By Lawrence Solomon
The University of East Anglia of Climategate fame - scene of the embarrassing emails that disgraced the global warming cause - has once again been embarrassed, this time through a failed attempt to silence one of the UK’s most brilliant - and biting - global warming sceptics.
James Delingpole, a take-no-prisoner blogger with the Daily Telegraph, has been a relentless critic of the university and the professor at the heart of the scandal, Phil Jones. In an attempt to curb Delingpole’s blog posts, the university lodged a complaint with the UK Press Complaints Commission, an independent body. The Commission’s decision, just out, is a crushing repudiation of the university’s attempt to manage dissent that could strike a blow for free speech everywhere.
The Commission summarized the university’s complaints thus: “In particular, the complainants were concerned that the blog posts described Professor Phil Jones as ‘disgraced, FOI-breaching, email-deleting, scientific-method abusing’. They explained that Professor Phil Jones had been exonerated of any dishonesty or scientific malpractice by a series of reviews. They were concerned that a second blog post repeated accusations that had been demonstrated as untrue, concluding that the University’s scientists were ‘untrustworthy, unreliable and entirely unfit to write the kind of reports on which governments around the world make their economic and environmental decisions’, and a third blog post referred to the scientists’ work as ‘shoddy’ and ‘mendacious’.
It then ruled: “The Commission was satisfied that readers would be aware that the comments therein represented the columnist’s own robust views of the matters in question. … The Commission has previously ruled [North v The Guardian] that ‘In the realm of blogging (especially in cases touching upon controversial topics such as climate change), there is likely to be strong and fervent disagreement, with writers making use of emotive terms and strident rhetoric. This is a necessary consequence of free speech. The Commission felt that it should be slow to intervene in this, unless there is evidence of factual inaccuracy or misleading statement.’
To see the succinct UK Press Complaints Commission decision, click here.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers. LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com.
There is an excellent article in the Sunday Australian by Greg Sheridan. Excerpts:
EVERY so often Australians accuse themselves of being out of step. The implication is that we should “catch up with the world”. Sometimes this has been a useful spur to reform, sometimes it has been nonsense. But the Gillard government is attempting to put Australia off-side with the practice of virtually the entire world. And it is doing so by pursuing a puritan ideological obsession that virtually no one else in the world is doing.
I refer, of course, to the proposed carbon tax. If the carbon tax goes ahead, to be replaced in due course by an emissions trading scheme with a fixed carbon emissions target, Australia will have among the most extreme climate-change policies in the world.
Gillard has shown herself to be a highly reactive politician. And it is characteristic of her that she overreacts. The ETS was unpopular before the last election, so she urged Kevin Rudd to dump it. After the election, Labor was worried about hemorrhaging votes on its left to the Greens, so every Labor right-winger who had ever bruised a ballot became a champion of gay marriage. And Gillard embraced the carbon tax....
Let’s have a simple rundown of what the rest of the world is doing. In Europe there has indeed been an ETS for some years. But more than 95 per cent of the carbon permits in its first years were given out for free. The scheme had little effect on reducing greenhouse emissions. It was widely regarded as a joke, although European officials who come to Australia are inevitably interviewed reverentially by uninformed ABC personalities who never hold them to account for this.
Europe says it is going to fix its ETS. But even so, the vast majority of Europe’s export industries will qualify for free or highly discounted carbon permits.
Some heavy manufacturing has left Europe and gone to China. But as Graeme Kraehe of Bluestone Steel pointed out, carbon emissions attributable to European imports have risen massively. So any carbon reductions from European manufacturing have been more than matched by carbon increases from non-European manufacturers now supplying Europe’s population. Out of this, there is little or no net carbon reduction for the planet.
What about China?
China is the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, responsible for nearly a quarter of the world’s new carbon. The Gillard government’s Greg Combet uses a Jesuitical form of words, which is a first cousin to rank fraud, when he talks about China. He recently spoke of an “implicit carbon price” in “certain sectors” of the Chinese economy. Gillard herself frequently talks of China decommissioning coal-fired power stations. Let’s be quite clear. China is engaged in a massive, yes massive, increase in carbon emissions....
It is a nonsense to describe the imposition of a carbon tax as an economic “reform” for Australia. If the proponents of the tax were honest, they would acknowledge that it is completely implausible that a massive cost imposition on the Australian economy will benefit the Australian economy. Instead, Australians are being asked to engage in a massive act of altruism - although the benefits of that altruism are doubtful, even for the global environment, given that high-carbon activities will simply shift to other countries.
Richard Mackey also suggests you read the story by Geoffrey Lehmann, Peter Farrell and Dick Warburton in the March and April issues of the Quadrant. They start:
In a news story on March 20, 2000, “Snow falls are now just a thing of the past”, the UK’s Independent newspaper reported:
Sledges, snowmen, snowballs ... are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters - which scientists are attributing to global climate change - produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries ... According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event ... Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”.
This millenarian prediction from the world’s most prominent climate research centre was a dud. When the news story appeared ten years ago, an unanticipated pause in global warming was already taking place, and global warming has not resumed since then. On January 7, 2010, a NASA satellite photographed the UK covered entirely by a blanket of snow. The published photograph shows the familiar shape of the map of England, Scotland and Wales, frozen white, and set in an ocean of dark blue silk, with the edges partly obscured by wisps of cloud. In the winter just ending, Britain underwent yet another winter of heavy snowfalls. On November 29 the Independent had a story headed, “Cold comfort for a Britain stuck in a deep freeze”.
With Julia Gillard’s sudden switch to support for a carbon price, Australia in 2013 could be the first country to hold an election with anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as the pivotal issue.
They go on to discuss the science in some detail. A good read.
By Art Horn, ICECAP on Pajamas Media
I hardly know where to begin in describing how ignorant and vacuous Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) is on this issue. I know that sounds harsh, and it’s intended to be for so many, many reasons.
On March 30, Senator Boxer went on a tirade about how despicable the Republicans were for attaching an amendment to the Small Business Innovation Research Bill (SBIR). The amendment, sponsored by Senator Mitch McConnell (R-TN), would prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating emissions of greenhouse gases to address climate change. The principal gas in question that the EPA wants to regulate (er, tax) is carbon dioxide.
Carbon DIOXIDE! Not carbon.
The first thing Senator Boxer said on the floor, immediately exposing her profound understanding of scientific knowledge:
There has been an amendment that was attached to this bill on the very first day that would stop the Environmental Protection Agency forever from enforcing the Clean Air Act as it relates to carbon pollution… It is essentially a repeal of the Clean Air Act as it involves a particular pollutant, carbon, which has been found to be an endangerment to our people.
She is so very wrong, already. First, the amendment is not a repeal of the Clean Air Act. The Clean Air Act is supposed to regulate pollution - this amendment is intended to stop the EPA from regulating a harmless and beneficial trace gas, carbon dioxide. Without carbon dioxide in the air, all life on Earth would die. It is essential for all plant life. Likely the senator does not know she was exhaling copious amounts of it during her rant.
Carbon dioxide is not dangerous to human health. In the very hall she was speaking in, it is possible and likely that carbon dioxide levels were three to five times higher than the air outside. Servicemen on submarines breathe air with up to 8,000 parts per million of carbon dioxide with no harmful effects - the Earth’s atmosphere currently contains only 390 parts per million.
Her further remarks are so full of errors, it’s hard to know which ones are worth discussing: virtually everything she said was not so.
She referred to a letter from the American Lung Association (which deserves just as much scorn here. The letter is a disgrace - the ALA should know better than to say that by not regulating carbon dioxide the health of Americans will be compromised. Apparently they are not worried about their professional credibility, as the letter actually supports the absurd notion that carbon dioxide is air pollution). Said Boxer:
And what is the science telling us? That it is dangerous to breathe in air pollution with lots of carbon in it.
Once again, not what she was supposed to be there to talk about.
She then entered into the record a despicable letter signed by a long list of environmental groups - groups that are anti-business, anti-civilization, anti-human - that read, among other things:
Medical professionals and public health organizations agree that carbon dioxide pollution is a serious public health issue.
No, they do not. There is absolutely no scientific evidence to support this claim. It is 100% false. She continued:
Compromising the work of the EPA means that more Americans will suffer from the impacts of severe asthma attacks.
What? How did she get there?
More children will end up in hospitals attached to respirators...
Are you kidding me? From CO2?
More seniors lives will be put at risk from heat waves and severe weather.
Ah, now we see where her head is at and where this letter is really coming from. That statement let the truth sneak out: the argument about carbon dioxide being dangerous to health and equivalent to carbon pollution is a cover, an excuse, and a fabrication to legitimize the environmentalists’ attack on carbon dioxide and the companies, utilities, and manufacturing industries that produce it.
The entire letter is a tactical lie.
The spectacularly fact-challenged senator continued:
Let me give you one economic fact: If you can’t breathe you can’t work.
Wow.
This statement is so absurd I would find this enjoyable if it weren’t so serious an issue. Perhaps the only thing more absurd is that enough people in California voted for her, and that she is in a position to affect policy. The good senator actually believes that a trace gas essential for life on Earth that constitutes only .038% of the atmosphere has the potential to inhibit someone from breathing. Unbelievable.
It gets unfathomably worse. The senator then held up a picture of a little girl on a breathing tube.
Yes, really:
Do you want their future to look like this, breathing through a device? Come on, this is clear.
It certainly is clear: this woman has absolutely no idea what she is talking about. Terribly, profoundly clear.
Some of the business and industries that would be struck hard by the EPA should they be allowed to move forward with regulating CO2 recently took out a full-page ad in several newspapers. Senator Boxer gave some color commentary about the ad’s design:
It looks almost environmental, green. This is not green - it is dirty, dirty air. That is what this ad stands for - dirty air.
The remainder of her rant (which you can read here) makes for an amazing read - it is so thoroughly lacking in any understanding, of absolutely anything factual. She was completely clueless as to what carbon dioxide is - she kept referring to it as carbon - and has no idea that the hearing was completely unrelated to carbon air pollution.
And you wonder why people are outraged at what our leaders have given us: a bankrupt, once-great nation now led by uninformed dolts like Barbara Boxer, the EPA, and unscrupulous environmental groups that want to make sure we have no hope of recovering our former greatness.
Her term can’t end soon enough.
Art Horn spent 25 years working in television as a meteorologist. He now is an independent meteorologist and speaker who lives in Connecticut. He can be contacted at skychaserman@cox.net.