Political Climate
May 14, 2007
Who Are the Merchants of Fear? - An Attack from the Left on ‘Greenhouse Fearmongers’

By Alexander Cockburn, The Nation

No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies.  Actually, the energy companies have long since adapted to prevailing fantasies, dutifully reciting the whole catechism about carbon neutrality, repositioning themselves as eager pioneers in the search for alternative fuels, settling comfortably into new homes, such as British Petroleum’s Energy Biosciences Institute at UC, Berkeley (or Exxon Mobil’s huge investment into Stanford University).

Man-made-global-warming theory is fed by pseudo-quantitative predictions from climate careerists working primarily off the megacomputer General Circulation Models, whose home ports include the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Department of Commerce’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab.

These are multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. They are as unlikely to develop models refuting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming as is the IPCC to say the weather is getting a little bit warmer but there’s no great cause for alarm. Threat inflation is their business.

The world’s best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man’s physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. White House advisory bodies on climate change in the Clinton/Gore years were well freighted with nukers like Larry Papay of Bechtel. As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters. By the mid-’90s he’d positioned himself at the head of a strategic alliance formed around “the challenge of climate change,” which stepped forward to take Communism’s place in the threatosphere essential to political life.  See full story here



May 11, 2007
Analysis: U.N. Calls Climate Debate ‘Over’, Says It Is Immoral to Question the Issue

By William M. Reilly, UPI UN Correspondent

A former chief of the U.N. World Health Organization who also is a former prime minister of Norway and a medical doctor has declared an end to the climate-change debate. Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, one of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s three new special envoys on climate change, also headed up the 1987 U.N. World Commission on Environment and Development where the concept of sustainable development was first floated. 

“This discussion is behind us. It’s over,” she told reporters. “The diagnosis is clear, the science is unequivocal—it’s completely immoral, even, to question now, on the basis of what we know, the reports that are out, to question the issue and to question whether we need to move forward at a much stronger pace as humankind to address the issues.”

According to Icecap’s Norwegian sources, Gro Harlem Brundtland “...is a socialist and former chair of the Norwegian Labor Party. Her UN report “Our Common Future” pointed out 3 major challenges for our World: (1) The ozone hole created by anthropogenic CFCs, (2) An increasing Greenhouse Effect from anthropogenic CO2 and (3) The increasing population vs. the Earth’s sustainability.

From her UN position she may be regarded as the one who elevated the “CO2 Problem” from a narrow academic discussion to an alarming international level covering ordinary people to international leaders. If you read her references in her UN report, you will see that she builds her report mainly on political speeches and popular science, and to a very small degree on scientific publications built on first principles.”
Read full story here



May 10, 2007
‘We Are Children of the Tropics’ - Biologist Josef Reichholf on Global Warming

Interview in Spiegel On-line International

Biologist Josef Reichholf discusses the benefits of a warmer climate for animals and plants, large cities as centers of biological diversity and the myth of the return of malaria.

Why has it become a dogma that we should be afraid of warmer times?  “It is a mystery to me. As recently as the 1960s, people were more concerned about a new ice age—and that would indeed pose a great danger to us. The most catastrophic eras were those in which the weather became worse, not phases of warmer climates. Precisely because we have to feed a growing population on this planet, we should in fact embrace a warmer climate. In warmer regions it takes far less effort to ensure survival.”
See full story here

Also Bruce Hall on the blogspot Hall of Record has three blogs touching on this same theme: Do People Fear Warmer Climates? and The Effect of Not Warming and Avoid Global Warming - Why?



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