By Viv Forbes, Carbon Sense Coalition

One of the fastest growing industries in the world is based on a pyramid of frauds and its inevitable collapse will be worse than the sub-prime crash.

The Global Warming Industry is now fed by billions of dollars from western taxpayers and consumers.  It is based on the unproven and now discredited claim that man’s production of carbon dioxide causes dangerous global warming.

The basic fraud is this:

There is no evidence that carbon dioxide controls world temperature - just a theory and the manipulated results from a handful of giant computer models that very few people have checked or understand.

But there is clear evidence from historical records of atmospheric carbon dioxide and temperature that carbon dioxide does not control temperature. Rather the reverse - as solar or volcanic heat warms the oceans, the waters expel carbon dioxide. Global warming causes an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, not the reverse.

Moreover, every day provides more evidence that current temperatures are not unusually high. Over the past 2000 years there have been two previous eras of warming ("the golden ages") separated by two mini ice ages ("the dark ages"). Both the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warming were warmer than today and there was no human industry causing that warming.

The next fraud, invoked as the first fraud started to falter, is the claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is the food for all plants and thus the food source for all life on earth. It is not poisonous at any level likely to be experienced in the atmosphere and there is clear evidence that more carbon dioxide makes plants grow faster and bigger, and makes them more tolerant of drought, heat and salinity. Current levels are below those optimal for life.

A related scientific fraud is the claim that grazing animals increase atmospheric carbon. Any competent biologist can debunk this fraud by explaining the carbon food cycle.

Built on these frauds are the fraud-riddled carbon credit and carbon trading empires. The revelations of massive fraud in European carbon credits and the collapse of carbon trading on the Chicago Climate Exchange are harbingers of crises yet to surface. Carbon credits have no intrinsic value – they are dependent on political support, and this will always evaporate in time.

The next level of fraud is the alternate energy industry. Despite decades of subsidies and tax breaks the wind/solar power industry cannot survive unless the handouts continue, and their coal competitors are taxed heavily. To call these activities “industries” is a fraud – they are corporate mendicants.

Finally, those who waste millions on projects designed to prove the feasibility of burying carbon dioxide are committing a fraud on taxpayers and shareholders. There are no benefits of burying atmospheric plant food from any source. With zero benefits and huge costs CCS can never be “economic” and it is fraudulent to pretend it can ever be otherwise.

The global warming industry is a huge pyramid of financial and political fraud resting on a quasi-scientific foundation of quicksand.

Read more and see relevant links in this PDF.
Icecap Note: Lets make 2011 the year we destroy this monster and expose the frauds like those quoted in the misguided story below. We must work hard to communicate the truth as you can see the alarmists are swinging back and plan another assault to protect their agenda and enormous financial gains. One of the arguments they will use and which will be reported unquestioned in the mainstream media is that we are a handful of people who are funded by big oil. That is patently false. The alarmists have benefited hugely from oil money - Climategate revealed the Hadley Center received $23 million from oil and alternative energy companies, big bad Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford and BP $500 million to UC Berkeley. In all our government has provided $79B, yes billion to the build up the global warming ‘industry’ the past 20 years and support its political and financial agendas. I have spoken to many big name scientists who used to get funding for their work, but since they have taken a stand against AGW or even just challenged one aspect of it, their funding has been cut off, despite prolific past peer review success. Please help us by donating to Icecap, buying books or items posted or being active in your community. If you are interested in getting involved, please feel free to contact me at jsdaleo@yahoo.com. Merry Christmas from the Icecap staff.

By Lauren Morello, E&E reporter

Climate science isn’t just about carbon dioxide anymore.

An increasing number of scientists who spend their days crunching numbers, running computer models or collecting samples are looking to develop another skill: transforming themselves into “deadly communications ninjas of climate science.”

That was evident last week at the American Geophysical Union’s fall meeting in San Francisco, which included a special emphasis this year on the getting the word out on climate change—and getting ahead of climate skeptics who dismiss the idea that the climate is changing and human activities are driving the shift.

At one session, journalist Chris Mooney exhorted more than 200 scientists packed into a stuffy conference room to commence their “ninja training.” Their model? According to Mooney, it’s the “highly trained, well-paid, talented communicators who are committed to winning the issue in the media in a way scientists aren’t willing to yet”—in other words, the skeptics.

Lost in Translation

Consultant Susan Joy Hassol specializes in helping researchers talk about their findings in plain English. She’s helped scientists write several major U.S. and international climate reports.

Along the way, she’s compiled a list of more than 100 terms that mean one thing to scientists and something very different to the man on the street. Many of the examples on the list make scientists chuckle, Hassol says, but there’s another common reaction: “The scientists do see themselves in it.”

He and other experts laid out the ground rules: Don’t expect to convince everyone that you’re right. Do expect to spend less time in the lab and more time dealing with questions from journalists, the public and lawmakers. And don’t be surprised by an uptick in harsh or just plain nasty e-mails from critics.

Take the examples offered by Michael Oppenheimer, who directs the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at Princeton University. His lecture on scientists’ role in public policy included a smattering of the messages he’s received. One began with this greeting: “First of all, I must say you look like Bozo the clown.” Another, with the subject line “Commie maggot,” read: “Commie maggot, die slow, die hard.”

“Those are the nice ones,” Oppenheimer said, in jest.

But the tone linking many of the talks and workshops in San Francisco wasn’t self-pity. It was tough love, mixed with practical advice on speaking plain English (see table).

‘Calm the tone of the debate’

“Charlie Brown just keeps coming back trying to kick the football,” said Walt Meier, a research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. “He doesn’t punch out Lucy. He just keeps trying to kick the ball. I think that’s what we need to do.”

Meier believes that scientists often err by refusing to engage those who don’t agree with them.

“From a scientist’s perspective, the sense is, ‘We’re the experts. You guys don’t have an understanding of the details of science, so why should you be put on equal footing?’” he said. “But a lot of people [who disagree with mainstream climate science] are very passionate and intelligent—and when they get ignored, the sense is, whether or not it’s true, ‘the scientists think we’re idiots.’”

Meier now spends some of his free time responding to blog posts that are critical of NSIDC data or other aspects of climate science. While it might not always change minds, “I think it does help calm the tone of the debate,” he said. “And it can stir up good questions.”

Climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University also counseled his colleagues not to shy away from critics, drawing on lessons he’s learned defending himself against sustained attacks on his work from skeptics, including congressional Republicans and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R).

After the release last fall of e-mails stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, for example, Mann published an op-ed in The Washington Post rebutting claims that the messages undermined the fundamental conclusions of climate science. He credits that piece, in part, for spurring an editorial echoing that view in the journal Nature.

“When scientists fight back, there may be others who are watching who are willing to take a stronger stance,” he said.

That doesn’t mean that reaching out to the public is a natural fit for researchers who may feel uncomfortable translating their work for laypeople or concerned that their colleagues will perceive them as hogging the limelight. There’s also no guarantee that such efforts will sway public opinion.

Recent polls offer conflicting portraits of how climate change is perceived by the general public.

The Pew Research Center for People and the Press released results last year that showed a 14-point drop between 2008 and 2009 in the number of Americans who believe there is “solid evidence for global warming,” from 71 to 57 percent. That number rose slightly this year, to 59 percent, but don’t mistake that for a rebound, said Pew’s director of survey research, Scott Keeter.

Dealing with the partisan split

Pew’s polling also shows deep splits on climate between Republicans—who tend to doubt climate change is real or believe that, if it’s real, human activities aren’t driving it—and Democrats—who tend to believe human activities are warming the planet.

“I think if I were a scientist, I’d say, ‘We need to do good work to figure out how to deal with global warming—but we also need to figure out how to communicate better with the public,’” Keeter said.

Meanwhile, Stanford University’s Jon Krosnick has arrived at a very different conclusion. His surveys show “large, and sometimes huge, majorities” of Americans who believe that humans are influencing the climate and the government should act to limit warming.

In August, for example, Krosnick reported that more than 70 percent of Americans in Florida, Maine and Massachusetts say they support government limits on greenhouse gases and think a rise in the world’s temperature is caused “mostly or partly” by human activity—results that mimic conclusions of national surveys he’s conducted.

“There’s a lot of worry, a lot of handwringing, a lot of soul-searching going on among the natural science community saying, ‘We are failing. We need to find a better way to communicate [with the public],’” Krosnick said. “You can imagine that these folks have something to offer, but I think it’s a mistake to say they’ve been failing.”

Scientists would do better to focus their outreach on lawmakers rather than the general public, he said.

“What I’m talking about is what leads a legislator to vote for a bill, to co-sponsor a bill,” he said. “That’s a whole set of issues I just don’t hear the natural science community thinking about or talking about.”

See post here.

By Peter Foster, Financial Post

After predicting a mild winter, the British weather service is profoundly ­embarrassed by the current deep freeze

Let’s hope Santa isn’t relying on weather forecasts from the U.K. Met Office. The British deep freeze of recent weeks (which has also immobilized much of continental Europe) is profoundly embarrassing for the official forecaster. Just two months ago it projected a milder than usual winter.

This debacle is more than merely embarrassing. The Met Office is front and centre in rationalizing the British government’s commitment to fight catastrophic man-made global warming with more and bigger bureaucracy, so its conspicuous errors raise yet more questions about that “settled” science.

When you’re making confident global projections for the year 2100, you can only be contradicted on the basis of alternative hypotheses, of which the vast majority of people have no comprehension. But pretty much anybody can look out of the window and tell the difference between light drizzle and a snowbank. Moreover, private forecasters strongly disagreed with the Met Office’s winter projections as soon as they were made (which should add fuel to calls for the organization’s privatization).

Yesterday, the British-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, one of the world’s leading advocates for climate objectivity, called on the U.K. government to set up an independent inquiry into the Met Office’s failures. It also wants an examination of the institution’s politicization, although that is hardly likely to come from the very government that is manipulating it. Still, bias can be expensive. Dr. Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, noted that the price tag on the country’s unpreparedness for this winter could reach $15-billion.

At the recent Cancun climate meetings, the Met Office presented a study suggesting that the outlook for global climate was, on balance, worse than projected in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Given its short-range accuracy, this forecast might be taken with a pinch of road salt, or a tot of de-icing fluid.

Significantly, the Met Office is closely associated with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, home of Climategate. Both organizations are deeply involved with the IPCC. When it comes to the CRU’s crystal ball, one of its official declared a decade ago: “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” No danger of that for little Britons this year.

The Met’s blunder follows similar cockups last year and the year before. In February, Met Office scientist Peter Stott declared that 2009 was an anomaly, and that milder and wetter winters were now - for sure - to be expected. He suggested that exceptionally cold British winters such as the one that occurred in 1962-63 were now expected to occur “about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850.” Now, the Met Office is admitting that the current December may be the coldest in Britain in the past 100 years.

No doubt the warmist crowd will be quick to express outrage at this blatant confusion of global climate with local weather, but that won’t wash. The Met makes its short-term forecasts on the basis of the same brand of massive computer power and Rube Goldberg modelling used to project the global climate. The suggestion that forecasting the climate is easier than forecasting the weather comes into the same category as acknowledging that governments couldn’t run a lemonade stand, but then believing that they can “manage” an economy.

Confusing weather with climate isn’t always condemned by alarmists. In March, Al Gore deemed it disgraceful that “deniers” dared to suggest that North America’s East Coast Snowmageddon in any way undermined the Inconvenient Truth of man-made global warming. More snow was obviously due to man. The very next day, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell declared that the lack of snow at the Vancouver Olympics was due to...man-made global warming.

Another example of one-way theory was provided three months later by climatologist Michael Mann, concoctor of the infamous “Hockey Stick” graph, and one of the reluctant stars of the Climategate emails. In an interview, Mr. Mann claimed that the then current North American heat wave was clear evidence of hand of man. So you see the principle: If it supports the warmist cause, it’s climate; if it doesn’t, it’s just weather.

The Met’s red face comes at the end of a very bad year for climatism. It started with Climategate and ended with the utter collapse of the Kyoto process at Cancun. In between, there was a United Nations report that admitted that the IPCC process was deeply flawed, followed by projections from the International Energy Agency that confirmed that bold commitments to slash fossil fuel use were so much political pollution. Meanwhile, the vast costs of government promotion of alternatives such as wind and solar have also become increasingly apparent, along with the fact that green jobs are a mirage.

Mirages definitely aren’t a problem this week on the runways of Heathrow. See post here. See Bishop Hill’s commentary on the Winter Resilience Review on the Met Office.

See also this blog post from Paul Hudson of the BCC with this plot so far (enlarged here).

H/T GWPF