Political Vendetta

"Mr. Speaker, in no democracy in this world," cried Van Loan as the questions persisted for days, "does a prime minister and a party use their power to conduct political vendettas against their political enemies."

Oh really what would you call this then.....

Climatologists puzzled at rationale for ending research fund
"I truly think they don't understand what research means," said Dr. Andrew Weaver, a climatologist from the University of Victoria's School of Earth

Feds cutting climate studies: Nobel winners
Nobel Prize-winning scientists from Canada say the Harper government has shut down a federal climate change research network and blocked new studies on the ...

Nobel scientists deliver stinging criticism of federal government
"I can only put it down as one of two things," said Dr. Andrew Weaver, a climatologist from the University of Victoria's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences.

Canadian scientists sharing Nobel prize
University of Victoria senior scientist Ken Denman said the prestigious award raises climate change in the public consciousness.

The Conservatives of course may be upset over their flat earth 'pals' getting short shrift on CBC's Fifth Estate, the same program that exposed the Mulroney Schrieber affair that Van Loan was actually referring to in his quote.

From basic statistics mistakes to subliminal language tricks,
The Denial Machine disgraces the CBC

Another less severe, though still significant subliminal trick used by the Fifth Estate is the way they identify scientists on each side of the debate:

Climate alarmist Dr. Andrew Weaver is identified as a “climatologist” at the University of Victoria and “one of the authors of that definitive international report.”

Climate ‘skeptics’ are ascribed lesser credentials. I (Tim Ball) am just “a retired University of Winnipeg Professor”, a “so-called expert” “who hasn’t published original research in years”.

SEE

Junque Journalism

Michael Crichton Climate Change Denier

Strange Bedfellows

Saving Capitalism From Itself

Echo Chamber

Fraser Institutes Flat Earth Report

Fraser Institute Meets Bill O'Riley

Flat Earth Society Meets In London

Capitalism Creates Global Warming

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Junque Journalism

The National Post and its resident flat earther; Terence Corcoran attacked Nobel Prize winner Al Gore over Global Warming on their front page in yesterdays paper with another of their Fox News style Tabloid Headline; A coup for junk science

They forgot to mention that there were Canadian climate scientists on the UN IPCC committee who shared the Nobel with Gore And those scientists don't believe as the National Post and Corcoran do that;

"Global warming theory has been in political and scientific trouble for some time."

Nor would these Canadian scientists accept Corcoran's assertion that;

Onto this heap of forgotten causes and marginalia the Nobel has just tossed Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN's official climate science group. What a blow the award must be to the IPCC, self-proclaimed home of scientific rigour, to now be lumped in with Reverend Al and his Travelling Snake Oil Road Show and Climate Terror Machine.

The Post and Corcoran of course have engaged in junk journalism making political statements that they assert are facts. And in making Gore their straw man they forgot the Canadian Scientists, the guys who share the Nobel with him, who assert that their two decades of warnings about Global Warming are only in trouble because of lack of media and political attention to the problem. In other words because of articles like the Post published. Not only is it junk journalism it's failure to mention the Canadian scientists is sloppy journalism.

Unlike Al Gore, University of B.C. climate change expert John Robinson won't be going to Oslo, Norway, to pick up the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

But Robinson, who has been called "Dr. Sustainability," still felt like a winner when the award was announced early Friday.

"I've been in this area of research since the late '80s and it's been a long struggle to make the case that climate change really matters," Robinson, a professor at UBC's Institute of Resources, Environment and Sustainability, said Friday.

He is one of thousands of scientists in more than 100 countries who contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including about two dozen Canadian scientists.

"It's unbelievable how climate change has risen to the top of the policy agenda and hopefully not in a flash-in-the-pan kind of way," he said.

The panel uses scientific reports and data to explore man-made climate change and ways to fight it.

Five Victoria scientists also contributed to the reports.

"It brings more awareness to the biggest issue facing humanity today. The consequences of global warming are huge," said Andrew Weaver, Canada research chairman in climate modelling and analysis at the University of Victoria.

The IPCC has been releasing regular reports on the state of climate change since it was established by the United Nations in 1988. In an IPCC report earlier this year, top scientists from 113 countries agreed unanimously that the mass burning of fossil fuels, land use and agriculture practices are melting polar ice caps.

"We are treating the atmosphere like a landfill and we're not paying for it," said Weaver.

University of Victoria senior scientist Ken Denman said the prestigious award raises climate change in the public consciousness.

"I hope it will help people and government take action. It makes the work worthwhile," he said. "If we accept collective responsibility for this it can be empowering. If we have created this, we have the capability of reversing it."

The Post and Corcoran further slighted Canadians when they deliberately overlooked Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the Canadian Inuit woman who was in the running for the Nobel Peace Prize, and who has seen the real effects of the theory of Global Warming.

The Post front page 'news' was all about attacking Gore, and promoting the myth that Global Warming is not a fact. Hence facts would just get in the way of such partisan pontificating.


H/T to Mentarch

SEE

Michael Crichton Climate Change Denier

Strange Bedfellows

Saving Capitalism From Itself

Echo Chamber

Fraser Institutes Flat Earth Report

Fraser Institute Meets Bill O'Riley

Flat Earth Society Meets In London

Capitalism Creates Global Warming

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Stating The Obvious

Oh dear what are the reactionary right wing climate change deniers going to do now?

The White House has finally admitted the obvious after years of being in denial.

George Bush's top scientific advisor has delivered the strongest statement yet from within the US administration that greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity are to blame for climate change.

Professor John Marburger said it was more than 90 per cent likely that mankind was causing global warming and that the earth may become "unlivable" without reductions in CO2 output.

"I think there is widespread agreement on certain basics, and one of the most important is that we are producing far more CO2 from fossil fuels than we ought to be," he told the BBC.

"And it's going to lead to trouble unless we can begin to reduce the amount of fossil fuels we are burning and using in our economies."

Of course its one thing to admit the obvious and another to do something about it.

The federal office that oversees the nation's research on global warming is inadequate on many levels and some of its tools are falling apart, according to a critique issued yesterday by a committee of the National Research Council.

Lack of new investment would mean that “U.S. capability to monitor trends, document the impacts of future climate change and further improve prediction and assimilation models . . . will decline even as the urgency of addressing climate change increases,” said the report, which focused on the U.S. Climate Change Science Program.

The bleak assessment was led by Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate and atmospheric scientist at UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

It is the second major study released in recent days that denounced the U.S. government's handling of global warming. The other, written by the Government Accountability Office, blamed the Bush administration for doing little to address how climate change is altering the nation's lands and waters.

It's unclear whether such criticisms will gain traction at the White House, which has been faulted for years for not making global warming a priority.

SEE:

APEC Is Not Kyoto

No Rush

Michael Crichton Climate Change Denier

Industrial Ecology

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Michael Crichton Climate Change Denier

In an essay on his home page Michael Crichton, author of Jurassic Park, compares the current debate around Climate Change with the Scientific movement for eugenics and Lysenkoism. He calls it the politicization of science. Well duh science has always been the handmaiden of the ruling class.

"Once again, the measures being urged have little basis in fact or science. Once again, groups with other agendas are hiding behind a movement that appears high-minded. Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once again, vague terms like sustainability and generational justice --- terms that have no agreed definition --- are employed in the service of a new crisis.

I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions of the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression. "

Michael Crichton© 1997-2007 Constant C Productions. All rights reserved.

However in describing those who oppose the science and politics of climate change as brave 'authentic', 'objective' scientists whose voices are being suppressed he overlooks their politics, and their political agenda. Which is not the defense of science, or even technology but of capitalism as it currently exists.

As much as Crichton is a popular author, and one who opposes attempts to patent genes, on the issue of Climate Change he ends up using the arguments of the political right who have made the eugenics argument their way of slagging feminism and the left and now those who defend the science of global warming.

What they fail to do, as does Crichton, is differentiate between the moralist reform movements of the fin de sicle 19th Century (the temperance movement) which sought to keep women in the home and those progressive movements that sought greater liberty for women. Both were precursors to modern feminism and the progressive movements for social reform. But they were politically different, and thus to confuse the two is at best poor scholarship at worst deliberate political obfustication.

In his essay Crichton ultimately sounds like that other defender of science and technology and opponent of the conspiracy theory of Climate Change; Lyndon LaRouche.

In the first half of the 20th century, eugenics in action largely meant governments sterilizing or murdering people they didn't like. (Lenin, Stalin, and Mao slaughtered even more tens of millions in the name of equality than Hitler murdered in the name of inequality. And, as Aleksandr Solzenhistyn has pointed out, the doctrine of "class origins" transformed "egalitarian" mass murder into ethnic genocide since there is no sharp line between family and race.)

Progressives, Eugenics, Women and the Minimum Wage
Stephen W. Carson

American intellectual life in the early 20th century has a dirty secret and its name is Eugenics. Alex Tabarrok points out an excellent article by Thomas C. Leonard on Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women's Work (PDF). Leonard makes the point that Progressive support for exclusionary labor legislation for women, including the minimum wage, was based among other things on ensuring "that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as 'mothers of the race'". Though most know that eugenics had some sort of open popularity prior to the Nazis giving it a bad name, few know how thoroughly it was supported by all the "best and brightest". Here's a partial list from Leonard's paper: Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence and economist Irving Fisher.

Progressives, in part for eugenic reasons, wanted to make women and other groups unemployable. Their chosen tool: the minimum wage.

...these progressives argued that minimum-wage-induced disemployment was a social benefit. Legal minimum wages and other statutory means of inducing undesirable groups to leave the labor force were, in the progressive view, a eugenic benefit.

The Progressive Case for Regulating
Women’s Work

By THOMAS C. LEONARD*

ABSTRACT. American economics came of age during the Progressive Era, a time when biological approaches to economic reform were at their high-water mark. Reform-minded economists argued that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers—whom they labeled “unemployables,” “parasites,” and the “industrial residuum”—so as to uplift superior, deserving workers. Women were also frequently classified as unemployable. Leading progressives, including women at the forefront of labor reform, justified exclusionary labor legislation for women on grounds that it would (1) protect the biologically weaker sex from the hazards of market work; (2) protect working women from the temptation of prostitution; (3) protect male heads of household from the economic competition of women; and (4) ensure that women could better carry out their eugenic duties as “mothers of the race.” What united these heterogeneous rationales was the reformers’ aim of discouraging women’s labor-force participation.

Eugenic thought crossed national borders, and it also traversed an extraordinary range of political views. Ideologically, the eugenics movement attracted reactionaries, such as Madison Grant, author The Passing of the Great Race, and key movement figures, such as Francis Galton, founder of modern eugenics, and Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, who can be described as social conservatives. But eugenics also won advocates of very different politics, such as Margaret Sanger, the birth control advocate who began intellectual life as a radical anarchist (a protégé of Emma Goldman), Fabian socialists such as Karl Pearson, Sidney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw, and the sui generis feminist, economist Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Love and Eugenics in the late Nineteenth Century
Angelique Richardson

Developed by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in the 1860s, and drawing on theories of evolution, eugenics looked to provide solutions both for the problems of the urban poor and for the challenge of maintaining national supremacy. Richardson shows how these theories had particular resonance for a number of intellectually and politically concerned women in the period, who firmly believed that "the women of Britain could best serve the race, the country, and their own interests through the rational selection of a reproductive partner" (p. 215). This was the view that time and again comes across in the fiction of some of the best known New Woman Authors, particularly Sarah Grand and George Egerton (although, as she shows, resistance to eugenics is an important aspect of Mona Caird's work). Richardson's achievement is to get us to recognize this fact and its implications, as well as the part played by their writings in the late-century debates between the hereditarians and the environmentalists. This is a bravely revisionist reading, which will give considerable pause for thought to all those who have enthusiastically embraced and celebrated the progressive, protofeminist aspects of the New Woman movement. One understands freshly that the resistance to romance which can be found in so many of the New Woman novelists and polemicists is less a defiant call for woman's autonomy and self-determination than a demand for rational reproduction. Richardson exposes not just the class biases, but in some cases the antihumanitarianism of these writers.

In the first volume of The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault deemed eugenics one of the ‘two great innovations in the technology of sex of the second half of the nineteenth century’. Richardson’s book is a notable aid to our understanding of the scope and importance of Foucault’s remark and the continuing significance of eugenics as a language of modernity. Much scholarly work in recent years has emphasized the pervasive anxiety about degeneration and decline characteristic of the period, in which eugenic thinking played a central part, but Richardson also shows the tremendous eugenic optimism felt by many of its enthusiasts: able to reverse Malthus’s cruel laws, eugenics promised a new and clean way to social perfection … In charting this ground, Richardson leaves us in no doubt about the class violence endemic to eugenic discourse in the period. That advocacy of eugenics was most enthusiastic within collectivist politics is now well known, but illuminated further here, especially in the final chapter on Mona Caird. Biological determinism, Richardson argues, ‘was underpinned by the paralysis of the individual’; at the heart of the eugenic project of this period is a critique of liberal individual, exemplified here by one of the book’s good men, John Stuart Mill. In her suggestive interpretation of this troubled alignment between left politics and the eugenic fantasy of state-managed human reproduction as a means to squeeze suffering out of the social body, Richardson reminds us that individualism ‘was not anathema to Marx’. Mill’s own contribution to the opposition to eugenics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an individualism that shares with Marx a commitment to ‘autonomy, activity, true consciousness, and sociality.’

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Damn Commie Canadians

Quick someone tell the flat earth society and the climate change deniers at the Blogging Tories.

Canadians prove humans are causing climate change

Like Medicare this will prove once again to the Republican and conservative American rightwhing whiners that their northern neighbours are truly evil and a socialist menace.



See:

Strange Bedfellows

Saving Capitalism From Itself

Echo Chamber

Fraser Institutes Flat Earth Report

Fraser Institute Meets Bill O'Riley

Flat Earth Society Meets In London

Capitalism Creates Global Warming

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climate-change, Conservatives, Liberals, government, environment, oil, electricity, capitalism, sustainablity

Strange Bedfellows

You know the climate change deniers have officially joined the Flat Earth society when their major spokesperson publishes his work in Lyndon LaRouche's conspiratorial publication; Executive Intelligence (sic) Review.

Yep that puts them squarely in the camp of conspiracy nutbars and folks who believe that humans lived with dinosaurs.

Of course LaRouche and his followers are the original climate change deniers, who have spent the past thirty years promoting nuclear power.

Of course it is all about the company you keep. And it seems that when it comes to Climate Change there are those on the American left who also embrace the flat earth ideal.

Alex Cockburn for instance, who in keeping up with his fellow ex-Trotskyist, ex-Brit compatriot and former Nation fellow writer; Christopher Hitchens, has decided to be a contrarian.

“Peer Review” and Global Warming

There were yelps of alarm and the rustle of skirts being hoist knee-high after I published a note on sources in my column last week, Dissidents against Dogma. The panic was caused by one of the references to the work of Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski who, as I wrote, has written devastating onslaughts on the IPCC rallying cry that CO2 is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. Jaworowski has pointed out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO2 reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO2 from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there’s been some highly suspect editing of the CO2 data, presumably to reinforce the case for the “unprecedented levels” of modern CO2. I offered a couple of references to Jaworowski, one of them to an essay, "Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase", published in 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1997.

It turns out that this is a publication put out by the LaRouche crowd. Next thing you know, poor Jaworowski was being accused oif being a neo-Nazi cultist, with kindred vitriol hurled at CounterPunch co-editor Cockburn.

Of course this makes sense since LaRouche is also an ex-Trotskyist. Heck isn't everybody who makes up the American neo-con right.

The problem with Hitchens and Cockburn is that they could have posed a libertarian alternative to the war in Iraq (which Hitchens supported) or to Kyoto and the capitalist crisis of the environment, which Cockburn denies. But they didn't. Instead they have like their former Trotskyist predecessors, embraced the neo-con right. Just as some of those in the so called Libertarian movement in the U.S. have over the issue of climate change.

Take Lew Rockwell, for instance. He is incredibly insightful when discussing the over bearing power of the state to make war, or the intrusion of the state into our lives. But he happily links to articles such as this one by Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch, regurgitates the most of the so-called scientific evidence against global warming, every single bit of which has been debunked and refuted before.

It is clear from the preponderance of evidence, from the vast majority of climate scientists (a number that is growing, not shrinking) that global warming is really happening and is caused by human activity. Why, then do libertarians and anarchists refuse to accept it?

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Ice Age Continues

Let's see how quick the flat earth society of climate change deniers are to grab onto this news item to once again claim that climate change is not the creation of capitalism.

The satellites found that the Earth's crust over Canada has not completed what scientists call the "post-glacial rebound." Now, it's clear that the ice age is still affecting the planet.

GRACE satellites have detected changes in the gravitational field over regions of Canada that can be attributed to the crust bouncing back after the melting of a glacier 20,000 years ago (Illustration: Science/ M Tamisiea)

CO2 burps from ocean to atmosphere at end of last ice age

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Groupthink

We sometimes overlook the most obvious connection between deniers, those who deny global warming, those who deny evolution and those who deny the holocaust.

They suffer from the same kind of groupthink and conspiracy theories.

Its not denial they say, it's debate they want, the facts are not irrefutable, there is evidence to the contrary.

For a long time Bradley Smith has tried to present himself as an honest chap, a champion of intellectual freedom simply seeking an "open debate"about the "holocaust controversy [sic]." But this debate is a sham. The so-called holocaust controversy does not exist. It is the invention of a collection of long-time anti-Semites and apologists for Hitler.

On the surface, Holocaust deniers portray themselves as individuals and groups engaged in a legitimate, dispassionate quest for historical knowledge and "truth."

Dressing themselves in pseudo-academic garb, they have adopted the term "revisionism" in order to mask and legitimate their enterprise. After all, the ongoing challenge to and revision of previously accepted historical interpretation is one of the hallmarks of the professional historian's craft.

Of course most holocaust deniers are right wing kooks that even other right wingers disavow or do they? Not so. Once upon a time they had powerful business backers, and in many cases still do today.

Like Robert Welch Jr. who founded the John Birch Society. Today the Birchites focus their criticism on immigration, legal or illegal and the UN. There are many in a variety of right wing movements, like the Minutemen, whose roots go back to the sixties and the World Anti-Bolshevik Movement which gave succour to post WWII fascists.

The right wing is inundated with conspiracy theorists, holocaust deniers and neo-fascists. And ideological differences aside they are part of the 'mainstream' right, they are backed by private business interests and the tactics they have developed over fifty years of lobbying in the United States remain the same.

Because they are effective. Deny that your opponents have evidence, claim something is a theory, not a fact and viola, their views are challenged for there creditability.

Thus the same argumentative tactic used to deny the holocaust is used to deny evolution and used to deny climate change. It is groupthink on the right. And the argumentative style does not change, the subject of the attack does.

And it is always tinged with conspiracy theory, that the scientific or historical facts are being foisted on us because it is consensus reality, consensus of those in power it is not the 'real thing'.

So all the historians that accept the holocaust are establishment historians not 'real' historians. Scientists that accept evolution or global warming are not 'real' scientists.

The only place that a climate change science consensus exists is in what Essex and McKitrick call 'Official Science', the collective voice of governments and other so-called 'science authorities'. But this is not real science.

The Climate Change Deniers have money and powerful connections they have used to discredit their opponents, in this case other scientists and academics. And sometimes do so to end careers, literally terrifying their opponents into silence. Certainly a form of fascism.

"There is a strategy to single out individuals, tarnish them and try to bring the whole of the science into disrepute," he says. "And Kevin [Trenberth] is a likely target." Mann agrees that the scientists behind the upcoming IPCC report are in for a rough ride. "There is already an orchestrated campaign against the IPCC by climate change contrarians," he says.

Many of the IPCC's authors, some of whom asked not to be named, say this is a smokescreen. They claim there is an extensive network of lobby groups and scientists involved in making the case against the IPCC and its reports. Automobile, coal and oil companies have coordinated and funded past attacks on them, the scientists say. Sometimes this has been done through Washington lobby groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), whose officers include Myron Ebell, a former climate negotiator for George W. Bush's administration. Recently, the CEI made television advertisements arguing against climate change, one of which ended with the words: "Carbon dioxide, they call it pollution, we call it life." CEI's past funders include ExxonMobil, General Motors and the Ford Motor Company.

The money trail

Some sceptical scientists are funded directly by industry. In July, The Washington Post published a leaked letter from the Intermountain Rural Electric Association (IREA), an energy company based in Colorado, that exhorted power companies to support the work of the prominent sceptic Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Worried about the potential cost of cleaning up coal-fired power plants to reduce their CO₂ emissions, IREA's general manager, Stanley Lewandowski, wrote: "We believe that it is necessary to support the scientific community that is willing to stand up against the alarmists... In February this year, IREA alone contributed $100,000 to Dr Michaels."

The Fraser Institutes response to the IPCC report was a long time in the making, and a coordinated effort between them and the anti-climate change lobby, the flat earthers, in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe. And the organizations, front groups really, are all interconnected.

It was planned years ago, as new front organizations sprung up over the past three years in preparation for the IPCC report. While the Fraser Institute like its American counter-part the Cato Institute have existed since the seventies, groups like Canada's Natural Resources Stewardship Project, and the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition are all relatively new lobbying groups. Even the older Friends of Science. was only created in 2002.

The push was on by the right and their big business backers when they saw the writing on the wall after Kyoto was signed. One faction of capitalism endorsed Kyoto, another was ambivalent, and a handful, but a powerful handful, vehmently opposed Kyoto.

Having lost the war they now engage in a protracted series of battles to attempt to inundate doubt in the public mind, using fronts like Junk Science.com and Fox News, various assorted right wing media mouthpieces in Canada, Europe and America. They know they have lost, but if in anyway they can hold back radical changes required to deal with the heat death of the planet, to save their industries they will. Victory to them is to delay change.

And they will never go away, another issue will come to the fore that they can delay, attack, undermine, and deny. And the consipiratorial politics of denial will once again be used.

The Right Wing exposes the Janus nature of the ruling class. One face appeals to the public as liberal, seeking to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism, the other jingoist, nativist, reactionary seeks to dominate through demagoguery and populism. One is enlightened capitalism the other is fascism. Both are false choices.

The alternative is, as it has always been for the past one hundred years, Barbarism or Socialism.



See:

Fraser Institute

Environment

Conspiracy Theory

Fascism

Anti-Semitism


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Fraser Institutes Flat Earth Report

Real Climate - Climate Science From Scientists says the Fraser Institutes Flat Earth response to the IPCC report, falls flat as a pancake;

An unofficial, "Independent Summary for Policymakers" (ISPM) of the IPCC Fourth Assessment report has been delivered by the Fraser Institute. It's a long, imposing-looking document, resembling, come to think of it, the formatting of the real Summary for Policymakers (SPM) document that was released on Friday after final negotiations of the IPCC in Paris last week. The Fraser Institute has assembled an awsome team of 10 authors, including such RC favorites as tilter-against-windmills-and-hockey-sticks Ross McKitrick, and other luminaries such as William Kininmonth, MSc, M.Admin -- whose most recent paper is "Don't be Gored into Going Along" in the Oct-Nov issue of Power Engineer. To be fair, he did publish a paper on weather forecasting, back in 1973. According to the press release, the London kickoff event will be graced by the presence of "noted environmentalist" David Bellamy. It's true he's "noted," but what he's noted for is his blatant fabrication of numbers purporting to show that the world's glaciers are advancing rather retreating, as reported here.

And Real Climate refutes the theory of Radiative Forcing which Blogging Tory Kitchner Conservative used in his blog to prove that the IPCC report was Fear Mongering and Alarmism.

One of the strangest sections of the Fraser Institute report is the one in which the authors attempt to throw dirt on the general concept of radiative forcing. Radiative forcing is nothing more than an application of the principle of conservation of energy, looking at the way a greenhouse gas alters the energy balance of a planet. The use of energy conservation arguments of this type has been standard practice in physics at least since the time of Fourier. We have heard certain vice presidents dismiss "Energy Conservation" as merely a matter of personal virtue, but we have never before heard people who purport to be scientists write off the whole utility of "Conservation of Energy." From what is written in the Fraser report, it is not even clear that the authors understand the first thing about how radiative transfer calculations are done.

Ouch.

And DeSmogblog issued a press release in anticipation of the Fraser Institutes Report today;

DeSmogBlog.com: IPCC Criticism Fits into Canadian Climate Change ...

A Canadian think tank's attack on the recently released report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is one of several recent initiatives by Canadian groups to block action on global warming, DeSmogBlog.com President, James Hoggan, said Monday. The latest attack, by the Exxon-funded Fraser Institute, is scheduled to be released today, Feb. 5 at a press conference in the United Kingdom.

"These people are an embarrassment to Canadians," Hoggan said. Two industry front groups (the Natural Resources Stewardship Project and the Friends of Science) have popped up in Canada the last couple of years, spreading doubt about climate change at every turn. And a scientist associated with those groups put together a petition of skeptical "experts" last spring, a petition that was quoted in U.S. Senate committee hearings.

Now the Fraser Institute, a right-wing think tank that has received annual grants from oil-giant ExxonMobil, is issuing what it calls an independent summary of the report of the IPCC. The Institute claimed that the IPCC's own summary is a political document "neither written by nor reviewed by the scientific community".

Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis and a lead IPCC author called the Fraser Institute's effort "highly ideological". The IPCC summary was written and reviewed by some of the most senior climate scientists in the world, without political or bureaucratic input, Weaver said.

The English newspaper the Mirror issued the following report;

ATTACKS ON GLOBAL WARMING

A RIGHT-WING think tank funded by oil firms will today try to rubbish claims of climate change.

The Canadian-based Fraser Institute argues there is no globally consistent pattern in rain or snow falls and not enough data to prove rising temperatures pose a danger.

Its review - branded "rubbish" by Friends of the Earth - attempts to challenge the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which compiled a report by 2,500 scientists from more than 130 countries.

ExxonMobil has paid the institute more than £30,000. A quarter of its funding comes from organisations including pharmaceutical, oil, and gas companies.

Today's launch of the report follows the revelation that the right-wing American Enterprise Institute - also funded by ExxonMobil - offered scientists up to £5,000 to underminine the IPCC study.

Just to be Fair and Balanced as they say on Faux Newz.

The Scoop from New Zealand published a news release from a New Zealand Flat Earth Coalition, another arm of the Fraser Institute. You can tell because they call the Fraser Institute an 'independent think tank', not a right wing one nor do they mention Exxon funded the report, nor the fact they are one of the Fraser Institutes sources.

Press Release: New Zealand Climate Science Coalition

Independent Summary Shows New UN Climate Change Report Refutes Alarmism And Reveals Major Uncertainties In The Science

February 5, 2007

For Immediate Release

LONDON, UK—An independent review of the latest United Nations report on climate change shows that the scientific evidence about global warming remains uncertain and provides no basis for alarmism.

In 2006, independent research organization The Fraser Institute convened a panel of 10 internationally-recognized experts to read the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) draft report and produce an Independent Summary for Policymakers. The result, released today and available at www.fraserinstitute.ca, is a detailed and thorough overview of the state of the science. This independent summary has been reviewed by more than 50 scientists around the world and their views on its balance and reliability are tabulated for readers.

US Republican Senator Inhofe is using the Fraser Institute Report to refute the IPCC Report, he too is aligned with the small circle of climate deniers, he quotes the report almost word for word,

Washington, DC – Sen. James Inhofe, (R-Okla.), Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, today commented on the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Summary for Policymakers.

"This is a political document, not a scientific report, and it is a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain. The media has failed to report that the IPCC Summary for Policymakers was not approved by scientists but by UN political delegates and bureaucrats," Senator Inhofe said. The IPCC is only releasing the Summary for Policymakers today, not the actual scientific report which is not due out until May 2007.

Which is refuted by Real Climate;

Why go to all the trouble of producing an "independent" summary? The authors illuminate us with this wisdom regarding the official Summary for Policymakers: "A further problem is that the Summary for Policy Makers attached to the IPCC Report is produced, not by the scientific writers and reviewers, but by a process of negotiation among unnamed bureaucratic delegates from sponsoring governments." This statement (charitably) shows that the Fraser Institute authors are profoundly ignorant of the IPCC process. In fact, the actual authors of the official SPM are virtually all scientists, and are publically acknowleged. Moreover, the lead authors of the individual chapters are represented in the writing process leading to the SPM, and their job is to defend the basic science in their chapters. As lead author Gerald Meehl remarked to one of us on his way to Paris: "Scientists have to be ok, they have the last check. If they think the science is not represented, then they can send it back to the breakout groups. "

Inhofe, the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition; a handful of scientists and rigth wing lobbyists, and a wine grower, like the folks the Fraser Institute has rounded up are all part of the coalition funded by Exxon of climate change deniers, like the Candian petro lobby; Friends of Science.

In fine neo-con tradition what they do is quote each other, without refering to the fact they all belong to the same club, as if that proves their authority and points.
And they make the misleading claim that they are "leading climate scientists" which of course they are not. They are corporate apologists for capitalism.

This is the same tactic used when the Fraser Institute issues an economic report on the joys of the free market, proving their evidence by quoting a "leading" economicst from the Cato Institute, which of course quotes a "leading" economist from the Fraser Institute as a source.

You get where all this is leading. It is a self completing circle, as Phil Ochs said; a small circle of friends. Though one could be forgiven for considering it an ideological circle jerk.

See:

Fraser Institute

Environment


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Fraser Institute Meets Bill O'Riley

Love this announcement from the Fraser Institute for their Flat Earth Report; note the Bill O'Riley like No Spin Zone pronouncement.

Climate Change Without the Spin:
An Independent Summary for Policymakers of the New IPCC Report

When spinning is exactly what this is all about. Another example of neo-con newspeak.


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Environment


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BT Climate Change Denial

Well this proves that in order to be a true card carrying conservative in Canada you must, despite all evidence to the contrary, continue to deny the scientific evidence of Global Warming. Not because you don't believe it but because it's the rigorous (as in rigor mortus) position you MUST hold or all is lost.

As evidenced by the following Blogging Tory posts:
PCC Report Doesn't Prove Causality
By the Numbers
"The best CTV push-poll yet..."
A Voice of Sanity at the Globe
From the people who brought you...
"The semantics of climate change"
The forecast calls for pain
National Post reinforces my point
"Global Cooling" ?
It?s very likely, said the groundhog
It is VERY LIKELY!

etc. etc. ad nauseum.

The irony is that like their Great Leaders denial of the science of climate change/Global Warming back in 2002 when he called Kyoto a 'money sucking socialist' scheme, these poor deluded folks don't get it.

Kyoto is meant to save capitalism from itself. It has to do with ameliorating the worst excesses of the market by creating a market to exchange carbon credits, thus producing a new form of stock market. That is capitalism in action. Nothing socialist about it. Well except for government regulations, which even capitalists agree are needed to keep the playing field level.

Of course these folks are correct in pointing out Kyoto doesn't work, nor can capitalism when it comes to changing the course of its own inherent crisis as the result of its creation of self sustaining technology.

See:

Environment

Kyoto

A Critique of Kyoto Capitalism Is NOT Sustainable

Socialism

industrial ecology

Social Ecology

Green Capitalism

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Flat Earth Society Meets In London

The New Flat Earth Society is officially meeting in London England to respond to the UN Global Warming report issued by the IPCC in Paris.

And its all paid for by Exxon Mobil.

And it is a tax write off because they are a registered as a charity in Canada and the United States. Yep your tax dollars help pay for this right wing drivel.

Their sypmathisers at the National Pest round up the usual suspects to be 'objective' in their reporting on global warming. If being objective means quoting folks about why the world is flat.

These guys are the grass roots base of the Harper government so the fact the New Canadian Government opposes Kyoto should come as no surprise.

And just because they have scientists on their side don't forget so did these guys;

The Flat Earth Society was founded in 1956 by Samuel Shenton, a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Geographic Society, as a successor to the 19th century Universal Zetetic Society. The Flat Earth Society devised detailed arguments, based on scientific observations and references to the Bible, to support their claim that the Earth is a motionless disc not an orbiting globe.


A tip o the blog to Buckdog, Far and Wide and Mike Marin

See

John Baird In Exxons Pocket?

Climate Change Skeptics the New Flat Earthers

Fraser Institute

Environment

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