Exclusive New Video: Calls cap-and-trade an ‘horrendous scam’ — Joins other left of center scientific and activist dissenters

By Marc Morano

Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt, a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement. 

In a hard-hitting and new exclusive video just released by Climate Depot, Dr. Rancourt declares that the entire man-made global warming movement is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else,” Rancourt, who has published peer-reviewed research, explained in a June 8, 2010 essay. (Rancourt’s email: claude.cde@gmail.com)

Watch Rancourt video here. 

“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said. 

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he stated.

Read the rest at Climate Depot.

The CCX was the topic of thousands of MSM articles over the years, but not a single article reported their recent demise. Hmmm.

By Steve Milloy

Global warming-inspired cap and trade has been one of the most stridently debated public policy controversies of the past 15 years. But it is dying a quiet death. In a little reported move, the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) announced on Oct. 21 that it will be ending carbon trading — the only purpose for which it was founded — this year.

Although the trading in carbon emissions credits was voluntary, the CCX was intended to be the hub of the mandatory carbon trading established by a cap-and-trade law, like the Waxman-Markey scheme passed by the House in June 2009.

At its founding in November 2000, it was estimated that the size of CCX’s carbon trading market could reach $500 billion. That estimate ballooned over the years to $10 trillion.

Al Capone tried to use Prohibition to muscle in on a piece of all the action in Chicago. The CCX’s backers wanted to use a new prohibition on carbon emissions to muscle in on a piece of, quite literally, all the action in the world.

Read the rest at Pajamas Media.

By Paul Chesser

Hey! Did you know that what is depicted in those nature documentaries is not always genuinely “in the wild?” It’s often set up in controlled circumstances, according to Chris Palmer, author of a new book that uncovers the tricks used by wildlife videographers. From the Washington Post:

…At 63, he has written a confessional for an entire industry. “Shooting in the Wild,” published this year by Sierra Club Books, exposes the unpleasant secrets of environmental filmmaking: manufactured sounds, staged fights, wild animals that aren’t quite wild filmed in nature that isn’t entirely natural.

Read the rest at the American Spectator.

By Elmer Beauregard

HACKENSACK – Yet another Global Warming report came out yesterday, it’s called “Global Warming and Extreme Weather” and its put out by a group called Environment Minnesota.

I haven’t had a chance to look at it in detail yet, but it seems to be the same old recycled shtick. They are trying to blame the horribly cold winter we had on “Global Warming”.

Plus, there were some floods and it was hot this summer (even though it never broke 100º) and its all our fault. So just like our ancestors we must make sacrifices to the gods of Global Warming and they will save us.

I Googled the term “extreme weather global warming” to see what people were saying about it and was surprised by what I found.

This same supposedly “Local” report was also done in Maryland by Environment Maryland. I found the same thing in NewJersey, Iowa, Pennsylvania (of course), and Virginia. I don’t know how long the list goes on.

The other thing I noticed is all the websites have the same logo, so I did a whois and found out that all these sites are registered by the same group Fund for Public Interest based in Boston Massachusetts and by the same person Marcia Eldridge.

Read the rest of this ground-breaking story at Minnesotans for Global Warming.

By Elmer Beauregard

I was checking out the blogoshere and latest on Michael Mann and how he has been cleared of all wrong doing. I noticed that they are now admitting he did hide the decline, but now their saying that its no big deal.

An End to Climategate? Penn State Clears Michael Mann
Wyatt Andrews, CBS News

Tree data showing global temps going down didn’t mesh with actual recorded temperatures, so pains were taken, (most of the time disclosed, but sometimes not) to use actual temp recordings and “hide the decline” from trees. Sometimes, on the so called hockey stick charts that show global temps as a flat line and then a sharp upward spike are indeed mixing tree ring data and actual temps.

The five key leaked emails from UEA’s Climatic Research Unit
Fred Pearce, guardian.co.uk

Jones and Mike Mann had been adding real temperatures to the end longer graphs of temperature estimates based on tree rings. The only thing being “hidden” was tree ring data that did not match reality.

This last statement is remarkable because it shows that what is being done in the realm of “Climate Science” is not science at all but rather politics.

Read the rest at Minnesotans For Global Warming.

Professor Phil Jones, the scientist at the centre of the ‘climategate scandal’, is to be reinstated in his role at the University of East Anglia after being cleared of dishonesty by a major review.

By Louise Gray

Prof Jones lost his job as head of the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA after personal emails he sent appeared on the internet.

The emails referred to a ‘trick’ used to interpret data and the death of a leading climate change sceptic as “cheering news.”

Sceptics claimed the stolen emails showed Prof Jones and his colleagues were willing to manipulate key data to exaggerate the rise in global temperatures.

The scandal, that became known as ‘climategate’, caused repercussions around the world as it was used by those who question the case for man made global warming.

However a comprehensive review into the case by Sir Muir Russell, a senior UK civil servant, has cleared Prof Jones of dishonest behaviour.

Edward Acton, Vice Chancellor of the UEA, immediately announced that Prof Jones will be reinstated as Director of Research in CRU, a role of similar importance to his last post.

He said it was a personal vindication for Prof Jones, who has said he considered suicide over the affair.

“We hope this means the wilder assertions about the climate science community will stop,” he said.

However sceptics claimed the report was a whitewash and questioned the reinstatement of Prof Jones.

David Holland, one of the leading sceptics on the blogosphere, pointed out that Prof Jones referred to deleting emails in one of his communications.

“Would you trust a man who has asked to delete evidence?” he said.

Read the rest of this story at The London Telegraph.

By Marc Oestreich

Former Vice President Al Gore spent the last decade as a larger-than-life figure, more of a symbol than a living, breathing human being. Stolen from the pages of a Danielle Steele novel and plopped on stage at the 2000 Democratic Convention, this normally lifeless personality was possessed by the ghost of Madmen’s Jon Hamm and political pop-culture history was made. Al and Tipper’s kiss marked the dawn of Gore’s personal stardom and his pet project: anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmism.

Since his mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, Gore has been married to the AGW cause. And just as Al’s and Tipper’s kiss represented the dawn of the most successful movement in pseudoscience, their divorce aptly marks its end.

A stark trend toward accepting empirical science instead of speculation has caused the ground beneath AGW to cave in quickly. Like the news of the Gore divorce, the scientific evidence hit the public as if from nowhere. But both these cases are results of major, longstanding problems instead of a single cataclysmic event.

For AGW alarmism, what were once dismissed as minor discrepancies are being exposed as major contradictions of the scientific facts.

At first, AGW was a smooth talker. Graphs, models, charts, PowerPoints, and Hollywood movies all worked to persuade. As questions began to arise, however, patronizing and talking down turned small spats into explosive arguments. The Michael Mann “hockey stick” diagram was exposed as being based on a trick that would make any trend look like a spike. Gore’s new mansion was built in an area he had predicted would be underwater in the near future. The Climategate scandal showed us AGW was hiding the facts. Stories weren’t adding up.

Read the rest at Heartland Institute.

FOIA Response Long Overdue

By Stephan Dinan

The man battling NASA for access to potential “Climategate” e-mails says the agency is still withholding documents and that NASA may be trying to stall long enough to avoid hurting an upcoming Senate debate on global warming.

Nearly three years after his first Freedom of Information Act request, Christopher C. Horner, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said he will file a lawsuit Thursday to force NASA to turn over documents the agency has promised but has never delivered.

Mr. Horner said he expects the documents, primarily e-mails from scientists involved with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), will be yet another blow to the science behind global warming, which has come under fire in recent months after e-mails from a leading British research unit indicated scientists had manipulated some data.

“What we’ve got is the third leg of the stool here, which is the U.S.-led, NASA-run effort to defend what proved to be indefensible, and that was a manufactured record of aberrant warming,” Mr. Horner said. “We assume that we will also see through these e-mails, as we’ve seen through others, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws like FOIA.”

Read the rest of this story at the Washington Times.

Global Warming Hysteria Might be a Crime

By Steve Milloy

Are academics some special subspecies of humans who are beyond suspicion and above the law? That’s the question being played out in a drama between Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli and the dead-end defenders of global warming’s poster junk scientist, Michael Mann.

Mr. Cuccinelli is under assault by the climate-alarmist brigades for launching an investigation into whether any fraud against taxpayers occurred with respect to Mr. Mann’s hiring by the University of Virginia and his receipt of government grants. Mr. Cuccinelli recently sent the university a civil investigative demand requesting e-mails and other documents pertaining to Mr. Mann.

Mr. Cuccinelli’s rationale is simple to understand: Mr. Mann’s claim to fame – the infamous “hockey stick” graph – is so bogus that one cannot help but wonder whether it is intentional fraud.

Developed in the late 1990s, while he was at the University of Massachusetts, Mr. Mann’s hockey-stick graph purports to show that average global temperature over the past millennium was stable until the 20th century, when it spiked up, presumably because of human activity. The hockey stick was latched onto by the alarmist community, incorporated into government and United Nations assessments of climate science and held out to the public (particularly by Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth”) as proof that humans were destroying the planet.

But by the mid-2000s the hockey-stick graph was revealed for what it was – pure bunk.

Skeptics first became suspicious because the hockey stick failed to show two well-known periods of dramatic swings in global temperature – the so-called Medieval Optimum and the Little Ice Age. Mr. Mann’s indignant refusal to share his data and methods with skeptics only added fuel to the fire. Eventually, skeptics discovered that the hockey stick’s computer model would produce a hockey-stick graph regardless of what data was input. But it gets worse.

Mr. Mann apparently created the hockey stick by cherry-picking data he liked and deleting data he didn’t like. While the vast majority of the hockey stick is based on temperature data extrapolated from tree rings going back hundreds of years, the tip of the blade (representing the late 20th century) was temperature data taken from thermometers. Beyond the obvious apples-and-oranges problem, Mr. Mann appended the thermometer data to the hockey stick at a point at which the tree-ring data actually shows cooling. This cooling trend data was then deleted. This is what is referred to by the now-famous “Climategate” phrase “Mike’s Nature trick to … hide the decline.”

Read the rest of this piece at the Washington Times.

Investors Business Daily Editorial

Corruption: The carbon trading system being pushed here has spawned crime and fraud across the pond. Cap-and-trade is not about saving the planet. It’s about money and power, and absolute power corrupting absolutely.

All across Europe authorities have been conducting raids, rounding up individuals involved in a new version of Climate-gate. This time the data aren’t corrupted. Europe’s Emissions Trading System is. The system is so sick, it’s turned out to be a scam built upon a scam.

Twenty-five people have been arrested in raids by British and German authorities as part of a pan-European crackdown on carbon credit VAT tax fraud.

U.K. officials announced raids on 81 offices and homes, nabbing 13 people in England and eight in Scotland. The operation involved 450 investigators from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs office.

German authorities raided 230 locations, including the headquarters of Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt and the offices of RWE, one of the largest energy firms in Europe. The German operation involved 1,000 investigators targeting 50 companies and 150 suspects.

The amount of money involved in carbon trading is huge and the temptations vast. While our Congress demagogues about banks and their “complex financial instruments,” they are simple compared to cap-and-trade, which as we have noted involves essentially the buying and selling of air. Throw in an oppressive value-added tax and you have a recipe for corruption and fraud.

Last December, Europol, the European criminal intelligence agency, announced that Emissions Trading System fraud had resulted in about 5 billion euros in lost revenues as Europe’s carbon traders schemed to avoid paying Europe’s VAT and pocket the difference. In announcing the raids, the agency said that as much as 90% of Europe’s carbon trades were the result of fraudulent activity.

Read the rest at Investors Business Daily.

Cap-And-Trade: While senators froth over Goldman Sachs and derivatives, a climate trading scheme being run out of the Chicago Climate Exchange would make Bernie Madoff blush. Its trail leads to the White House.

Lost in the recent headlines was Al Gore’s appearance Monday in Denver at the annual meeting of the Council of Foundations, an association of the nation’s philanthropic leaders.

“Time’s running out (on climate change),” Gore told them. “We have to get our act together. You have a unique role in getting our act together.”

Gore was right that foundations will play a key role in keeping the climate scam alive as evidence of outright climate fraud grows, just as they were critical in the beginning when the Joyce Foundation in 2000 and 2001 provided the seed money to start the Chicago Climate Exchange. It started trading in 2003, and what it trades is, essentially, air. More specifically perhaps, hot air.

The Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) advertises itself as “North America’s only cap-and-trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.” Barack Obama served on the board of the Joyce Foundation from 1994 to 2002 when the CCX startup grants were issued. As president, pushing cap-and-trade is one of his highest priorities. Now isn’t that special?

Read the rest of this story at Investors Business Daily.

By Dr. Richard Lindzen

In November last year a file appeared on the internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. How this file got into the public domain is still uncertain, but the emails, whose authenticity is no longer in question, provided a startling view into the world of climate research.

In what has become known as Climategate, one could see unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation.

Moreover, the emails showed collusion with other prominent researchers in the US and elsewhere. The CRU supplies many of the authors for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

One might have thought the revelations would discredit the science underlying proposed global warming policy. Indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December’s Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits.

But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the effect of the emails appears to have been small.

The general approach of the scientific community (at least in the US and Britain) has been to see whether people will bother to look at the files in detail (they mostly have not) and to wait until time diffuses the initial impressions to reassert the original message of a climate catastrophe that must be fought with widespread carbon control. This reassertion, however, continues to be suffused by illogic, nastiness and outright dishonesty.

There were, of course, the inevitable investigations of individuals such as Penn State University’s Michael Mann (who manipulated data to create the famous “hockey stick” climate graph) and Phil Jones (director of the CRU).

The investigations were brief, lacked depth and were conducted mainly by individuals already publicly committed to the popular view of climate alarm. The results were whitewashes that are incredible given the data.

Read the rest of this article at The Australian.

Looks like the warmists are getting SLAPP happy (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation).

Climate modeller Andrew Weaver launches libel action in Canada for publishing ‘grossly irresponsible falsehoods’

By David Adam

One of the world’s leading climate scientists has launched a libel lawsuit against a Canadian newspaper for publishing articles that he says “poison” the debate on global warming.

In a case with potentially huge consequences for online publishers, lawyers acting for Andrew Weaver, a climate modeller at the University of Victoria, Canada, have demanded the National Post removes the articles not only from its own websites, but also from the numerous blogs and sites where they were reposted.

Weaver says the articles, published at the height of several recent controversies over the reliability of climate science in recent months, contain “grossly irresponsible falsehoods”. He said he filed the suit after the newspaper refused to retract the articles.

Weaver said: “If I sit back and do nothing to clear my name, these libels will stay on the internet forever. They’ll poison the factual record, misleading people who are looking for reliable scientific information about global warming.”

The four articles, published from December to February, claimed that Weaver cherrypicked data to support his climate research, and that he tried to blame the “evil fossil fuel” industry for break-ins at his office in 2008 to divert attention from reported mistakes in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on which he was lead author.

The lawsuit also highlights several claims in the articles that attempt to question or undermine the scientific consensus on climate change, including that annual global mean temperatures have stopped increasing in the last decade and that climate models are “falling apart”.

Such statements, the lawsuit says, would lead readers to conclude that Weaver “is so strongly motivated by a corrupt interest in receiving government funding that he willfully conceals scientific climate data which refutes global warming in order to keep alarming the public so that it welcomes… funding for climate scientists such as himself.”

Weaver said: “I asked the National Post to do the right thing, to retract a number of recent articles that attributed to me statements I never made, accused me of things I never did, and attacked me for views I never held. To my absolute astonishment, the newspaper refused.”

A spokesman for the National Post said: “Beyond saying that we intend to defend the article, we do not comment on such suits.”

Read the rest of this story at the London Guardian.

By Julia A Seymour

It’s been a rough five months for the credibility of many of the “leading” climate scientists.

First, the ClimateGate e-mails appeared to show unethical or illegal behavior of high profile scientists and a potential conspiracy to distort science for political gain. These weren’t just a few renegade scientists; in the following months, damning information came to light about the world’s leading climate alarmists and their work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Stern Report, the U.S. National Climate Data Center and even NASA.

 

Even with the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day coming up on April 22, Americans are skeptical about the threat of climate change. A March 2010 Gallup poll found that 48 percent of Americans think the threat of global warming is “generally exaggerated.” That’s the highest in 13 years, according to Gallup.

 

The public’s receding fear of climate change may be related to the series of scandals and admissions that have been uncovered since Nov. 20 when e-mails from University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) were leaked. Those e-mails provided “ammunition” to climate skeptics about the authenticity and ethics surrounding the CRU’s work on global warming science.

 

The networks news media were unshaken by the apparent bad behavior on the part of the very climate scientists and organizations whose claims they had pushed for years. Less than 10 percent of stories mentioning global warming or climate change since Nov. 20, 2009, referenced any of the climate science scandals.

 

The first scandal of many – ClimateGate – involved thousands of stolen e-mails showing the potential manipulation of temperature data, a willingness to destroy information rather than release it under British Freedom of Information (FOI) law and the intimidation of publications willing to publish skeptical articles.

 

Read the Executive Summary

Read the rest of this story at Business & Media Institute.

By Eoin O’Carrol

In an unprecedented move Wednesday, the Norwegian Nobel Committee rescinded the Peace Prize it awarded in 2007 to former US vice president Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, amid overwhelming evidence that global warming is an elaborate hoax cooked up by Mr. Gore.

A press release from the committee quotes a chagrined Rajendra Pachauri, the UN climate panel’s chair, who claims that he was the victim of a “cunning deception spanning decades”:

“I am deeply ashamed for having unwittingly perpetuated such a massive fraud on the governments of the world,” said Mr. Pachauri.

“It turns out that all that data from satellites and radiosondes, surface temperature readings, borehole analysis, measurements of rising sea levels, melting glaciers and permafrost, phenological data, and proxy reconstructions of paleoclimatic conditions were all fabricated out of thin air by my former friend, Al Gore. Now that I think about it, I suppose that we should have instituted some sort of peer-review process before publishing such alarming conclusions. Once again, I’m very sorry.”

After revoking the 2007 prize from Gore and the IPCC, the Nobel committee retroactively awarded it to the more than 31,000 people who signed the Oregon Petition – an appeal challenging the notion that there exists a scientific consensus regarding global warming – “for their efforts to pursue pure, objective science that is free from the influence of any special interest group.”

Read the rest at Christian Science Monitor.