Update:

Pope Francis has said he wanted the encyclical (text released - here) to be read by everyone - not just Catholics - and he notes in the introduction that the document is now part of the formal teaching “magisterium” of the Catholic Church. That could be read as a warning of sorts to climate skeptics, including many Catholics in the U.S. who have suggested they simply will ignore the encyclical since the pope’s views on the environment clash with their doubts about climate change.

Sorry as a lifetime practicing Catholic, I will ignore your encyclical and support my local church but no longer the Vatican. Your Scientific Advisory Board refused to hear from our side. We sent a contingent to Rome and a letter signed by 500+ multidenominational scientists, economists explaining how the athiest UN one world government plans will seriously hurt the poor. Unlike what you suggest providing energy - fossil fuels and agricultural technology to the poor saves and enriches lives of the world’s poorest people. Don’t lecture us on topics you know nothing about. The Vatican is said to be concerned about not making a mistake like they did with Galileo but ironically by listening to the phoney consensus idea, you will ensure the church will again be on wrong side of history. The so called scientist standing besides Pope Francis this Thursday believes that the population of the earth at 7 billion is unsupportable and the loss of 6 billion would be a good thing for the planet. Pray for us all. See an example of Shellnhuber’s junk science here. See comments on the paper here. He is so bad, he would fit right in on The Weather Channel.

See the Irony of the Encyclical as written here by Dr. Calvin Beisner.  See also the things in the encyclical you won’t hear from the mainstream media here.
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By Myron Ebell, CEI

A version, but perhaps not the final version, of Pope Francis’s encyclical on climate change was leaked to and published by an Italian paper today.  For those who read Italian (not Latin), it’s available here This leak moved up the release of a short video by our friends at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which is their response.  It’s two minutes long and can be watched here:

Also, Fred Smith, founder and former president of CEI, published the article pasted below on Forbes Online today.

The key points to my mind are that global warming is a moral issue and that the effects of energy rationing policies, particularly on poor people, need to be considered.  That changes the moral equation.  Second, if alarmists push the Pope’s moral authority, then ask them whether they also agree with the Pope on abortion, population control, gender issues, gay marriage, etc.

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Fred Smith Contributor
I work to reduce regulation and expose its enormous costs.

The Pope, Poverty And Global Warming

The world waits in anticipation as Pope Francis and his advisers finalize an official Vatican statement on climate change and the environment - expected out this week. The Pope is reportedly worried about how climate change might impact the poor, and he is quite right to be concerned. But it is the environmental proposals currently being championed as solutions, however, that are the real threat. The most frequently cited policies for allegedly “dealing with climate change” - like raising prices on fossil fuels and taxing carbon dioxide emissions - would actually cause harm to energy-starved and impoverished nations around the world.

Environmental activists argue the continued use of fossil fuels will produce dramatic changes in the climate that will harm future generations. Therefore, if we succeed in capping greenhouse gases, many, especially the most vulnerable, will benefit. Opponents counter that restricting fossil fuel use will harm poor people today both by slowing economic growth and by denying them access to more efficient, dependable fuels.

Asking the poor of today to sacrifice their livelihoods and hopes in the name of reducing energy use would be a great injustice. Faster growth means more wealth and greater knowledge for future generations. Whatever challenges climate change may bring, our smarter, richer great-grandchildren will have better tools and more abundant resources to deal with them than we have today.

The Catholic Church has a history of resolving complex risk situations. For example, to ensure that saints were properly selected, the Church ensured that both sides of the case were heard. The Advocatus Dei made the case favoring that decision; the Advocatus Diablo - “Devil’s Advocate” - made the opposing case. One hopes that in addressing the morality of energy restrictions, both sides will be heard. The Vatican has heard the case for conventional environmental policies, having recently hosted a conference on this topic. Have they heard the opposing view?

Long before the theoretical effects of climate change are ever felt, the alarmist policies favored by United Nations agencies and major environmental advocacy groups would severely hobble developing countries’ economies. Replacing affordable and reliable fossil fuels with more expensive, less reliable alternative sources would increase the cost of energy around the world. That would be bad enough for low income people in developed nations. If forced on developing countries, it would be a humanitarian disaster.

The world’s poorest people already spend a disproportionate amount of their income on energy. Increasing prices would block the shift in poorer nations from “biomass” fuels like dried animal dung to much healthier alternatives like propane and natural gas.

Increasing energy costs will slow the process of replacing backbreaking human labor with mechanical devices, as occurred over the past century in now-wealthy Western countries. The next stage of industrialization and prosperity will be blocked, as the factories and processes that the United States and Europe used to grow their economies in the 19th and 20th centuries will no longer be affordable - or possibly even allowed under international law.

The impact on individuals and families in poor countries will also be enormous. When a key economic input like fossil fuel energy artificially increases in price, virtually everything becomes more expensive. For the 1.2 billion people living on less than $1 a day, making everything they need to survive even marginally more expensive would be catastrophic.
None of this is to say that potential threats from future climate change should simply be ignored. If the world’s leaders - from heads of state to spiritual leaders like Pope Francis - want to help make the world a safer place, they should champion policies that improve society’s ability to cope with disasters, environmental and otherwise, and avoid those that hamper economic growth and innovation.

A wealthier world is a healthier world, and it’s the people at the bottom of the economic ladder who will benefit most from rising global prosperity. People of good faith have innumerable ways to help our fellow humans flourish and protect themselves from harm. Forcing them into perpetual energy poverty is not one of them. I hope Pope Francis will agree.

It’s Back. Slate reports the first hoax that opened the door to follow up ones like Acid Rain and then AGW is back in the news. The ‘fix’ never really worked because the problem never really existed. The Ozone hole was a natural phenomenon due to ice clouds forming at the end of the southern polar winter. It had never been seen before satellite and hasn’t changed since the world changed from CFCs to HFCs. But never mind. Now they are repeating the bad science and conclude HFCs are ‘powerful’ greenhouse gases. This from Slate.

You might remember that ozone gas - made from triplets of oxygen atoms -helps shield us from the sun’s harmful UV-B rays. Most of it is in the lower stratosphere, roughly six to 30 miles above the Earth’s surface, where it’s created naturally by the interaction of sunlight and regular oxygen. Other gases, particularly those containing chlorine or bromine, can make ozone molecules break apart. Starting in the 1970s, scientists suspected that the widespread use of industrial chemicals might be putting additional chlorine and bromine into the stratosphere. In particular, researchers worried about the chlorofluorocarbons used in fridges, air conditioners, and aerosol spray cans and the halon gases used in fire extinguishers. (Human technology also creates some ozone, but that stuff tends to stay close to the ground, where it causes a range of health issues.)

Given the projected boom in usage in the developing world - thanks to a growing appetite for refrigerators and air conditioners - these chemicals may end up being a major contributor to climate change. (Researchers estimate that HFCs could be one-fifth as problematic as carbon dioxide by the year 2050.) Earlier this month, the United States, Canada, and Mexico issued a joint proposal for a “phase down” in HFCs, which can be replaced in some applications with more eco-friendly options, like carbon dioxide, ammonia, or HFCs with lower global-warming potential. In November, the signatories of the Montreal Protocol will hold their annual meeting in Egypt, so we should hear more on this topic in the next few months.

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Back in 2011, this post was on Icecap.

Dr. Wil Happer of Princeton wrote “The Montreal Protocol to ban freons was the warm-up exercise for the IPCC.  Many current IPCC players gained fame then by stampeding the US Congress into supporting the Montreal Protocol. They learned to use dramatized, phony scientific claims like “ozone holes over Kennebunkport” (President Bush Sr’s seaside residence in New England). The ozone crusade also had business opportunities for firms like Dupont to market proprietary “ozone-friendly” refrigerants at much better prices than the conventional (and more easily used) freons that had long-since lost patent protection and were not a cheap commodity with little profit potential” (link).

Even James Lovelock agrees. James Lovelock formulated the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment. He later became concerned that global warming would upset the balance and leave only the arctic as habitable. He began to move off this position in 2007 suggesting that the Earth itself is in “no danger” because it would stabilize in a new state.

James Lovelock’s reaction to first reading about the leaked CRU emails in late 2009 was one of a true scientist. “I was utterly disgusted. My second thought was that it was inevitable. It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn’t want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They’re not like that nowadays. They don’t give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced universities and churn them out. They say: “Science is a good career. You can get a job for life doing government work.” That’s no way to do science.

Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science. I’m not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It’s the one thing you do not ever do. You’ve got to have standards.”

On a March 2010 Guardian interview, Lovelock opined “The great climate science centres around the world are more than well aware how weak their science is. If you talk to them privately they’re scared stiff of the fact that they don’t really know what the clouds and the aerosols are doing...We do need skepticism about the predictions about what will happen to the climate in 50 years, or whatever. It’s almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s wrong to do it.”

Will Happer further elaborated “The Montreal Protocol may not have been necessary to save the ozone, but it had limited economic damage. It has caused much more damage in the way it has corrupted science. It showed how quickly a scientist or activist can gain fame and fortune by purporting to save planet earth.  We have the same situation with CO2 now, but CO2 is completely natural, unlike freons. Planet earth is quite happy to have lots more CO2 than current values, as the geological record clearly shows.  If the jihad against CO2 succeeds, there will be enormous economic damage, and even worse consequences for human liberty at the hands of the successful jihadists.”

LIKE GLOBAL WARMING THE DATA DOESN’T SUPPORT THE THEORY

The ozone hole has not closed off after we banned CFCs. See this story in Nature about how the Consensus about the Ozone Hole and Man’s Role (with CFCs) May Be Falling Apart.

The size of the hole has hardly changed since 1990 (enlarged here).

“As the world marks 20 years since the introduction of the Montreal Protocol to protect the ozone layer, Nature has learned of experimental data that threaten to shatter established theories of ozone chemistry. If the data are right, scientists will have to rethink their understanding of how ozone holes are formed and how that relates to climate change. Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere - almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.

Other groups have yet to confirm the new photolysis rate, but the conundrum is already causing much debate and uncertainty in the ozone research community. “Our understanding of chloride chemistry has really been blown apart,” says John Crowley, an ozone researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. “Until recently everything looked like it fitted nicely,” agrees Neil Harris, an atmosphere scientist who heads the European Ozone Research Coordinating Unit at the University of Cambridge, UK. “Now suddenly it’s like a plank has been pulled out of a bridge.”

STILL COMING

Yet like the cultists whose spacecraft didn’t arrive on the announced date, the government scientists find ways to postpone it and save their reputations (examples “Increasing greenhouse gases could delay, or even postpone indefinitely the recovery of stratospheric ozone in some regions of the Earth, a Johns Hopkins earth scientist suggests” here and “Scientists Find Antarctic Ozone Hole to Recover Later than Expected” here. 

“The warmers are getting more and more like those traditional predictors of the end of the world who, when the event fails to happen on the due date, announce an error in their calculations and a new date.” Dr. John Brignell, Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton, on Number Watch (May 1) PDF

See here how HARVARD, SYRACUSE RESEARCHERS CAUGHT LYING TO BOOST OBAMA CLIMATE RULES.

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By John Hayward

As climate data continues its stubborn refusal to conform to doomsday models, global-warming activists have focused much of their effort on attempting to discredit critics, apparently in the belief that “science” means suppressing inconvenient information to make hypotheses look better. A major theme running through these efforts is the supposed financial “conflicts of interest” facing scientists whose work is not funded by ideologically pure supporters of catastrophic man-made climate change theories. To put it bluntly, the warmists insist that anyone who disagrees with them is a dishonest puppet of reckless and greedy fossil fuel companies.

Skeptical scientists, facing demands from witch-hunting enforcers of climate-change orthodoxy to total up their lunch receipts for the last decade or two, pointed out that global-warming true believers are hardly free of their own conflicts of interest.

There is actually far more money behind the Church of Global Warming than any of its skeptics. The difference is that global-warming cabbage is not portrayed as unclean or suspected of influencing the outcome of scientific studies, because it comes from media-approved “good guy” organizations presumed 100 percent selfless and altruistic.

The biggest media-beloved, honorable, compassionate organization is, of course, the government.

The government has an obvious conflict of interest when it comes to pushing climate-change theories, because they provide a pretext for seizing enormous amounts of economic and political power. It is no coincidence that the politicians most eager to tax and regulate industries to their knees are politicians who weren’t all that fond of capitalism to begin with.

Most of them know less about science than the average kid building a papier-mache volcano in his kitchen for the upcoming science fair. They do, however, have a keen appreciation for the value of authority for the accumulation of power. “Do what I want, or cities will drown in melted polar ice” is a splendid example of invoking authority to compel obedience.

JunkScience.com brings us a very clear illustration of the double standard applied to climate money. Cash just doesn’t count when it comes from a power-hungry bureacracy!

Earlier this week, the Nature Climate Change journal wrote about a study that supposedly validates the Environmental Protection Agency’s claims that its new rules on carbon dioxide will save thousands of lives every year. As always with news useful to climate change and/or Big Government, this story was immediately picked up and reported far and wide by the media, with very little criticism… and a universal consensus that the study’s authors had no competing financial interests whatsoever.

That’s only true if you accept - as all of the media does, and absolutely no one should - that government money doesn’t count. As it turns out, most of the report’s authors have been given enormous amounts of money by the EPA, far beyond the sums routinely depicted as creating unacceptable conflicts of interest when climate-change skeptics produce work for private organizations. The total grants add up to some $45 million. That, in turn, is a mere fraction of the money riding on these new EPA regulations.

This is a study expressly intended to support a power grab by the EPA. As JunkScience points out, one of the authors admitted his team had its conclusion in mind before the study even began, admitting that “we wanted to bring attention to the additional benefits of carbon controls.”

Also keenly interested in bringing attention to the benefits of carbon controls: the bureaucrats who enforce them. In this case, those bureaucrats gave a great deal of money to the scientists who conducted a study supporting the agenda of the agency, and those scientists have every reason to expect more financial support in the future… provided the global-warming gravy train keeps rumbling along. If it comes off the rails, and the public demands an end to the confiscation of their money and capital… why, that wouldn’t be good for anyone who benefits from the current arrangement, now would it?

Do these financial and political interests invalidate the study that claimed to find thousands of lives per year at stake, absent the new EPA regulations? No, although JunkScience does a fine job of challenging the study in a separate post. The issue is that far less significant financial ties are routinely cited to discredit skeptical scientists whose work holds up very nicely to academic scrutiny… and those ties are never, ever left unmentioned by the media, if they deign to cover skeptical scientists at all.

Dr. Willie Soon responded to conflict-of-interest allegations leveled against him by calling for equal disclosure standards on all sides of the climate-change debate: “If the standards for disclosure are to change, then let them change evenly. If a journal that has peer-reviewed and published my work concludes that additional disclosures are appropriate, I am happy to comply. I would ask only that other authors - on all sides of the debate - are also required to make similar disclosures. And I call on the media outlets that have so quickly repeated my attackers’ accusations to similarly look into the motivations of and disclosures that may or may not have been made by their preferred, IPCC-linked scientists.”

In truth, the Solomonic disinterested wisdom assigned by friendly media to climate-change believers would be difficult for anyone to achieve, with issues this large, and the necessary studies so expensive to conduct. Furthermore, Dr. Soon’s advice would be well-taken in nearly every public policy debate. The contestants should be presumed neither angelic nor demonic, and their work should be able to stand on its own...as the theories of the climate-change movement have so spectacularly failed to do, for years on end.

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The Green-Left’s funding secrets
Craig Rucker, CFACT
Environmental pressure groups continually spin conspiracy theories about the funding of their critics.

It’s one of the tricks they employ to try to silence those who oppose their dreams of regulatory control.

In CFACT’s case, this has always struck us as absurd. For nearly 30 years, we have gratefully received contributions from a variety of foundations, corporations and individuals who share our vision, and last year, 80% of that support came from private citizen supporters. (Thank you, by the way!)

So where did the Left come up with this?  How about, “projection.”

The Green movement is well aware of the mountains of funding it receives from taxpayers, foreign governments and other questionable interests.  They’d rather have the public focus on their critics than take a peek at their own Green-minded tycoon and billionaire backers like George Soros or Tom Steyer, the latter of which alone spent $100 million last year trying to move the Senate more toward the global warming-Left.

Opposition to the Sandpiper and Keystone XL oil pipelines also furnish perfect examples.  As CFACT’s Paul Driessen writes at Investor’s Business Daily and at CFACT.org, “Putin-allied Russian billionaires laundered $23 million through the Bermuda-based Wakefield Quin law firm to the Sea Change Foundation and thence to anti-fracking and anti-Keystone groups, the Environmental Policy Alliance found. Sandpiper opponents are likewise funded and coordinated by wealthy financiers and shadowy foundations.”

“‘Honor the Earth’ is a ‘Native American’ group that is actually a Tides Foundation ;project,’ with the Tides Center as its fiscal sponsor, contributing $700,000 and extensive in-kind aid. Out-of-state donors provide 99% of Honor’s funding.’

‘Among Tides’ biggest donors is Obama friend and advisor Warren Buffett...while public, media and political attention was riveted on Keystone, Berkshire Hathaway quietly bought the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad and Union Tank Car manufacturing company.” With Keystone blocked, “oil-by-rail skyrocketed from 9,500 carloads in 2009 to 450,000 carloads in 2014. Buffett’s ‘investment’ in anti-pipeline activism garnered billions in rail revenues.”

When CFACT Collegians chapters confronted demonstrators with these facts, first they went into denial...then they became livid!  They didn’t like being exposed as a combination of hypocrites and useful idiots advancing the interests of corporate billionaires and foreign potentates.

The funds available to the radical Greens, including corporate, dwarf anything available to those who oppose them. They want to make an issue of any trace amount of corporate funding their opponents might receive while keeping their own funding entirely hidden.

This is complete hypocrisy. It needs to be exposed.

Fortunately, we not only have the merits of the argument on our side, but we also have talented writers and spokesmen, such as Paul Driessen, to help us make these facts known.

Stay tuned.

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ICECAP Note:

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