By Donna Laframboise, NoFrakkingConsensus

Last week I discussed the Worldwatch Institute’s admiration for James Hansen’s alleged courage. It seems to me that courage is displayed by people who swim against the tide, who struggle to communicate new ideas rather than delivering age-old, hellfire and brimstone messages.

On the one hand Worldwatch was declaring, back in 1988, that:

Most scientists agree that a global warming is under way, caused by the accumulation of “greenhouse gases” due primarily to fossil fuel use…

On the other hand, in 2009 it was implying that Hansen’s 1988 testimony before Congress was daring. If most scientists already agreed with him how could that have been the case? One or the other of these statements has to be wrong.

In any event, I pointed out that Hansen has been handsomely rewarded for his views. Between 2001 and 2010 he pocketed $683,000 in assorted prize money. That’s on top of the salary he receives from his NASA day job.

I speculated that, since Hansen has held a senior position there for years, he must be well compensated. Thanks to reader GR, we now know that this is the case. This website reveals that Hansen’s 2008 annual rate of pay was $152,220.

Who said selling doom and gloom isn’t lucrative?

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Environmentalist David Suzuki made some distressing remarks in an interview recently:

My wife and I huddle at night and weep for our helplessness. We are losing big-time and I’m enough of a scientist to see we are heading right down the tube. Judging by the past twenty years, we are going backward.

A thoughtful response appears at ClimateQuotes.com. The writer, a young man with a young family, has a message for Suzuki:

You’ve overestimated the dangers which lie before us, and you’ve underestimated our capabilities. Please, don’t assume you are one of the enlightened few that could have saved me and my generation.

Like this writer, I’m also puzzled. Why does Suzuki have so little faith? Why does he assume that future generations won’t be able to take care of themselves?

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One of the ugliest books about the climate debate is Ross Gelbspan’s 1997 The Heat is On. It’s an early example of the kind of simple-minded, comic book “journalism” that paints activist climate scientists as saints and skeptical scientists as industry stooges.

So it was with some interest that I read yesterday about a Greenpeace student training program. The application deadline is May 16th, and interested parties are advised:

You will receive training by some of the best professional activists in the environmental movement…

If one clicks on the More about trainers link one discovers that, among these professional activist trainers, is....come on down...Mr. Ross Gelbspan.

Indeed.

Link
h/t Tom Nelson

By Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun

A definition of political insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.

Based on that, politicians supporting the so-called “solutions” to man-made global warming—Kyoto accord, cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, renewable energy—are insane.

That’s because none of these things has worked in the real world—assuming the goal is to lower man-made carbon dioxide emissions—and yet they keep promoting them.

The UN’s Kyoto accord is a fiasco, falsely billed as a global treaty to combat global warming.

In fact, Kyoto was ratified by a few dozen industrialized countries who are a small part of the problem—including (under Jean Chretien) Canada, with 2% of global emissions.

The accord places no demands on China, the world’s largest emitter, or on the entire developing world, where emissions are now rising the fastest.

It doesn’t impact the U.S., the world’s second-largest emitter, which never ratified Kyoto.

Since China and the U.S. are responsible for 40% of global emissions, Kyoto, or any successor treaty which doesn’t include them, obviously won’t work.

Cap-and-trade, now recklessly advocated by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff even in the absence of a bilateral agreement with the U.S., is another fiasco.

Europe’s had cap-and-trade since 2005. From its inception, the Emissions Trading Scheme failed to lower emissions—in fact, they rose—until 2008, when the global recession, not carbon trading, cut them.

Instead, the ETS drove up prices for such necessities as electricity and provided windfall profits to utility companies and speculators.

The international carbon credit system on which the ETS is built, is riddled with multi-billion-dollar frauds.

As for a carbon tax, advocated by former Liberal leader Stephane Dion in 2008, Norway’s had one since 1991. In 2002, Statistics Norway concluded it had little impact on emissions.

Real-world experience with renewable energy—such as utility-scale wind turbines and solar panels—has shown that not only are these technologies impractical at present without huge public subsidies, they also fail to deliver promised emission reductions.

Meanwhile, they create other environmental problems due to the large amount of land they require and some of the materials needed to manufacture them.

But what if the purpose of these failed policies isn’t to lower emissions, but something else?

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who, sadly, no longer talks as honestly about these matters as he once did, was attacked in opposition for describing Kyoto as a “socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.”

But an official of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said much the same thing last year, prior to a major climate meeting in Cancun, albeit more positively.

As German economist Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chairman of the IPCC’s Working Group III, explained:

“Basically, it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun ... is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War ... one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

To Edenhofer, this was desirable because developed countries “having basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community” would now use a portion of the wealth this generated to assist developing countries in growing their economies in environmentally responsible ways.

Of course, if none of these programs reduce emissions, then the exercise simply becomes a permanent “sin tax” imposed on developed countries like Canada for using fossil fuels to produce energy, a portion of which will be paid in perpetuity to the developing world.

If that’s the goal—plus providing governments in the developed world with a massive new revenue stream paid for by ordinary citizens—then all these failed policies make perfect sense.

By Lawrence Solomon

The University of East Anglia of Climategate fame - scene of the embarrassing emails that disgraced the global warming cause - has once again been embarrassed, this time through a failed attempt to silence one of the UK’s most brilliant - and biting - global warming sceptics.

James Delingpole, a take-no-prisoner blogger with the Daily Telegraph, has been a relentless critic of the university and the professor at the heart of the scandal, Phil Jones. In an attempt to curb Delingpole’s blog posts, the university lodged a complaint with the UK Press Complaints Commission, an independent body. The Commission’s decision, just out, is a crushing repudiation of the university’s attempt to manage dissent that could strike a blow for free speech everywhere.

The Commission summarized the university’s complaints thus: “In particular, the complainants were concerned that the blog posts described Professor Phil Jones as ‘disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method abusing’. They explained that Professor Phil Jones had been exonerated of any dishonesty or scientific malpractice by a series of reviews.  They were concerned that a second blog post repeated accusations that had been demonstrated as untrue, concluding that the University’s scientists were ‘untrustworthy, unreliable and entirely unfit to write the kind of reports on which governments around the world make their economic and environmental decisions’, and a third blog post referred to the scientists’ work as ‘shoddy’ and ‘mendacious’.

It then ruled: “The Commission was satisfied that readers would be aware that the comments therein represented the columnist’s own robust views of the matters in question. … The Commission has previously ruled [North v The Guardian] that ‘In the realm of blogging (especially in cases touching upon controversial topics such as climate change), there is likely to be strong and fervent disagreement, with writers making use of emotive terms and strident rhetoric.  This is a necessary consequence of free speech. The Commission felt that it should be slow to intervene in this, unless there is evidence of factual inaccuracy or misleading statement.’

To see the succinct UK Press Complaints Commission decision, click here.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.