Claudia Rosett, Wall Street Journal

Is the godfather of the Kyoto treaty a public servant or a profiteer? “I don’t trust you, and I also question your integrity.” Thus did Maurice Strong offer me a seat on his living room sofa.

Often described as an “international man of mystery,” Mr. Strong during his long, globe-trotting career has been one of the most influential architects of the opaque cross-border bureaucracy that is today’s United Nations. He is probably best known as godfather of the U.N.’s 1997 Kyoto treaty, and as a former U.N. top adviser who in that same year received a check for almost $1 million, bankrolled by the U.N.-sanctioned regime of Saddam Hussein. (Mr. Strong told me that at the time he did not know the money came from Baghdad.)

In his most recent stint at the U.N., from 1997-2005, Mr. Strong served as an Under-Secretary-General and special adviser to former Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He was point man on matters ranging from U.N. reform to environmentalism to North Korea. By some accounts, including his own, he has been a benevolent toiler in the multilateral trenches, a friend of Mikhail Gorbachev and Al Gore, networking to save the planet.

By other accounts, he’s a self-dealing and self-declared socialist who has parlayed his talents into a push for collectivist global government. These days he is living in China, where he says his ties go back “40 years.”

The apple-faced Mr. Strong was born in 1929 in rural Canada. He grew up with a hankering to see the world. His travels took him to New York, where he spent a few months working in 1947 as a junior security officer at the U.N. He went on to tour Africa, and returned home to climb the corporate and public-sector ladders in Canada. In 1970 he returned to the U.N. for the first in a series of high-level incarnations that included organizing the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the environment, founding and becoming the first head of the U.N. Environment Program, and chairing the 1992 Rio summit on the environment.

Does Mr. Strong see any conflict in the fact that his signature U.N. product, the Kyoto treaty, grants big, profitable concessions to developing nations such as China—and now here he is, involved in China’s carbon trading and working as an adviser to the Chinese government? He replies that China when it signed on to Kyoto was not “the cause of the problem.” He also says that his work for the Chinese government and universities is “all pro bono.”

Asked whether he’s involved in any private ventures these days, he says he was involved with the Chinese Chery Automobile Company, but as an adviser, not an investor, and he is now out of that. He says he’s chairman of a company that’s helping China earn emissions credits, the China Carbon Corporation. Read more about the “man behind the curtain”, the man behind Kyoto which has helped propel the world’s economies into a downward spiral here.

Consensus Watch on Planet Moron

An ongoing series dedicated to vigorously monitoring emerging threats to The Consensus that global warming is real, caused by humans, and must be addressed immediately if we are to forestall cataclysm. After all, without consensus, scientific conclusions would remain vulnerable to new data and alternative hypotheses that better fit recorded observations!

The Consensus has come under assault from a familiar foe. At a recent presentation before the Texas Public Policy Foundation, Roy W. Spencer, Principle Research Scientist at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, demonstrated how testing current climate models against actual satellite data reveals fatal flaws underlying the assumptions regarding the feedback mechanisms related to heat capture, CO2 and cloud formation.

This is a standard smear tactic used by global warming deniers in which they take observed data and apply it in a straightforward manner to reach verifiable conclusions.

Okay, that doesn’t sound as bad when you say it out loud.  However, we’ve already established that The Consensus is true so the real question is not so much how do we subject it to critical examination that may yield superior climate models and in so doing generate information that could be better acted upon by policy makers, it’s how do we defend it from any and all criticism.

Fortunately, Al Gore has two suggestions on how to better shore up the science underlying The Consensus: Vandalism and Suppression.

Vandalism: Al Gore has called for “civil disobedience” to stop the construction of new coal plants that do not incorporate ‘carbon sequestration,’ a process by which coal plants are made too expensive to build. (So it’s sort of a win-win.) This kind of direct action skips the laborious, time-consuming process of building political support among the citizenry, who, let’s face it, clearly do not recognize the size and magnitude of the problem Al Gore is still having getting over the 2000 election.

Suppression: Al Gore has also called on attorneys general across the country to prosecute public companies for committing stock fraud if they challenge The Consensus. People who might object to using state law enforcement to suppress dissenting views clearly lack an understanding of the history of scientific inquiry.

If someone as revered as Galileo can face criminal prosecution for challenging the prevailing consensus, then who are we too argue?

Of course, Galileo lived in what we now refer to as the “Golden Age of Consensus Enforcement.” It makes our attempts at intimidation look feeble in comparison.  Sure, you can threaten to strip someone of their scientific certification. But you know what would be better? Threatening to imprison them for life.

Sometimes it’s that little extra bit that helps to get you over the top. Read more here.

By Charles Clover

Canute appointed, MAFF returns, Ministry for Concrete rolls on. Whether you are a climate-change denier, a sceptic or a believer in the scientific consensus on global warming, you have to admit that there is something preposterous about making someone Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.

It’s a bit like giving King Canute added responsibility for sea level rise: it implies that he can do something about it. Given that there is a less than 50 per cent chance, in my view, that mankind could do something about its greenhouse gas emissions in time to prevent dangerous climate change - thereby proving itself rational - Ed Miliband, the newly appointed Secretary, would appear to have his work cut out.

Given, too, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits that there is only a 95 per cent probability that man-made factors caused the warming we have seen, you might think that Gordon Brown might have seen fit to create a few more new posts in his reshuffle. The suggestion from the sceptic, Philip Stott, is that if the Prime Minister wanted to leave no stone unturned, he might also have created a minister for cosmic ray fluxes, solar magnetic cycles and sunspots; a minister for meteorites and cosmic dust, a minister for the earth’s orbit, tilt, wobble, shape and velocity; a minister for volcanic eruptions and ocean circulations; and a minister for water vapour, clouds and atmospheric gases. All of those have something to do with climate change. The unresolved question is how much.

Seriously, though, the new Energy and Climate Change post is a way of dealing with a serious problem: relentless squabbling between what used to be called BERR and what still is called DEFRA. That was a recipe for nothing happening at all, for example, on the timetable for cleaner coal-fired power stations. One can see the point of the tradeoffs being made in Mr Miliband’s head, rather than in two separate departments, between the long-term need for clean coal and the short term need to keep the lights on.

But there is no use pretending that the political landscape hasn’t changed. With the new remit comes new dangers - in this case the suspicion is that what has been created is the ministry for nuclear power, wind farms and the Severn Barrage. And toffee nuts to the environment. Read more here