Saturday, September 11, 2010

Failing To Convince, Climate Activists Threaten Instead

In what can only be seen as that latest tactic by Greenpeace in their evangelical approach to Climate change is to directly threaten those members of the wider public who have not been convinced by their arguments, hectoring and abuse of the past. In an article by Paul Joseph Watson entitled: Greenpeace To Global Warming Skeptics: “We Know Where You Live” we find the following:

An article carried by the official Greenpeace website written by a Greenpeace member urges climate activists to resort to criminal activity in an effort to reinvigorate momentum for their stalling global warming agenda, while ominously threatening climate skeptics, “we know where you live”.

The article, written by Greenpeace activist “Gene” from India, calls for “mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism”.

“Gene” then has a special message for roughly half of Americans who, in the wake of the climategate scandal, are now skeptical of man-made global warming – “We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work. And we be many, but you be few.”

“Gene” quotes another climate activist who calls for an army of greenies to break the law and take retribution against anyone who stands in their way.

“The politicians have failed. Now it’s up to us. We must break the law to make the laws we need: laws that are supposed to protect society, and protect our future. Until our laws do that, screw being climate lobbyists. Screw being climate activists. It’s not working. We need an army of climate outlaws.”

Greenpeace has not issued a retraction of the comments, preferring instead to buffer the blog at both beginning and end with desperate-sounding explanations insisting that the author has peaceful intentions. The organization has obviously been taking a hammering for this as it worsens into another public relations disaster.

This is by no means the first time global warming adherents have resorted to physical threats in an effort to bolster their rapidly crumbling credibility on climate change issues. In June last year, a global warming activist posted an article on the Talking Points Memo website entitled “At What Point Do We Jail Or Execute Global Warming Deniers?”

Shortly after the article was retracted, a comment traced back to another prominent global warming activist which appeared on the Climate Progress blog threatened Skeptics that “an entire generation that will soon be ready to strangle you and your kind while you sleep in your beds.” Website owner Joe Romm defended the comment as “clearly not a threat but a prediction”.

For years, climate Skeptics have been the target of campaigns to denounce them as criminals and traitors on the scale of the Nazis, with calls for Nuremberg trials. A July 2007 Senate report detailed how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation.

“Is this really the kind of caring, sensitive message this charity ought to be conveying to the world?” asks James Delingpole. “Not to judge by the comments below. Happy Easter, Greenpeace PR department! I think you’re going to have a busy next few days…”

As a recent Psychological Science study highlighted, warmists tend not to adhere to the caring, sensitive image they portray when it comes to their own private lives.

“Those who wear what the authors call the “halo of green consumerism” are less likely to be kind to others, and more likely to cheat and steal,” summarizes the Telegraph’s Iain Hollingshead. “Faced with various moral choices – whether to stick to the rules in games, for example, or to pay themselves an appropriate wage – the green participants behaved much worse in the experiments than their conventional counterparts. The short answer to the paper’s question, then, is: No. Greens are mean.”

Despite Greenpeace’s efforts at damage control, there can be little doubt as to the true context of the article. By first encouraging climate activists to “break the law” in pursuit of their stalling political agenda, “Gene” has greased the skids for criminal activity. Concluding with the threat to climate Skeptics that “we know where you live,” is clearly a form of intimidation and an invitation for “an army of climate outlaws” to take physical retribution against people who disagree with them.

Imagine if Infowars put out an article urging its readers to break the law in order to combat the IRS, imagine if we told IRS agents, “we know where you live”. We’d be raided quicker than a heartbeat and Alex Jones would be demonized all over the establishment media as a dangerous extremist. Indeed, a mere peaceful letter-writing campaign urging governors to resign was leapt upon by the media and the federal government this past weekend as a concerning portend of the “extremist” threat posed by constitutionalists despite the fact that there was no indication of violence.

When so-called “right-wingers” or libertarians merely write letters urging peaceful political change, they are demonized as terrorist hate-mongers, but when greenies openly call for criminal behavior allied with thinly veiled threats of physical violence, it’s no big deal.

Will CNN and MSNBC devote weeks of endless coverage to Greenpeace’s threats towards people they disagree with? There’s more chance of Keith Olbermann awarding Rep. Hank Johnson (a major global warming adherent) his “worst person in the world” gong for hilariously warning that the island of Guam could capsize like a boat due to overpopulation.

Another example is this recent video from Greenpeace of a hooded youth who has clearly been so wound up with their hype that he snarls his way through his presentation and log of climate claims that adults are killing his world:

“By the time I grow up there won’t be any fish left in the sea,” he snarls at the camera.

“Clean air will be a thing of the past, polar ice caps will be gone, oceans will rise, entire countries will disappear ... There could be famine, worldwide epidemics ...

“We’re not just talking about the future, we’re talking about my future.”

Believe all that and you’re excused the threat this boy makes next: “Starting today, the lines are drawn. You have to choose sides. You can be for my future or you’re against it. You’re a friend, or you’re an enemy.

“I may be just a kid a today, but tomorrow will be different ...

“You’ve had your chance to fix this problem. Now we have ours. We won’t be cute. We won’t be patronised. We won’t be denied our future.”

Once again we see an organisation with the word "peace" in it's title has becom so totalitarian and militant in it's beliefs that it is now prepared to enlist child soldiers to its ranks to fight it's climate war against the very populace from which it rose. But again this is not surprising given their total hatred and contempt for the human race that they advocate such extreme measures as:

“All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants ... In those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilisation and infertility must be pushed ..

...“For every human born, ACRES of wildlife forests must be turned into farmland in order to feed that new addition over the course of 60 to 100 YEARS of that new human’s lifespan! THIS IS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE FOREST CREATURES!!!!”

Demanded James J. Lee who burst into Discovery Channel’s Maryland headquarters to demand the station do more to save the planet from the Armageddon we’re told will be caused by global warming and held three hostages at gunpoint until police shot him dead, thus reducing his population.

put something in the water, a virus that would be specific to the human reproductive system, and would make a substantial proportion of the population infertile”.

Suggested Dr John Reid, a former Swinburne University academic, in a lecture on the (Australian) ABC’s Ockham’s Razor program with fellow warmist Robyn Williams. Needless to say this wasn't challenged in any way.

Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control,”...

...“A program of sterilising women after their second or third child” and “the development of a long-term sterilising capsule that could be implanted under the skin and removed when pregnancy is desired”, which “opens additional possibilities for coercive fertility control”.

Were the ideas though about by President Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren, when he co-wrote his 1977 book, Ecoscience.

Whilst none of those mentioned above were or are members of Greenpeace, Paul Watson who was a co founder of Greenpeace and is the current Captain of the Sea Shepard anti whaling ship is and he says the following about the human race:

“We need to radically and intelligently REDUCE HUMAN POPULATIONS to fewer than one billion” because humans are “the AIDS of the Earth” and “our viral like behaviour can be TERMINAL both to the present biosphere and ourselves”.

It seems it is a common attitude towards humanity from those that see themselves as the ultimate warriors for the environment, that they want "your" "population reduced" by any means fair or foul.

Friday, September 10, 2010

IPCC Continues To Fail In Its Bid For Accuracy

At the start of September 2010 yet another blunder was discovered about the IPCC's 4th Assessment Report. This blunder involved Plagiarism of a book written in 1993 titled Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species. The book was authored by an Australian epidemiology professor named Anthony McMichael.



Professor McMichael is a known believer in AGW and is not above releasing alarmist statements to support his beliefs(my emphasis added): "As climate change advances we must realise that it endangers more than the economy, infrastructure and valued species. Climate change, ominously, is disrupting and weakening Earth's life-supporting capacity. This poses a profound, and growing, risk to human wellbeing, health and survival."

In her post The Book the IPCC Plagiarized author Donna Laframboise examines this closely:

Some people think early editions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report were scrupulously science-based, but that the process became more politicized in recent years. A look at the first appearance of the health chapter – in the 1995 edition – challenges this view. [29-page PDF of the chapter]

The person who headed that effort was an Australian epidemiology professor named Anthony McMichael. According to a 2001 bio, his early research interests included mental health, occupational diseases, the link between diet and cancer, and environmental epidemiology (diseases). In the late 1980s he co-authored a “bestselling guide to a healthier lifestyle” that discussed nutrition and physical fitness.

The bio tells us it was only “during the 1990s” that McMichael developed “a strong interest” in the risks associated with global environmental change. So in the early 1990s, out of all the experts in the entire world the IPCC might have chosen to oversee the writing of a section dealing with climate change and human health, why was McMichael selected?

Stacking the Deck I suspect it had a great deal to do with another book he wrote – the one that appeared in 1993 titled Planetary Overload: Global Environmental Change and the Health of the Human Species. This book’s central theme is that human activity is undermining the planet’s ecosystem. Its tone, language, and analysis are similar to hundreds of other environmental treatises published in recent decades.

McMichael declares that “humans cannot live apart from nature, remote from the great web of life.” He frets that we are too distant “from the rhythms of natural systems.” He speaks of environmental degradation as “an unprecedented moral problem” and says people in rich countries live a wasteful, “ecologically distorted lifestyle.”

His language is not the tentative sort used by dispassionate scientists. Back in 1993 he didn’t say there was concern that carbon dioxide might eventually “disrupt various of the biosphere’s natural cycles,” he confidently proclaimed that it would. Like a long line of other eco thinkers, he believes environmental challenges require a wholesale “reordering of social values.”

McMichael’s Planetary Overload arguments rely on a Greenpeace report about global warming. His book frequently cites articles in non-peer-reviewed publications such as New Scientist and Scientific American. McMichael is, in other words, an environmentalist whose day job happens to involve the study of public health. He has no expertise in most of the topics his book discusses.

He is, of course, entitled to his personal opinions. But was he the best choice to lead an IPCC chapter? Let’s rephrase that: if one wished to deliberately stack the deck, to ensure that a certain perspective would dominate the climate bible’s first health chapter, would someone who had expressed views similar to McMichael’s not have seemed like the perfect candidate?

There is a straight line between what the UN’s 1995 climate bible told the world about health issues and what McMichael had already written in his 1993 book. Although Planetary Overload isn’t included among the 182 references listed at the end of the health chapter, entire passages of the climate bible were lifted directly from it. A selection appears below:

McMichael’s 1993 book, page 150:
Sandstorms in Kansas (USA) and in the Sudan have been accompanied by increased illness and death from bronchitis and asthma.

Climate Bible’s 1995 Working Group 2 report, page 578:
Sandstorms in Kansas (USA) and the Sudan have been accompanied by increases in bronchitis and asthma.

McMichael’s 1993 book, page 155:
In Egypt, for example, the water snails tend to lose their schistosome infections during the winter months (January-March). However, if temperatures increase, snails may spread schistosomiasis throughout the year, thus increasing the already heavy parasite burden in rural Egypt.

Climate Bible’s 1995 Working Group 2 report, page 574:
In Egypt, for example, water snails tend to lose their schistosome infections during winter, but if temperatures increase, snails may mediate schistosomiasis transmission throughout the year.

McMichael’s 1993 book, page 155:
Arboviral infections span a wide clinical spectrum, from those that cause mild feverish illness or subclinical infections to those causing severe and often fatal encephalitis (brain inflammation) or hemorrhagic fever. Under favourable environmental conditions, an arboviral disease can become epidemic (population-wide), from a local endemic base – in much the same way that cholera has recently broken out…

Climate Bible’s 1995 Working Group 2 report, page 575:
Arboviral infections span a wide clinical spectrum, from those that cause mild feverish illness or subclinical inflections to those causing severe and often fatal encephalitis (brain inflammation) or hemorrhagic fever. Under favorable environmental conditions, an arboviral disease can become epidemic (population-wide), from a local endemic base or by its introduction to a previously unaffected area.

McMichael’s 1993 book, page 154:
In eastern Africa, a relatively small increase in winter temperature would enable the malarial zone to extend ‘upwards’ to engulf the large urban highland populations that are currently off-limits to the mosquito because of the cooler temperatures at higher altitudes – e.g. Nairobi (Kenya) and Harare (Zimbabwe). Indeed, such populations around the world, currently just outside the margins of endemic malaria, would provide early evidence of climate-related shifts in the distribution of this disease.

Climate Bible’s 1995 Working Group 2 report, page 574:
Hence, it is a reasonable prediction that, in eastern Africa, a relatively small increase in winter temperature could extend the mosquito habitat and thus enable faciparum malaria to reach beyond the usual altitude limit of around 2,500 m to the large, malaria-free, urban highland populations, e.g. Nairobi in Kenya and Harare in Zimbabwe. Indeed, the monitoring of such populations around the world, currently just beyond the boundaries of stable endemic malaria, could provide early evidence of climate-related shifts in malaria distribution.

McMichael’s 1993 book, page 165:
Already in Africa, there are over 100 million people who are ‘food insecure’, many of them in the arid Sahel region, home to approximately 35 million people.

Climate Bible’s 1995 Working Group 2 report, page 577:
Already in Africa, more than 100 million people are “food insecure,” many of them in the arid Sahel region.

McMichael’s 1993 book, page 166:
A rise in temperature could also have significant effects on the growth and health of farm animals. Young animals are less tolerant of a wide range of temperature than are adult animals.

Climate Bible’s 1995 Working Group 2 report, page 577:
An increase in temperature and temperature extremes could also affect the growth and health of farm animals; young animals are much less tolerant of temperature variation than are adult animals.

McMichael’s 1993 book, page 166:
With respect to adverse effects on livestock, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has identified several infectious diseases – such as the horn fly in beef and dairy cattle and insect-borne anaplasmosis infection in sheep and cattle – which might well increase in response to climate changes.

Climate Bible’s 1995 Working Group 2 report, page 577:
For example, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has identified several infectious diseases – such as the horn fly in beef and dairy cattle and insect-borne anaplasmosis infection in sheep and cattle – that could increase in prevalence in response to climate changes.

McMichael’s 1993 book, page 187:
UNEP predicts that an average 10% loss of ozone (such has become established at middle-to-high latitudes in recent years), if sustained globally over three-four decades, would cause at least 300,000 additional cases of non-melanocytic skin cancer worldwide each year and 4,500 extra cases of malignant melanoma – and possibly double that figure.

Climate Bible’s 1995 Working Group 2 report, page 578:
The UN environment Programme predicts that an average 10% loss of ozone (such as occurred at middle-to-high latitudes over the past decade), if sustained globally over several decades, would cause approximately 250,000 additional cases of [nonmelanocytic skin cancers] worldwide each year.

It appears unlikely that a good faith, bona fide review of the scientific literature took place prior to the writing of significant sections of the IPCC’s first health chapter. Instead, the climate bible surreptitiously incorporated numerous opinions expressed a few years earlier by the activist-oriented person in charge of writing this chapter.

Then the media told the world that the IPCC’s proclamations regarding global warming and diseases such as malaria were the considered, consensus view of thousands of experts.

Then the following day we find out via Dr. Jo Nova that Dr. Pachauri admits the IPCC just guesses the numbers. She writes:

Such is the pressure finally beginning to bear on the IPCC that Pachauri has been forced into the ridiculous position of trying to rescue credibility by contradicting most of their past PR campaign. He’s taken the extraordinary step of admitting they don’t have hard numbers, hey, but it’s all OK because the IPCC is really a government agency to make policy, not to write scientific reports “that don’t see the light of day”.

So he’s admitting that the IPCC was all about policy prescriptions all along? And the science was just fudged-up window dressing to provide an excuse? Well, who would have guessed.

Hidden beside Pachauri’s declaration that he’s happy about the IAC report, he let slip a corker of a line:

Times of India asks: Anything in the UN probe report you completely or partly disagree with?

They have talked about quantifying uncertainties. To some extent, we are doing that, though not perfectly. But the issue is that in some cases, you really don’t have a quantitative base by which you can attach a probability or a level of uncertainty that defines things in quantitative terms. And there, let’s not take away the importance of expert judgment. And that is something the report has missed or at least not pointed out.

So if you can’t quantify uncertainties (like is climate sensitivity say 0.5 degrees or 6.5 degrees, and with what probabilities) just go with your best guess, call it expert opinion (especially if you only pick and pay the “right” experts) and say that there is a 90% certainty, even if there are no numbers you can add up to get that.

Then after all these years of saying the IPCC is a scientific body, now that they’re exposed as being unscientific, suddenly the excuse is that really they’re policy driven. Watch how far away from science Pachauri is trying to position the IPCC:

Times of India: Stifling politics out of science, does that make it devoid of its real social purpose?

Let’s face it, we are an intergovernmental body and our strength and acceptability of what we produce is largely because we are owned by governments.
(And here was me thinking their strength was their “2500 scientists” and their rigorous review?)

If that was not the case, then we would be like any other scientific body that maybe producing first-rate reports but don’t see the light of the day because they don’t matter in policy-making. Now clearly, if it’s an inter-governmental body and we want governments’ ownership of what we produce, obviously they will give us guidance of what direction to follow, what are the questions they want answered. Unfortunately, people have completely missed the original resolution by which IPCC was set up. It clearly says that our assessment should include realistic response strategies. If that is not an assessment of policies, then what does it represent? And I am afraid, we have been, in my view, defensive in coming out with a whole range of policies and I am not saying we prescribe policy A or B or C but on the basis of science, we are looking at realistic response strategies.

But that is exactly what this committee has recommended that we get out of — policy prescriptions. It is for this reason that I brought out that this what is written in the IPCC mandate. This is a misperception on the part of some people in the scientific community. And I hope I can correct it.

The IPCC can’t be both the last word on impartially declaring the science AND the last word declaring the policy. Either the search for truth runs this agency or the need to push policy does, they can’t answer to both without a conflict.

He’s declaring that their first priority is NOT to figure out exactly what drives our climate.