The GOLDEN RULE

This article, under the prefix “Hellfire and Heresy:”, is from Larry Bell, ‘Forbes.com’.  It brings together a lot of information about the politics, policies and attitudes of personnel actively involved in the promotion of the global warming movement. Revealing a lot of fiery rhetoric and display of extremely bad manners, often associated with defending the indefensible.

An overview of the present state of the ‘art’, normally referred to as ‘science’. However, the science has not been included here, only how it has been left behind, together with the ‘truth’, distorted, mutilated or ignored.

Nobel Physics laureate Ivar Giaever has called global warming (now “climate change”) a “new religion”. Its temple is built on grounds of faith rather than scientific foundations.

Author Michael Crichton articulated the essence of this creed in a 2003 speech whereby “There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with Nature; there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result from eating from the tree of knowledge; and as a result of our actions, there is a judgment day coming for all of us. We are energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment, just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs imbibe.”

It seems the deepest, hottest pit of fossil-fueled climate change hell is reserved for crisis “deniers”. These are the heretics who have either turned their backs on true villainy of human climate sin, or worse, are its evil agents.

An article written by Forbes contributor Steve Zwick last month charges the latter. Moreover, he called for retribution, venting: “We know who the active denialists are–not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn. Let’s swap their safe land for submerged islands. Let’s force them to bear the cost of rising food prices. They broke the climate. Why should the rest of us have to pay for it?”

After his article ignited a firestorm of inflamed reader responses, Steve has subsequently posted a second one clarifying that it wasn’t really his wish to incite burning of skeptical households. And it’s unlikely that most ever saw that as his literal intent. I certainly understand that opinion columns, very much including mine, should often be expected to present controversial viewpoints that provoke reflection and commentary. No doubt, he clearly accomplished that.

Environmental blog author Mark Lynas has expressed a similarly harsh moral view of climate crisis skeptics: “I wonder what sentences judges might hand down at future international criminal tribunals on those who are partially but directly responsible for millions of deaths from starvation, famine and disease in decades ahead. I put this in a similar moral category to Holocaust denial-except that this time the Holocaust is yet to come, and we still have time to avoid it. Those who try to ensure we don’t will one day have to answer for their crimes.”

The horrifically offensive Holocaust/climate denier conflation has come to be indelibly inculcated into the attack lexicon through repeated references. For example, when television commentator Scott Pelly was asked in a March 23, 2006 CBS PublicEye blog post why he didn’t interview anyone who didn’t agree that global warming is a threat, he compared scientists who are skeptical about human-caused catastrophic climate change to Holocaust deniers: “If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?”

David Roberts, a regular contributor to Grist, a prominent environmental news and commentary blog site, carried the denier Holocaust theme even farther. Referring to the “denial industry”, he stated that we should have “war crime trials for these bastards—some sort of Nuremberg.”

UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) chairman, Rajendra Pachuri, even went beyond the Holocaust to compare the views of global warming crisis skeptics with those of Hitler himself. Referring to the well-known skeptic Bjorn Lombord, Pachuri stated, “What is the difference between Lomborg’s views on humans and Hitler’s? You cannot treat people like cattle.”

Another broadly applied denigration strategy is to accuse skeptical scientists and organizations of having nefarious financial ties to “evil” special interest sponsors, most particularly, being in the pockets of Big Oil companies.  An example is Al Gore’s claim in a Rolling Stones article last year that: “Polluters and Ideologues are financing pseudoscientists whose job it is to manufacture doubt about what is true and false [and] ….spending hundreds of millions of dollars each year on misleading advertisements in the mass media.”

Al didn’t happen to mention, however,  that his alarmist Alliance for Climate Protection organization reportedly netted more than $88 million in 2008, that the Natural Resources Defense Council took in more than $95 million in 2011 operating revenues, or that the World Wildlife Fund raised more than $238 million last year. Nor did he call attention to his Generation Investment Management hedge fund that realizes huge profits from investors in government subsidized “green” projects.

But Gore hasn’t been the least bit reticent about taking high-profile positions in support of personally lucrative cap-and-trade legislation and alternative energy subsidies. Speaking before a 2007 U.S. Joint House Energy and Science Committee, he enthused: “As soon as carbon has a price, you’re going to see a wave of investment in it–there will be unchained investment.”

Yes, what better way to reduce evil carbon than to make it a profitable commodity?

Some bent on linking climate crisis skeptics to greedy corporate agendas have reverted to the desperation tactic of fabricating such evidence. A recent incident involved noted climate skeptic critic Peter Gleick who, ironically, chaired the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Task force on Scientific Ethics. Gleick illegally obtained confidential materials including financial sponsorship documents from the conservative Heartland Institute. He then publicly distributed them along with a forged document which falsely reported a $200,000 contribution from the Koch Foundation along with other intentionally misleading claims.

In reality, Heartland had received only $25,000 from Koch interests over an entire ten year period to help support a health care newsletter. None of that money was either intended or used for their climate-related research and information services. The organization had received no funding from Exxon or other petroleum companies.

Al Gore’s assertion that climate alarm skeptics, motivated by prurient interests, are “manufacturing doubt about what is true and false” ignores a far different reality. Most of that media climate reporting emanates from tax-supported government and university climate scientists whose jobs depend upon stoking alarm-fueled funding pots.

Disquieting and costly consequences of this circumstance have become apparent through Freedom of Information Act exposure of scandalous e-mail exchanges between international researchers within the U.K.’s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) network. Many of these communications clearly reveal that top IPCC scientists consciously misrepresented and actively withheld vitally important information …then attempted to prevent discovery. As Myron Ebell, Director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Center on Energy and Environment observes stated: “Several of the new e-mails show that the scientists involved in doctoring the IPCC reports are very aware that the energy-rationing policies that their junk science is meant to support would cost trillions of dollars.”

In one e-mail, a scientist warned: “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.” Another admits: “…clearly, some tuning or very good luck [is] involved.  I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.” Still another modeler complained: “Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive — there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC …”

Of course climate model projections are fatally compromised from the get-go when based upon poor global temperature records. One e-mail posted by database programmer Ian “Harry” Harris reports: “[The] hopeless state of their [CRU] database. No uniform data integrity. It’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found…There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy [surface temperature recording] stations…and duplicates…Aarrggghh! There truly is no end in sight. This project is such a MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!”

One key source of that data is NASA’s Goddard Institute of Climate Science (GISS), headed by the Father of Fright, James Hansen. For example, on December 6, 2005 Hansen stated that the Earth’s climate was already reaching a tipping point that will result in the loss of Arctic ice as we know it, with sea levels rising as much as 80 feet during this century (40 times higher than even the upper end of the most recent IPCC summary report has projected), thus flooding coastal areas.

A GISS researcher confessed in an e-mail that “[the United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date, and in another that NASA had inflated its temperature data since 2000 on a questionable basis. “NASA’s assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data…may not have been correct.”

Under Hansen’s influence, irresponsible GISS performance has been a long-term embarrassment to many at NASA who believe it reflects very badly upon its public reputation. This concern prompted 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts to send a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden on April 10, admonishing the agency for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change, while neglecting basic empirical evidence that calls the theory into question.

The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, are dismayed over the failure of NASA, particularly GISS, to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change. They charge that NASA is relying too heavily upon complex climate models that have proven to be scientifically inadequate for climate predictions as little as one or two decades in advance.

Senator John Kerry, who civil servant Hansen had famously endorsed for his 2004 presidential run, recently lamented a political climate change regarding what he referred to as “the flat-Earth caucus” of global warming skeptics, saying: “Even amid the ‘Tuesday Group’…a bi-partisan block of lawmakers, mostly Democrats, who are interested in energy issues… you can’t talk about climate now.  People just turn off. It’s extraordinary. Only for national security and jobs will they open their minds.”

More and more Americans no longer buy that indictment. Nor, apparently, do many Democrat senators who are currently facing hot challenges from skeptical cooler-headed opponents.

The complete post here.

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