Al Gore says everyone will benefit when new government rules require companies to pay to reduce global warming. But some people will benefit more than others, as will some companies. Benefiting most are those like the ex-vice president who can set up and invest in companies that will profit from the federal regulations imposing heavy costs on others.

Who pays for Gore’s crusade? In accounting for the $300 million in costs for the public education campaign of the Alliance for Climate Protection, the group’s website says that Al Gore pays for much of the project himself using the proceeds from his film and book, An Inconvenient Truth, and the $750,000 cash prize attached to the Nobel Peace Prize. It adds that he “has since received additional support in the form of private donations from those concerned about solving the climate crisis.”

Andrew C. Revkin of the New York Times reported on the newspaper’s Dot Earth blog March 31 that the Alliance raised half the sum - $150 million - for the ad campaign. But from whom? Gore says he put up about $3 million, but when asked the question on TV’s “60 Minutes,” he would not identify other funders. Solar and wind power companies? Hedge funds and venture capitalists? Gore’s own company, Generation Investment Management?

Gore and the global warming crowd are usually quick to challenge the credibility and sincerity of any scientist, climatologist or policy organization skeptical of man-made global warming. They call skeptics “shills” for Big Oil or, worse, “deniers,” invoking the term used against anti-Semites who deny the Holocaust. But they refuse to acknowledge their own growing financial interest in the carbon control industry. Barack Obama has said if he is elected president, he will be sure to find a prominent role for Al Gore in his administration. If that happens, will anyone raise questions about Al Gore’s conflict of interest?

Since leaving public office, Al Gore has become a one-man conglomerate: He writes books, stars in a movie, commands massive speaking fees, and sits on numerous corporate boards. According to Bloomberg News, Gore had less than $2 million when he left the vice presidency in 2001. Today his fortune is more than $100 million (Fast Company, July 2007) and the prospects are that he will grow even richer mounting his crusade against global warming.

The prospect of carbon regulation is why major corporations have latched onto Gore. He is the environmental movement’s bullhorn to the world, proclaiming the crisis of planetary warming. But the truth is that Gore also has become a bullhorn for corporations that are ready to cash in on the hysteria.

Read much more here.

Fred Lucas is a senior writer and investigative reporter for Cybercast News Service

No single topic seems to arouse as much blog animosity as any discussion of Hansen’s 1988 projections. Although NASA employees are not permitted to do private work for their bosses off-hours (a currying favor prohibition, I suppose) - for example, secretaries are not supposed to do typing, over at realclimate, Gavin Schmidt, in his “private time”, which flexibly includes 9 to 5, has provided bulldog services on behalf of his boss, James Hansen, on a number of occasions.

In January 2008, I discussed here and here how Hansen’s projections (from 1988) compared against the most recent RSS and MSU data, noting a downtick which resulted in a spread not merely between observations and Scenario A, but between observations and Scenario B, sometimes said to have been vindicated.

However, rather than engaging in further exegesis of the January versions, I thought it would be useful to update the graphics to include satellite data up to June 2008 and GISS data up to May 2008. Ironically, the new data has resulted in a downtick that is more substantial than either of the versions published in January. I’ve re-centered RSS to match GISS GLB on 1979-1997.

See larger image here.

See larger image here.

Read full blog including NASA’s Gavin Schmidt’s own plot and reader comments here.

Icecap Note: Hansen Scenario C supposes that CO2 are stabilized at 368 ppm in 2000 - a level already surpassed. Yet temperatures from GISS and RSS are trending lower than even Scenario C. We will see if that continues.

A new paper by Demetris Koutsoyiannis et al has been published, which demonstrates that climate models have no predictive value. The full paper entitled, ‘On the Credibility of Climate Predictions’ is published in the Journal of Hydrological Sciences, and is available for free download. 18 years of climate model predictions for temperature and precipitation at 8 locations worldwide were evaluated.

The Abstract states: “Geographically distributed predictions of future climate, obtained through climate models, are widely used in hydrology and many other disciplines, typically without assessing their reliability. Here we compare the output of various models to temperature and precipitation observations from eight stations with long (over 100 years) records from around the globe. The results show that models perform poorly, even at a climatic (30-year) scale. Thus local model projections cannot be credible, whereas a common argument that models can perform better at larger spatial scales is unsupported.” See post and blog comments here.

As one poster noted : “On a more salient point; this paper by Koutsoyiannis looks to be a polished up version of this one which surfaced in May.I have been banging on about it for some time, and it doesn’t seem to have got much reaction at the usual AGW websites.” Another poster responded “Serious contradictory evidence is usually met with silence at the usual AGW sites for a simple reason - if it isn’t discussed, it cannot therefore exist.”

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hotspot about 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes - weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hotspot whatsoever. So an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of the recent global warming. So we now know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming.

See larger image here.

The theoretical combined signature expected by the IPCC contains a prominent and distinct hotpot over the tropics at 8 - 12 kms. This hotspot is the signature feature of an increase in greenhouse warming. The observed signature at 8 - 12 km up over the tropics does not contain a hotspot, not even a little one. Therefore: 1. The IPCC theoretical signature is wrong. So the IPCC models are significantly wrong. 2. The signature of increased greenhouse warming is missing. So the global warming from 1979 to 1999 was not due predominately to increased
greenhouse warming, and was therefore not due to carbon emissions.

When the signature was found to be missing, alarmists objected that maybe the readings of the radiosonde thermometers might not be accurate and maybe the hotspot is there but went undetected. The uncertainties in temperature measurements from a radiosonde are indeed large enough for a single radiosonde to maybe miss the hotspot. Yet hundreds of radiosondes have given the same answers, so statistically it is not possible that they collectively failed to notice the hotspot. Recently the alarmists have suggested we ignore the radiosonde thermometers, but instead take the radiosonde wind measurements, apply a theory about wind shear, and run the results through their computers to estimate the temperatures. They then say that the results show that we cannot rule out the presence of a hotspot. If you believe that you believe anything.

Cool ocean temperatures in the southern Pacific Ocean—a phenomenon known as La Nina—chilled sunny expectations this summer for thousands of visitors to Mount Rainier National Park. Those who arrived here in July planning to backpack or hike its famous sub-alpine wildflower meadows found snow instead, six feet in places, though sunny daytime temperatures reach into the 70s.

The popular mountain that draws 1.5 million visitors each year received 950 inches of snow last winter, 300 inches more than its 650-inch average. Park officials said a cooler than usual spring also pushed back the thaw. “A lot of people were disappointed to come and find snowy meadows,” said Mike Punches, a park interpreter at the Henry M. Jackson Visitor Center at Paradise, located 5,400 feet above sea level. “Normally the wildflower season is all of July and August. The early bloomers come the first of July.

Press Photo/Howard Meyerson

Areas that feature the avalanche lily are limited to certain parts of the mountain."I led wildflower hikes in June on 10 feet of snow. They weren’t listed that way. We shifted them to ecology hikes about life on Rainier, and what it takes to adapt here.” Climate officials said the Pacific Northwest snowpack is the heaviest it has been since 1999. That’s when the last La Nina event occurred. Deep snows remain throughout the region affecting the Olympic and North Cascade mountain ranges along with portions of Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia.

“The main driver is a strong La Nina,” said Dave Garen, hydrologist for the National Water and Climate Center in Portland Oregon, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency monitors mountain snowpack for its water content, predicting river flow volumes for agricultural use. Read full story here.

Also see this story on the ongoing chill in nearby Vancouver, British Columbia.