By Christopher Booker, UK Telegraph
One of the fond delusions of our age is that scientists are a breed apart from ordinary mortals, white-coated custodians of a mystery with authority to pronounce on any scientific issue, however remote it may be from their own field of expertise. A shining example was the status given to Sir David King, who has just retired after seven years as the government Chief Scientist. In 2001, when he was appointed by Tony Blair at the height of the foot-and-mouth crisis, Professor King’s speciality was ‘surface chemistry’.
The big issue to put King in the headlines was global warming, which in 2004 he described as ‘a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism’. At a press conference with Blair, he claimed that global temperatures were higher than they had been for 60 million years, predicting that by the end of the 21st century Antarctica would be the only habitable continent left on earth.
Top of the politicians’ global warming agenda at that time was the need to win ratification of the Kyoto Protocol by Russia, which would at last bring the treaty into force. On behalf of the EU, King led a team to a key international conference in Moscow, where their behaviour astonished those present. They demanded that scientists critical of Kyoto should not be allowed to speak. They frequently interrupted other speakers, or overran their own time at the rostrum. When King was floored by evidence from the tropical disease expert Professor Paul Reiter that the melting of the ice on Kilimanjaro was not caused by global warming, he stormed out. Read more here.
By Brad Macdonald, theTrumpet.com
Al Gore says global warming is an inconvenient truth. “Inconvenient” adds a clever twist to the name of the would-be president’s popular documentary and book. But far worthier of scrutiny is the other word in the title: “Truth.” To climate activists, the case is closed on man-made global warming. But is it? Flinging the word truth around is easy.
The real test of truth is whether or not it conforms with reality and is backed by verified, indisputable facts. For climate alarmists, the really inconvenient truth is that a burgeoning number of scientists, climate experts and even politicians around the world are discussing facts that clash with the so-called truth that the globe is warming because of human activities. The real truth is that the theory of man-made global warming-despite being virtually canonized in the UN and the minds of a slew of politicians and celebrities, and naturally in the mainstream media-remains one of the most contentious issues in science.
The Business and Media Institute (BMI), a division of Media Research Center (America’s largest and most respected watchdog group), also released its comprehensive study on how the mainstream media reports on global warming. BMI’s analysis of 205 network stories between July 1, 2007, and Dec. 31, 2007, exposed the mainstream media as the largest propaganda vehicle for global warming crusaders: global warming proponents overwhelmingly outnumbered those with dissenting opinions. On average, for every skeptic there were nearly 13 proponents featured. ABC did a slightly better job with a 7-to-1 ratio, while CBS’s ratio was abysmal at nearly 38-to-1.
Of the three networks (ABC, NBC and CBS), 80 percent of stories (167 out of 205) didn’t mention skepticism or anyone at all who dissented from global warming. CBS did the absolute worst job. Ninety-seven percent of its stories ignored other opinions. The lesson: Transforming a lie into truth before an unwitting public is made easier by silencing dissenting opinions. Eighty percent of news stories omitted the opposing view altogether. The collective embrace of man-made global warming as the cause of the growing number of environmental and climate disasters is a globe-encompassing red herring, a giant distraction from the real cause of these natural catastrophes. Read more of this story here. To learn more about the great global warming hoax, the real causes of environmental and climate disasters, and the solution for these crises, read ”The Politics of Global Warming”.
By Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic
The full speech is now available at this link. And also at Klaus’s own site along with his other addresses to the UN and other meetings here. If you do nothing else today read the full inspiring speech from the only leader of a major world country that ‘gets it”. A brief except is below.
I would like first of all to thank the organizers of this important conference for making it possible and also for inviting one politically incorrect politician from Central Europe to come and speak here. This meeting will undoubtedly make a significant contribution to the moving away from the irrational climate alarmism to the much needed climate realism.
I know it is difficult to say anything interesting after two days of speeches and discussions here. If I am not wrong, I am the only speaker from a former communist country and I have to use this as a comparative—paradoxically—advantage. Each one of us has his or her experiences, prejudices and preferences. The ones that I have are—quite inevitably—connected with the fact that I have spent most of my life under the communist regime. A week ago, I gave a speech at an official gathering at the Prague Castle commemorating the 60th anniversary of the 1948 communist putsch in the former Czechoslovakia. One of the arguments of my speech there, quoted in all the leading newspapers in the country the next morning, went as follows: “Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical—the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.” What I had in mind was, of course, environmentalism and its currently strongest version, climate alarmism.
The climate alarmists believe in their own omnipotency, in knowing better than millions of rationally behaving men and women what is right or wrong, in their own ability to assembly all relevant data into their Central Climate Change Regulatory Office (CCCRO) equipped with huge supercomputers, in the possibility to give adequate instructions to hundreds of millions of individuals and institutions and in the non-existence of an incentive problem (and the resulting compliance or non-compliance of those who are supposed to follow these instructions).
We have to restart the discussion about the very nature of government and about the relationship between the individual and society. Now it concerns the whole mankind, not just the citizens of one particular country. To discuss this means to look at the canonically structured theoretical discussion about socialism (or communism) and to learn the uncompromising lesson from the inevitable collapse of communism 18 years ago. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom. This should be the main message of our conference.
Vaclav Klaus is president of the Czech Republic. These remarks were delivered at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, New York, March 4, 2008.