A lecture by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
No need for guilt about your sins of emission.

The science is in, the truth is out, Al Gore is through, the game is up, and the scare is over.

There has been no global warming for 15 years. Warming since 1990 has been below the IPCC’s least estimate. For 8 years, sea level has risen at a rate equivalent to 1 inch per century. Pacific atolls are not drowning. Hurricanes are as quiet as they have been in 30 years. Global sea-ice extent has hardly changed. Polar bears thrive. The snows of Kilimanjaro are growing. The 50 million climate refugees the UN had predicted by 2010 do not exist. The news media reported the fears but have not reported the facts. Systemic errors in determining how much global warming Man will cause, with fraudulent manipulation of data and results, whipped up predictions of catastrophe. Those predictions are now proven baseless. Government projections as greatly overstate the costs of climate action as they understate the welfare losses from inaction. The cost of mitigating global warming this century exceeds tenfold the welfare loss from the climate-related damage expected if we do not act. Mitigation policies inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective: policies costly enough to be effective will be unaffordable. It is unlikely that any CO2-mitigation policy will prove cost-effective solely on grounds of the welfare benefit foreseeable from mitigation alone. Focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of future global warming is likely to prove more cost-effective than attempted mitigation, which is one of the least efficient uses of taxpayers’ money in history.

Attempts by the international classe politique to fabricate climate fears as a Trojan Horse to end democracy and establish an all-powerful, unelected world government continue. The menace that climate extremism poses to the prosperity, liberty, and democracy of the West persists, but all rational scientific and economic basis for extreme alarm has gone. The science is in, the truth is out, Al Gore is through, the game is up, and the scare is over. Will someone tell the President?

Christopher, Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is a retired British international business consultant, policy advisor, writer, and inventor. He served as policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Viscount Monckton has gained international attention through his extensively reasoned critiques of “global warming” and the apparently widespread belief that the science is settled. He has also examined related policy decisions with
regard to their costs to the economy and to a free society.

The climate of freedom
Friday, March 2, 2012 2:30 P.M.
United Technologies Hall
Room 320
University of Hartford
The event is Free & Open to the Public
Parking is in A Lot or B Lot
http://www.hartford.edu/march2012/aeparking.pdf

Steven F. Hayward, March 5, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 24

The forlorn and increasingly desperate climate campaign achieved a new level of ineptitude last week when what had looked like a minor embarrassment for one of its critics - the Chicago-based Heartland Institute - turned out to be a full-fledged catastrophe for itself. A moment’s reflection on the root of this episode points to why the climate campaign is out of (greenhouse) gas.

In an obvious attempt to inflict a symmetrical Climategate-style scandal on the skeptic community, someone representing himself as a Heartland Institute insider “leaked” internal documents for Heartland’s most recent board of directors meeting to a fringe environmental blog, along with a photocopy of a supposed Heartland “strategy memo” outlining a plan to disseminate a public school curriculum aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science.”

This ham-handed phrase (one of many) should have been a tipoff to treat the document dump with some skepticism (a trait that has gone missing from much of the climate science community). But more than a few environmental blogs and mainstream news outlets ran with the story of how this “leak” exposed the nefarious “antiscience” Neanderthals of Heartland and their fossil fuel paymasters. But the strategy memo is a fake, probably created because the genuine internal documents are fairly ho-hum. It seems the climate campaign is now taking its tactics from Dan “fake but accurate” Rather.

Why Heartland? And how did the “leaker” get his hands on authentic Heartland board materials that are obviously the source for the faked strategy memo? The Heartland Institute sponsors the most significant annual gathering of climate skeptics, usually in New York, Chicago, or Washington, D.C. - a conference that attracts hundreds of scientists and activists from around the globe, including most of the top skeptical scientists, such as MIT’s Richard Lindzen, Yale’s Robert Mendelsohn, and career EPA official Alan Carlin. By assembling a critical mass of serious dissenting opinion, the Heartland conference dispels the favorite climate campaign talking point that there’s virtually no one of repute, and no arguments of merit, outside the -so-called consensus of imminent climate catastrophe.

The Heartland conferences have been too big for the media to ignore completely, though coverage has been spare and grudging. The conferences are also a morale booster for skeptics, who tend to be isolated and relentlessly assailed in their scattered outposts. It is worth adding that Heartland has always extended invitations to the leading “mainstream” figures to speak or debate at the conference, including Al Gore, NASA’s James Hansen, and senior officials from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Heartland typically receives no response from such figures.)

The most likely instigator of an anti-Heartland provocation would be someone from among the political activists of the environmental movement, such as the merry pranksters of Greenpeace, who have been known to paw through the garbage cans of climate skeptics looking for evidence of payoffs from the fossil fuel industry (which, contrary to left-wing paranoia, has tended rather to be a generous funder of the climate catastrophe campaign). But shortly after the document dump, Ross Kaminsky, an unpaid senior fellow and former Heartland board member now with the American Spectator, noticed something odd in the digital fingerprint of the “strategy memo.” It had been scanned on an Epson printer/scanner on Monday, February 13, on the West Coast (not in the Midwest, where Heartland is located), just one day before the entire document dump appeared online for the first time. Like the famous little detail of when and how Alger Hiss disposed of his old Ford, this date and location will turn out to be a key piece of evidence unraveling the full story, some of which still remains shrouded.

So how did the official Heartland documents get out? Someone claiming to be a board member emailed an unsuspecting Heartland staffer, asking that a set of board documents be sent to a new email address. This act may have violated California and Illinois criminal statutes prohibiting false representation, and perhaps some federal statutes pertaining to wire fraud as well.

Kaminsky and a second blogger, Steven Mosher, piled up the anomalies: The leaked board documents were not scanned but were original software-produced documents, which moreover have a time stamp from Heartland’s Central time zone. Hence the “strategy memo,” if authentic, would have had to be obtained by some other channel. These and other clues led both Kaminsky and Mosher to go public with the accusation that the most likely perpetrator was Peter Gleick, a semi-prominent environmental scientist in Oakland, California.

Gleick is known chiefly for his work on water issues, for which he enjoys a deserved reputation for his data-driven research (though he gets the remedies wrong). He has been as well a peripheral but aggressive figure in the climate wars, notable for the angry and politicized tone of his participation. Gleick is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was, until two weeks ago, the chairman of an American Geophysical Union task force on scientific -ethics. He’s also a columnist for Forbes magazine’s website and a recipient of one of those MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants that typically go to the trendy and politically correct.

Making a direct accusation as Kaminsky and Mosher did is a strong and potentially libelous move, and the green blogosphere closed ranks quickly around Gleick. One poster wrote: “I hope that Mr. Kaminsky will be prepared [to] fully retract and apologize to Dr. Gleick once he is ruled out as the possible culprit.” But then the other shoe dropped: Gleick confessed on Monday, February 20, that he was the person who had deceived Heartland into emailing their board documents. Gleick claimed, though, that he had received the phony strategy memo anonymously early in the year by mail. He explained in a column for the Huffington Post: “I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name.”

Gleick’s story doesn’t add up, given that many of the details in the phony “strategy memo” could only have been composed by someone with prior access to the complete board materials that Gleick says he subsequently sought out. So far Gleick is the only person known to have had access to the Heartland internal board documents. And he has not been forthcoming about the details of the phony memo. Was there a postmark? Did he keep the envelope and the original document that he scanned? Why does he think he was singled out to receive this information, rather than a reporter? The only thing missing right now to make Gleick’s story weaker is an old Woodstock typewriter.

Then there is the content of the memo itself, which tellingly is written in the first person but bears no one’s name as an author. One is supposed to presume it came from Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, but it is not quite his style. Megan McArdle of the Atlantic sums it up nicely: “It reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.” Numerous observers pointed to items in the memo that are strikingly inauthentic or alien to the conservative think tank world, but one in particular strikes me - a curious passage about the need for “expanded communication”:

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out. Efforts might also include cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences (such as [Andrew] Revkin at Dot­Earth/NYTimes, who has a well-known antipathy for some of the more extreme AGW [anthropogenic global warming] communicators..

As curious as the reference to Gleick and Forbes is (Gleick shares space at Forbes with Heartland’s James Taylor, which is another interesting circumstance), the reference to Andy Revkin is more intriguing. Revkin is a New York Times science blogger who reports climate issues fairly straight up, though his own sympathies are with the climate campaign. Perhaps because he is basically sympathetic, Revkin’s occasional departures from the party line have been a source of annoyance for more ardent climate campaigners; one of the emails from the first cache of leaked Climategate documents in 2009 complained that Revkin wasn’t “reliable,” and University of Illinois climate alarmist Michael Schlesinger threatened Revkin directly with the “big cutoff” if he didn’t mend his ways. Was the language in the phony Heartland memo another attempt to try to shame Revkin into falling in line by suggesting he’s not hostile enough towards climate skeptics?

After Gleick’s semi-confession, Revkin wrote for the Times that “Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others,” and that his actions “surely will sustain suspicion that he created the summary [strategy memo].”

Gleick looks set to be spending a good chunk of his MacArthur genius prize winnings on lawyers; he’s retained the same criminal attorney that Andrew Fastow of Enron used for his defense against fraud charges. And Gleick has hired Clinton/Gore crisis manager Chris Lehane. Heartland, for its part, has set up a legal defense fund to pursue a civil case against Gleick, presenting the ultimate irony: - Gleick’s attack may well help Heartland raise more money.

More than a few observers have asked why anyone should trust Gleick’s scientific judgment if his judgment about how to deal with climate skeptics is so bad.  - Gleick’s defense of his motives would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic: “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts& - often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated - to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

Let’s take these in order. Anony-mous? True, Heartland’s board documents reveal seven-figure contributions for their climate work from one “anonymous donor,” but environmental organizations take in many multiples of Heartland’s total budget in anonymous donations washed through the left-wing Tides Foundation. The Environmental Defense Fund thanks 141 anonymous donors in one recent report. “Well-funded”? Heartland’s total budget for all its issues, which include health care, education, and technology policy, is around $4.4 million, an amount that would disappear into a single line item in the budget for the Natural Resources Defense Council ($99 million in revenues in 2010). Last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, the World Wildlife Fund spent $68.5 million just on “public education.”

The dog that didn’t bark for the climateers in this story is the great disappointment that Heartland receives only a tiny amount of funding from fossil fuel sources - and none from ExxonMobil, still the bête noire of the climateers. Meanwhile, it was revealed this week that natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens had given $453,000 to the left-wing Center for American Progress for its “clean energy” projects, and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club over $25 million (anonymously until it leaked out) for the Club’s anti-coal ad campaign. Turns out the greens take in much more money from fossil fuel interests than the skeptics do.

Finally, “coordinated”? Few public policy efforts have ever had the massive institutional and financial coordination that the climate change cause enjoys. That tiny Heartland, with but a single annual conference and a few phone-book-sized reports summarizing the skeptical case, can derange the climate campaign so thoroughly is an indicator of the weakness and thorough politicization of climate alarmism.

The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.

Steven F. Hayward is the F. K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama (Regnery).

SPPI Blog, Source: WND

WASHINGTON - The fight against climate-change alarmism is just one part of Sen. James Inhofe’s lifelong struggle for liberty.

But what a fight there is over dire predictions of global calamities because people drive SUVs and are allowed unharnessed access to home heating and the like.

Now the Oklahoma Republican, in his new book, “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future,” reveals the ever-shifting rationalizations, fabricated evidence and corrupt profiteering of so-called climate change activists.

Inhofe confides that the battle is just the latest chapter of a saga that began when he first ran for office in Oklahoma against anti-business policies that were destroying the lives of hardworking Americans.

His “mentor,” he documents, a small oilman in Oklahoma, was broken by his own government and abandoned his livelihood in despair. Inhofe ran for office in order to change an environment where productive Americans are seemingly warred upon by those in power.

However, in Washington, he discovered that it was even worse. Many congressmen and senators were conspiring against their own constituents with the slogan “vote liberal and press release conservative.”

“Never once did I hear vote conservative and press release liberal,” he says.

Even more shocking, the Speaker of the House from Texas, Democrat John Nance Garter, deliberately set up a system to allow liberal representatives in conservative districts to secretly vote for left-wing legislation and then deny it.

Anyone who exposed liberals taking advantage of this system was threatened with expulsion from the House.

But Inhofe defied this left-wing intimidation and won his first victory in holding those in power accountable to the people by destroying this system. He fundamentally reshaped how the House does business and forced congressmen to answer to the people who elected them.

Get your copy now of “The Greatest Hoax.”

When climate change alarmism arose, he saw the stakes were higher.

Inhofe realized early on that the hysteria about “global warming” was not about the environment, but about power. Regulating carbon emissions and imposing draconian standards on businesses and personal behavior gives the federal government and global elites almost unlimited power.

In the words of MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen, “Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon, you control life.”

For that reason, Inhofe, almost single-handedly, spoke out against the push by the United Nations and left-wing extremists for a regulatory regime that would have almost unlimited power to radically change the American way of life.

In 2003, he labeled global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

The response from those who may have had their hands out, expecting to benefit from global warming, was to greet him at a United Nations conference with “Wanted” posters calling him, “The most dangerous man on the planet.”

The driving force internationally was the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which claimed a “consensus” on global warming.

But Inhofe systematically dismantles the scientifically flawed and deliberately deceptive studies that the IPCC used to push its plan. From dismissing global cooling between 1940 to 1975, burying admissions that even the IPCC couldn’t link climate change to man-made activity, and inserting incendiary language demanding action, the IPCC was a political, rather than a scientific, body from the beginning, he explains.

Providing the publicity for the so-called “science” was a team of elites and Hollywood celebrities, he writes.

Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” featured the so-called “hockey stick” graph showing a dramatic surge in global temperature in recent years. Gore was hailed by the likes of Howard Fineman, Katie Couric and Oprah Winfrey, as a “climate prophet,” a “secular saint” and the “Noah” of our time.

Left out of such praise was the fact that Gore stood to benefit personally from environmental policies that would push funds to the businesses in which his money was invested, the book reveals.

Meanwhile, celebrity activists such as Laurie David, Will Ferrell and Leonardo DiCaprio tried to brainwash children with propaganda telling them that Earth would become like Venus and inhabitable. This was coupled with a campaign to silence and destroy the careers of climate skeptics by boycotting publications that published their work.

All of this collapsed following the “Climategate” revelations of 2009, which are republished in this book. From so-called scientists trying to “hide the decline” of global temperatures, praising “tricks” to reach conclusions determined in advance, and trying to “balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same,” Climategate showed left-wing activists masquerading as experts.

Incredibly, even though the IPCC, Al Gore, and their “hockey sticks” all have been utterly discredited, the push for global regulation continues under different names.

Democrats, occasionally joined by Republicans such as Lindsey Graham, continue to push cap-and-trade legislation.

Dire warnings about the end of human existence have been replaced with arguments about “green jobs” supposedly needed to help the economy.

Frank admissions that the price of energy needs to be raised and Americans need to radically change their way of life have been transformed into claims that cap-and-trade really is about, as John Kerry said,"the creation of jobs and the security of the country.”

Barack Obama even has tried to reframe the debate as “our generation’s Sputnik moment.”

But Inhofe provides an insider’s view of the shifting alliances and collapsing rationalizations of the regulators as they scramble to impose the ruinous regime on the American economy. Like the Walking Dead, cap-and-trade and the attempt to set up a global regulatory apparatus continue to march on, even though the arguments have been discredited, he writes.

As Inhofe reveals, the arguments may change but the rationale is always the same. It is about global control over the United States, government control over business, and ultimately, state power over how people live their lives. From the zoning struggles in Tulsa, Okla., to fraud at the United Nations, Inhofe reveals what is really at stake and how alarmists operate.

Beyond just environmental policy, Inhofe’s personal testament, a global warming exposé and dire warning for the future of liberty, is something that no friend of freedom can afford to ignore.