By Joanne Nova
If this was Exxon pushing a PDF promoting skeptical views, it would be on the front page tomorrow. Where are the front page headlines?
“Bankers feed scare-mongering report”
Instead it’s just Deutsche Bank try to save the world their profit line.
Just in case you are missing your daily dose of being spoon fed propaganda by Bankers who want your money, see Climate Spectator Balancing reason and risk, where Deutsche Bank is helping the skeptics by giving us yet another example of just how desperate they are to get carbon trading running.
Q: When will the bankers worry about whales?
(Ans: When they can trade Humpback Credits.)
The good news is we are getting to them, and we are marking the lines they need to jump over. They now admit it looks bad when they denigrate scientists (they finally a “get” that they shouldn’t call scientists deniers):
Although the scientific community has already addressed the sceptic arguments in some detail, there is still a public perception that scientists have been dismissive of the sceptic viewpoint,
Watch how they pretend to care about the science (science-schmaltz), even as they trash the scientific method by arguing from authority:
...we at Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors (DBCCA) have always said that the science is one essential foundation of the whole climate change investment thesis. Navigating the scientific debate is therefore vitally important for investors in this space.
For these reasons, we asked our advisors at the Columbia Climate Center at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, to examine as many as possible of the major sceptic claims in the light of the latest peer reviewed scientific literature and to weigh the arguments of each side in the balance. The result is, [a 51 page document!] we believe, a balanced, expert, and detailed assessment of the scientific case for climate change that will help investors navigate these extremely complex issues.
As always, there’s “that line” where the basic physics that might give us 1.2 degrees is hailed as if it explains it all:
To us, the most persuasive argument in support of climate change is that the basic laws of physics dictate that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere produce warming. (This will be the case irrespective of other climate events.)
But lookee here. The feedback argument makes an appearance. So Deutsche Bank are forced to come up to another line we’ve drawn in the sand. They admit they have to answer:
The only way that warming can be mitigated by natural processes is if there are countervailing ‘feedback mechanisms’, such as cooling from increased cloud cover caused by the changing climate.
Then there is the straight out deceit:
A key finding of the current research is that there has so far been no evidence of such countervailing factors.
No evidence? Douglass 2007, Spencer 2007, Lindzen & Choi 2010, McKitrick 2010, McShane 2010, Spencer 2010 and of course, the entire radiosonde record going back to 1959.
In fact, most observed and anticipated feedback mechanisms are actually working to amplify the warming process, not reduce it.
That’s according to the models that predict things we know don’t happen.
This is an information war
The lesson from this is that even the most well resourced advocates armed with PR, marketing and teams of scientists can’t endlessly back a false claim, not as long as we have free speech. With next to no resources we’re setting the rules. We’ve pointed out their bad manners, their censorship and their name-calling, and so even the bullies recognize there’s a price - they can’t afford to be “seen” doing those things. So they finally start being polite, finally admit there are “uncertainties”, and admit the feedbacks are worth talking about.
Next step: we need to point out why “Bankers Really Want Us To Trade Carbon” and show it for what it is. When bankers push it on us, it marks them as profit hungry corporations who are happy to see their customers cheated, who have no interest in protecting their investors, and are keen to join in the propaganda war. We need to make their every attempt a net negative for them. The alarmists made it too painful for Exxon to support skeptics with pitifully small amounts, so we are only returning fire with fire. If Exxon can’t support unpaid skeptics, why should Bankers get away with pushing their power-hungry, profit-seeking legislation that is backed-by-a-fake-consensus and supported by scientists who cheat, hide data, and declare only half the truth?
When the public starts to associate bankers pushing carbon-scares as being bad corporate citizens, the bankers will sit it out quietly. They’ll still fund the PR, but they won’t want their name on it. It will be another small win for us.
Note their Disclaimer:
Disclaimer
This material is intended for informational purposes only and it is not intended that it be relied on to make any investment decision.
ie: we can lie to you and it’s ok, you can’t sue us.
Who would trust this bank?
Their 51 page pdf report attacks all the usual Strawmen.
See Deutsche Bank exposed in a previous post for advertising for climate change, and (if you want) see more Deutsche Bank propaganda on their site.
See more here.
See here the good news that the value of carbon on the carbon exchange (CCX) has dropped to 10 cents with no volume from a high over $7 US). That means a lot of investors and banks (hopefully Deutsche is one) have lost a lot of money and the trading of air will fail miserably.
By Shikha Dalmia, Fortune
When a woman consistently messes up her relationships, her therapist doesn’t just tell her to wear a new dress and change her lipstick before her next date; s/he asks her to do some real soul searching. But a new dress-and-lipstick combo is pretty much what an agency charged with reviewing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control’s procedures in the wake of the GlacierGate mess recommended last week.
Both the detractors and supporters of the IPCC - the U.N. body that serves as the Vatican of climate change - are billing the
Inter Academy Council’s recommendations as “fundamental” change. And some of its recommendations might indeed make a difference if the IPCC ever implements them - a big “if.” But fundamental change would require creating incentives for the IPCC to question its own conclusions - do constant soul searching, as it were - something that other scientific disciplines do as a matter of course. Nothing in the review’s recommendations does that.
The global warming establishment found itself in hot water last year when leaked e-mails suggested that leading climatologists had massaged data, interfered with the peer review process and engaged in other shenanigans to exaggerate the observed warming. A subsequent whitewash exonerated the scientists involved but further scrutiny debunked other alarmist claims in the IPCC’s last assessment report. For example, the IPCC had predicted that the entire 500,000 square km Himalayan glacier range would disappear by 2035. Multiple analyses, including one by the Yale Climate Media Forum - no denialist outfit - found the claim to be perfectly accurate except for two problems. One, the approximate area covered by the glaciers is just 33,000 - not 500,000 - square km as the IPCC stated. And two, the paper from which the IPCC lifted this claim had predicted the shrinkage would occur by 2350, not 2035! (The Yale analysis is well worth a full read.)
The IPCC withdrew this claim - dismissing it as one mistake in a voluminous report that didn’t affect its overall conclusions. But the bigger problem is not with what the IPCC says but what it doesn’t. Even before GlacierGate, many external reviewers had bitterly complained that lead authors of the report’s various chapters solicit their opinion only to ignore it in the final summary if it contradicts their conclusions - creating an impression of a faux scientific consensus. Ross McKitrick, the University of Guelph-Ontario economist who debunked Penn State climatologist Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph, has copiously documented this behavior. Take tree ring-based climate reconstructions in the third IPCC report. McKitrick notes that Mann, a lead author, had available to him two studies besides his own presenting hemispheric temperature histories dating back to the Medieval Era. One of them did not support his claim that the 1990s were the hottest decade in the millennium. So what did Mann do? Simply delete all mention of it. The same trick was pulled in the latest report, McKitrick says. Indur Goklany, a policy analyst in the Department of Interior, has documented similar sleights of hand when it comes to predictions of food and water shortages due to global warming.
To its credit, the IAC review, headed by former Princeton University president Harold Shapiro, takes a serious stab at addressing these problems. It acknowledges that giving lead authors the final say in accepting critiques of their work is like having Enron certify its own books. (O.K. It didn’t quite put it that way, but the point is that there is a fundamental conflict of interest here). It recommended letting editors - not authors - be the final arbiters of which comments to keep or throw out as academic journals do. And when substantial disagreement persists between reviewers and authors, it should be documented in an appendix, the academy emphasized. This is something that is already required by the current IPCC rules but roundly ignored. Even more commendably, the IAC recognized the incestuous group-think involved in producing the IPCC reports and recommended that more scientists from outside the climate change establishment be inducted in various stages of the report-writing process.
But then the academy’s review takes a leap into Banal Land. It recommends that IPCC chairs serve no more than one six-year term, a thinly veiled dig at the current chair, Rajendra Pachauri, now on his second term. Pachauri is a pompous, arrogant man (with an awful haircut) who brooks no disagreement with the global warming orthodoxy and deserves to go. He dismissed concerns that the IPCC’s Himalayan glacier claim might be in error as “school boy science.” However, there is no reason why a one-term chair would inherently be any better than a multiple-term chair.
Even more ridiculously, the academy concluded that IPCC’s sloppiness could be better handled if it had a permanent executive committee, something it currently lacks, a suggestion that Pachauri - surprise, surprise! - whole-heartedly embraced. But the idea that another layer of bureaucracy will solve the panel’s problems is absurd. Equally absurd is the academy’s suggestion that the IPCC enhance its “media-relations capacity” in order to communicate better with “audiences beyond scientists and governments” - as if its real problem is getting its message out given the legions of compliant journalists who happily regurgitate its line for free.
But none of the academy’s suggestions - good or bad - address the IPCC’s fundamental problem: It has every incentive - financial and otherwise - to buttress the global warming orthodoxy and none to challenge it. In every other discipline, scientists earn fame and fortune if they successfully debunk its reingning theories. They are feted at conferences, cited more often, offered more jobs. In climate science, by contrast, debunkers invite an onslaught by the entire global warming juggernaut that can leave their academic reputation in ruins. Debunkers get branded as deniers. And as this Australian blogger points out, they get investigated by Desmog, Exxon Secrets, or Sourcewatch, websites dedicated to exposing any connection the researcher might have with the fossil fuel industry - no matter how old or tenuous.
So how could the problem be fixed? First and foremost, IPCC’’s Working Groups 2 and 3, neither one of which has the slightest thing to do with science, ought to be disbanded. Group 2 speculates about the larger impact of global warming and Group 3 offers mitigation options to policy makers, all of which inevitably pushes the panel toward advocacy, something the IAC said it shouldn’t do. In their stead, Working Group 1 that deals with the scientific issues ought to be expanded to include departments dedicated to exploring the full range of possible explanations for the observed warming beyond human emissions such as natural variability or sun spot activity - all of which have become anathema to the global warming establishment.
The case for anthropogenic warming might indeed become airtight one day. But in order to get there, it has to withstand constant attempts at falsification. That’s what fundamental change would require. Anything less is purely cosmetic. More here.
Shikha Dalmia is a senior analyst at Reason Foundation and a Forbes columnist
By Paul Joseph Watson
An article carried by the official Greenpeace website written by a Greenpeace member urges climate activists to resort to criminal activity in an effort to reinvigorate momentum for their stalling global warming agenda, while ominously threatening climate skeptics, “we know where you live”.
The article, written by Greenpeace activist “Gene” from India, calls for “mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism”.
“Gene” then has a special message for roughly half of Americans who, in the wake of the climategate scandal, are now skeptical of man-made global warming - “We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you be few.”
“Gene” quotes another climate activist who calls for an army of greenies to break the law and take retribution against anyone who stands in their way.
“The politicians have failed. Now it’s up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It’s not working. We need an army of climate outlaws.”
Greenpeace has not issued a retraction of the comments, preferring instead to buffer the blog at both beginning and end with desperate-sounding explanations insisting that the author has peaceful intentions. The organization has obviously been taking a hammering for this as it worsens into another public relations disaster.
This is by no means the first time global warming adherents have resorted to physical threats in an effort to bolster their rapidly crumbling credibility on climate change issues. In June last year, a global warming activist posted an article on the Talking Points Memo website entitled “At What Point Do We Jail Or Execute Global Warming Deniers?”
Shortly after the article was retracted, a comment traced back to another prominent global warming activist which appeared on the Climate Progress blog threatened Skeptics that “an entire generation that will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds.” Website owner Joe Romm defended the comment as “clearly not a threat but a prediction”.
For years, climate Skeptics have been the target of campaigns to denounce them as criminals and traitors on the scale of the Nazis, with calls for Nuremberg trials. A July 2007 Senate report detailed how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation.
“Is this really the kind of caring, sensitive message this charity ought to be conveying to the world?” asks James Delingpole. “Not to judge by the comments below. Happy Easter, Greenpeace PR department! I think you’re going to have a busy next few days...”
As a recent Psychological Science study highlighted, warmists tend not to adhere to the caring, sensitive image they portray when it comes to their own private lives.
“Those who wear what the authors call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal,” summarizes the Telegraph’s Iain Hollingshead. “Faced with various moral choices - whether to stick to the rules in games, for example, or to pay themselves an appropriate wage - the green participants behaved much worse in the experiments than their conventional counterparts. The short answer to the paper’s question, then, is: No. Greens are mean.”
Despite Greenpeace’s efforts at damage control, there can be little doubt as to the true context of the article. By first encouraging climate activists to “break the law” in pursuit of their stalling political agenda, “Gene” has greased the skids for criminal activity. Concluding with the threat to climate Skeptics that “we know where you live,” is clearly a form of intimidation and an invitation for “an army of climate outlaws” to take physical retribution against people who disagree with them.
Imagine if Infowars put out an article urging its readers to break the law in order to combat the IRS, imagine if we told IRS agents, “we know where you live”. We’d be raided quicker than a heartbeat and Alex Jones would be demonized all over the establishment media as a dangerous extremist. Indeed, a mere peaceful letter-writing campaign urging governors to resign was leapt upon by the media and the federal government this past weekend as a concerning portend of the “extremist” threat posed by constitutionalists despite the fact that there was no indication of violence.
When so-called “right-wingers” or libertarians merely write letters urging peaceful political change, they are demonized as terrorist hate-mongers, but when greenies openly call for criminal behavior allied with thinly veiled threats of physical violence, it’s no big deal.
Will CNN and MSNBC devote weeks of endless coverage to Greenpeace’s threats towards people they disagree with? There’s more chance of Keith Olbermann awarding Rep. Hank Johnson (a major global warming adherent) his “worst person in the world” gong for hilariously warning that the island of Guam could capsize like a boat due to overpopulation. See post here.
See more stories on how the UN plans to make another run at using climate change to achieve its goal of one world government, how green jobs are failing and much more here.
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Microbes ate BP oil deep-water plume: study
By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent
WASHINGTON, Aug. 24, 2010 (Reuters) - A Manhattan-sized plume of oil spewed deep into the Gulf of Mexico by BP’s broken Macondo well has been consumed by a newly discovered fast-eating species of microbes, scientists reported on Tuesday.
This undated handout image shows microbes (C) degrading oil (upper right) in the deepwater plume from the BP oil spill in the Gulf, a study by Berkeley Lab researchers has shown.
The micro-organisms were apparently stimulated by the massive oil spill that began in April, and they degraded the hydrocarbons so efficiently that the plume is now undetectable, said Terry Hazen of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
These so-called proteobacteria—Hazen calls them “bugs”—have adapted to the cold deep water where the big BP plume was observed and are able to biodegrade hydrocarbons much more quickly than expected, without significantly depleting oxygen as most known oil-depleting bacteria do.
Oxygen is essential to the survival of commercially important fish and shellfish; a seasonal low-oxygen “dead zone” forms most summers in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by farm chemical run-off that flows down the Mississippi River.
Hydrocarbons in the crude oil from the BP spill actually stimulated the new microbes’ ability to degrade them in cold water, Hazen and his colleagues wrote in research published on Tuesday in the journal Science.
In part, Hazen said, this is because these new “bugs” have adjusted over millions of years to seek out any petroleum they can find at the depths where they live, which coincides with the depth of the previously observed plume, roughly 3000 feet. At that depth, water temperature is approximately 41 degrees F (5 degrees C).
FEASTING ON HYDROCARBONS
Long before humans drilled for oil, natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico have put out the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill each year, Hazen said.
Another factor was the consistency of the oil that came from the Macondo wellhead: light sweet Louisiana crude, an easily digestible substance for bacteria, and it was dispersed into tiny droplets, which also makes it more biodegradable.
These latest findings may initially seem to be at odds with a study published last Thursday in Science by researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which confirmed the existence of the oil plume and said micro-organisms did not seem to be biodegrading it very quickly.
However, Hazen and Rich Camilli of Woods Hole both said on Tuesday that the studies complement each other.
The Woods Hole team used an autonomous robot submarine and a mass spectrometer to detect the plume, but were forced to leave the area in late June, when Hurricane Alex threatened. At that time, they figured the plume was likely to remain for some time.
But that was before the well was capped in mid-July. Hazen said that within two weeks of the capping, the plume could not be detected, but there was a phenomenon called marine snow that indicated microbes had been feasting on hydrocarbons.
As of Tuesday, there was no sign of the plume, Hazen said.
That doesn’t mean there is no oil left from the 4.9 million barrels of crude that spilled into the Gulf after the April 20 blowout at BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig. The U.S. government estimated on August 4 that 50 percent of the BP oil is gone from the Gulf and the rest is rapidly degrading.
Read more here.