By Dr. Bob Carter, the Australian

In 2006, former US vice-president Al Gore made a movie and companion book about global warming called An Inconvenient Truth. Gore undertook many speaking tours to publicise his film, and his PowerPoint slide show has been shown by thousands of his acolytes spreading a relentless message of warming alarmism across the globe.

But while audiences reacted positively and emotionally to the film’s message - which was that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing dangerous global warming - some independent scientists pointed out that An Inconvenient Truth represented well-made propaganda for the warming cause and presented an unreliable, biased account of climate science.

For nowhere in his film does Gore say that the phenomena he describes falls within the natural range of environmental change on our planet. Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change.

In early February 2007, the Department for Education and Skills in Britain, apparently ignorant that the film was scientifically defective, announced that all secondary schools were to be provided with a climate change information pack that contained a copy of Gore’s by then notorious film. Many parents were scandalised at this attempt to propagandise their children on such an important environmental issue.

One parent, school governor Stuart Dimmock who had two sons at a state school in southern England, took legal action against the secretary for education in the High Court, and sought the film’s withdrawal from schools.

In a famous judgment in October 2007, Justice Burton, discerning that Gore was on a “crusade”, commented that “the claimant substantially won this case”, and ruled that the science in the film had been used “to make a political statement and to support a political program” and that the film contained nine fundamental errors of fact out of the 35 listed by Dimmock’s scientific advisers. Justice Burton required that these errors be summarised in new guidance notes for screenings.

In effect, the High Court judgment typed Gore and his supporters as evangelistic proselytisers for an environmental cause.

Fast forward to this month and many Australian parents have been surprised to learn Gore’s film “will be incorporated in the [new] national [English] curriculum ), as part of a bid to teach students on environmental sustainability across all subjects”.

It is, I suppose, some relief the film has not been recommended for inclusion in the science syllabus. Instead, Banquo’s ghost has risen to haunt English teachers, doubtless in class time that might otherwise have been devoted to learning grammar.

Some Australian English teachers may feel competent to advise pupils on the science content of An Inconvenient Truth, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Of course, the same teachers have to feel competent also to shepherd their flock on to the green pastures of sustainability, that other pseudo-scientific concept so beloved by the keepers of our society’s virtue.

Australian schools are being transformed from institutions that impart a rigorous education into social reform factories that manufacture right-thinking (which is to say, left-thinking) young clones ready to be admitted into the chattering classes. This process is manifest in other aspects of the new syllabuses.

Two other biases in the public debate about global warming have occurred recently. The first was the launching of the website Power Shift 2009, which describes itself as “Australia’s first national youth climate summit. It’s the moment where [sic] our fast-growing youth movement for a safe climate future [whatever that might be] comes together”.

In reality, this is simply another website aimed at indoctrinating children regarding global warming, and while it’s not surprising to see Greenpeace and GetUp are involved, it is disappointing to see the involvement of persons with the mana of Ian Thorpe.

The second recent bias has been the broadcast on ABC Radio National of the George Munster Award Forum from the Sydney University of Technology. Here, a panel of “Australia’s top journalists” examined the proposition: “Telling both sides of the story is a basic rule of journalism, but should it apply to reporting climate change?”

Stellar contributions made by the journalists involved included the notions that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, that 97 per cent of all climate scientists agree that dangerous human-caused global warming is happening, and that there is no real debate about climate change. Independent scientists who question these specious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change orthodoxies - for the good reason that they are untrue - were referred to as denialists, fruitcakes, clowns and fools who had “invaded the ABC”. Giving them airtime was said to “attack the essence of journalism”.

The reporting of email leaks from the University of East Anglia last year was “a terrible and wrong disturbance” in the run-up to the Copenhagen climate conference, and the astonishing claim was even made that Fairfax and the ABC “have delivered the objective, factual scientific stories on climate change”.

This farrago of nonsense was described by one US scientist who listened as “probably the most horrifying and disturbing Big Ideas-Small Minds discussion by journalists I have ever heard”. Book-burning parties for Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth or my own Climate: the Counter Consensus can’t be far away, and if the persons involved in the forum were Australia’s top environmental journalists, then God help us all.

Australia is rightly vigilant about preventing child abuse and guarding the freedom of the press. Why, then, are we so willing to tolerate the abuse of educational indoctrination of our children and the deliberate limitation on the scope of the media discussions they will be exposed to as adults?

Gore’s movie and book are an embarrassment to US science and its many fine practitioners, a lot of whom know (but are often unable to state publicly) his crusade is mostly based on junk science.

If allowed in Australian schools at all, An Inconvenient Truth belongs not alongside Jane Austen and Tim Winton, nor with Charles Darwin and Richard Feynman, but with the works of authors such as Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in the science-fiction section of the library.

Geologist Bob Carter is a fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs

See post here.

By Hans Labohm in the Washington Times

The fight against the delusion of dangerous man-made global warming remains an uphill struggle. For decades, the climate debate has been obfuscated by cherry-picking, spin-doctoring and scaremongering by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other climate alarmists, including the environmental movement and mainstream media. Their massive campaign to overstate the threat of man-made warming has left its imprint on public opinion.

But the tide seems to be turning. The Climate Conference fiasco in Copenhagen, the Climategate scandal and stabilization of worldwide temperatures since 1995 have given rise to growing doubts about the putative threat of “dangerous global warming” or “global climate disruption.” Indeed, even Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and one of the main players in Climategate, now acknowledges that there has been no measurable warming since 1995 despite steadily rising atmospheric carbon dioxide.

People are paying attention, and opinion polls in many countries show a dramatic fall in the ranking of climate change among people’s major concerns. People also are beginning to understand that major rain- and snowstorms, hurricanes and other weather extremes are caused by solar-driven changes in global jet streams and warm-cold fronts, not by CO2, and that claims about recent years being the “warmest ever” are based on false or falsified temperature data.

In various parts of the world, the climate debate displays different features. The U.S. and other parts of the non-European Anglo-Saxon world feature highly polarized and politicized debates along the left-versus-right divide. In Europe, all major political parties are still toeing the “official” IPCC line. In both arenas, with a few notable exceptions, skeptical views - even from well-known scientists with impeccable credentials - tend to be ignored and/or actively suppressed by governments, academia and the media.

Nevertheless, skepticism about man-made climate disasters is gradually gaining ground.

In my own country, the Netherlands, for instance, that skepticism even has received some official recognition, thus dissolving the information monopoly of climate alarmists. The Lower House’s Standing Committee on Environment recently organized a one-day hearing at which both climate-chaos adherents and disaster skeptics could freely discuss their different views before key parliamentarians who decide climate policy.

This hearing was followed by a special seminar organized by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences, using the same format but focusing on scientific topics. The academy will soon publish a report about this seminar.

Europe often brags about its emission-trading system (ETS), regarding itself as the vanguard of an international climate policy. In the European view, the Copenhagen climate summit should have produced a worldwide extension and sharpening of its ETS. But the vast majority of countries in the world refused to follow Europe’s example, so the meeting turned into a fiasco. Its follow-up in Cancun, Mexico, at year’s end surely will produce a similar result. For good reason.

Contrary to official claims, Europe’s experience with ETS is dismal. The system is expensive and prone to massive fraud. More important, it serves no useful purpose.

The European Environmental Agency tracks Europe’s performance regarding the reduction of CO2 emissions. Its latest report states: “The EU’s greenhouse gas inventory report ... shows that emissions have not only continued their downward trend in 2008, but have also picked up pace. The EU-27’s emissions stood 11.3 percent below their 1990 levels, while EU-15 achieved a reduction of 6.9 percent compared to Kyoto base-year levels.”

On the face of it, the system seems to be pretty successful. However, much of the downward trend was caused by the global economic recession, not the ETS. Moreover, both climate-chaos proponents and climate-disaster skeptics agree that the scheme will have no detectable impact on worldwide temperatures - perhaps 0.1 degrees - though this crucial piece of information has been carefully and deliberately shielded from the public eye.

What about renewable energy as an alternative? Consider these costs for various sources of electricity in cents per kilowatt-hour: Nuclear is 4, coal is 4, natural gas is 5, onshore wind is 13, biomass is 16 and solar is 56.

Obviously, the price tag for renewables is extremely high when compared to that for hydrocarbons. The additional costs can be justified either by imminent fossil-fuel scarcity (the “oil peak"), which would send prices for petroleum and coal through the roof, or by the threat of man-made global warming. But on closer inspection, neither argument is tenable.

The authoritative International Energy Agency does not foresee any substantial scarcity of oil and gas in the near to medium future, and coal reserves remain sufficient for centuries to come. As for global warming, there has been no statistically significant rise in average worldwide temperatures since 1995. Meanwhile, recent peer-reviewed studies indicate that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere (natural or man-made) have minimal effects on climate change - and on balance, this plant-fertilizing gas is beneficial, rather than harmful, for mankind and the biosphere.

All this argues for a closer look at the cost/benefit relationship of investing in renewable-energy projects, to prevent a massive waste of resources in uncompetitive and thus wasteful forms of energy. Because every cloud has a silver lining, the ongoing economic crisis might give extra impetus toward that end.

Read more here.

By Andrew Restuccia

The midterm elections brought an unprecedented number of climate skeptics into Congress, with no incoming Republicans acknowledging the existence of man-made climate change. Environmentalists have all but given up on passing significant climate legislation in the near future, but in the long term, it may be difficult for climate skeptics to hold their ranks: Young Americans are significantly more concerned about global warming than older generations, and there are no major organizations of young climate skeptics.

This raises the question: What will come of climate skeptics as young people begin to rise to positions of power?

The Washington Independent put this question to Warren Meyer, who runs the website climate-skeptic.com. Meyer, in an email, said younger generations are drawn to “the ‘civilization in peril’ line,” and he suggested that people’s views change over time. “The lack of teenage skeptics today is meaningless for whether there will be skeptics in 20 years,” he said.

Meyer said young people will eventually become more attuned to the economic cost associated with lowering greenhouse gas emissions. “This seems really compelling to the young,” he said. “Until you understand that on the other side of the equation is a 100% chance of really high economic costs.”

There is evidence to suggest that older people care much more about the cost of policies like cap-and-trade than younger people. A June National Journal/Society for Human Resources Management poll shows that while 65 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds favor “protecting the environment” - to 29 percent concerned with “keeping prices low” - those numbers change for older people: 40 percent of people over 65 care about protecting the environment, while 47 percent are concerned with keeping prices low.

Overall though, the issue breaks down along party lines. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that about 79 percent of Democrats and just 38 percent of Republicans believe the earth is warming. Among Republicans who identify with the Tea Party, just 23 percent say there is solid evidence of climate change. The majority of Tea Partiers are over 45, with just 7 percent between the ages of 18 and 29, according to an April New York Times poll.

In an effort to find young people who question the science behind global warming, I allowed Meyer to put a call out on his blog. During the last several weeks, I’ve heard from about half a dozen young people who question climate science.

Andrew Funk, a 27-year-old biologist at the Department of Agriculture, is one of those people. Funk rejects the term climate skeptic in favor of “rational optimist.” In a phone conversation, Funk said he believe climate science is “pretty shaky.” He added, “I think it’s a shaky platform to re-engineer large portions of society.”

In a city flush with young Democrats, Funk said he has found a small group of like-minded individuals. “I end up hanging out with friends that are more independent, a little more libertarian-minded,” he said.

Other skeptics preferred to remain anonymous. For example, one 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Maryland said in an email:

It would be imprudent of me to let my heterodoxy on this issue be publicly known, as, sadly, I feel this has become more of a political matter in academic circles than a scientific one. I would rather my name not be associated with dissent on this matter.

The student’s comments say a great deal about the way young people think about climate change and the potential implications for somebody who questions the broad scientific consensus on the issue.

Anthony Watts, a prominent climate skeptic who runs the popular and controversial site “Watts Up With That,” blamed the “liberal” education system for the lack of young climate skeptics. “I suppose such a group would be unlikely because our children are conditioned by textbooks and a generally liberal education process to believe in the [man-made global warming] premise as factual and without question,” he said.

“In colleges, there are so many activist groups recruiting to ‘save the planet’ that skepticism generally gets drowned in the cacophony,” he added.

Maura Cowley, national director of the Sierra Student Coalition, organizes the types of “save the planet” activists Watts criticizes. “My opinion is that this whole dialogue will just fade into the past,” she said. “If you look at the millennial generation, you look at a generation that is savvy and soon to be the best educated generation.”

Cowley said young people recognize what’s at stake if nothing is done to address climate change “It’s really clear that this generation has the most to lose with this issue,” she said. “I think that’s a big part of the reason they care about this.”

Polling shows that climate skepticism has increased significantly in the last couple of years, as the issue has heated up in Congress. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that between April 2008 and October 2009 - a period that saw the passage of a cap-and-trade bill in the House and the beginning of debate on a similar bill in the Senate - the percentage of Americans who believe there is “solid evidence” that the earth is warming fell drastically, from 71 percent to 57 percent.

Joe Romm, a former Clinton administration official who now runs the popular blog Climate Progress, said any effort to address climate change in Congress will run into opposition from a number of powerful industry interests.

“The disinformation campaign is incredibly well funded,” he said. “There’s a staggering amount of money in it. But he said the effects of climate change will become more obvious over time, forcing skeptics to change their tune. “Come 2020 we’re going to be desperate to respond to global warming
and the skeptics will be condemned,” he said. See post here.

Another Romm fairy tale - his organization is heavily funded by George Soros of the one world governance agenda and alarmists groups have a huge funding advntage to the tune of $79B. By 2020. Romm and his cohorts will be in hiding - and hopefully pay the price for their non-science based advocacy.