By Roger Friedman, FOX News
It’s a good thing Leonardo DiCaprio made so much money from “Titanic” a decade ago.
His environmental documentary, “The 11th Hour,” has been a total bust at the box office. After 18 days in release, the film has grossed only $417,913 from ticket sales. The 90-minute snore-fest is playing on 111 screens this week, but that number is likely to be reduced this Friday. The film will be sent to DVD heaven after that.
By comparison, Al Gore and Davis Guggenheim’s similar but far more engaging “An Inconvenient Truth” had already made $3.5 million by its 18th day of release.
I hesitated to say before “11th Hour” actually opened how mind-numbingly dull it was for fear that I would ruin it for those interested in the subject of global warming. But at Cannes, when the film by Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Peters was shown to journalists, nearly the entire room fell asleep. A Russian filmmaker told us afterward that she was the only person in the room who was awake at one point.
The following is extracted from a new paper from one of the thousands of UN scientists who supposedly endorse the “consensus.”
By Vincent Gray, Expert Reviewer IPCC
The 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) defined “Climate Change” in Article 1 as follows: “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods”. The whole exercise was set up in order to accumulate “evidence” that the “globe” is undergoing “global warming” as a result of increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
From the beginning there have been scientists who disagreed with this proposition but their views have not been included in the IPCC Reports. This was made clear in Appendix 4, of “Climate Change 1990” in an introduction to a list of Reviewers, with the statement: “While every attempt was made by the Lead Authors to incorporate their comments, in some cases these formed a minority opinion which could not be reconciled with the larger consensus”.
The Governments who signed the FCCC (which included New Zealand) have accepted the FCCC definition of “Climate Change” as legally binding. This means that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has the function of seeking to provide evidence to support this definition. The 1995 and subsequent reports however, had, as a footnote on the first page a disclaimer, as follows “Climate change in IPCC usage refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as the result of human activity”. The IPCC still retain the term “Climate Change” in their title, to make their real objective plain and throughout the report “natural” climate influences are only considered in order to rule them out , marginalize their importance, or even recruit them as greenhouse effects.
The first Report summarized the obvious fact that their models did not fit even this biased record by the statement “The size of the warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models”. They thereby established the pattern they have followed throughout of qualitative, ambiguous statements without scientific support which are invariably regarded as certain proof by their sponsors.
By Investor’s Business Daily, 24 September 2007
Democracy: George Soros is known for funding groups such as MoveOn.org that seek to manipulate public opinion. So why is the billionaire’s backing of what he believes in problematic? In a word: transparency.
How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely “NASA whistleblower” standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros’ Open Society Institute, which gave him “legal and media advice”? That’s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros’ flagship “philanthropy,” by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI’s “politicization of science” program.
That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly “censored” spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda. Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen’s OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different. Read full editorial here.
BTW, Hansen, the director of the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, received a $250,000 grant from the charitable foundation headed by former Democrat Presidential candidate John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz. Subsequent to the Heinz Foundation grant, Hansen publicly endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president in 2004, a political endorsement considered to be highly unusual for a NASA scientist. He has also been assailed by at least one former NASA colleague. See the 2006 CNS story here.
UPDATE HOT OFF THE PRESSES: NASA’s James Hansen is claiming he’s being swift-boated by critics concerning his connections to Soros and GISS’s ice age prediction in 1971.