World Tour, she flew by private jet, transporting a team of up to 100 technicians and dancers around the globe. Waiting in the garage at home, she has a Mercedes Maybach, two Range Rovers, an Audi A8 and a Mini Cooper S. Indeed, Madonna’s carbon footprint is dwarfed only by her ego - she has vowed that she will ’speak to the planet’ at Wembley. In fact, an apology might be in order - for the superstar’s energy consumption is only the tip of the iceberg in this epic vanity-fest.

The Live Earth event is, in the words of one commentator: “a massive, hypocritical fraud”. For while the organisers’ commitment to save the planet is genuine, the very process of putting on such a vast event, with more than 150 performers jetting around the world to appear in concerts from Tokyo to Hamburg, is surely an exercise in hypocrisy on a grand scale. Matt Bellamy, front man of the rock band Muse, has dubbed it ‘private jets for climate change’. A Daily Mail investigation has revealed that far from saving the planet, the extravaganza will generate a huge fuel bill, acres of garbage, thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions, and a mileage total equal to the movement of an army. The most conservative assessment of the flights being taken by its superstars is that they are flying an extraordinary 222,623.63 miles between them to get to the various concerts - nearly nine times the circumference of the world. The true environmental cost, as they transport their technicians, dancers and support staff, is likely to be far higher.

The total carbon footprint of the event, taking into account the artists’ and spectators’ travel to the concert, and the energy consumption on the day, is likely to be at least 31,500 tonnes of carbon emissions, according to John Buckley of Carbonfootprint.com, who specialises in such calculations. Throw in the television audience and it comes to a staggering 74,500 tonnes. In comparison, the average Briton produces ten tonnes in a year. The concert will also generate some 1,025 tonnes of waste at the concert stadiums - much of which will go directly into landfill sites. Moreover, the pop stars headlining the concerts are the absolute antithesis of the message they promote - with Madonna leading the pack of the worst individual rock star polluters in the world. Supermodel Kate Moss, another profligate polluter through her use of private jets, is producing a T-shirt for the event. Yet, Gore is touting the concerts as ‘carbon neutral’. So how can that be?

Let us start with some facts. Worldwide, an audience of around 1,268,500 is expected to attend the concerts - making it one of the largest global events in history. Dr Andrea Collins, an expert in sustainability from Cardiff University, has researched the impact of such mass gatherings on the environment.

“An event of this size at Wembley - which holds 65,000 at a rock concert, will generate around 59 tonnes of waste,” she says. “That is largely composed of the rubbish from food and drink consumption.” She found that a Wembley-sized football match generated an ‘ecological footprint’ of 3,000 global hectares - an area the size of 4,166 football pitches. This is the amount of bioproductive land required to absorb the C02 emissions produced by such an event. Dr Collins estimates that the global audience for Live Earth will generate some 1,025 tonnes of waste. An extraordinary one million people are expected at the free concert at Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach, featuring Lenny Kravitz, Macy Gray and Pharrell Williams. Other venues including the Coca-Cola Dome in Johannesburg - where Joss Stone is performing - will cater for audiences of tens of thousands. Live Earth say that they will recycle much of the waste generated. Fine talk, but in fact some of the concert venues are struggling to keep up with their commitments. A spokesman for Wembley says they only have the capacity to recycle around a third of waste produced - the rest will go into landfill sites.

Travel forms the vast majority of the ‘carbon footprint’ talked of by ecological campaigners - contributing up to 90 per cent of the environmental ‘cost’. Collins says: “It is patently absurd to claim that travel of this nature doesn’t have an impact. Each person attending the event will have to make a return journey to the venue, be it by air, rail, bus or car. This burns fossil fuel - precisely what we are trying to reduce. There is also the environmental cost of these artists flying around the world - that is absolutely huge.”

Indeed, an audit of the lifestyles of the A-list performers appearing at Live Earth, reveals that they are among the worst individual polluters in the world, as their world tours and private jets billow thousands of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. One hour in a Gulfstream jet burns as much fuel as driving a family car for a year. The Daily Mail has found that five of the top performing acts together have an annual output of almost 2,000 carbon tonnes. Madonna alone has an annual carbon footprint of 1,018 tonnes, according to John Buckley.

Remember, the average Briton produces just ten tonnes.

• The veteran pop singer’s Confessions tour last year produced 440 tonnes of carbon pollution in just four months, simply in flights between venues. This does not include the trucks required to transport equipment, the power needed to stage each show, or the transport for fans travelling to each concert.
• Rock group Genesis re-formed last year and are in the middle of their European tour. The three-man band will fit their Live Earth performance into a tour of at least 47 locations across the world. Their carbon footprint last year totalled 195 tonnes.
• James Blunt, another Wembley performer, completed his world tour of the U.S. last year, racking up a carbon footprint of 195 tonnes.
• American band Red Hot Chili Peppers have, like Madonna, flown in to Wembley from the U.S. They have produced 220 tonnes of carbon dioxide with their private jet alone over the last six months.
• Meanwhile, the Daily Mail has learnt that Bon Jovi left the UK this week to travel back by private jet to the U.S. to perform at the New York stadium for the American leg of Live Earth.
• Music impresario Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ex-wife Sarah Brightman is being flown out to sing at the Shanghai concert in China. This is a distance of 5,679.95 miles, producing one tonne of carbon dioxide pollution.
• Two other acts have already been criticised for being paid to promote fuel-guzzling cars. John Legend is featured in a Lexus advert, while Sheryl Crow’s hit Everyday Is A Winding Road is used to sell Subaru 4WDs.
• Razorlight frontman Johnny Borrell has been criticised for urging people to drive electric eco-scooters - but buying a 1,000cc Moto Guzzi bike - described as ‘a monster-revving beast’.

Such is the level of disquiet felt about Live Earth in New Zealand, that a pressure group called the Climaction Coalition, is urging people to protest against it on July 7. Radiohead, who are pioneers in eco-friendly performing, have refused to appear. Of course, Live Earth is doing its utmost to ensure the event is ‘green’ in appearance at least - stars will be ferried between the stage and dressing room by energy-efficient Smart Cars and biodiesel fuelled Mercedes. A proposal for Gore to appear at concerts in Britain and America on the same day - something that Phil Collins, the Genesis drummer and singer, was able to do at the original Live Aid in 1985, courtesy of Concorde - has been dropped because of the anger that the ‘gas-guzzling’ flight would provoke. Andrea Robinson, Live Earth’s green manager, says her message to celebrities is: “Leave the Learjet at home - fly commercial.” Wembley Stadium will be lit using low energy fluorescent lightbulbs, while the backdrop is composed of recycled tyres and oil drums. The organisers tried to introduce re-usable cups for interval refreshments, but found that - like many green strategies - this was not practical on such a huge scale.

Some bio-produced plastic, made from corn, will be used, and artists’ changing rooms will be fitted with energy-saving lightbulbs - all rather a drop in the ocean compared to the pollution generated by fans traveling across the UK to the concert or using the stadium’s 2,618 toilets. Plans to ask the British public to turn off their electrical appliances during the Live Earth broadcast were scuppered when the National Grid pointed out that as everyone switched on again, a giant power surge could cripple the country. Some stadiums are greener than others. The Aussie Stadium in Sydney will run the event on 100 per cent green energy supply. Each Australian Live Earth ticket comes with a free public transport voucher, while all the bathrooms will be waterless with waste being composted into fertiliser. Conversely, in New York’s Giants Stadium, trade unions have blocked Live Earth’s attempts to recycle, and the 52,000-seater arena is not situated near public transport. The smallest - and least polluting - concert will be held at the British Antarctic Survey’s base in Rothera.

Bizarrely, the concerts are also being ‘independently audited’ by consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers over the next seven weeks, to assess the level of pollution they will have generated. It is unclear what benefit this exercise will have, although the Live Earth organisers talk in terms of providing a ‘legacy’ for future events, showing how recycling and low-impact travel can be encouraged, and carbon-offsetting used. But the fact remains - massive rock concerts are hardly eco-friendly.

So just how does Gore claim that Live Earth will be carbon neutral? He does so by convenient use of ‘carbon offsetting’ - a trendy new method of absolving yourself of guilt. Carbon offsetting involves ‘neutralising’ the emissions you are responsible for by buying ‘credits’. A spokesperson for Live Earth says: “This might involve buying environmentally sound lightbulbs for a Third World school, planting trees, or installing solar panels in a developing country.”

A huge industry has sprung up to provide corporations with carbon credits. However, critics say that the practice is simply a way for consumerist industries and nations to export their responsibility to developing countries. Others say it simply does not work. Carbon-offsetting is, it turns out, how celebrities square green issues with their extravagant lifestyles and use of private jets. Jon Bon Jovi has said: “We wrote a cheque, we took care of our footprint and raised awareness, blah blah blah.” When Gore - who himself spent eight years flying on Air Force Two - was asked if he had persuaded Madonna to stop using private jets, he said: ‘Well, I appreciate and respect her as an artist and as a person, and there are many artists who are offsetting their role in contributing to the CO2 build-up, and I understand that.’ A rather longwinded way of saying ‘no’. Madonna has, however, been given an instruction handbook on climate crisis by Live Earth.

John Rego, the environmental director of Live Earth, says he expects to purchase at least 3,000 tonnes of carbon credits to off-set the event. It is believed the organisers will spend in excess of £1million on carbon offsetting to counter criticism. Rego explains: “All the events are carbon neutral. We have chosen a reforestation and reagricultural project in Mozambique. It is a credible certifiable carbon-diffused project. We are in the process of purchasing a carbon offset.”

Dr Collins says: “Taking a flight and planting a tree does not add up. It does not make it all right. It is having your cake and eating it.” Dr John Barrett, from the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York, says: “There is a huge irony in flying halfway across the globe in a private jet, eating up fossil fuel. The idea that you can offset the pollution you cause is just ridiculous. What these people at Live Earth have done is defined their boundaries to suit themselves, but there is no sense in which this concert is carbon neutral. Planting trees or investing in renewable energy does not reverse the damage of releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the environment. It is far better not to pollute in the first place. Carbon offsetting can be a removal of guilt, but it is not an effective one.”

Live Earth is encouraging ‘citizens of the world’ to take small steps: share a car, plant a shrub, turn off a light or hang out washing rather than use a dryer. But Dr Barrett says: “It would be far better for these celebrities to stay at home. Holding large concerts to highlight environmental concerns and cut carbon emissions just seems ridiculous. What planet do these people live on?”

Using the fearsome title “Pending doom: Global warming crisis” it goes on to say;

A group of fourth-graders in Portland creates a list of priorities to stop global warming. Our school study of global warming started with lots of questions. What is global warming? What is happening now? What might happen in the future? What can each of us do to help? Why should we care? What will the future look like?

But when you get into reading the article you will find that the answers to the questions are simple a regurgitation of Al Gore’s global war on independent thought.

Related articles: 

Comparing global warming with religion
Michael Crichton on Environmentalism as a Religion
Anthropocentric Global Alarmism
Church to merge with Global Warming Religion
Not the End of the World as We Know It
Sin Independence Day
Replacing the bible with Al Gore’s book
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism
The Theology of Global Warming

“There seems to be this mad rush toward expansion of the alternative fuels industry without sufficient due diligence,” said Bill Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies (NACAA). The Renewable Fuels Association, a major industry lobbying group, lists 119 working ethanol refineries in the United States, with another 77 refineries being built as of June 1. Federal and state environmental agencies are responsible for monitoring the plants and making sure they follow local and national clean air and water guidelines. Those agencies have been busy.

A Cybercast News Service analysis of EPA records found 73 biorefineries - more than 60 percent of those operating - were cited by state or federal agencies for environmental violations in the last three years. The vast majority involve state or federal clean air laws. “They’ve brought the enforcement actions against a number of ethanol companies and refineries for essentially sidestepping the law,” said Frank O’Donnell, president of the non-partisan Clean Air Watch. “Ethanol refineries have the potential to pollute quite a bit.” Most of the companies have not been fined by state or federal government agencies, though some of the biggest ownership groups have been forced to pay millions for cleanup and anti-pollution devices. “Ethanol has been dramatically oversold as a green energy source,” said O’Donnell.

Fordland, Mo., bed and breakfast owner Larry Alberty agreed. He and his rural neighbors are fighting a proposed ethanol plant in nearby Rogersville. They fear the plant’s proposed 12-acre wastewater holding pond will seep into groundwater - the plant will be built on top of a major aquifer - and that the project will harm tourism in the area with its smokestacks and noise. “Eleven million people visit this area [each year],” Alberty said. “People aren’t going to want to come to the bed and breakfast and hear the noise and the light pollution … it has an impact there and we’re very concerned about it.” Becker predicted that these “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) battles will happen more frequently as the industry rushes to expand capacity.

Most ethanol plants are built in rural areas and are sold as major job-producing engines, but Becker said the tons of pollution the plants churn out will have a major impact on the heartland’s air quality and, consequently, the area’s quality of life. “It’s very important that the rural areas, the clean areas grow judiciously and allow industrial growth in such a way that it doesn’t kick the air quality into a dirty area,” he said. Failure to do so could cause all industries in the area to install pollution controls, make drivers go through emissions tests for vehicles, and make it more difficult for future development, he argued. The pro-ethanol lobby said there is substantial support for expanding the industry.

“For every NIMBY group and every project that runs into opposition from the community, you’re seeing half a dozen communities that want an ethanol plant,” said Geoff Cooper of the National Corn Growers Association. Cooper said Cybercast News Service’s analysis is not surprising, but he said things are getting better. “Some of the older plants that have been around for a decade or longer were built at a time when the regulatory regime for these types of facilities wasn’t completely ironed out,” he explained. “Some of those older plants are having to do some things to get up to code.”

Cooper said any problems with pollution are offset by the environmental benefits of renewable fuels being used in U.S. vehicles. “When you look at the carbon footprint and ethanol’s ability to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the industry’s track record speaks for itself,” he said. Cooper also noted that many powerful environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, are strongly in favor of ethanol. “Where you’re seeing most of the opposition in terms of air quality is the fringe groups,” he said. But Becker, who represents a group of state and local environmental regulatory agencies, said the ethanol industry’s green credentials have been blackened. At one time, those agencies viewed the renewable fuels industry as a natural ally in environmental protection - but not anymore.

“I don’t think they would qualify as green today,” said Becker.

Incentives for ethanol production and distribution are a significant part of the Senate’s omnibus energy bill being debated this week. Repeated requests for comment from one of the most powerful pro-ethanol lobbying groups, the Renewable Fuel Association, went unreturned, as did requests for comment from Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) - both of whom have been outspoken advocates for ethanol. Aides for Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) reviewed the Cybercast News Service analysis and declined to comment.

Cybercast News Service Correspondent Katherine Poythress contributed to this article.

Global expenditure for imported foodstuff in 2007 is expected to top $400 billion, almost 5 percent above last year’s record, while developing countries are expected to face a 9 percent increase, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization said. The Rome-based agency’s “Food Outlook” report blamed most of the increase on price hikes of up to 13 percent for coarse grains and vegetable oils, the commodities that are more heavily used in biofuel production. Last month, an agency report said that biofuels like ethanol can help reduce global warming and create jobs for the rural poor. But it warned that the benefits may be offset by higher food prices for the hungry.

Biofuels, which are made from corn and other agricultural products, have been seen by many as a cleaner and cheaper way to meet the world’s soaring energy needs.

And because Kilimanjaro is a tropical glacier, the processes contributing to ice melt are different than those on other mid-latitude glaciers located closer to the Earth’s poles. Mid-latitude glaciers become warmed and melted by surrounding air in the summer, while the air around Kilimanjaro’s 19,340-foot (6,447 m) peak (the tallest in Africa) is generally well below freezing. Ice melt on Kilimanjaro is the result of sublimation, which turns ice directly into water vapor at below-freezing temperatures.

Clift, professor of environmental technology at Surrey University, sits on the scientific advisory council of Defra, David Miliband’s environment department. He will tell the seminar that promoting the use of biofuels is likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions. Clift’s comments will amount to a direct challenge to Miliband, who has published a strategy promoting biofuels. It coincides with a surge of anger among environmentalists over the weak pledges on climate change that emerged from last week’s G8 summit. The audience on Thursday will also include Howard Dalton, Miliband’s chief scientist at Defra, who is expected to speak in defence of biofuels.

Clift said: “Biodiesel is a complete scam because in the tropics the growing demand is causing forests to be burnt to make way for palm oil and similar crops. We calculate that the land will need to grow biodiesel crops for 70-300 years to compensate for the CO2 emitted in forest destruction.” Clift will also condemn plans to produce British biodiesel from rapeseed, pointing to research showing the crop generates copious amounts of nitrous oxide – an even more powerful global warming gas than CO2. The attack comes as the government increases its support for biofuels. Next year it will introduce a requirement for 3% of all fuel sold on UK forecourts to come from a renewable source.

Across the EU the renewable transport fuels obligation will increase this to 5% by 2010, with the British government pushing for a target of 10%. Miliband wants British farming to diversify into biofuels. “It is an important part of our vision for a diversified farming sector,” he said in a recent speech. The UK Biomass Strategy published last month is, however, also critical of turning crops into transport fuels, pointing out that this is the least efficient way of using them. It says that it is most efficient simply to burn them. Clift is not the only government science adviser calling for a rethink on biofuels. Roger Kemp, who advises the Department for Transport on energy use in transport, told a conference last week that using biofuels in transport would have no impact on cutting emissions. In his submission to the Institute of Engineering and Technology’s climate change committee he warned that Britain produced 200m tonnes of CO2 a year in transport emissions.

On current trends that will double by 2045 – whereas the government has pledged to reduce transport emissions to around 90m tonnes by that date. “We would need to plant a land area twice the size of Britain to get enough biofuel crops to halve our emissions,” said Kemp, professor of engineering at Lancaster University. “The numbers simply do not add up.” Kemp and Clift point out that the surging global interest in biofuels derives from a “false belief” among politicians that there must be a technical solution to climate change. Kemp said: ”Underlying all this is the assumption that we have to preserve the mobility and freedom to travel that we now enjoy at all costs. However, when you look at the science of climate change it is clear there are no such simple solutions. Humanity has to accept that.”

A similar message was this weekend emerging from environmentalists as they denounced the G8 industrialised nations for failing to take action on climate change at last week’s summit. Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, accused the G8 of being little more than a “talking shop”. He said: “The G8 has a record of putting the short term interests of rich countries before those of the environment and developing countries and this year was no exception.”

FACTS OF ‘GREEN’ FUEL

• What are biofuels? Biofuels come from plants: bioethanol from sugars and starches, biodiesel mainly from rapeseed and palm oil. They are blended with normal fuels, making up about 5% of the product.
• What are the benefits? The carbon in biofuels comes from the atmosphere so when they burn that carbon is simply rereleased and there is no increase.
• What are the concerns? Biofuel crops take land from growing food and create pressure for deforestation. Burning forests generates vast amounts of CO2.

Efforts to cut off the scientific debate and to malign the characters of nonconforming scientists are another disturbing sign. If opposition to global warming measures is to be portrayed as an “assault on reason,” then the voices of reason who oppose them must be shut down. The thing is, for Al Gore and his followers, global warming is just such a doggone convenient truth. [more]

By asserting that mankind is endangering the climate, liberals are using time-worn techniques of psychological manipulation in an attempt to gain control over economics, institute a measure of world government, and show a triumph of science over theology. Blaming capitalism for all the world’s ills as they do, in Global Warming they see a chance to lay at its feet the price, and exact tribute for their cause. They insist that the cures for Global Warming require subverting both the nation and prosperity before the needs of “the planet”. And since traditional religions did not predict climate changes, and don’t offer solace for this problem, Global Warming is an opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of the atheistic world view.

Whether we call it Anthropocentric Global Warming (AGW), Anthropocentric Climate Change, or whatever (ACCOW), or something else, the concept is both simple, and bizarre. The path by which the idea of AGW has arrived at mainstream acceptance is the usual one: a weird theory is proposed, which masks incredible complexity with apparent simplicity, along with the alleged potential for disaster. So by repeatedly having a cow over having ACCOW, liberals are using the technique of the Big Lie: repeated assertions take on the aura of truth. [more]

Also read the first part of this series.

Amid all the hyped-up prophecies, however, there is reason to be concerned, and I’m not talking about melting icecaps or frozen beaches here. I’m talking about history. The record is clear: media ideologues, movie stars, and would-be presidents, are using bad history to support bad science. This is unethical. Working class jobs are on the line.

How many times, for instance, does Al Gore denounce his critics as “flat-earthers” in a year? Yes, he believes that in the so-called Dark Ages, angry Catholics trekked around Europe denouncing men of science as “globe-earthers,” no doubt. But history paints an entirely different picture. In the Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, Tom Bethell, an Oxford graduate, points out that: “The claim that medieval scientists and theologians believed the earth is flat was concocted in the nineteenth century.”

Likewise, Jeffrey Burton Russell, an emeritus professor of history at the University of California states: “In the first fifteen centuries of the Christian era [only!] five writers seemed to have denied the globe, and a few others were ambiguous and uninterested in the question.” Today’s lesson: Al Gore likes attacking dead Catholics because they can’t speak back. For more facts, you can read Inventing the Flat Earth. Nevertheless, there are no primary sources to support Gore’s spin that there was a huge war between “flat-earthers” and “globe-earthers”. While I’m at it, what is it with these scaremongers and their obsession with reinventing histories? But there’s hope. I contend that a basic understanding of history will enrich students of science, and protect us all from alarmists.

Here’s another example of how history can correct misinformation. In The Politically Incorrect Correct Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, Christopher C. Horner states: “One key alarmist tactic is to redefine the word ‘Arctic’.” For example: “The Artic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), which has served as the basis for serial, breathless stories about a melting Arctic in recent years chose to expand the Arctic Circle by 450 miles in all directions.” Curiously, they didn’t advertise their new maps as well as their new temperature readings. Naturally, a student of history will not be surprised to learn that when one expands traditional boundaries - by about 50 per cent in this case - one can colour temperature readings. Imagine for argument’s sake if I told you that Melbourne was getting hotter, but forgot to mention that I expanded the city’s borders to encompass, say, Mildura.

Colouring temperature readings is an old trick. Still, no account of bad history supporting bad science is complete without reference to Leonardo Di Caprio’s green sermons. But to summarise: Bush is a meat-eating, rainforest rapist.

The former Santa Barbara soap star turned Titanic heartthrob, asserts in one of his stirring fan site essays that: “The alarm bells are ringing across the globe (e.g., the melting Arctic, parts of Antarctica breaking off, the disappearing glacier on top of Mt Kilimanjaro, etc.).” Also, Bush kills pretty flowers. So, the glacier on top of Mount Kilimanjaro is disappearing because of global warming? History begs to differ.

In the International Journal of Climatology, 2004, for example, G. Kaser asserts: “Retreat from a maximum extent of Kilimanjaro’s glaciers started shortly before Hans Meyer and Ludwig Purtscheller visited the summit for the first time in 1889,” and this was “caused by an abrupt climate change to markedly drier conditions around 1880”. In addition to pointing to inconvenient historical facts and observations (made during two fieldwork trips to Kilimanjaro), Kaser’s findings can’t be overruled by know-nothing movie stars. “Positive air temperatures, have not contributed to the recession process on the mountain so far,” maintains the scientist. More than ever before, crusading actors are manipulating histories. I could go on. And, in addition to using bad history to support bad science, they do not care for fieldtrips.

From Pieter “illustrator of nature” Brueghel’s Hunter’s of the Snow painting (February, 1565), to extreme weather periods cited in the ancient Torah, or the Christians’ Old Testament, history, after all, is replete with examples of harsher conditions. I would encourage all free minds to not only challenge the global warming industry, but to see this as an opportunity to stand up for history. In some ways, we’re mere ants in this unfolding picture called Life. Weather is weather. Acting is acting. And, falsifying temperature readings is a dirty scam concocted by fat cat, eco-socialists.

Take for example the media’s fascination with Enron in the early part of this decade, or more recently all of the focus on oil company profits and supposed price gouging at the pumps. Yet, despite the predictable media mania for such financial schemes, press outlets have largely ignored the con game involved with anthropogenic global warming irrespective of the billions of dollars at stake. Fortunately, as has been addressed before, foreign media seem much more willing to expose the charlatan behind the curtain. For example, England’s the Guardian reported Saturday in an article entitled “Truth About Kyoto: Huge Profits, Little Carbon Saved”

“It’s a total scam,” said Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club’s global warming program. “The automakers are trying to shield themselves from having to make more efficient vehicles. They’re avoiding the path to cutting oil dependence, curbing global warming, saving consumers money and ultimately saving Detroit from competitors like Toyota.” The reality is that ethanol, an outgrowth of the Alternative Motor Fuels Act, has done more to spawn a billion-dollar industry than to lessen the total cost consumers will pay at the pump, said David Friedman, research director for the vehicles program for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Under the act, automakers receive credit for building vehicles that run on alternative fuel, but the vehicles are not fuel-efficient. Ethanol is a win because it costs manufacturers only $50 per vehicle to make it a flex-fuel vehicle. However, the end product is a gas-guzzling, fuel-inefficient vehicle that will actually create more greenhouse gases than those that run on gasoline, Friedman said. [more]

There are numerous flaws in this concept. First, is the notion that you can “sin all week long”, as long as you go to Church on Sunday and put a hefty contribution into the collection basket. Does that mean the rich are the only people who are going to be forgiven? Are people really that shallow that they can soothe their guilty consciences this way? Secondly, it is very clear that reducing carbon dioxide emissions has a near-zero hope of stopping global warming and climate change. Does anyone not realize that these costs are going to be passed on to the consumer? Think again, this will just like an added, hidden tax. Finally, do you know who is going to benefit from this? The middle-man, the broker, the sellers of the “carbon credits”. And of course the makers and installers of solar panels and windmills will benefit. So a lot of people stand to make money from this, so there will be supporters. A lot of people make money selling “snake oil” too. Is this a fraud and a scam, or what? [more]

Man, the world’s largest listed hedge fund manager, was reporting a 24% surge in funds under management to $61.7bn (£31bn) in the year to 31 March and profits 13% higher at $1.3bn and cranked up the dividend by 40% in dollar terms to 20 cents. Chariman Harvey McGrath said Man’s performance was in line with a vintage year for hedge funds which saw $165bn of new money raised from financial institutions and world’s super wealthy. McGrath admitted the industry is becoming ever more competitive with new managers setting up all the time but added: ‘There is still significant further development to come as we look at new emerging strategies like those in the green space.’

“To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change,” Griffin said. “I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

Griffin’s comments immediately drew stunned reaction from James Hansen, NASA’s top climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. “It’s an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement,” Hansen told ABC News. “It indicates a complete ignorance of understanding the implications of climate change.”

Hansen believes Griffin’s comments fly in the face of well-established scientific knowledge that hundreds of NASA scientists have contributed to. “It’s unbelievable,” said Hansen. “I thought he had been misquoted. It’s so unbelievable.” News media inquiries to NASA headquarters about Griffin’s comments prompted the space agency to make the unusual move of issuing a news release late Wednesday night.

“NASA is the world’s preeminent organization in the study of Earth and the conditions that contribute to climate change and global warming,” Griffin said in a statement. “The agency is responsible for collecting data that is used by the science community and policy makers as part of an ongoing discussion regarding our planet’s evolving systems. It is NASA’s responsibility to collect, analyze and release information. It is not NASA’s mission to make policy regarding possible climate change mitigation strategies. As I stated in the NPR interview, we are proud of our role and I believe we do it well.”

Hansen, featured prominently in Al Gore’s global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” has been warning of the potential dangers of climate change since the 1980s. In late 2005, he accused NASA of trying to improperly censor him after he warned that Earth’s climate might be approaching a dangerous “tipping point.” The agency later fired a public affairs employee, a political appointee of the Bush administration, over the incident.

Last year, many NASA scientists were upset when reports surfaced that the agency had quietly deleted the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” from the NASA mission statement. The scientists believe research on issues like climate change will suffer as NASA shifts priorities toward exploration missions to the moon and Mars.

“Earth has always been central to NASA’s science,” Hansen said.

1. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, proved in a laboratory a century ago.
2. Global warming has been occurring for a century and concentrations of atmospheric carbon have been rising for a century. Correlation is not causation, but in a rough sense it looked like a fit.
3. Ice core data, starting with the first cores from Vostok in 1985, allowed us to measure temperature and atmospheric carbon going back hundreds of thousands of years, through several dramatic global warming and cooling events. To the temporal resolution then available (data points more than a thousand years apart), atmospheric carbon and temperature moved in lockstep: they rose and fell together. Talk about a smoking gun!
4. There were no other credible causes of global warming.

This evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we are absolutely certain when we apparently need to act now? So the idea that carbon emissions were causing global warming passed from the scientific community into the political realm. Research increased, bureaucracies were formed, international committees met, and eventually the Kyoto protocol was signed in 1997 to curb carbon emissions.

The political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too.

I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn’t believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; there were international conferences full of such people. We had political support, the ear of government, big budgets. We felt fairly important and useful (I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet!

But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence above fell away. Using the same point numbers as above:

2. Better data shows that from 1940 to 1975 the earth cooled while atmospheric carbon increased. That 35 year non-correlation might eventually be explained by global dimming, only discovered in about 2003.
3. The temporal resolution of the ice core data improved. By 2004 we knew that in past warming events, the temperature increases generally started about 800 years before the rises in atmospheric carbon. Causality does not run in the direction I had assumed in 1999 — it runs the opposite way!

It took several hundred years of warming for the oceans to give off more of their carbon. This proves that there is a cause of global warming other than atmospheric carbon. And while it is possible that rising atmospheric carbon in these past warmings then went on to cause more warming (”amplification” of the initial warming), the ice core data neither proves nor disproves this hypothesis.

4. There is now a credible alternative suspect. In October 2006 Henrik Svensmark showed experimentally that cosmic rays cause cloud formation. Clouds have a net cooling effect, but for the last three decades there have been fewer clouds than normal because the sun’s magnetic field, which shields us from cosmic rays, has been stronger than usual. So the earth heated up. It’s too early to judge what fraction of global warming is caused by cosmic rays.

There is now no observational evidence that global warming is caused by carbon emissions. You would think that in over 20 years of intense investigation we would have found something. For example, greenhouse warming due to carbon emissions should warm the upper atmosphere faster than the lower atmosphere — but until 2006 the data showed the opposite, and thus that the greenhouse effect was not occurring! In 2006 better data allowed that the effect might be occurring, except in the tropics.

The only current “evidence” for blaming carbon emissions are scientific models (and the fact that there are few contradictory observations). Historically, science has not progressed by calculations and models, but by repeatable observations. Some theories held by science authorities have turned out to be spectacularly wrong: heavier-than-air flight is impossible, the sun orbits the earth, etc. For excellent reasons, we have much more confidence in observations by several independent parties than in models produced by a small set of related parties!

Let’s return to the interaction between science and politics. By 2000 the political system had responded to the strong scientific case that carbon emissions caused global warming by creating thousands of bureaucratic and science jobs aimed at more research and at curbing carbon emissions.

But after 2000 the case against carbon emissions gradually got weaker. Future evidence might strengthen or further weaken it. At what stage of the weakening should the science community alert the political system that carbon emissions might not be the main cause of global warming?

None of the new evidence actually says that carbon emissions are definitely not the cause of global warming, there are lots of good science jobs potentially at stake, and if the scientific message wavers then it might be difficult to later recapture the attention of the political system. What has happened is that most research efforts since 1990 have assumed that carbon emissions were the cause, and the alternatives get much less research or political attention.

Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. Climate change has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly blames carbon emissions, to the point of silencing critics.

The integrity of the scientific community will win out in the end, following the evidence wherever it leads. But in the meantime, the effect of the political climate is that most people are overestimating the evidence that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming.

I recently bet $6,000 that the rate of global warming would slow in the next two decades. Carbon emissions might be the dominant cause of global warming, but I reckon that probability to be 20% rather than the 90% the IPCC estimates.

I worry that politics could seriously distort the science. Suppose that carbon taxes are widely enacted, but that the rate of global warming increase starts to decline by 2015. The political system might pressure scientists to provide justifications for the taxes.

Imagine the following scenario. Carbon emissions cause some warming, maybe 0.05C/decade. But the current warming rate of 0.20C/decade is mainly due to some natural cause, which in 15 years has run its course and reverses. So by 2025 global temperatures start dropping. In the meantime, on the basis of models from a small group of climate scientists but with no observational evidence (because the small warming due to carbon emissions is masked by the larger natural warming), the world has dutifully paid an enormous cost to curb carbon emissions.

Politicians, expressing the anger and apparent futility of all the unnecessary poverty and effort, lead the lynching of the high priests with their opaque models. Ironically, because carbon emissions are raising the temperature baseline around which natural variability occurs, carbon emissions might need curbing after all. Maybe. The current situation is characterized by a lack of observational evidence, so no one knows yet.

Some people take strong rhetorical positions on global warming. But the cause of global warming is not just another political issue, subject to endless debate and distortions. The cause of global warming is an issue that falls into the realm of science, because it is falsifiable. No amount of human posturing will affect what the cause is. It just physically is there, and after sufficient research and time we will know what it is.

(A version of this article was previously blogged on Mises.org here, and inspired a spirited debate. The author reworked the piece for the Mises.org front page. The blog item remains the same.)

The growing political salience of environmental politics has sparked a “green gold rush”, which has seen a dramatic expansion in the number of businesses offering both companies and individuals the chance to go “carbon neutral”, offsetting their own energy use by buying carbon credits that cancel out their contribution to global warming. The burgeoning regulated market for carbon credits is expected to more than double in size to about $68.2bn by 2010, with the unregulated voluntary sector rising to $4bn in the same period.

In the 70’s it was the Global Cooling fears that were the hot topic of debate. A lot of Global Warming activists are probably too young to remember that and we all know how that generation cares nothing about facts and history, so for those that do, here’s an interesting video that highlights the fear mongering of the 70’s.

As will be revealed post haste, this newest – and likely youngest – member of the growing list of folks skeptical about man’s role in climate change actually walks the walk better than she talks the talk. Yet, despite her youth and precocious scientific acumen, it seems quite unlikely that she’ll be sitting down with Matt Lauer or Diane Sawyer any time soon to discuss her research concerning one of the most popular subjects on the media’s front-burner. Why? Because a prediction that she made last month concerning Australia’s drought has marvelously borne fruit making the scientists employed by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change look a bit foolish. [more]

Fighting global warming will also protect our security interests — a recent report authored by a group of top military leaders said that, if unchecked, global warming could lead to civil strife, genocide, and increased terrorism.

Thus, for example, from the depraved perspective of environmentalism, if global carbon dioxide emissions equal to 25 percent of present emissions were to disappear, because those responsible for them ceased to exist, there would be no need for the global cutback in emissions urged by the Stern Review, and thus no need for any diminution in economic well-being on the part of the survivors (provided, of course, their number did not increase). If still more emissions could be eliminated by the elimination of still more people, there would be room for actual economic improvement among the survivors, according to environmentalism. Obviously, the magnitude of mass murder that is invited is the greater, the greater is the alleged need to curb carbon dioxide emissions. Those who recognize the astoundingly evil nature of environmentalism must never cease opposing it.

Al did not make and publicize this movie because he cares; something obvious when you consider his own lifestyle. He did not make this movie to run for president. This movie has grossed over 60 million dollars to date and it hasn’t even made it to cable. Al charges over $100,000 per slide show. But the real money that Al will make is through his new company, Generation Investment Management, a company that seeks to establish the rules and licensing for the new carbon-trading scheme. We have all heard of politicians who lie for money and power; it looks as if Al did not retire after all.

Following the U.S. Senate’s vote today on a global warming measure (see today’s AP article: Senate Defeats Climate Change Measure,) it is an opportune time to examine the recent and quite remarkable momentum shift taking place in climate science. Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included below are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global warming.

The list below is just the tip of the iceberg. A more detailed and comprehensive sampling of scientists who have only recently spoken out against climate hysteria will be forthcoming in a soon to be released U.S. Senate report. Please stay tuned to this website, as this new government report is set to redefine the current climate debate.

In the meantime, please review the list of scientists below and ask yourself why the media is missing one of the biggest stories in climate of 2007. Feel free to distribute the partial list of scientists who recently converted to skeptics to your local schools and universities. The voices of rank and file scientists opposing climate doomsayers can serve as a counter to the alarmism that children are being exposed to on a daily basis. (See Washington Post April 16, 2007 article about kids fearing of a “climactic Armageddon”)

The media’s climate fear factor seemingly grows louder even as the latest science grows less and less alarming by the day. (See Der Spiegel May 7, 2007 article: Not the End of the World as We Know It) It is also worth noting that the proponents of climate fears are increasingly attempting to suppress dissent by skeptics. (See UPI May 10, 2007 article: U.N. official says it’s ‘completely immoral’ to doubt global warming fears)

Once Believers, Now Skeptics (Link to pdf version)

Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre, who was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, now says the cause of climate change is “unknown” and accused the “prophets of doom of global warming” of being motivated by money, noting that “the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!” “Glaciers’ chronicles or historical archives point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious,” Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L’EXPRESS. The National Post in Canada also profiled Allegre on March 2, 2007, noting “Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution.”

Allegre now calls fears of a climate disaster “simplistic and obscuring the true dangers” mocks “the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man’s role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters.” Allegre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, had previously expressed concern about manmade global warming. “By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century,” Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity” in which the scientists warned that global warming’s “potential risks are very great.”

Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed his view of man-made climate change and instead became a global warming skeptic. Wiskel was once such a big believer in man-made global warming that he set out to build a “Kyoto house” in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997. Wiskel wanted to prove that the Kyoto Protocol’s goals were achievable by people making small changes in their lives. But after further examining the science behind Kyoto, Wiskel reversed his scientific views completely and became such a strong skeptic, that he recently wrote a book titled “The Emperor’s New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming.” A November 15, 2006 Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel’s conversion while building his “Kyoto house”: “Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was full of holes and ‘red flags,’ and became convinced that humans are not responsible for rising temperatures.”

Wiskel now says “the truth has to start somewhere.” Noting that the Earth has been warming for 18,000 years, Wiskel told the Canadian newspaper, “If this happened once and we were the cause of it, that would be cause for concern. But glaciers have been coming and going for billions of years.” Wiskel also said that global warming has gone “from a science to a religion” and noted that research money is being funneled into promoting climate alarmism instead of funding areas he considers more worthy. “If you funnel money into things that can’t be changed, the money is not going into the places that it is needed,” he said.

Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel’s top young award winning scientists, recanted his belief that manmade emissions were driving climate change. “”Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye,” Shaviv said in February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post article. According to Shaviv, the C02 temperature link is only “incriminating circumstantial evidence.” “Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming” and “it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist,” Shaviv noted pointing to the impact cosmic- rays have on the atmosphere. According to the National Post, Shaviv believes that even a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2100 “will not dramatically increase the global temperature.”

“Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant,” Shaviv explained. Shaviv also wrote on August 18, 2006 that a colleague of his believed that “CO2 should have a large effect on climate” so “he set out to reconstruct the phanerozoic temperature. He wanted to find the CO2 signature in the data, but since there was none, he slowly had to change his views.” Shaviv believes there will be more scientists converting to man-made global warming skepticism as they discover the dearth of evidence. “I think this is common to many of the scientists who think like us (that is, that CO2 is a secondary climate driver). Each one of us was working in his or her own niche. While working there, each one of us realized that things just don’t add up to support the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) picture. So many had to change their views,” he wrote.

Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian Government, recently detailed his conversion to a skeptic. “I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical,” Evans wrote in an April 30, 2007 blog. “But after 2000 the evidence for carbon emissions gradually got weaker — better temperature data for the last century, more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low clouds,” Evans wrote. “As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’” he added.

Evans noted how he benefited from climate fears as a scientist. “And the political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990’s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn’t believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed,” Evans wrote. “The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases.

The new ice core data shows that past warmings were *not* initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role,” he added. “Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. The science of global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics,” he concluded. (Evans bio link )

Climate researcher Dr. Tad Murty, former Senior Research Scientist for Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, also reversed himself from believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. “I stated with a firm belief about global warming, until I started working on it myself,” Murty explained on August 17, 2006. “I switched to the other side in the early 1990’s when Fisheries and Oceans Canada asked me to prepare a position paper and I started to look into the problem seriously,” Murty explained. Murty was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.”

Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife, recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science and now calls global warming fears “poppycock.” According to a May 15, 2005 article in the UK Sunday Times, Bellamy said “global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.” “The climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer models which do not prove anything,” Bellamy added. Bellamy’s conversion on global warming did not come without a sacrifice as several environmental groups have ended their association with him because of his views on climate change. The severing of relations came despite Bellamy’s long activism for green campaigns. The UK Times reported Bellamy “won respect from hardline environmentalists with his campaigns to save Britain’s peat bogs and other endangered habitats. In Tasmania he was arrested when he tried to prevent loggers cutting down a rainforest.”

Climate scientist Dr. Chris de Freitas of The University of Auckland, N.Z., also converted from a believer in man-made global warming to a skeptic. “At first I accepted that increases in human caused additions of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere would trigger changes in water vapor etc. and lead to dangerous ‘global warming,’ But with time and with the results of research, I formed the view that, although it makes for a good story, it is unlikely that the man-made changes are drivers of significant climate variation.” de Freitas wrote on August 17, 2006. “I accept there may be small changes. But I see the risk of anything serious to be minute,” he added. “One could reasonably argue that lack of evidence is not a good reason for complacency. But I believe the billions of dollars committed to GW research and lobbying for GW and for Kyoto treaties etc could be better spent on uncontroversial and very real environmental problems (such as air pollution, poor sanitation, provision of clean water and improved health services) that we know affect tens of millions of people,” de Freitas concluded. de Freitas was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases.”

Meteorologist Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, was pivotal in promoting the coming ice age scare of the 1970’s ( See Time Magazine’s 1974 article “Another Ice Age” citing Bryson: & see Newsweek’s 1975 article “The Cooling World” citing Bryson) has now converted into a leading global warming skeptic. In February 8, 2007 Bryson dismissed what