By Larry Bell, Forbes

Reprinted with permission of author

One year after U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged at least $100 billion annually by 2020 to help Third World countries address climate problems attributed to America and capitalism at the U.N.-sponsored World Climate-Change Summit in Copenhagen, the Cancun meeting that followed focused primarily upon formulating a plan of action to implement that commitment. This commenced literally with a vengeance, producing the design for a new $100 billion per year “Green Climate Fund” (GCF). Its purpose is nothing less than to fundamentally transform the global economy...beginning with ours.

And the key players? They include George Soros, a World Bank representative, and Lawrence Summers, former director of the White House National Economic Council and assistant to President Obama for economic policy.  Be advised to take what is envisioned very seriously.

The first GCF meeting of the 40-member design team, the “Transitional Committee” (TC), took place in Mexico City on April 28-29. Its charge was to prepare “operational specifications” for the GCF in time for approval at U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change meeting in Durban, South Africa last week. You can bet that its primary goal will be to finalize financing strategies to squeeze those annual $100 billion installments out of American consumers unencumbered by Congressional approvals.

According to plans, the U.N. would be granted taxing authority that will effectively transform its role of governance to “government” and preempt our national sovereignty. This falls in line with proposals prepared by a 20-member “High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing” assembled by U.N. Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon for the purpose of calling upon nations “to fundamentally transform the global economy-based on low-carbon, clean energy resources.” Resulting recommendations are to institute:

•a carbon tax
•a tax on international aviation and shipping
•a financial transaction tax
•a wire tax for producing electricity
•redirection of 100% of all fossil fuel subsidies for international climate action.

Fox News reported possession of position papers indicating topics covered in meetings involving Ban ki-Moon and 60 of his top lieutenants during a two-day 2010 Australian Alpine Retreat discussing ways to put their sprawling organization in charge of world agendas. Those topics included:

•how to restore “climate change” as a top global priority after the Copenhagen fiasco

•how to continue to try to make global redistribution of wealth the real basis of that climate agenda, and widen the discussion further to encompass the idea of “global public goods”

•how to keep growing U.N. peacekeeping efforts into missions involved in police, courts, legal systems and other aspects of strife-torn countries

•how to capitalize on the global tide of immigrants from poor nations to rich ones, to encompass a new “international migration governance network”
•how to make “clever use of technologies to deepen direct ties with what the U.N. calls “civil society”, meaning novel ways to bypass its member nation states and deal directly with constituencies that support U.N. agendas.

An underlying position paper theme those top U.N. bosses grappled with was how to cope with the pesky issue of national sovereignty that interferes with their global governance goal. As one paper put it: “the U.N. should be able to take the lead in setting the global agenda, engage effectively with other multinational and regional organizations as well as civil society and non-state stakeholders, and transform itself into a tool to help implement the globally agreed objectives.”

It went on to state: “it will be necessary to deeply reflect on the substance of sovereignty, and accept that changes in our perceptions are a good indication of the direction we are going.”

And just how much of this sovereignty sabotage has to do with sinking capitalism, stifling consumption and achieving global wealth redistribution? A bunch.

As an opening session explained: “The real challenge comes from the exponential growth of the global consumerist society driven by ever higher aspirations of the upper and middle layers in rich countries, as well as the expanding demand of emerging middle-class in developing countries. Our true ambition should be therefore creating incentives for the profound transformation of attitudes and consumption styles.” A paper prepared by Secretary General Ban’s own climate change team called for “nothing less than a fundamental transformation of the global economy.”

Such ambitious goals will of course require lots money to carry out...our money, along with new taxing authority. And manufactured carbon-based climate change alarmism provides an excuse to get it.

In 2004 the United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) published a study addressing possible scenarios for implementing a global tax.  It asked “How can we find an extra US $550 billion for development funding? Our focus is on flows of resources from high-income to developing countries.” The conclusion?  “Any foreseeable global tax will be introduced, not by a unitary world government, but as the result of concerted action of nation states...The taxation of environmental externalities is an obvious potential source of revenue.” It went on to say “We are presupposing that the tax is indeed levied on individuals and firms in the form of a carbon levy.”

Another UNU-Wider publication states: “Support for an international ‘carbon tax’ has been growing since the 1992 U.N. Earth Summit focused international attention on the damage to the environment caused by excessive use of fossil fuels worldwide...Over 20% of the tax yields would originate in the U.S.”

As Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chair of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group III on Mitigation of Climate Change admitted in an Investor’s Business Daily interview, “The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month [December, 2010] is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.”

Read much more here.

Read Lord Monckton’s detailed on what the UN treaty entails and how it will help decimate the world economies to benefit the bureaucrats here. Two extracted comments:

Green Climate Fund: Western nations are urged to “commit to the initial capitalization of the Green Climate Fund without delay”, to include “the full running costs” and “the funding required for the formation and operating costs of the board and secretariat of the Green Climate Fund”. Here, as always, the UN bureaucrats want their own pay, perks, pensions and organizational structure guaranteed before any money goes to third-world countries.

The UN is now the biggest obstacle to the eradication of poverty worldwide, because its pampered functionaries divert so much cash to themselves, to an ever-expanding alphabet-soup of bureaucracies, and then to heroically lunatic projects like “global warming” control. Time to abolish it.

Climate Contrarians Ignore Overwhelming Evidence

Every snowflake is unique, but attacks on climate science all seem the same. I should know. I’ve been one of the climate contrarians’ preferred targets for years. A recent op-ed on this page by blogger and climate-change denier James Delingpole attacked the “hockey stick” graph my co-authors and I published more than a decade ago with well-worn, discredited arguments ("Climategate 2.0,” Nov. 28).

Our original work showed that average temperatures today are higher than they have been for at least the past 1,000 years. Since then, dozens of analyses from other scientists based on different data and methods have all affirmed and extended our original findings.  Contrarians have nonetheless painted a misleading picture of climate science as a house of cards teetering on the edge of a hockey stick. In reality, my research is just one piece in a vast puzzle scientists have painstakingly assembled over the past 200 years establishing the reality of human-caused climate change.

Does that mean that everyone should have to drive an electric car and adopt a polar bear? Of course not. Policy decisions must balance matters of economics, international diplomacy and ethics in a way that is informed, rather than prescribed, by science.

In 2006, then-Rep. Sherwood Boehlert (R., N.Y.) asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into studies like the hockey stick. It affirmed our conclusions. In recent years, attacks on climate science have become personal. After my colleagues and I had our emails stolen and posted online in November 2009, attacks from climate contrarians were subsequently shot down by investigations from two universities, the National Science Foundation, two federal agencies and several media outlets. Contrarians declared that those institutions were part of an imagined global-warming conspiracy.
In April 2010, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli demanded emails I sent or received from other scientists while at the University of Virginia. A judge concluded Mr. Cuccinelli hadn’t demonstrated any good reason to see that correspondence. Shortly after that, the American Tradition Institute, a group with ties to fossil-fuel interests, asked for the same emails under the state’s open records laws. The university rightly asserted that much of my private correspondence is just that and not subject to release.

Many fossil-fuel interests and their allies are following the same attack-the-science strategy that tobacco companies adopted to delay smoking regulation. Climate scientists can also find kinship with Dr. Herbert Needleman, who identified a link between lead contamination and impaired childhood brain development in the 1970s. The lead industry accused him of misconduct. Later, the National Institutes of Health exonerated him.

Mr. Delingpole ends his piece by saying the anonymous hacker or hackers who stole emails from me and my colleagues deserve thanks. What they deserve is to be brought to justice. But British police have not determined who stole the emails. Recent reports of police expenditures suggest they may be devoting far fewer resources to it than other similar investigations.
Celebrating theft is silly. We should respect the role science and scientists play in society, especially when scientists identify new risks. Whether those risks stem from smoking, lead exposure or the increasing use of fossil fuels, scientists will always work to increase knowledge and reduce uncertainty. And we all benefit from that work.

Prof. Michael E. Mann
Meteorology Department
Penn State University

See Bishop Hill’s post on Tim Barnett’s challenge of Mann’s Hockey Stick.

It’s interesting how much evidence there is now that the Hockey Stick was known to be a problem. Perhaps readers can help collate a list of emails making this point.

NAS panel review of hockeysticks prompted by McIntyre and McKitrick.

#1104 -Heinz Wanner - on reporting his NAS panel critique of Mann to the media.
I just refused to give an exclusive interview to SPIEGEL because I will not cause damage for climate science.

#1656 Douglas Maraun - on how to react to skeptics.
How should we deal with flaws inside the climate community? I think, that “our” reaction on the errors found in Mike Mann’s work were not especially honest.

#3234 Richard Alley
Taking the recent instrumental record and the tree-ring record and joining them yields a dramatic picture, with rather high confidence that recent times are anomalously warm. Taking strictly the tree-ring record and omitting the instrumental record yields a less-dramatic picture and a lower confidence that the recent temperatures are anomalous.

Paleoclimate and hide the decline

#0300
Bo Christiansen - On Hockey stick reconstructions
All methods strongly underestimates the amplitude of low-frequency variability and trends. This means that it is almost impossible to conclude from reconstruction studies that the present period is warmer than any period in the reconstructed period.

Ed Cook #3253
The results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).

#4133 Johnathan Overpeck - IPCC review.
What Mike Mann continually fails to understand, and no amount of references will solve, is that there is practically no reliable tropical data for most of the time period, and without knowing the tropical sensitivity, we have no way of knowing how cold (or warm)the globe actually got.

[and later]

Unsatisfying, perhaps, since people will want to know whether 1200 AD was warmer than today, but if the data doesn’t exist, the question can’t yet be answered. A good topic for needed future work.

Rob Wilson - 1583
The palaeo-world has become a much more complex place in the last 10 years and with all the different calibration methods, data processing methods, proxy interpretations - any method that incorporates all forms of uncertainty and error will undoubtedly result in reconstructions with wider error bars than we currently have. These many be more honest, but may not be too helpful for model comparison attribution studies. We need to be careful with the wording I think.

#3234 Richard Alley - on NAS panel and divergence
records, or some other records such as Rosanne’s new ones, show “divergence”, then I believe it casts doubt on the use of joined tree-ring/instrumental records, and I don’t believe that I have yet heard why this interpretation is wrong.

#4758 Tim Osborne - Criticizing other people for doing the same thing
Because how can we be critical of Crowley for throwing out 40-years in the middle of his calibration, when we’re throwing out all post-1960 data ‘cos the MXD has a non-temperature signal in it, and also all pre-1881 or pre-1871 data ‘cos the temperature data may have a non-temperature signal in it! If we write the Holocene forum article then we’ll have to be critical or our paper as well as Crowley’s!

#0497 - Phil Jones UEA - Scientists don’t know the magnitude of past warming.
Even though the tree-ring chronologies used have robust rbar statistics for the whole 1000 years ( ie they lose nothing because core numbers stay high throughout), they have lost low frequency because of standardization. We’ve all tried with RCS/very stiff splines/hardly any detrending to keep this to a minimum, but until we know it is minimal it is still worth mentioning.

#0886 Jan Esper on his own reconstruction [ also hidden decline
And the curve will also show that the IPCC curve needs to be improved according to missing long-term declining trends/signals, which were removed (by dendrochronologists!) before Mann merged the local records together.

Tiim Osborne 4007
Also we have applied a completely artificial adjustment to the data after 1960, so they look closer to observed temperatures than the tree-ring data actually were

Tim Osborne #2347
Also, we set all post-1960 values to missing in the MXD data set (due to decline), and the method will infill these, estimating them from the real temperatures - another way of “correcting” for the decline, though may be not defensible!

#3234 Richard Alley
Unless the “divergence problem” can be confidently ascribed to some cause that was not active a millennium ago, then the comparison between tree rings from a millennium ago and instrumental records from the last decades does not seem to be justified, and the confidence level in the anomalous nature of the recent warmth is lowered.

I think the best way to sum up all of this is a quote from a guest post at tAV and DieKlimazweibel by Bo Christiansen:
Where does all this lead us? It is very likely that the NH mean temperature has shown much larger past variability than caught by previous reconstructions. We cannot from these reconstructions conclude that the previous 50-year period has been unique in the context of the last 500-1000 years.

Of course we all know that the IPCC reports differently.

See also Delingpole’s response to Mann.  H/T Chris Horner, Marc Morano

By Dr. J. Cao, Australia

The second law of thermodynamics states the entropy of an isolated system increases always with time towards its maximum.  William Thomson (Lord Kevin), one of the most brilliant minds in the field of thermodynamics in the 19th century, applied the law to the case of the universe and formulised a hypothesis that says: when the maximum entropy is reached the universe will have no thermodynamic free energy any more to sustain motion or life - ultimate fate of the universe is heat death.  The theory has been further developed since, and cosmological research suggests eventually all matters will decay into iron, and collapse into black holes in some remote future of 10’s 3 digits power (>10^100) years from now.  Presumably this is the scariest projection our human minds are capable to image.

A century after Lord Kevin, another scary projection is formulised by climate scientists.  Instrumental observations have found that atmospheric carbon dioxide absorbs significant amount of earth outgoing radiation.  It is then believed that atmospheric carbon dioxide traps heat and warms up the atmosphere.  With the concentration of CO2 increasing more and more, the Earth will become warmer and warmer, ice melts, sea level rises, leading to catastrophic climate change that will destroy the living environment of the mother Earth.

Unlike the theory of heat death of the universe that is only studied by academics, the theory of global warming has alarmed and mobilised our mankind.  We’ve spent trillions of dollars trying to combat global warming.  From the Kyoto Protocol to the Copenhagen Climate Summit COP15 to the current Durban conference COP17, world leaders have shown how they are convinced that carbon dioxide is causing global warming.  Australian parliament even recently passed a carbon tax law.

While the theory of heat death of the universe remains a valid scientific hypothesis, the theory of global warming has been found to be a false illusion due to technical errors.  Physics analysis of carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen molecules shows carbon dioxide is cooler than, gains heat by molecular collision from, and dissipates heat by radiation for nitrogen and oxygen gases. 

CO2 is a cooling agent for the atmosphere; nitrogen and oxygen gases secure the Earth a warm liveable near surface atmosphere.  In the thermosphere where CO2 is sorted out due to heavier molecular weight, the temperature of residual air is well above 100C, goes higher and higher with altitude reaching a value exceed 1000C.

http://jinancaoblog.blogspot.com/