Climate Lies in Iowa’s Supreme Court

By Alan Caruba

Since the climate liars cannot make their case on the basis of the known science, taking it into a court of law with a passionate appeal to emotion in order to impose restrictions on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions has long been a Green goal.

The claim that CO2 causes “climate change” which is the new spin on “global warming” is utterly false, but it may be argued if the Iowa Supreme Court takes the case.

When a similar case was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court, the esteemed justices ruled that CO2 was a “pollutant” under the Clean Air Act and not the second most vital atmospheric gas after oxygen, the “food” for all vegetation on Earth.

The Greens have understandably concluded they can get what they want, restrictions on all energy use, in the courts of justice if not in the court of public opinion.

The defendant filing the case is a 14-year-old girl, Glori Dei Filippone. Exploiting minors is old hat to climate liars. They have filled our schools with global warming garbage for decades. The brief filed in her name is joined by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources who ia asking the State Supreme Court to rule on “whether the State of Iowa has an obligation to protect the atmosphere under the Iowa Constitution and the Public Trust Doctrine.”

Federal laws have made it clear that the nation’s air and water must be protected from manmade pollution, but how does a state go about protecting the entire, ever changing atmosphere above it? Can Iowa be sued for allowing the heat wave that roasted its populace and crops? If there is so much rain a flood ensues, is it the state’s fault? Can the state stop dust from other states from blowing in?

In a news release from OurChildrensTrust.org, the green organization behind the request for a hearing, says the case is critical to determine “whether the people of Iowa have a right to a healthy atmosphere.” This is so absurd that it defies belief.

The last time I checked the Constitution it spelled out a Bill of Rights and none of them make any reference to the atmosphere!

A spokesperson for OurChildrensTrust.org said the case needs to be argued because “the atmosphere is imperiled and must be protected by State officials.” The Latin phrase to describe this argument is reductio ad absurdum. 

The atmosphere is not “imperiled.” It is what it is and the State of Iowa, the United States of America, or all the nations of Earth can do nothing about it. Just as the temperature of the Earth is determined in large measure by the Sun and its cycles, the Earth and its atmosphere has been through many ice ages of greater or lesser intensity and length, as well as warmer periods like the one in which we presently find ourselves. It even has a name—the Holocene.

To put it another way, Mother Nature’s message to humans is frequently “Get out of the way. Here comes a flood, a blizzard, a hurricane, a tornado, or a forest fire ignited by lightning. For good measure I will throw in a volcanic eruption and an earthquake.”

Climate changes all the time and has done so for the 4.5 billion years of the Earth’s existence. Or just keep in mind something called “the seasons” from winter to spring, summer to autumn, and back to winter. This is not rocket science. This is funamental climate science and meteorology.

The Iowa Supreme Court should throw out the petition for this case for a very simple reason. As Hans Schreuder explains onwww.ilovemycarbondioxide.com, “Carbon dioxide is not a warming gas at all, it is a cooling gas.” Moreover, “In our open-to-space atmosphere, the excellent radiating properties of all so-called greenhouse gases serve to cool the atmosphere, never to warm it.” Schreuder is a retired analytical chemist and a co-author of “Slaying the Sky Dragon”, a collection of scientific papers that debunk global warming.

In the brief before the Iowa Supreme Court, Glori Dei Fillippone argues that “Iowa has a moral obligation to provide my generation, and future generations, with a liveable state. Climate change is the most important moral issue of our time and I hope our Court will also protect our rights.”

Well, no, climate change is not, nor ever was a moral issue and it is most certainly not the most important issue of our time. Like Paul said, “When I was a child I spoke as a child. I understood as a child. I thought as a child, but when I became a man, I put aside childish things.” (1 Corinthians, 13/11)

Using the courts to require states to impose coercive laws on people and businesses using bogus “science” and where no atmospheric “health threat” can be affected by any action of the State is immoral. Using a child to advance that objective is immoral.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

POSTED BY ALAN CARUBA AT 1:41 PM  

Radical Muslims, Environmentalists, and the Green Jihad

- Accuracy In Media - http://www.aim.org -

Posted By Mark Musser On April 25, 2011 @ 3:45 pm In AIM Column | Comments Disabled

(A Special Report from the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism)

Rep. Keith Ellison, the Muslim Congressman from Minnesota who shed tears in protest over the congressional hearings on the growing radicalization of Muslims in the U.S., wrote the foreword to a book entitled Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet ^[1]. In Arabic, “deen” means religious creed. The author of Green Deen is Ibrahim Abdul Matin. He wrote his book to demonstrate that there is a close relationship between Islam and modern environmentalism.

It turns out Ellison would have been a good witness to how Muslims are being radicalized as foot solders not only for global Jihad but for a “green” future. It is an unholy alliance that threatens our future but which escapes the attention of media predisposed to believe that radical Muslims working with environmentalists could only produce positive results.

What is fascinating is that Matin works in New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s environmental planning department as a policy advisor for New York City’s long term sustainability, and was one of the Muslims promoting the idea that the new mosque being considered near Ground Zero should be a green one ^[2]. In fact, Matin devotes one whole chapter of his book to “Green Mosques” and provides a list of environmentally friendly practices that can and should be implemented at each local mosque. Being the progressive Muslim that he paints himself to be, Keith Ellison was very impressed with Matin’s abilities and proudly decided to endorse his book.

One of the reasons Ellison decided to work with Matin was because of his own growing personal involvement in the green movement, which surprisingly enough, is becoming more popular among Muslims. In an interview posted on the DC ^[3] Green Muslim’s website ^[4], Ellison commented that “my involvement in politics is really rooted in my desire to try to promote unity among people, trying to promote unity with the Earth and creation, and trying to promote justice.” Ellison is also involved in an organization called the “Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM ^[5]).” Ellison, the first Muslim Congressman in U.S. history, thus believes in green Islamic social justice of sorts—a veritable Islamic political ecology.

Ellison first met Matin in 2008 at a Muslim American seminar caucus in Washington, D.C.  Matin was a fellow of “Green For All ^[6],” the very organization founded by communist Van Jones ^[7] to help promote the financial wonders of the so-called Green Economy ^[8]. Matin also helped organize Green For All’s National Day of Action ^[9] calling for “Green Jobs Now,” which more than 50,000 people attended. Ellison was very impressed by Matin’s influence at the caucus: “Ibrahim made an important connection that day—that the faith community needs to be involved in the green movement.” He went on to conclude his foreword by saying that “Green Deen brings faith communities into the environmental movement by changing the conversation from the facts of global warming to the fact that we all live and work here together and have a collective responsibility to keep this place clean and safe for everyone.”

While there is certainly no small controversy over exactly what a caliphate ^[10] may be, especially with regard to how Sunnis and Shia ^[11]s view it, or how closely it may be tied to the ushering in of Sharia law ^[12], Islamic totalitarianism ^[13], terrorism ^[14] and violence ^[15], it is a word that shows up often in Matin’s Green Deen. Matin innocuously translates the word “caliphah” to simply mean “steward,” a very environmentally-correct term. While this may satisfy the environmental consciousness of modern Western elites, this definition is, of course, very far removed from how most of the Muslim world have historically understood this word.

However, no matter how green a Muslim may or may not be, by definition, the caliphate must still be an Islamic theocratic state under the dominion of Allah. Even though Matin maintains ^[16] that he wrote his book to help rebrand Muslims from being considered terrorists to environmentalists, he still prefaces his entire book with the idea that “the earth is a mosque.”  This means that the environmental holism being espoused by Matin must necessarily be subject to Allah’s totalitarian authority over the earth. In other words, environmental holism and Islamic totalitarianism go hand in hand in Matin’s Green Deen.

Secret Conquest

If the entire earth is a mosque, as Matin maintains, then Allah’s boundaries are boundless, and this means that simultaneously Americans must live under the theocratic dictates of Allah, and environmentalism can easily be used alongside Sharia law to help bring America to its knees under Islamic jihadist control. While many on the left would naively consider such a possibility beyond the pale, something along these lines is exactly what the Muslim Brotherhood ^[17] has in mind for the future of America. Indeed, in 1991, the radical Muslim Brotherhood espoused ^[18] that “the process of settlement…in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” In other words, something like environmentalism can be easily used as a jihadist tool in the hands of a green Muslim to help sabotage America from within. After all, Matin says that “Muslims have a personal connection to the color green,” and that “the favorite color of the Prophet Muhammad was green.”

More troubling is that Keith Ellison’s pilgrimage ^[19] to Mecca in 2008 was paid for by the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, which is just another name ^[20]for the Muslim Brotherhood. Ellison also likes to attend Hamas rallies ^[21], and has even worked with communist front groups ^[22] like the National Lawyers Guild ^[23]. He even once went so far as to praise ^[24] the terrorist record of Bernardine Dohrn—the wife of the infamous Bill Ayers. After converting from Roman Catholicism to Islam, Ellison also praised ^[25] the likes of Louis Farrakhan ^[26] and the Nation of Islam ^[27] during his college days. This hot-wiring of the anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, together with environmentalism, only helps to serve up an explosive eco-fascist concoction not seen since the 1930’s ^[28].

With such a cadre of characters and organizations under Ellison’s belt, is it any wonder that suspicions should arise over his activities, even over something as allegedly harmless as environmentalism? Which brings us back to Matin. Why in the world would Matin want Ellison’s endorsement if all he wants to do is try and show Americans that Muslims are not terrorists but are becoming progressive environmentalists? Neither should it be overlooked that the Muslim American Society also touts ^[29] the Green Deen book. Matin even considers Malcom X, who was also one of his heroes as a child when he used to listen to his tapes, to be a green Muslim ^[30]. Such disconcerting connections betray the image that Matin’s Green Deen is as benign as it reads.

Indeed, Matin’s whole approach to energy is viewed as a green Muslim apocalyptic dichotomy between heaven and hell. Matin considers gas, coal and oil as energy from hell, i.e., from the ground: “it is dirty, and it is a major cause of pollution and climate change. Energy from hell is non-renewable; it takes away from the Earth without giving back. It disturbs the balance of the universe and is therefore a great injustice.” As such, it appears that energy from hell needs to be placed under the caliphate control of Allah to help bring about a green Muslim social ethic on the earth: “one way we can stand out firmly for justice is by ending our reliance on oil and coal. Energies from hell are particularly devastating and unjust to people and the planet.”

From One Hell to Another

With the likes of the OPEC oil cartel largely run by the Middle East, coupled with the environmental restrictions on the homefront, perhaps the earth indeed is becoming one giant mosque. Worse is that Matin’s Green Deen only promises to become more hellish, leaving America increasingly exposed to the harsh natural elements of the sun, storm and wind. Yet, Matin views such exposure as a gift from heaven. For him, solar and wind power are Allah’s answers to America’s energy problems: “energy from heaven comes from above. It is not extracted from the Earth and it is renewable…energy from above is a gift from heaven.” The problem now, however, is that America’s electrical grid is not ‘smart ^[31]’ enough yet to incorporate Allah’s heavenly gifts into her energy system.

Matin also proudly notes in his book that the EPA received much needed help from a green Muslim by the name of Dr. Aziz Saddiqi. In the 1960’s Saddiqi was a young doctoral candidate who was doing groundbreaking research in the Houston area on chemical engineering. The University of Houston was so impressed with his work that he was offered a job: “Soon he found himself guiding the development of curriculum that would help the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency carry out its new mission of enforcing the Clean Air Act.” His chemical engineering expertise was much needed at the beginning to help the EPA get off of its feet: “In 1973 the EPA was only three years old and did not understand the full breadth of its power.” The EPA thus had a lot of growing up to do, and Dr. Saddiqi was at the heart of it all at the very beginning: “The EPA, its scientists, and its partner agencies needed to be trained on how to monitor pollution from smokestacks and other commonly used industrial practices.”

In fact, it seems that they were all on the learning curve together on this, as Dr. Saddiqui “had to learn how to explain his research in chemical engineering to this group of regulators.” Dr. Saddiqi “also authored the training materials used to teach EPA scientists how to sample ambient air and develop pollution controls.” Today, Dr. Saddiqi is in charge of the largest Islamic community in the United States, called the Islamic Society ^[32] of Greater Houston.

It is certainly comforting to discover that the EPA had a green Muslim helping them all out at the beginning on how to be good regulators. Environmentalism and the Islamic caliphate working together arm in arm at the very foundations of the EPA?  Green hippies and a green Muslim expert working hard together trying to come to grips with the full regulatory power of the Clean Air Act?

Conflict of Civilizations

However innocent some green Muslims and environmentalists may or may not be in this whole ecological experiment that America is increasingly rushing headlong into, ratcheting up secular problems with apocalyptic concerns and solutions will only feed radicalism and religious fervor. It also draws in the naïve and unsuspecting to do things that they would not normally do. By apocalypticizing their worries and concerns ^[33], environmentalists have managed to take something as banal and neutral as handling natural resources and have turned it into a gigantic worldwide ethic of ecological social justice requiring immediate action that now is even beginning to draw ^[34] in the Muslims as well.

Muslims like Ibrahim Abdul Matin and Keith Ellison would do well to think again about the differences between Gaia ^[35], considered the spirit of the earth by environmentalists, and Allah. Though both havetotalitarian ^[36] goals, they are by no means the same. Ecological pantheism ^[37] cannot be mixed with monotheism ^[38], even if the Muslim religion is symbolized by a crescent moon. At some point, these two ideologies will collide, and even though I am not a betting man, I would put my money on the growing juggernaut of Western pantheism. It has already largely devoured the Judeo-Christian worldview in America, and is well on its way to spitting out the pieces of what is left of free market capitalism.

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Article printed from Accuracy In Media: http://www.aim.org

URL to article: http://www.aim.org/aim-column/radical-muslims-environmentalists-and-the-green-jihad/

URLs in this post:

[1] Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet: http://www.greendeenbook.com/

[2] green one: http://www.aim.org../aim-report/the-%E2%80%9Cgreen%E2%80%9D-mosque-near-ground-zero/

[3] DC: http://arabnews.com/world/article20017.ece

[4] website: http://dcgreenmuslims.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html

[5] EJAM: http://www.ejamn.org/

[6] Green For All: http://www.greenforall.org/

[7] Van Jones: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/15455

[8] Green Economy: http://junkscience.com/2011/03/23/clean-energys-junk-economics/

[9] National Day of Action: http://www.greenjobsnow.com/

[10] caliphate: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1278

[11] Sunnis and Shia: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=754

[12] Sharia law: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/05/10/caliphate-and-sharia-law.html

[13] Islamic totalitarianism: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/04/the_muslim_mainstream_and_the.html

[14] terrorism: http://www.danielpipes.org/2798/what-do-the-terrorists-want-a-caliphate

[15] violence: http://www.raymondibrahim.com/8882/caliphate-jihad-sharia-now-what

[16] maintains: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/16/author-wants-to-rebrand-muslims-from-terrorists-to-environmentalists/

[17] Muslim Brotherhood: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/muslimbrotherhood.html

[18] espoused: http://www.investigativeproject.org/document/id/20

[19] pilgrimage: http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/36417549.html?source=error

[20] name : http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/muslim-american-society-leader-admits-group-is-part-of-muslim-brotherhood/

[21] Hamas rallies: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/02/rep-keith-ellison-attends-ugly-prohamas-rally-in-minnesota.html

[22] communist front groups: http://www.aim.org../aim-column/times-helps-muslim-rep-ellison-obstruct-terror-probe/

[23] National Lawyers Guild: http://debs.indstate.edu/u588r47_1950.pdf

[24] praise: http://www.aim.org../aim-column/will-rep-king-expose-rep-ellison%E2%80%99s-pro-terrorist-record/

[25] praised: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/764obcsx.asp

[26] Louis Farrakhan: http://ww3.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue22/chajua22.htm

[27] Nation of Islam: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/NOI.html

[28] 1930’s: http://gulagbound.com/14685/nazi-political-biology-the-hotwiring-of-power-politics-naturalism-environmentalism-racism

[29] touts: http://muslimgreenteam.org/

[30] green Muslim: http://www.greendeenbook.com/author_malcolm.html

[31] smart: http://www.greensmartgridinitiative.org/

[32] Society: http://www.isgh.org/

[33] apocalypticizing their worries and concerns: http://www.theignorantfishermen.com/2011/03/eco-fascist-prophecy-of-global-warming.html

[34] draw: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/s_690815.html

[35] Gaia: http://www.usasurvival.org/cultofgaia.html

[36] totalitarian: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100032069/only-global-fascist-tyranny-can-save-us-now-says-nice-old-man/

[37] Ecological pantheism: http://www.brontaylor.com/environmental_books/dgr/dark_green_religion.html

[38] monotheism: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10499a.htm

 

Earth Summit Babble

- Accuracy In Media - http://www.aim.org -

Earth Summit Babble

Posted By Alan Caruba On June 22, 2012 @ 4:10 pm In Guest Columns | Comments Disabled

Why anyone still believes anything the UN Environmental Program and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to say is one of those great imponderable questions. To prepare you for the flood of totally idiotic predictions to which you will be treated during the June 20-21 Earth Summit, here are just a few and I strongly advise you to ignore all of them.

A 550-page preparatory UN report, put together by “600 experts”, the Global Environmental Outlook-intended to soften up global suckers-predicts that Earth’s environmental systems are nearly at “their biophysical limits” thus subjecting the Earth to “irreversible and possibly cataclysmic world changes” and “If humanity does not urgently change its ways” it is doomed.

Notably, the Earth Summit will abandon “global warming” and “climate change” as its main theme and instead focus on “sustainability”, the utterly bogus notion that humans are using up all of the Earth’s resources.

The people most famous for really bad predictions these days are environmentalists. Rachel Carson kicked it off fifty years ago with her book, “Silent Spring”, assuring everyone that all the birds would fall dead out of the sky because of pesticide use. These days they are more likely to be chopped to shreds by wind turbines.

Ever since the early days of environmental hysteria just about every awful scenario cooked up in the fevered brains of the Greens has become front page news. There is method to their madness and it comes down to a simple equation: Scaring People Equals Money and Power.

Environmentalism is all about controlling you while picking your pocket. By any other name it is Socialism or its big brother Communism. It depends on lies backed up by a massive propaganda machine, funded by ultra-wealthy foundations, by governments who support Green programs of all sorts, and by the members of an endless succession of environmental organizations.

For example, you may recall that global warming, a massive heating of the Earth due to carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gas emissions” was predicted to occur twenty, thirty or fifty years hence when the hoax kicked off in the late 1980s. Keep that in mind when the Rio+20 United Nations Earth Summit is held in Rio de Janeiro, the site of the first conference.

Supported by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the so-called “scientists” backed up their claims with all manner of computer models, dubious graphs, and tons of “scientific” papers to convince governments and people that massive changes had to occur-primarily a huge reduction in the use of fossil fuels-or we were all doomed.

Exposed in November 2009 by the “Climategate” release of thousands of emails between the perpetrators, I still find it astonishing that not one single member of this conspiracy has gone to jail. Indeed, in 2007 the IPCC and Al Gore shared a Nobel Peace Prize.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has issued a formal request that all the “researchers” who contributed to the global warming hoax be granted immunity from prosecution. Unbelievable, eh?

Back in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert released the findings of his calculations to let the world know that U.S. oil production would “peak” between 1965 and 1970. It didn’t. What has since slowed oil production in the U.S. has been the refusal of the Obama administration to issue the permits necessary to drill on federal lands and offshore. The world is afloat on an ocean of oil and, in addition, the U.S. is not running out of coal or natural gas.

Similarly, all the population predictions made by Prof. Paul R. Erhlich and his wife in 1968 have proven false as well. A colleague of his, Dr. John Holdren, is the science advisor to the President. One of the central themes of environmentalism is that humanity is to blame for harming the Earth and that there are too many people.

The other theme is that all these people are “consuming” too much of the Earth’s natural resources and should be penned up in cities and kept out of most places on Earth in order to protect its “endangered species”, etc. Meanwhile, as this is being written, huge sections of western states’ forests are going up in flames thanks to Mother Nature setting off fires off with lightning strikes.

Does it surprise anyone that the Earth Summit is calling for a “climate fund” and wants nations to kick in $100 billion? The proposal for the fund called “The Earth We Want” covers an extraordinary range of topics that includes gender equality, woman’s empowerment, and all the usual social justice and environmental clap-trap that is intended to ensnare everyone in a web of laws, regulations, and treaties aimed directly at eliminating the freedoms the West has and that many in other parts of the world want.

There is one good reason to not ignore the Earth Summit. They are telling you just what kind of an Orwellian and totalitarian world they have in mind for you.

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Article printed from Accuracy In Media: http://www.aim.org

URL to article: http://www.aim.org/guest-column/earth-summit-babble/

 

THE NEW ECO-SCARE: WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!

HEAT OF THE MOMENT!

Exclusive: Brian Sussman covers Rio U.N. conference 20 years after Agenda 21′s birth

Published: 1 day ago

by BRIAN SUSSMANEmail | Archive

Brian Sussman is the author of “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda Will Dismantle America.” He also hosts the morning-drive radio show on KSFO in San Francisco.More ↓

• The U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development is wrapping up in Rio de Janeiro, and we’re all gonna die. That’s the claim made by the eco-tyrannists at this years’ annual international environmental confab. Just the mere presence of so many human beings, they claim, is enough to send the entire world into a complete species meltdown, much like the cataclysmic event that killed off the dinosaurs millions of years ago.

This year’s gathering of representatives from virtually every nation (and environmental organization) on the planet is meant to further the goals presented at the first Rio “Earth Summit” in 1992, via a detailed plan known as Agenda 21 – the global political agenda for the 21st century. The 1992 conference was unique in that it made global warming a household term, introduced the planet to Al Gore and presented the details of a term conjured up by U.N. masterminds nearly 10 years earlier: “sustainable development.”

In short, sustainable development insists that the human species is certainly no more significant than any other species on the planet, and in fact should be discriminated against because, left unchecked, it will do great harm or even destroy all other species. Sustainable development is described by its architect, Maurice Strong, founder of the U.N. Environmental Program, as akin to “putting our planet, Earth Incorporated, if you will, on a sound business basis.”

That “business plan” sees liberty-loving humans as carriers of a plague. It’s prescribed cure is liberty-sapping, heavy-handed regulations and laws designed to control human behavior.

As for Agenda 21, as I write in “Eco-Tyranny,” it’s sustainable development’s version of a PowerPoint presentation. The Agenda begins with a preamble that speaks “the fulfillment of basic needs, improved living standards for all, better protected and managed ecosystems and a safer, more prosperous future. No nation can achieve this on its own; but together we can – in a global partnership for sustainable development.”

It should be no surprise that Agenda 21 deems universal health care a “right.” It also redefines wealth, insisting on “the need for new concepts of wealth and prosperity.” The Agenda also encourages government-sponsored societal brainwashing, stating, “Achieving the goals of environmental quality and sustainable development will require … changes in consumption patterns.” Indeed, “Governments themselves [can] also play a role in [determining] consumption … and can have a considerable influence on both corporate decisions and public perceptions.”

Of course, Agenda 21 also heralds the abolition of private property rights, something Maurice Strong began pushing via the U.N. in 1976 at the Conference on Human Settlements, aka “Habitat I.” At the event Strong proclaimed:

• “Private land ownership is a principal instrument of accumulating wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice. Public control of land use is therefore indispensable.”
• “Public ownership of land is justified in favor of the common good, rather than to protect the interest of the already privileged.”
• “Zoning and land-use planning [are to be used] as a basic instrument of land policy in general and of control of land-use changes in particular.”
• “Fiscal controls [are to be employed], e.g. property taxes, tax penalties and tax incentives [in order to eradicate private lands].

As the Agenda states, governments shall “formulate appropriate land-use policies and introduce planning regulations specially aimed at the protection of eco-sensitive zones against physical disruption by construction and construction-related activities.”

This plank from Rio has done more to abolish physical private property in the United States than any other governmental policy.

Coinciding with its plan to usher us into a brave new world, Agenda 21, is responsible for promoting “green jobs,” as well as high-speed rail and other mass transit projects that “promote the use of labor-intensive construction and maintenance technologies which generate employment in the construction sector for the underemployed labor force found in most large cities.”

And we can’t forget the hidden crown jewel of the sustainable development scheme: population control. Agenda 21 demands, “Population policy should also recognize the role played by human beings in environmental and development concerns.” Additionally the document reveals that the population-control method of choice is abortion. Cloaking their message with terms like “curative health facilities,” (a deceptive alias for abortion clinics), the Agenda declares, “Governments should take active steps to implement programs to establish and strengthen preventive and curative health facilities that include women-centered, women-managed, safe and effective reproductive health care and affordable, accessible services, as appropriate, for the responsible planning of family size.”

Now, as the U.N. doubles down on their global sustainable development ploy in Rio, they are rebranding the issue in a new agenda, alleging that the “greatest threat” facing the planet is the extinction of species.

Trouble is, just like with global warming, extinction of species is not a problem.

The massive species losses being cited in Rio are based on sloppy extrapolations, wild guesses and unfounded presumptions – all force-fed into biased, non-validated, virtual-reality computer models that assume increased carbon dioxide levels will raise global temperatures so high that plants, birds, reptiles and animals will be exterminated.

Like their ridiculous global cooling, global warming, climate change scenarios, there is no evidence to support any of these bizarre extinction scenarios.

In a nutshell – we’re not gonna die. However, if we let the U.N. have their way, liberty will be pushed to the brink.

Don’t miss Brian Sussman’s brilliant expose of the debilitating green movement: “Eco-Tyranny: How the Left’s Green Agenda will Dismantle America”

America’s Real Climate and Environmental Crisis

By Paul Driessen

5/25/2012

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson says we face serious threats to human health, welfare and justice. She’s absolutely right. However, the crisis is not due to factory or power plant emissions, or supposed effects of “dangerous manmade global warming.”

The crisis is the result of policies and regulations that her EPA is imposing in the name of preventing climate change and other hypothetical and exaggerated environmental problems. It is those government actions that are severely impacting Americans’ health, welfare, and pursuit of happiness and justice.

After Congress rejected cap-tax-and-trade, President Obama said there are “other ways to skin the cat.”

By hyper-regulating carbon dioxide, soot, mercury, “cross-state air pollution” from sources hundreds of miles away, and other air and water emissions, EPA intends to force numerous coal-fired power plants to shut down years before their productive life is over; block the construction of new coal-fired power plants, because none will be able to slash their carbon dioxide emissions to half of what average coal-fired plants now emit, without employing expensive (and nonexistent) CO2 capture and storage technologies; and sharply reduce emissions from cars, factories, refineries and other facilities, regardless of the cost.

EPA has also issued 588 pages of rules for hydraulic fracturing for critically needed oil and natural gas, while the Obama Administration has vetoed the Keystone XL pipeline and made 95% of all publicly owned (but government controlled) lands and resources off limits to leasing, exploration, drilling and mining.

These actions reflect President Obama’s campaign promise to “bankrupt any company that tries to build a new coal-fired power plant,” replace hydrocarbons with heavily subsidized solar, wind and biofuel energy, make energy prices “necessarily skyrocket” – and “fundamentally transform” America’s constitutional, legal, energy, economic and social structure.

Energy is the lifeblood of our nation’s economy, jobs, living standards and civil rights progress. Anything that affects energy availability, reliability and price affects every aspect of our lives. These diktats put the federal government in charge of our entire economy – and impair our health and welfare.

Moreover, the anti-hydrocarbon global warming “solutions” the Obama Administration is imposing will bring no real world benefits – even assuming carbon dioxide actually drives climate change. That’s largely because China, India and other developing countries are increasing their use of coal for electricity generation, and thus their CO2 emissions – far beyond our ability to reduce US emissions. These nations rightly refuse to sacrifice economic growth and poverty eradication on the altar of climate alarmism.

Even worse, the health, welfare and environmental justice benefits that EPA claims will result from its regulations are equally exaggerated and illusory. They exist only in the same dishonest computer-generated virtual reality that concocted its alleged climate change, health and environmental cataclysms, and in junk-science analyses that can only be described as borderline fraud.

Implementing EPA’s regulatory agenda will inflict severe economic dislocations and send shock waves through America’s factories, farmlands and families. Far from improving our health and welfare – they will make our economy, unemployment, living standards, health and welfare even worse.

EPA’s new automobile mileage standards alone will result in thousands of additional serious injuries and deaths every year, as cars are further downsized to meet its arbitrary 54.5 mpg requirements. Its anti-coal rulings and anti-fracking attitudes will severely impact electricity generation, reliability and prices; factory, office and hospital operations and budgets; American industries’ competitiveness in global markets; employment, hiring and layoffs; and the well-being of families and entire communities. Especially for areas that depend on mining and manufacturing – and the 26 states where coal-based power generation keeps electricity rates at half of what they are in states with the least coal use and toughest renewable energy mandates—it will be all pain, for no gain.

According to the Wall Street Journal, a White House letter to House Speaker John Boehner inadvertently acknowledged that EPA alone is still working on new regulations that the agency itself calculates will impose $105 billion in additional regulatory burdens and compliance costs. Win or lose in November, the Administration will likely impose these and other new rules after the elections. We, our children and grandchildren will pay for them in countless ways.

Utilities will have to spend $130 billion to retrofit or replace older coal-fired units, says energy analyst Roger Bezdek – and another $30 billion a year for operations, maintenance and extra fuel for energy-intensive scrubbers and other equipment, to generate increasingly expensive electricity.

Duke Energy’s new $3.3 billion coal gasification and carbon dioxide capture power plant will increase rates for its Indiana customers by some 15% the next two years. Hospitals, factories, shopping malls and school districts will have to pay an extra $150,000 a year in operating expenses for each million dollars in annual electricity bills. That’s four or five entry-level jobs that won’t be created or preserved.

Nationwide, 319 coal-fueled power plants totaling 42,895 megawatts (13% of the nation’s coal fleet and enough for 40 million homes and small businesses) are already slated to close, the Sierra Club joyfully proclaimed. Illinois families and businesses could pay 20% more for electricity by 2014, theChicago Tribune reports. Chicago public schools may have to find an extra $2.7 million a year to keep the lights and heat on and computers running.

Higher electricity prices will further strain refineries already struggling with soaring electricity costs and EPA’s sulfur and other regulations, restrictions on refinery upgrades and construction, constraints on moving crude oil to East Coast refineries, and other compliance costs – all of dubious environmental or health benefit. Three East Coast refineries have already closed, costing thousands of jobs and causing the Department of Energy to warn that pump prices are likely to soar even higher in Eastern states.

When we include discouraged workers who have given up looking for jobs and people who have been forced to work fewer hours or at temporary jobs, our unemployment rate is a whopping 19 percent – and double that for black and Hispanic young people. America’s labor force participation rate is at a 30-year low, its 2011 economic growth rate was a dismal 1.7 percent.

Well over a million US workers age 55 and older have now been out of work for 27 weeks or more. Not only do prospects plummet for re-employment of older workers. The longer they are unemployed, the more they are disconnected from society, the further their living standards fall, the more their physical and emotional well-being deteriorates, and the more likely they are to die prematurely.

The cumulative effect is that families have even less money to buy food, pay the rent or mortgage, repair the car or house, save for college and retirement, take a vacation – and keep people comfortable (and alive) on frigid winter nights and sweltering summer afternoons. Health and welfare, family relationships, future prospects and psychological well-being plummet. Because they spend the highest proportion of their incomes on energy, poor and minority families suffer disproportionately.

And yet EPA’s regulations, regulatory agenda and horse-blinder definition of health, welfare and justice ignore these realities – and ensure that this intolerable situation will only get worse. In fact, the only welfare EPA’s rules will ensure is the expansion of our welfare rolls, our unemployment lines and our already record-setting food stamp programs.

Worst of all, our Congress and courts have completely abdicated their obligations to provide oversight and control of this dictatorial agency and Obama Administration. If this is the hope, change and future we can look “forward” to, our nation’s health, well-being and justice will be bleak, indeed.

Paul Driessen

Paul Driessen is senior policy adviser for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), which is sponsoring the All Pain No Gain petition against global-warming hype. He also is a senior policy adviser to the Congress of Racial Equality and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green Power – Black Death.

Follow Up: Revisiting the 2010 IPCC Press Release on Economics of Disasters

As I prepared for my lunch seminar which I am giving later today. I had a chance to revisit the press release issued by the IPCC on January 25, 2010 in response to an article that appeared in the UK Sunday Times one day earlier which detailed failures of the IPCC AR4 related to claims made about climate change and disasters.

The Sunday Times article was about how the 2007 IPCC AR4 mishandled the issue of the economic toll of disasters and climate change. With the advantage of hindsight, we can now see that the claims made in the Sunday Times article have been completely vindicated and the IPCC press release was full of misinformation (to put it kindly).  This post has the details.

The IPCC press release of 26 January 2010 started out as follows (PDF):

The January 24 Sunday Times ran a misleading and baseless attacking the way the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC handled an important question concerning recent trends in economic losses from climate-related disasters

What did the Sunday Times article claim?

The United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough. . .

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”.

It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: “One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.”

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts — but were ignored.

None of these claims are “misleading and baseless” but are factually correct. (Note that full text of the Times article can be found here.)

In its press release, the IPCC explained its position by re-asserting what was claimed in the report:

one study detected an increase in economic losses, corrected for values at risk, but that other studies have not detected such a trend

We now know that the “study” that was cited by the IPCC (a white paper from a workshop that I had organized) did not contain any analysis of trends. Instead, that paper was intentionally miscited by one of the chapter’s authors to circumvent the deadline for inclusion of relevant publications. When the miscited paper actually did appear in the literature it said this:

“We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.“

Thus, the paper that the IPCC wanted to cite did not say what the was claimed in a specially invented graph that was made up for the report but which did not appear in the miscited paper. Further, the IPCC intentionally miscited it to get it into the report in the first place. Three bad moves.

The IPCC press release also said that

In writing, reviewing, and editing this section, IPCC procedures were carefully followed to produce the policy-relevant assessment that is the IPCC mandate.

The IPCC did not follow its procedures for citing grey literature, for following its own deadline for publications, for proper citation of source material and included a graph that cannot be found in any literature anywhere. The IPCC press release was thus wrong again — the procedures were ignored, not “carefully followed.”

The bottom line is that the Sunday Times article has proven correct comprehensively on the substantive and procedural aspects of the IPCC’s failures (the substance of which hasrecently been reaffirmed by the IPCC SREX report).

The IPCC 26 January 2010 press release still sits uncorrected on the IPCC website (here in PDF). If the IPCC has a commitment to getting things right, shouldn’t it correct “baseless and misleading” claims that it has made?

Posted by Roger Pielke, Jr. at 4/09/2012 10:21:00 AM

Climate Change Denial is About Maintaining Control of the Wealth

March 16, 2012 By Roberta Seldon The Waxman-Markey climate bill is a good investment for the United States to make in our own economic future and in the future of the planet, an NYU study reports. Yet Congressional Republicans continue to fight climate change legislation every step of the way — all for the sake of big oil. In a video I posted last month, Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) told Fox News Radio’s Alan Colmes that “the bureaucratic dream is to control carbon,” he said in reference to the notion that global warming is merely a hoax. Liberals want government to control our lives, and “if you control carbon, you control life,” he added. Well, Inhofe was certainly right about one thing — the debate over global warming/climate change is about control; but not government control. It’s about the 1 percent maintaining control over the country’s wealth. According to KCET – the nation’s largest independent public television station — Inhofe and two other senators known for their stance against addressing climate change “received a large chunk of their campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry.” “For Inhofe” the oil and gas industry is his largest contributor, giving more than $1.2 million since 1989. His third-largest individual donor is Koch Industries, the Wichita oil and gas giant that has been recruiting Congressional Republicans to stand up to greenhouse gas regulations,” KCET reported. Moreover, Politico reported that staffers of Inhofe and Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the Republican chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, held a secret meeting in January with lobbyists from the American Petroleum Institute, the National Mining Association, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and others who wanted to block federal and state climate rules. That meeting led to the creation of the Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011. The Energy Tax Prevention Act of 2011, also known as H.R.910, is a piece of legislation aimed at amending the Clean Air Act “to prohibit the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from promulgating any regulation concerning, taking action relating to, or taking into consideration the emission of a greenhouse gas due to concerns regarding possible climate change.” According to a press release on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s website, H.R.910 would “protect American jobs and manufacturers from overreaching EPA regulations that hinder our ability to compete with China and other countries.” The legislation would also: Stop EPA bureaucrats from making legislative decisions that should be made by Congress; Clarify that the Clean Air Act was not written by Congress to address climate change; and Stop EPA bureaucrats from imposing a backdoor cap-and-trade tax that would make gasoline, electricity, fertilizer, and groceries more expensive for consumers. “With this draft proposal, we are initiating a deliberative, transparent process that we hope will prevent EPA from imposing by regulation the massive cap-and-trade tax that Congress rejected last year. We firmly believe federal bureaucrats should not be unilaterally setting national climate change policy, and with good reason: EPA’s cap-and-trade tax agenda will cost jobs, undermine the competitiveness of America’s manufacturers, and, as EPA has conceded, will have no meaningful impact on climate. In other words, all cost with no benefit,” Inhofe, Upton and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-Ky), Chairman of the Energy and Power Subcommittee, who also had a hand in drafting the legislation, said in a joint statement, according to the press release. But studies conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and New York University suggest that the phrase “all cost with no benefit” couldn’t be any further from the truth. According to the EPA, a 2003 Office of Management and Budget study found that the Acid Rain Program (ARP), a national cap and trade program, accounted for the largest quantified human health benefits — over $70 billion annually — of any federal regulatory program implemented in the last 10 years, with annual benefits exceeding costs by more than 40:1. In other words, “for every dollar spent on implementing this cap and trade program, 40 dollars are returned in health and environmental benefits.” Additionally, a 2005 study estimated ARP’s benefits at $122 billion annually in 2010, while cost estimates are around $3 billion annually (in 2000 dollars). In September 2009, The Wall Street Journal reported that a brief out from NYU Law School’s Institute for Policy Integrity said: “From almost any perspective and under almost any assumption, H.R. 2454 [the Waxman-Markey climate bill] is a good investment for the United States to make in our own economic future and in the future of the planet.” To reach that conclusion, the researchers set out to determine how much a ton of carbon not emitted into the atmosphere is worth to society in terms of avoiding climate change. Its worth came out to about $19 a ton. “So, given that the Waxman-Markey bill would curb emissions over the next 40 years, it’s a pretty simple job to tally up the potential benefits: about $1.5 trillion on the middle-of-the-road estimate. The benefits could be as low as $382 billion or as high as $5.2 trillion, depending on how you fiddle with the numbers. “Since Waxman-Markey is meant to cost about $660 billion, that means the bill provides $2.27 in benefits for every dollar spent, the brief concludes. That doesn’t include extra benefits — cleaner air from a cleaned-up power sector, for instance. And it suggests that even tougher greenhouse-gas targets in the Senate version of the bill would make an even more compelling economic argument,” The Wall Street Journal wrote. Moreover, in 2010, The Brookings Institution reported: “The U.S. government recently examined the full range of scientific and economic data and developed a new way to measure the costs of releasing greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere. The government’s central conclusion is that the release of an additional ton of carbon dioxide today will cause about $21 of damage globally. This is referred to as the social cost of carbon. It finally puts a monetary value on the expected damages from climate change, including shortened life spans, reduced agricultural yields, and increased property damage due to higher sea levels. “The social cost of carbon confirms that the price of inaction is substantial. Assuming that all nations continue on their current emissions path, the average annual damages from the increase in greenhouse gas emissions, relative to 2010 emissions, is expected to be about $100 billion over the next decade. As the chart reveals, the annual damages by 2050 would be equal to nearly $1.3 trillion. If caps are not put in place, the average annual damages from greenhouse gas emissions would be about $570 billion over the next four decades. “The projected economic damages for the United States alone are estimated to reach $200 billion annually by 2050. Over the next four decades, the average annual damages are projected at $85 billion.” Given the many benefits of climate change mitigation, one would have to wonder why Inhofe and others alike are so against combating global warming. Could it be they are, as Inhofe said, merely trying to prevent government from controlling our lives or are they simply trying to maintain control of the nation”s wealth? What do you think? This article was published originally by the Security and Sustainability Forum Submitters Bio: Roberta Seldon is the blogger at Security and Sustainability Forum, a website that provides free online seminars and useful information related to corporate sustainability, national security and climate change. Roberta Seldon is also a volunteer editor at OpEdNews.com.

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Radical Muslims, Environmentalists, and the Green Jihad

- Accuracy In Media - http://www.aim.org -

Posted By Mark Musser On April 25, 2011 @ 3:45 pm In AIM Column | Comments Disabled

(A Special Report from the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism)

 

Rep. Keith Ellison, the Muslim Congressman from Minnesota who shed tears in protest over the congressional hearings on the growing radicalization of Muslims in the U.S., wrote the foreword to a book entitled Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet ^[1]. In Arabic, “deen” means religious creed. The author of Green Deen is Ibrahim Abdul Matin. He wrote his book to demonstrate that there is a close relationship between Islam and modern environmentalism.

It turns out Ellison would have been a good witness to how Muslims are being radicalized as foot solders not only for global Jihad but for a “green” future. It is an unholy alliance that threatens our future but which escapes the attention of media predisposed to believe that radical Muslims working with environmentalists could only produce positive results.

What is fascinating is that Matin works in New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s environmental planning department as a policy advisor for New York City’s long term sustainability, and was one of the Muslims promoting the idea that the new mosque being considered near Ground Zero should be a green one ^[2]. In fact, Matin devotes one whole chapter of his book to “Green Mosques” and provides a list of environmentally friendly practices that can and should be implemented at each local mosque. Being the progressive Muslim that he paints himself to be, Keith Ellison was very impressed with Matin’s abilities and proudly decided to endorse his book.

One of the reasons Ellison decided to work with Matin was because of his own growing personal involvement in the green movement, which surprisingly enough, is becoming more popular among Muslims. In an interview posted on the DC ^[3] Green Muslim’s website ^[4], Ellison commented that “my involvement in politics is really rooted in my desire to try to promote unity among people, trying to promote unity with the Earth and creation, and trying to promote justice.” Ellison is also involved in an organization called the “Environmental Justice Advocates of Minnesota (EJAM ^[5]).” Ellison, the first Muslim Congressman in U.S. history, thus believes in green Islamic social justice of sorts—a veritable Islamic political ecology.

Ellison first met Matin in 2008 at a Muslim American seminar caucus in Washington, D.C.  Matin was a fellow of “Green For All ^[6],” the very organization founded by communistVan Jones ^[7] to help promote the financial wonders of the so-called Green Economy ^[8]. Matin also helped organize Green For All’s National Day of Action ^[9] calling for “Green Jobs Now,” which more than 50,000 people attended. Ellison was very impressed by Matin’s influence at the caucus: “Ibrahim made an important connection that day—that the faith community needs to be involved in the green movement.” He went on to conclude his foreword by saying that “Green Deen brings faith communities into the environmental movement by changing the conversation from the facts of global warming to the fact that we all live and work here together and have a collective responsibility to keep this place clean and safe for everyone.”

While there is certainly no small controversy over exactly what a caliphate ^[10] may be, especially with regard to how Sunnis and Shia ^[11]s view it, or how closely it may be tied to the ushering in of Sharia law ^[12], Islamic totalitarianism ^[13], terrorism ^[14] and violence ^[15], it is a word that shows up often in Matin’s Green Deen. Matin innocuously translates the word “caliphah” to simply mean “steward,” a very environmentally-correct term. While this may satisfy the environmental consciousness of modern Western elites, this definition is, of course, very far removed from how most of the Muslim world have historically understood this word.

However, no matter how green a Muslim may or may not be, by definition, the caliphate must still be an Islamic theocratic state under the dominion of Allah. Even though Matinmaintains ^[16] that he wrote his book to help rebrand Muslims from being considered terrorists to environmentalists, he still prefaces his entire book with the idea that “the earth is a mosque.”  This means that the environmental holism being espoused by Matin must necessarily be subject to Allah’s totalitarian authority over the earth. In other words, environmental holism and Islamic totalitarianism go hand in hand in Matin’s Green Deen.

Secret Conquest

If the entire earth is a mosque, as Matin maintains, then Allah’s boundaries are boundless, and this means that simultaneously Americans must live under the theocratic dictates of Allah, and environmentalism can easily be used alongside Sharia law to help bring America to its knees under Islamic jihadist control. While many on the left would naively consider such a possibility beyond the pale, something along these lines is exactly what the Muslim Brotherhood ^[17] has in mind for the future of America. Indeed, in 1991, the radical Muslim Brotherhood espoused ^[18] that “the process of settlement…in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” In other words, something like environmentalism can be easily used as a jihadist tool in the hands of a green Muslim to help sabotage America from within. After all, Matin says that “Muslims have a personal connection to the color green,” and that “the favorite color of the Prophet Muhammad was green.”

More troubling is that Keith Ellison’s pilgrimage ^[19] to Mecca in 2008 was paid for by the Muslim American Society of Minnesota, which is just another name ^[20]for the Muslim Brotherhood. Ellison also likes to attend Hamas rallies ^[21], and has even worked with communist front groups ^[22] like the National Lawyers Guild ^[23]. He even once went so far as to praise ^[24] the terrorist record of Bernardine Dohrn—the wife of the infamous Bill Ayers. After converting from Roman Catholicism to Islam, Ellison also praised ^[25] the likes ofLouis Farrakhan ^[26] and the Nation of Islam ^[27] during his college days. This hot-wiring of the anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, together with environmentalism, only helps to serve up an explosive eco-fascist concoction not seen since the 1930’s ^[28].

With such a cadre of characters and organizations under Ellison’s belt, is it any wonder that suspicions should arise over his activities, even over something as allegedly harmless as environmentalism? Which brings us back to Matin. Why in the world would Matin want Ellison’s endorsement if all he wants to do is try and show Americans that Muslims are not terrorists but are becoming progressive environmentalists? Neither should it be overlooked that the Muslim American Society also touts ^[29] the Green Deen book. Matin even considers Malcom X, who was also one of his heroes as a child when he used to listen to his tapes, to be a green Muslim ^[30]. Such disconcerting connections betray the image that Matin’s Green Deen is as benign as it reads.

Indeed, Matin’s whole approach to energy is viewed as a green Muslim apocalyptic dichotomy between heaven and hell. Matin considers gas, coal and oil as energy from hell, i.e., from the ground: “it is dirty, and it is a major cause of pollution and climate change. Energy from hell is non-renewable; it takes away from the Earth without giving back. It disturbs the balance of the universe and is therefore a great injustice.” As such, it appears that energy from hell needs to be placed under the caliphate control of Allah to help bring about a green Muslim social ethic on the earth: “one way we can stand out firmly for justice is by ending our reliance on oil and coal. Energies from hell are particularly devastating and unjust to people and the planet.”

From One Hell to Another

With the likes of the OPEC oil cartel largely run by the Middle East, coupled with the environmental restrictions on the homefront, perhaps the earth indeed is becoming one giant mosque. Worse is that Matin’s Green Deen only promises to become more hellish, leaving America increasingly exposed to the harsh natural elements of the sun, storm and wind. Yet, Matin views such exposure as a gift from heaven. For him, solar and wind power are Allah’s answers to America’s energy problems: “energy from heaven comes from above. It is not extracted from the Earth and it is renewable…energy from above is a gift from heaven.” The problem now, however, is that America’s electrical grid is not ‘smart ^[31]’ enough yet to incorporate Allah’s heavenly gifts into her energy system.

Matin also proudly notes in his book that the EPA received much needed help from a green Muslim by the name of Dr. Aziz Saddiqi. In the 1960’s Saddiqi was a young doctoral candidate who was doing groundbreaking research in the Houston area on chemical engineering. The University of Houston was so impressed with his work that he was offered a job: “Soon he found himself guiding the development of curriculum that would help the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency carry out its new mission of enforcing the Clean Air Act.” His chemical engineering expertise was much needed at the beginning to help the EPA get off of its feet: “In 1973 the EPA was only three years old and did not understand the full breadth of its power.” The EPA thus had a lot of growing up to do, and Dr. Saddiqi was at the heart of it all at the very beginning: “The EPA, its scientists, and its partner agencies needed to be trained on how to monitor pollution from smokestacks and other commonly used industrial practices.”

In fact, it seems that they were all on the learning curve together on this, as Dr. Saddiqui “had to learn how to explain his research in chemical engineering to this group of regulators.” Dr. Saddiqi “also authored the training materials used to teach EPA scientists how to sample ambient air and develop pollution controls.” Today, Dr. Saddiqi is in charge of the largest Islamic community in the United States, called the Islamic Society ^[32] of Greater Houston.

It is certainly comforting to discover that the EPA had a green Muslim helping them all out at the beginning on how to be good regulators. Environmentalism and the Islamic caliphate working together arm in arm at the very foundations of the EPA?  Green hippies and a green Muslim expert working hard together trying to come to grips with the full regulatory power of the Clean Air Act?

Conflict of Civilizations

However innocent some green Muslims and environmentalists may or may not be in this whole ecological experiment that America is increasingly rushing headlong into, ratcheting up secular problems with apocalyptic concerns and solutions will only feed radicalism and religious fervor. It also draws in the naïve and unsuspecting to do things that they would not normally do. By apocalypticizing their worries and concerns ^[33], environmentalists have managed to take something as banal and neutral as handling natural resources and have turned it into a gigantic worldwide ethic of ecological social justice requiring immediate action that now is even beginning to draw ^[34] in the Muslims as well.

Muslims like Ibrahim Abdul Matin and Keith Ellison would do well to think again about the differences between Gaia ^[35], considered the spirit of the earth by environmentalists, and Allah. Though both have totalitarian ^[36] goals, they are by no means the same. Ecological pantheism ^[37] cannot be mixed with monotheism ^[38], even if the Muslim religion is symbolized by a crescent moon. At some point, these two ideologies will collide, and even though I am not a betting man, I would put my money on the growing juggernaut of Western pantheism. It has already largely devoured the Judeo-Christian worldview in America, and is well on its way to spitting out the pieces of what is left of free market capitalism.

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Article printed from Accuracy In Media: http://www.aim.org

URL to article: http://www.aim.org/aim-column/radical-muslims-environmentalists-and-the-green-jihad/

URLs in this post:

[1] Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet: http://www.greendeenbook.com/

[2] green one: http://www.aim.org../aim-report/the-%E2%80%9Cgreen%E2%80%9D-mosque-near-ground-zero/

[3] DC: http://arabnews.com/world/article20017.ece

[4] website: http://dcgreenmuslims.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html

[5] EJAM: http://www.ejamn.org/

[6] Green For All: http://www.greenforall.org/

[7] Van Jones: http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/15455

[8] Green Economy: http://junkscience.com/2011/03/23/clean-energys-junk-economics/

[9] National Day of Action: http://www.greenjobsnow.com/

[10] caliphate: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=1278

[11] Sunnis and Shia: http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/viewSubCategory.asp?id=754

[12] Sharia law: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/05/10/caliphate-and-sharia-law.html

[13] Islamic totalitarianism: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/04/the_muslim_mainstream_and_the.html

[14] terrorism: http://www.danielpipes.org/2798/what-do-the-terrorists-want-a-caliphate

[15] violence: http://www.raymondibrahim.com/8882/caliphate-jihad-sharia-now-what

[16] maintains: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/11/16/author-wants-to-rebrand-muslims-from-terrorists-to-environmentalists/

[17] Muslim Brotherhood: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Terrorism/muslimbrotherhood.html

[18] espoused: http://www.investigativeproject.org/document/id/20

[19] pilgrimage: http://www.startribune.com/politics/statelocal/36417549.html?source=error

[20] name : http://creepingsharia.wordpress.com/2009/03/25/muslim-american-society-leader-admits-group-is-part-of-muslim-brotherhood/

[21] Hamas rallies: http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2009/02/rep-keith-ellison-attends-ugly-prohamas-rally-in-minnesota.html

[22] communist front groups: http://www.aim.org../aim-column/times-helps-muslim-rep-ellison-obstruct-terror-probe/

[23] National Lawyers Guild: http://debs.indstate.edu/u588r47_1950.pdf

[24] praise: http://www.aim.org../aim-column/will-rep-king-expose-rep-ellison%E2%80%99s-pro-terrorist-record/

[25] praised: http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/764obcsx.asp

[26] Louis Farrakhan: http://ww3.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue22/chajua22.htm

[27] Nation of Islam: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/NOI.html

[28] 1930’s: http://gulagbound.com/14685/nazi-political-biology-the-hotwiring-of-power-politics-naturalism-environmentalism-racism

[29] touts: http://muslimgreenteam.org/

[30] green Muslim: http://www.greendeenbook.com/author_malcolm.html

[31] smart: http://www.greensmartgridinitiative.org/

[32] Society: http://www.isgh.org/

[33] apocalypticizing their worries and concerns: http://www.theignorantfishermen.com/2011/03/eco-fascist-prophecy-of-global-warming.html

[34] draw: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/opinion/s_690815.html

[35] Gaia: http://www.usasurvival.org/cultofgaia.html

[36] totalitarian: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100032069/only-global-fascist-tyranny-can-save-us-now-says-nice-old-man/

[37] Ecological pantheism: http://www.brontaylor.com/environmental_books/dgr/dark_green_religion.html

[38] monotheism: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/10499a.htm

 

The Fictive World of Rajendra Pachauri

Quadrant Online

http://www.quadrant.org.au/magazine/issue/2012/3/the-fictive-world-of-rajendra-pachauri

Tony Thomas

It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul.
Othello

In 2005 the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, flew to a Washington conference. He spent ninety minutes getting through the airport formalities. A chauffeur-driven car had been waiting outside, with the engine and air-conditioner running so that Pachauri would have a cool car to step into. Pachauri was indignant. “My God! Why did you do that?” he rebuked the driver. “You probably had the engine on for two hours. Was that really required?” He told North Carolina legislators three years later: “So that’s the kind of change in lifestyle that I’m talking about … which when put together will really make an enormous difference.” [1]

In January 2010 Pachauri was under fire for the howler in the 2007 IPCC report about melting Himalayan glaciers. The fracas inspired the London Mail OnLine to check out Pachauri’s lifestyle in Delhi.[2] It turned out that Pachauri ran a chauffeur-driven Corolla; a smoky Indian derivative of the Morris Oxford; and an eco-friendly G-Wiz electric car provided for his short urban trips. On January 29 Pachauri had his chauffeured Corolla collect him for the 1.6 kilometre drive from his home to the office. The chauffeur hung round (meanwhile being chatted up by the villainous Mail reporter) before driving Pachauri in the Corolla to lunch at an upmarket restaurant one kilometre from Pachauri’s home. The battery-powered G-Wiz stayed in the carpark. The next day Pachauri issued a statement urging the masses to use public transport.

The 194 countries comprising the IPCC “panel” elected Pachauri chair in 2002. The term of office is the six years or so required to compile an IPCC “assessment report” on the state of climate science, although the panel has discretion to make it two terms. Pachauri’s second term is to 2013-14. Because the IPCC still has no executive director and only an in-house secretariat, the office of chair is influential (to put it mildly). Pachauri also heads the IPCC’s 31-member “scientific” bureau, on which Sudan is a Working Group vice-chair, with Cuba, Maldives, Madagascar and Iran also represented. Pachauri is the public face of the IPCC, although he is far from full-time (he has about fifty non-IPCC roles). The job is honorary but packs vast prestige.

In assessing Pachauri’s style and record, the transcript of his talk to the North Carolina legislative committee is worth further study, although it is oddly transcribed (“anthropogenic” becomes “natural progienic” and Pachauri is vexed about “vulnerable dentures”).[3]

Normally one is careful not to mis-speak to legislators. Pachauri hardly began before telling a whopper: “The IPCC … mobilises the best experts and scientists from all over the world and we carry out an assessment of climate change based on peer-reviewed literature, so everything that we look at and take into account in our assessments has to carry credibility of peer-reviewed publications, we don’t settle for anything less than that” (emphasis added).

Pachauri was wrong, 5587 times wrong, because that’s the number of non-peer-reviewed or “grey-lit” citations in the IPCC’s 2007 assessment report—30 per cent of all citations, as journalist Donna Laframboise discovered.[4] The grey-lit included press releases from Greenpeace and Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), not to mention a “first version of a draft”. The science team even used grey-lit in preference to unwelcome peer-reviewed findings. As George Filippo, a 2002–08 IPCC vice-chair of Group 1 (science), put it in a Climategate e-mail in 2000:

I feel rather uncomfortable about using not only unpublished but also unreviewed material as the backbone of our conclusions (or any conclusions) … I feel that at this point there are very little rules [sic] and almost anything goes.[5] 

Pachauri telling whoppers to legislators was naughty. Telling whoppers to a High Court judge was naughtier, as Pachauri discovered in 1996.[6] In 1981 Pachauri became a director of Tata Energy & Resources Institute (TERI, in 2003 renamed “The” Energy & Resources Institute). TERI was set up by Tata to fund external research. Pachauri’s job was to turn TERI itself into a research institute. He started in a New Delhi guest house, with kitchen and dining room as his office.[7] TERI has grown into a global consultancy with 900 workers and influence over ten-figure investment flows. Clients include BP, Britain’s Department for International Development, and the World Bank.

In the early 1990s, TERI moved into one of Delhi’s most desirable complexes, the India Habitat Centre, an eco-friendly government convention centre on four hectares of parkland.

In 1996, Pachauri and the Centre’s other two governing directors were defendants—who lost—in a dispute before the Delhi High Court about a contract.[8] The dispute was with the Centre’s design-and-management hotelier company which found itself ousted in 1995 two years into a twenty-year profit-sharing contract, possibly because of cost blow-outs. The governing trio claimed the hotelier arrangements had been only ad hoc pending finalisation of a contract, hence the hotelier could be (and was) ejected at will. The hotelier in rebuttal cited chapter and verse of an official contract with the Centre.

Pachauri’s sworn affidavit was that his council had never seen, discussed or approved the alleged contract and that the Centre’s then-director had misrepresented to the hotelier that the council had approved it.

Judge K. Ramamoorthy said Pachauri and his two co-defendants “have suppressed material facts and they have sworn to false affidavits”. The judge said that since the three were claiming lack of knowledge of a relevant contract, “I am afraid they demonstrate themselves totally unequal to the task entrusted to them.” He continued, “And I am afraid that the affairs and the efficient management of the Centre are not safe in the hands of officers like Mr K.K. Bhatnagar, Dr R.K. Pachauri and Mr Dinesh Mehta and they had ignored that the officers have to function as a public functionaries within the parameters of the Constitution.”

Well, the Centre took all that in its stride. Pachauri went on to serve two years as Centre president and remains a member.[9] More to the point, in 1997, a year after his put-down by the High Court, the IPCC panel of 194 governments elected him the Asian group’s vice-chair of the IPCC.[10] Today a man whom a High Court judge considered unsafe to run the Delhi Habitat Centre is urging the world to engage in multi-trillion dollar spending to “save the planet”.

In August 2011 Pachauri caught some further official flak over neglect of an environment issue, of all things. The siting of the 2010 Delhi Commonwealth Games Village on the environmentally sensitive Yamuna riverbank had roused the ire of local environmentalists, who won a court challenge. The Supreme Court overturned the lower court’s verdict, but conditional on a committee being set up to monitor and ensure the Village project met the concerns of the environmentalists. The three-person committee, appointed by the Prime Minister no less, included Pachauri. The Auditor-General found no evidence the committee had ever met.[11]

Pachauri as a lad was fascinated by maths and became a railways engineer. He earned a joint PhD in Economics and Industrial Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1974—incorrectly stated in his official IPCC biography as two separate PhDs.[12] The university confirms that he was awarded only one PhD.[13] North Carolina State University is currently ranked 101st on academic clout, compared with its neighbour the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill, on twenty-ninth, according to the US News & World Report league ladder.

Pachauri’s family are high-achievers. A brother is a lieutenant-colonel.[14] His father was an educational psychologist with a London PhD. Pachauri is married to Saroj, a medico and PhD who is a Distinguished Scholar with India’s Population Council. He lives in Central Golf Links Road, New Delhi, a top Indian address. Houses equivalent to Pachauri’s are advertised at around $9 million. His co-residents include Britain’s richest man, steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal.[15]  How Pachauri finances his residency in this mansion is none of our business. It certainly isn’t from his salary at TERI—what he calls a “laughable” $45,000, nor at the IPCC (zero). “I have never bothered about money—I come from a family of academics,” he told the Independent.[16] He’s a cricket player and fanatic. His TERI has its additional purpose-built “RETREAT” (an acronym) at Gurgaon near Delhi. The RETREAT includes not one cricket ground but two, dubbed by staff the “Patchy Greens”.[17]

Patchauri’s helpful suggestions to the world include a meat-free day weekly, curtailing iced water in restaurants and imposing severe taxes to deter passenger flights and promote trains.[18] Pachauri himself flew more than 700,000 kilometres in one nineteen-month period as IPCC chair (the equivalent of flying around the world every month), including a flight of 5000 kilometres for a Brookings Institution dinner.[19] During a seminar in New York, he flew to Delhi and back to join a cricket practice session.[20] He has claimed his big travel “footprint” is unavoidable in proselytising global warming.[21]

Around 2009 he used his air-time partly to write a novel, Return to Almora about the enlightenment of a climate scientist, Sanjay.[22] The sex scenes in the novel have led to mockery in the blogosphere. For example, when Sanjay found that “the excitement got the better of him” before he could enter the village tart, bloggers suggested he needed to “hide the decline”. Pachauri rejects criticism that Return to Amora is a soft-porn novel, and I’d agree that half a dozen sex scenes, such as a bride being forcibly buggered by her husband on their wedding night, are incidental to the eco-friendly plot of a soporific 402 pages. It’s the narcissism that got me down: “He decided to champion public causes and to expose and fight injustice and deceit”. Author and protagonist are way too close: Sanjay even checks in to a “smart suite” at Pachauri’s address at India Habitat Centre, tries to hose down the “personality cult” arising from his fame as a seer, and agonises about the melting Himalayan glaciers.

There were allegations in late 2009, led by the Sunday Telegraph (UK), that Pachauri was misusing his IPCC and TERI positions for personal financial gain, to the tune of millions of dollars.[23] He responded by commissioning a report from KPMG on his own and TERI’s finances from April 2008 to December 2009.[24] This review was not an audit, although he claimed it was a “forensic audit”. It said, “No evidence was found that indicated personal fiduciary benefits accruing to Dr Pachauri from his various advisory roles that would have led to a conflict of interest.” Moreover, his consulting fees had all wound up as income in TERI’s books. The Sunday Telegraphapologised.[25]

The KPMG report showed that in the seventeen months, Pachauri earned about $330,000 from his consulting and directing roles with eleven outside bodies, which all went to TERI along with expense reimbursements. Pachauri also held honorary roles with thirty-nine other bodies, yielding only expense reimbursements. This is modest compared, say, with Al Gore’s speaking fee of $130,000.[26] Pachauri had the bad luck to be computer-selected for a random tax audit for his 2005-06 personal finances. The Indian tax office gave him an all-clear.[27]

The IPCC chair is a driven man (no pun intended). A work day can be 6 a.m. to midnight. At an IPCC meeting in November 2007, he negotiated without sleep for forty hours and successfully threatened that if delegates didn’t agree, he would go sleepless for a further forty hours.[28]

He has made no pretence at objectivity as IPCC chair, referring derisively to AGW “deniers” and “denialists” and writing enthusiastic forewords to two Greenpeace publications.[29] As early as 2009, he was outlining the thrust of the Fifth Assessment Report, which will not be delivered until 2014: “When the IPCC’s fifth assessment comes out in 2013 or 2014, there will be a major revival of interest in action that has to be taken. People are going to say, ‘My God, we are going to have to take action much faster than we had planned.’”[30] But things are not going according to his script. In November 2011, a one-off IPCC report confessed that for the next twenty to thirty years, carbon dioxide emissions would have so little influence on extreme weather events that natural variability would be dominant.[31]

Pachauri’s standing as chair has degraded in the past two years. Principally, there was the melting-glacier gaffe, and rapid exposure of other serious errors in the fourth Report. A chastened Pachauri in March 2010 had to call in the Inter-Academy Council (IAC), a world peak-of-peak science body, to report on necessary IPCC reforms. The IAC in August 2010  recommended in four places, but in vain, that IPCC chairs serve only one term: “A 12-year appointment (two terms) is too long for a field as dynamic and contested as climate change.”[32] Pachauri is in his second term to 2013, although senior IPCC members, including a German co-chair of a Working Group, have put him on notice to shape up.[33] The IPCC panel at Abu Dhabi last May (2011) agreed about the “one-term limit” but said it could make exceptions, and anyway the one-term limit would only apply post-2013. Other important IAC recommendations were also negated by the IPCC at Abu Dhabi.[34] At the following session in Kampala last November the IPCC adopted—after twenty-three years—its first conflict-of-interest policy, but exempted any conflicted authors for the fifth Assessment Report in 2014 because, as Pachauri put it, it wouldn’t be “fair” to the authors to include them retrospectively.[35]

In October 2011 the investigative journalist Donna Laframboise published her “Delinquent Teenager” expose of the IPCC’s reliance on grey-lit and its wholesale infiltration by Greenpeace-style activist authors. Other tidbits included documentation about graduate students and sub-PhDs mysteriously doubling as “world-leading” scientists to become IPCC authors, lead authors and even top-rung “co-ordinating lead authors”. She also revealed how quality-assurance rules supposedly binding on IPCC writers and reviewers were routinely flouted. Within weeks Professor Ross McKitrick, a prominent sceptic, issued his own documentation of why the IPCC should either shape up or be replaced by a non-political scientific body.[36]

Pachauri’s nadir was in January 2010 when he had to issue to the world the Himalayan-glacier correction. He failed to “man up”, with the statement coming not from the chair, but from the chair plus nearly a dozen vice-chairs and co-chairs.[37]

The gaffe about the Himalayan glaciers melting away by 2035 is far worse than Joe Public realises. Rather than traverse the universe of IPCC failings, for which Pachauri as chair is procedurally accountable, I’ll focus on just this Himalaya episode.

In late 2009, the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests issued a sixty-page discussion paper by glacier expert Vijay Raina, who had a track record of forty years of glacier fieldwork and research. He concluded that the glaciers were not retreating abnormally, neither through global warming nor anything else. On November 9, 2009, New Delhi Television brought Pachauri on to its evening news to defend the IPCC report.[38]

Q: Are you questioning this report’s credibility completely?

Pachauri: I am questioning this evidence. They are totally wrong. This is one government report. The IPCC uses thousands of scientists and uses peer-reviewed literature … [Raina’s report] is, if I may say so, voodoo science, this is not science.

Q: The Minister says the IPCC report is “alarmist”.

Pachauri: I don’t think he has any business questioning a body that has established its credentials over the last 21 years, and whose reports are accepted by every government of the world including India.

Q: Are you willing to sit down with the Minister … ?

Pachauri: No, I will not sit down with the Minister … If this report is all that solid, let them publish it, let it go through a peer review process … I question these [Raina’s] findings completely. They don’t make sense to me at all.

[emphasis added]

This was not just a Pachauri brain-snap. He gave the same message to print interviewers, deriding the Raina report as “divine intervention … magical science … indefensible”.

In fact the IPCC’s Himalaya forecast was based on nothing more than speculation by an Indian scientist, Syed Hasnain, in an Indian eco-magazine in April 1999, recycled into the New Scientist and then into a report in 2005 by the activist group WWF. The grey-lit WWF report was then cited in the IPCC’s draft glacier chapter in 2007. (By February 2010 Pachauri was back-pedalling on his previous claims about use solely of peer-reviewed material, saying it was “perfectly valid” to use grey-lit provided the grey-lit was carefully scrutinised and authenticated, and caveats noted.[39] Incidentally, IPCC guidelines mandated that grey-lit be specifically flagged as such, but this requirement was ignored in all but six instances out of the 5587 IPCC grey-lit citations that Laframboise found, and the IPCC has since dropped the “flagging” rule.)

Six IPCC experts reviewed the draft chapter and none saw anything odd. Twelve reviewers looked at it again in second draft. One of them (from Hebron University) said caustically that two elements in the forecast contradicted each other. Another, (from Newcastle University in the UK) told the authors to look up certain contrary references that cited glacier expansion (the IPCC authors’ brief is to assess the full range of scientific views on a topic). The reviewers’ comments were ignored. None of the total eighteen reviewers found anything untoward about the lone WWF citation for the dramatic forecast.[40] The page even included a table showing the annual rate of retreat of nine well-studied glaciers. It took me one minute’s googling to calculate that one of the glaciers, Bara Shigri, is eleven kilometres long and would therefore take 305 years to disappear—that is, by 2317, not 2035. The Milam glacier drips its last in the year 3024.

The IPCC authors also got the area of Himalayan glaciers wrong (33,000 square kilometres, not 500,000!), and the number of glaciers wrong (9000 to 12,000, not 15,000). The Pindari glacier shown as having annual shrinkage of 135 metres is actually shrinking only by 25 metres a year [41]. A bright high-school student would have done a better job at checking these IPCC authors’ sensational claims.

Later, the second draft was taken up and run in the all-important Summary for Policy Makers. The draft summary was reviewed line-by-line by 190 government representatives (if the politicians’ changes clash with the science sections, the science sections are altered retrospectively). Only one commented, hitting the bullseye: “This is a very drastic conclusion. Should have a supporting reference otherwise should be deleted (Government of India).”[42]

Even then, IPCC rigour was not to be seen. The summary was watered down, leaving untouched the howlers in the source text. Thus the gold-standard fourth report of the IPCC was launched to the world. Looking at the chapter online today, the single page on the Himalayan glaciers, amounting to 497 words, has attracted not one but nine official errata.[43] (The reviewers obviously took special care not to be caught out again.) In a lifetime of journalism, I seldom made more than five errors per story. However, Glacier-gate has plenty more swings yet.

• A year after the 2007 report, Pachauri, wearing his TERI hat, recruited Syed Hasnain, the source of the 2035 nonsense, to run a new glacier team in TERI, where Hasnain is now a Professor and Distinguished Fellow.[44]
• In May 2009 TERI obtained a major share of a $3.9 million European Union grant for Himalayan glacier study, based on the IPCC’s prediction. In January 2010, after the melt hit the fan, the Eurocrats rationalised, in Yes, Minister mode: “Not all glaciers are about to disappear, but their recession is real.” Hence the project is studying a threat due to emerge several centuries hence.[45]
• Earlier, in September 2008, TERI as part of a small Iceland-based consortium called Global Centre, successfully won approval for a $500,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation for glacier study. The 2035 forecast was dubbed a “humanitarian challenge”. The Foundation, perhaps smelling a rat, at some point “suspended” the handover of the cash. It claimed that the Global Centre had declined the cash because of Iceland’s “political and economic challenges”.[46]
• The debunking report by Raina, the glacier expert, was in November 2009. On January 15, 2010, the President of Iceland, Dr Olafur Grimsson, no less, announced via TERI that academics from Iceland, TERI and Ohio would use the Carnegie $500,000 to speed up study of glaciers, given the 2035 melt prediction. Pachauri (wearing his TERI hat, certainly not his Jane Austen bonnet) added helpfully: “It is universally acknowledged that glaciers are melting because of climate change.”[47]
• The Iceland announcement from TERI was a bare five days before Pachauri (IPCC hat) had to issue his public regrets over the 2035 gaffe. It is barely conceivable that on January 15, while shmoozing with the President of Iceland, Pachauri (TERI and IPCC hats) was unaware of the gathering storm over the gaffe. Had he not even checked the IPCC chapter after his stoush with Raina? And since Carnegie for sixteen months had failed, for whatever reason, to disgorge the promised $500,000, wasn’t Pachauri jumping the gun about deploying the money for scholarly exchanges?
• In December 2011 we had the arrival at the Durban IPCC meeting of three studies from the Nepal-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) asserting that Himalayan glaciers are retreating after all. [48] David Molden, director-general of ICIMOD, informs me that the new studies are “a peer-reviewed ICIMOD report” funded by the Swedish government, and that the findings will be submitted to journals.[49]
• Finally, the melting-glacier literature, for good or ill, seems a bit overblown. There are long-term data for at most twenty to thirty of the 10,000 Himalayan glaciers; swathes of the region, apart from being uncomfortable, are off-limits for military reasons; and in the whole of the Himalayas, there is only one automated temperature-recording station.[50]

Gaffes notwithstanding, Pachauri is too committed to his “cause” to step down. It’s worth asking, what precisely is this “cause”? In a 5000-word interview with Nature he said it was not the global warming threat but something more important.[51] “I am not going to rest easy until I have articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development. That’s the real issue. Climate change is just a part of it” [emphasis added]. The “major structural changes” he wants involve transferring wealth from the West to developing countries—such as India—leading to a convergence of living standards. The West thereby pays for its past sins of emission. Climate Professor Fred Singer waspishly describes this as shifting money “from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor ones”.[52]

The key instrument for the wealth transfer is the UN’s Kyoto-designed “Clean Development Mechanism” (CDM). Through this, the West pays to invest in low-emission ventures in the developing world, a process which is usually cheaper than the West cutting its own emissions. India is getting a big share of this investment, with 1400-plus carbon credit projects worth $33 billion approved or under way.[53] Pachauri’s TERI is heavily involved, directly and through TERI executives’ close links and roles with the Indian government’s strategic energy planning. Pachauri’s view is that India, the world’s fifth-biggest emitter, need not itself abate its emissions in its catch-up phase, but should aim merely for reduced carbon-intensity per unit of output.[54]

I began this profile with Pachauri’s address to the North Carolina legislators and will end with it. First, he wrongly thought he was “off the record”. Second, he clearly set out to scare the legislators witless, with such forecasts as a 90 per cent drop in African crop harvests by 2100, along with security and peace issues with Africans heading out of Africa literally for greener pastures. To avert such perils, including “several metres” of sea-level rise, he said that the world need only give up one year’s GDP growth (3 per cent) by 2030, or 5.5 per cent of world GDP if we rashly delayed the emission targets to 2050.

Pachauri climaxed his address with a quote (probably taken from Al Gore’s book Earth in Balance) by native American Chief Seattle in 1854: “Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.” My b.s. detector beeped and sure enough, Chief Seattle’s eco-poetry is, in polite academic-speak, “inauthentic … an evolving work of fiction”.[55]

 

Tony Thomas is a retired economics and business journalist with thirty years experience at the Age and BRW, and author of Stolen Generations: The Pocket Windschuttle (Macleay Press, 2010).

 

References

---

[1] Global Climate Change Commission , Minutes, 11 February 2008:

https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0BwKfjKsXaxaGNTcyODQ3ZGUtNGRmNS00MjI0LTlhNzctMjFjMjNiMDEyY2Rh&hl=en

[2] Mail Online 31 January 2010: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1247376/Controversial-climate-change-boss-uses-car-AND-driver-travel-mile-office—says-YOU-use-public-transport.html

[3] Op cit: note 1

[4] Donna Laframboise, The Delinquent Teenager who was mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert (Toronto, 2011), p25

[5] http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2012/01/don-miss-this-devastating-criticism-of.html

[6] Old World Hospitality Pvt. Ltd. vs India Habitat Centre on 23 August, 1996 http://www.indiankanoon.org/doc/290167/

[7] Nature 450, 1150-1155 (2007) “Newsmaker of the year: Rajendra Pachauri” by Gabrielle Walker:http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071219/full/4501150a.html

[8] Op cit: note 6

[9] Rajendra Pachauri—Brief CV, IPCC: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/press/briefcv_pachauri.pdf

[10] http://www.scidev.net/en/opinions/how-the-media-is-creating-a-climate-for-change.html

[11] http://www.webcitation.org/60h5EOrIJ

[12] http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/press/briefcv_pachauri.pdf

[13] Email to author, 6 January 2012, from Keith Nichols, Director of Strategic Communications, North Carolina State University

[14] Dedication, Return to Almora by Rajendra Pauchauri (Rupa & Co, 2010)

[15] Mail Online, 31 January 2010. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1247376/Controversial-climate-change-boss-uses-car-AND-driver-travel-mile-office—says-YOU-use-public-transport.html

[16] Independent, 27 March 2010. http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/im-not-quitting-says-underfire-un-climate-boss-1928872.html

[17] http://www.teriin.org/files/jyotiraditya_20111228200133.pdf

[18] http://www.webcitation.org/5zaUkgkh9

[19] Though the source document is clearly the IPCC’s, http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session29/doc7-add1.pdf,the mileage data is absent.

See also: http://eureferendum.blogspot.com.au/2009/12/pachauri-basques-in-glory.html

[20] http://www.indianexpress.com/news/heat-on-cricket-pitch-warms-this-climate-change-laureate/231802/0

[21] http://www.un.org/apps/news/newsmakers.asp?NewsID=16

[22] Op cit: note 14

[23] Sunday Telegraph, UK, 20 December 2009. The article has been removed from its online archive.

[24] KPMG : Review of the personal financial records of Dr Rajendra K Pachauri and other records of TERI for the period 1 April 2008 to 31 December 2009. March 25, 2010. Access at http:/ www.google.com.au/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=kpmg+pachauri+scribd&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&redir_esc=&ei=1zoJT7rsC8aXiAeOifiOCQ, but note a need to sign in to Scribd first.

[25] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/7957631/Dr-Pachauri-Apology.html

[26] http://su.wustl.edu/node/45757

[27] Op cit: note 24

[28] http://www.nature.com/news/2007/071219/full/4501150a.html

[29] Op cit: Laframboise, p11

[30] http://news.bahai.org/story/729

[31] IPCC – Summary for Policymakers of the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX) Nov 18, 2011): http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/

[32] Climate Change Assessments—Review of the Processes & Procedures of the IPCC. InterAcademy Council: http://www.interacademycouncil.net/24026/26050.aspx

[33] http://chimalaya.org/2010/10/20/ipcc-signs-up-for-reform/

[34] http://www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session33/ipcc_p33_decisions_taken_governance_management.pdf

[35] http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-conflict-of-interest_decision.pdf
“Wouldn’t be fair…” http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/06/ipcc-and-greenpeace

[36] http://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/mckitrick-ipcc_reforms.pdf

[37] http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/presentations/himalaya-statement-20january2010.pdf

[38] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnYmQjFoNCs

[39] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLzUwbExetY&feature=related

[40] Op cit: note 30

[41] Hindustan Times, 23 January 2010. http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/Pachauri-won-t-quit-but-admits-to-four-new-errors/Article1-501012.aspx

[42] Op cit: note 32, p22

[43] http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg2/en/errataserrata-errata.html#

[44] Telegraph UK, 23 January 2010. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/7062667/Pachauri-the-real-story-behind-the-Glaciergate-scandal.html

[45] http://www.eu-highnoon.org/news-and-events/3

[46] www.dnaindia.com/world/report_carnegie-corporation-of-new-york-denies-funding-teri_1343008

[47] http://www.teriin.org/index.php?option=com_pressrelease&task=details&sid=171

[48] http://www.icimod.org/?q=5934

[49] Email to author, 3 January 2012

[50] Times of India, 10 November 2009. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2009-11-10/india/28069084_1_himalayan-glaciers-climate-change-global-temperatures-rise

[51] http://www.webcitation.org/5zblp2dJC

[52] http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/the_end_of_the_ipcc.html

[53] http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/no_fossil_fool.html . P22

[54] Ibid: p24-25

[55] “The Myth of Chief Seattle”, William S. Abruzzi, Dept of Sociology and Anthropology, Muhlenberg College, Allentown, PA. Human Ecology Review, Vol 7, No 1, 2000

 

Why the Climate skeptics are winning

Too many of their opponents are intellectual thugs.

Steven F. Hayward

March 5, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 24

The forlorn and increasingly desperate climate campaign achieved a new level of ineptitude last week when what had looked like a minor embarrassment for one of its critics—the Chicago-based Heartland Institute—turned out to be a full-fledged catastrophe for itself. A moment’s reflection on the root of this episode points to why the climate campaign is out of (greenhouse) gas.

In an obvious attempt to inflict a symmetrical Climategate-style scandal on the skeptic community, someone representing himself as a Heartland Institute insider “leaked” internal documents for Heartland’s most recent board of directors meeting to a fringe environmental blog, along with a photocopy of a supposed Heartland “strategy memo” outlining a plan to disseminate a public school curriculum aimed at “dissuading teachers from teaching science.”

This ham-handed phrase (one of many) should have been a tipoff to treat the document dump with some .  .  . skepticism (a trait that has gone missing from much of the climate science community). But more than a few environmental blogs and mainstream news outlets ran with the story of how this “leak” exposed the nefarious “antiscience” Neanderthals of Heartland and their fossil fuel paymasters. But the strategy memo is a fake, probably created because the genuine internal documents are fairly ho-hum. It seems the climate campaign is now taking its tactics from Dan “fake but accurate” Rather.

Why Heartland? And how did the “leaker” get his hands on authentic Heartland board materials that are obviously the source for the faked strategy memo? The Heartland Institute sponsors the most significant annual gathering of climate skeptics, usually in New York, Chicago, or Washington, D.C.—a conference that attracts hundreds of scientists and activists from around the globe, including most of the top skeptical scientists, such as MIT’s Richard Lindzen, Yale’s Robert Mendelsohn, and career EPA official Alan Carlin. By assembling a critical mass of serious dissenting opinion, the Heartland conference dispels the favorite climate campaign talking point that there’s virtually no one of repute, and no arguments of merit, outside the -so-called consensus of imminent climate catastrophe.

The Heartland conferences have been too big for the media to ignore completely, though coverage has been spare and grudging. The conferences are also a morale booster for skeptics, who tend to be isolated and relentlessly assailed in their scattered outposts. It is worth adding that Heartland has always extended invitations to the leading “mainstream” figures to speak or debate at the conference, including Al Gore, NASA’s James Hansen, and senior officials from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (Heartland typically receives no response from such figures.)

The most likely instigator of an anti-Heartland provocation would be someone from among the political activists of the environmental movement, such as the merry pranksters of Greenpeace, who have been known to paw through the garbage cans of climate skeptics looking for evidence of payoffs from the fossil fuel industry (which, contrary to left-wing paranoia, has tended rather to be a generous funder of the climate catastrophe campaign). But shortly after the document dump, Ross Kaminsky, an unpaid senior fellow and former Heartland board member now with the American Spectator, noticed something odd in the digital fingerprint of the “strategy memo.” It had been scanned on an Epson printer/scanner on Monday, February 13, on the West Coast (not in the Midwest, where Heartland is located), just one day before the entire document dump appeared online for the first time. Like the famous little detail of when and how Alger Hiss disposed of his old Ford, this date and location will turn out to be a key piece of evidence unraveling the full story, some of which still remains shrouded.

So how did the official Heartland documents get out? Someone claiming to be a board member emailed an unsuspecting Heartland staffer, asking that a set of board documents be sent to a new email address. This act may have violated California and Illinois criminal statutes prohibiting false representation, and perhaps some federal statutes pertaining to wire fraud as well.

Kaminsky and a second blogger, Steven Mosher, piled up the anomalies: The leaked board documents were not scanned but were original software-produced documents, which moreover have a time stamp from Heartland’s Central time zone. Hence the “strategy memo,” if authentic, would have had to be obtained by some other channel. These and other clues led both Kaminsky and Mosher to go public with the accusation that the most likely perpetrator was Peter Gleick, a semi-prominent environmental scientist in Oakland, California.

Gleick is known chiefly for his work on water issues, for which he enjoys a deserved reputation for his data-driven research (though he gets the remedies wrong). He has been as well a peripheral but aggressive figure in the climate wars, notable for the angry and politicized tone of his participation. Gleick is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was, until two weeks ago, the chairman of an American Geophysical Union task force on scientific -ethics. He’s also a columnist for Forbes magazine’s website and a recipient of one of those MacArthur Foundation “genius” grants that typically go to the trendy and politically correct.

Making a direct accusation as Kaminsky and Mosher did is a strong and potentially libelous move, and the green blogosphere closed ranks quickly around Gleick. One poster wrote: “I hope that Mr. Kaminsky will be prepared [to] fully retract and apologize to Dr. Gleick once he is ruled out as the possible culprit.” But then the other shoe dropped: Gleick confessed on Monday, February 20, that he was the person who had deceived Heartland into emailing their board documents. Gleick claimed, though, that he had received the phony strategy memo anonymously early in the year by mail. He explained in a column for theHuffington Post: “I attempted to confirm the accuracy of the information in this document. In an effort to do so, and in a serious lapse of my own and professional judgment and ethics, I solicited and received additional materials directly from the Heartland Institute under someone else’s name.”

Gleick’s story doesn’t add up, given that many of the details in the phony “strategy memo” could only have been composed by someone with prior access to the complete board materials that Gleick says hesubsequently sought out. So far Gleick is the only person known to have had access to the Heartland internal board documents. And he has not been forthcoming about the details of the phony memo. Was there a postmark? Did he keep the envelope and the original document that he scanned? Why does he think he was singled out to receive this information, rather than a reporter? The only thing missing right now to make Gleick’s story weaker is an old Woodstock typewriter.

Then there is the content of the memo itself, which tellingly is written in the first person but bears no one’s name as an author. One is supposed to presume it came from Heartland’s president, Joe Bast, but it is not quite his style. Megan McArdle of the Atlantic sums it up nicely: “It reads like it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.” Numerous observers have pointed to items in the memo that are strikingly inauthentic or alien to the conservative think tank world, but one in particular strikes me—a curious passage about the need for “expanded communication”:

Efforts at places such as Forbes are especially important now that they have begun to allow high-profile climate scientists (such as Gleick) to post warmist science essays that counter our own. This influential audience has usually been reliably anti-climate and it is important to keep opposing voices out. Efforts might also include cultivating more neutral voices with big audiences (such as [Andrew] Revkin at Dot­Earth/NYTimes, who has a well-known antipathy for some of the more extreme AGW [anthropogenic global warming] communicators .  .  .

As curious as the reference to Gleick and Forbes is (Gleick shares space at Forbes with Heartland’s James Taylor, which is another interesting circumstance), the reference to Andy Revkin is more intriguing. Revkin is a New York Times science blogger who reports climate issues fairly straight up, though his own sympathies are with the climate campaign. Perhaps because he is basically sympathetic, Revkin’s occasional departures from the party line have been a source of annoyance for more ardent climate campaigners; one of the emails from the first cache of leaked Climategate documents in 2009 complained that Revkin wasn’t “reliable,” and University of Illinois climate alarmist Michael Schlesinger threatened Revkin directly with the “big cutoff” if he didn’t mend his ways. Was the language in the phony Heartland memo another attempt to try to shame Revkin into falling in line by suggesting he’s not hostile enough towards climate skeptics?

After Gleick’s semi-confession, Revkin wrote for the Times that “Gleick’s use of deception in pursuit of his cause after years of calling out climate deception has destroyed his credibility and harmed others,” and that his actions “surely will sustain suspicion that he created the summary [strategy memo].”

Gleick looks set to be spending a good chunk of his MacArthur genius prize winnings on lawyers; he’s retained the same criminal attorney that Andrew Fastow of Enron used for his defense against fraud charges. And Gleick has hired Clinton/Gore crisis manager Chris Lehane. Heartland, for its part, has set up a legal defense fund to pursue a civil case against Gleick, presenting the ultimate irony: -Gleick’s attack may well help Heartland raise more money.

More than a few observers have asked why anyone should trust Gleick’s scientific judgment if his judgment about how to deal with climate skeptics is so bad. -Gleick’s defense of his motives would be laughable if it weren’t so pathetic: “My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts—often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated—to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

Let’s take these in order. Anony-mous? True, Heartland’s board documents reveal seven-figure contributions for their climate work from one “anonymous donor,” but environmental organizations take in many multiples of Heartland’s total budget in anonymous donations washed through the left-wing Tides Foundation. The Environmental Defense Fund thanks 141 anonymous donors in one recent report. “Well-funded”? Heartland’s total budget for all its issues, which include health care, education, and technology policy, is around $4.4 million, an amount that would disappear into a single line item in the budget for the Natural Resources Defense Council ($99 million in revenues in 2010). Last year, the Wall Street Journal reports, the World Wildlife Fund spent $68.5 million just on “public education.”

The dog that didn’t bark for the climateers in this story is the great disappointment that Heartland receives only a tiny amount of funding from fossil fuel sources—and none from ExxonMobil, still the bête noireof the climateers. Meanwhile, it was revealed this week that natural gas mogul T. Boone Pickens had given $453,000 to the left-wing Center for American Progress for its “clean energy” projects, and Chesapeake Energy gave the Sierra Club over $25 million (anonymously until it leaked out) for the Club’s anti-coal ad campaign. Turns out the greens take in much more money from fossil fuel interests than the skeptics do.

Finally, “coordinated”? Few public policy efforts have ever had the massive institutional and financial coordination that the climate change cause enjoys. That tiny Heartland, with but a single annual conference and a few phone-book-sized reports summarizing the skeptical case, can derange the climate campaign so thoroughly is an indicator of the weakness and thorough politicization of climate alarmism.

The Gleick episode exposes again a movement that disdains arguing with its critics, choosing demonization over persuasion and debate. A confident movement would face and crush its critics if its case were unassailable, as it claims. The climate change fight doesn’t even rise to the level of David and Goliath. Heartland is more like a David fighting a hundred Goliaths. Yet the serial ineptitude of the climate campaign shows that a tiny David doesn’t need to throw a rock against a Goliath who swings his mighty club and only hits himself square in the forehead.

Steven F. Hayward is the F. K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, of The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents: From Wilson to Obama (Regnery).

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