politics

Margaret Thatcher was the first senior politician to get involved in the global warming debate. At the time she was closing the British coal industry, fighting a battle with the miner's unions, attempting to expand nuclear energy and reducing Britain's manufacturing base to rubble. She also introduced 'big bang', a massive deregulation of the City of London financial centre which went on to become became the biggest in the world. . She established the Hadley Centre which is arguably the most influential climate data centre in the world. Her husband was a director of Burmah Oil and her government was dominated by the oil industry.

On November 8 1989, Margaret Thatcher shocked the UN with a speech on global warming

Two days before she delivered the speech, the UK blocked a proposal at a conference in the Netherlands for a 20% reduction in CO2 emissions by 2005. On the day after the speech, the energy secretary, John Wakeham, told the House of Commons that he had been forced to abandon the government's insane plan to privatise nuclear power. It was Thatcher who insisted that "nothing can stop the great car economy" and her ministers who announced "the biggest roadbuilding programme since the Romans".

Digging up the roots of the IPCC

By the late 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister of the UK, was eager to demonstrate the seriousness with which she took environmental issues in general and climate issues in particular. In September 1988, she gave a much-publicised speech to the Royal Society in which, citing concerns over global warming, the ozone layer and acid depositions

History of the Met Office Hadley Centre

The Met Office Hadley Centre was opened in 1990, by the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, when the Met Office was at its previous headquarters in Bracknell.

Prior to the opening of the dedicated centre different areas of the Met Office had been undertaking climatology research. By the late 1980s the Synoptic Climatology Branch was working closely with the Climatic Research Unit to produce an integrated global land surface air and sea surface temperature data set. This was the primary data set used to assess observed global warming by the IPCC in 1990.

Three events occurred in 1988 that assisted greatly in bringing the issue of man-made climate change to the notice of politicians:

In December 1988 the UK Government announced it was committed to extending its influence internationally to provide information about climate change and to supporting appropriate research. Discussions were held with the Department of the Environment to strengthen climate research at the Met Office. This led, in November 1989, to an announcement of a new centre for climate change research in the Met Office — then called the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research

Certainly, Mrs Thatcher was the first world leader to voice alarm over global warming, back in 1988, With her scientific background, she had fallen under the spell of Sir Crispin Tickell, then our man at the UN. In the 1970s, he had written a book warning that the world was cooling, but he had since become an ardent convert to the belief that it was warming, Under his influence, as she recorded in her memoirs, she made a series of speeches, in Britain and to world bodies, calling for urgent international action, and citing evidence given to the US Senate by the arch-alarmist Jim Hansen, head of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

She found equally persuasive the views of a third prominent convert to the cause, Dr John Houghton, then head of the UK Met Office. She backed him in the setting up of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, and promised the Met Office lavish funding for its Hadley Centre, which she opened in 1990, as a world authority on "human-induced climate change".

Hadley then linked up with East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to become custodians of the most prestigious of the world's surface temperature records (alongside another compiled by Dr Hansen). This became the central nexus of influence driving a worldwide scare over global warming; and so it remains to this day – not least thanks to the key role of Houghton (now Sir John) in shaping the first three mammoth reports which established the IPCC's unequalled authority on the subject.

Back in 1990, Mrs Thatcher, temporarily under the spell of the prophets of runaway global warming, authorised lavish funding for the then-head of the Met Office, Sir John Houghton, to set up its Hadley Centre in Exeter, as a "world-class centre for research into climate change". It was linked to the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, to create a record of global temperatures based on surface weather stations across the world, a data set known as HadCrut. Sir John himself played a key role at the top of the new IPCC as chairman of its scientific working group.

Sir John was a fervent believer in the theory that the cause of global warming is man-made CO2, and the HadCrut computer models, run by his CRU ally Professor Phil Jones, were programmed accordingly. Sir John (and the Hadley Centre) continued to play a central part in the running of the IPCC, selecting many of the contributors to its reports that were the main driver of global warming alarm. He and Prof Jones were also prominent champions of the IPCC's notorious "hockey stick" graph, which rewrote climate history by suggesting that global temperatures had suddenly shot up in the late 20th century to easily their highest level in history.

In recent months, in fact, a curious little drama has been unfolding over attempts by Steve McIntyre, a Canadian statistical expert, to get the Met Office and the CRU to divulge the computer data on which they base their temperature record. Mr McIntyre was not only the chief demolisher of the "hockey stick", showing how it was based on a seriously skewed computer model, but later exposed the "adjustments" which had skewed the other official record of surface temperatures, run by Dr James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. (The two other official sources of temperature data are based on satellite measurements.)

When Mr McIntyre made Freedom of Information requests to see the data used to construct the HadCrut record (as he has chronicled on his ClimateAudit blog) he was given an almighty brush-off, the Met Office saying that this information was strictly confidential and that to release it would damage Britain's "international relations" with all the countries that supplied it.

Sir John Houghton, former co chair of the IPCC and head of world leading Hadley Centre for Climate .

In an interview Sir John Houghton gave to The Sunday Telegraph in its "Me and My God" slot on September 10, 1995. As a fervent evangelical Christian, Sir John claimed that global warming might well be one of those disasters sent by God to warn man to mend his ways ("God tries to coax and woo but he also uses disasters"). He went on: "If we are to have a good environmental policy in the future, we will have to have a disaster".

As a virtual post industrial ,banking dominated nation, Britain has been at the forefront of pushing the global warming agenda. It is in the interest of financiers that manufacturing move to their investments in the cheap labour markets of India and China and that they control global energy markets through carbon trading. British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott pushed through the Kyoto Protocol deal, Lord Stern produced a dramatic report for the government on the effects of AGW and on 19 October 2009, a preliminary meeting of nations was held in London to set up the Copenhagen conference in December.

Much of the following is a series of articles revealing the British global warming agenda.

He adds: "The government should follow the example of Norway and many other countries by setting up a hydrocarbons authority, which would initiate new private-public partnerships to engage in offshore oil and gas production. This would generate many billions of pounds in highly needed revenues."

Only the US is similar to Britain, he claims, in leaving the exploitation of its natural resources entirely to the private sector, whereas most countries control the business through state agencies or their own national oil corporations.

Britain and Norway took very different paths in the development of the North Sea, with the UK initially using state-owned groups, such as the British National Oil Corporation and a partly state-owned BP. These government stakes were gradually sold off, while Oslo has kept a much tighter rein on its sector and built up a massive sovereign wealth fund with the proceeds.

There is mounting concern over what industry observers call the "supernormal" profits being made in the North Sea amid the continuing strength of the oil price. For oil explorers, the North Sea is among the world's most benign tax regimes, not least because the first Thatcher administration abolished special royalties and upped exploration allowances.

The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil

Oilmen at Aberdeen are interviewed about conditions, health and safety at work and wages. These are followed by interviews with American oil bosses and members of the population of Aberdeen and on issues such as the inaffordability of housing after the oil boom

Adair Turner was appointed FSA Chairman in September 2008.

In January 2008 he was appointed Chair of the Climate Change Committee, and he is also Chair of the Overseas Development Institute. Until September 2008 Lord Turner was a non-executive Director at Standard Chartered Bank; from 2000-2006 he was a Senior Adviser, Vice-Chairman of Merrill Lynch Europe, and from 1995-99, Director General of the Confederation of British Industry. Prior to that, he was with McKinsey and Company from 1982-95, and between 1992-1995, built McKinsey's practice in Eastern Europe and Russia.

He was, until appointed at the FSA, a trustee of Save the Children UK, and has been a trustee of WWF.UK

David Kennedy, Chief Executive

Previously he worked on energy strategy at the World Bank, and design of infrastructure investment projects at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Two others are employees of 106 billion dollar hedge fund manager, Jeremy Grantham.

http://www.theccc.org.uk/about-the-ccc/the-committee

British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott pushed through the Kyoto Protocol deal

In the glad, confident morning of 1997, the DPM's environment brief let him play a key role in the Kyoto protocol agreement on climate change.

The (Royal)Society has been tackling climate chnage policy for a number of years - indeed, it is interesting to note that Margaret Thatcher made her first major speech as UK Prime Minister about environmental issues, including climate change, to the Royal Society in 1988. The Society's activities include the publication of statements and reports and the hosting of major international discussion meetings, which not only seek to bring together scientists, but also civil society groups and policy-makers. The Society tries to be as open as possible about these activities, and you will find many details on the Society's website.

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/science_politics/000947bob_ward_comments_on.html

Mrs Thatcher could not have promoted the global warming issue without the support of her UK political party. And they were willing to give it. Following the General Election of 1979, most of the incoming Cabinet had been members of the government which lost office in 1974. They blamed the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) for their 1974 defeat. They, therefore, desired an excuse for reducing the UK coal industry and, thus, the NUM’s power. Coal-fired power stations emit CO2 but nuclear power stations don’t. Global warming provided an excuse for reducing the UK’s dependence on coal by replacing it with nuclear power.

And the Conservative Party wanted a large UK nuclear power industry for another reason. That industry’s large nuclear processing facilities were required for the UK’s nuclear weapons programme and the opposition Labour Party was then opposing the Conservative Party’s plans to upgrade the UK’s nuclear deterrent with Trident missiles and submarines. Unfortunately, the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents had damaged public confidence in nuclear technology. Then, privatisation of the UK’s electricity supply industry exposed the secret that UK nuclear electricity cost four times more than UK coal-fired electricity. Global warming became the only remaining excuse for the unpopular nuclear power facilities needed for nuclear weapons. Mrs Thatcher had to be seen to spend money at home if her international campaign was to be credible.

So, early in her global warming campaign - and at her personal instigation - the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research was established, and the science and engineering research councils were encouraged to place priority in funding climate-related research. This cost nothing because the UK’s total research budget was not increased; indeed, it fell because of cuts elsewhere. But the Hadley Centre sustained its importance and is now the operating agency for the IPCC’s scientific working group (Working Group 1). Most scientists’ work depends on funds fully or partly provided by governments. Also, all scientists compete to obtain their share of this limited resource. Available research funds were shrinking, and global warming had become the ‘scientific’ issue of most interest to governments. Hence, any case for funding support tended to include reference to global warming whenever possible. Much science in many fields may be conducted under the guise of a relationship to global warming. Activities which have obtained funds by this method include biology, meteorology, computer science, physics, chemistry, climatology, oceanography, civil engineering, process engineering, forestry, astronomy, and several other disciplines. Now, funds for this work are provided to most UK Universities and several commercial research establishments.

http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm

Should we believe anything the Met Office says?

Interesting fact: the Chairman of the Met Office board, Robert Napier, is or has been:

Management of the Met Office

In 1996 the Met Office became a Trading Fund within the Ministry of Defence. As a Trading Fund we are required to operate on a commercial basis and meet agreed performance targets as set by our Ministerial Owner.

Our owner

The Under Secretary of State for Defence and the Minister for Veterans, currently Kevan Jones, is the individual charged with directing and overseeing the Met Office on behalf of the Secretary of State for Defence.

The ultimate responsibility and accountability lies with the Secretary of State for Defence, currently the Right Honourable Bob Ainsworth MP.

Met Office Owner’s Council (MOOC)

Role and responsibility

To advise the owner of any aspect of their responsibilities from financial and customer interests through to the agreement of longer-term plans. The MOOC assists and advises the owner in order to determine and articulate the government's future meteorological strategy. Where appropriate the MOOC seeks advice from the Met Office Board to further assist in its

What should be rather better known, not least since it helps to explain these relentlessly optimistic forecasts, has been the leading part played by our Met Office in promoting the worldwide obsession with global warming, notably through its Hadley Centre for research into climate change. In 1988 the then-head of the Met Office, Dr (now Sir) John Houghton, was one of the two men chiefly responsible for setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, founded on their belief that rising CO2 would inevitably lead to higher temperatures.

In 1990, thanks to lavish funding from Mrs Thatcher, Houghton set up the Hadley Centre, which has continued to play a central role in shaping the IPCC's increasingly alarmist reports ever since. Not least, it chooses many of the scientists who write those reports, most of whom are sure to be "on message". In conjunction with the Climate Research Unit run by Professor Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia, equally firmly on side, the Hadley Centre also controls the most influential of the world's four official sources of global temperature data.

Nothing more tellingly reflects the Met Office's partisanship, however, than the fact that its present chairman is Robert Napier, a green activist who previously ran WWF UK, one of the most vociferous of the climate change lobby groups. Mr Napier now helps run not only the Met Office (which has been part of the Ministry of Defence ever since its forecasts came "from the Air Ministry roof") but also an array of other bodies centrally involved in driving the political climate-change agenda.

UK looks to break climate logjam

The UK government is hoping to bridge some difficult divides over tackling climate change at a meeting in London.

The Major Economies Forum (MEF) brings together 17 of the world's biggest greenhouse gas-emitting countries.

The meeting on Sunday and Monday will aim to make progress on protecting forests and providing finance to help poor countries adapt to climate change.

How is global warming related to atomic power? In order to understand this question, it is important to learn how the global warming issue was born. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, then the British Prime Minister, came to the conclusion that the UK needed atomic power energy for their future, but she faced strong objections by her people. It was also about the time when the first crude computer simulation of the greenhouse effect of CO2 was made, and it predicted a great disaster and catastrophe due to the expected temperature rise, unless the release of CO2 could be greatly reduced.

Margaret Thatcher must have taken this result into account in promoting atomic power, asking her people to choose either atomic power or global disaster/catastrophe, which would require a great sacrifice in their standard of living in order to avoid it. Without her strong endorsement, the IPCC would not have been established. She also established the Hadley Climate Research Center for further study of the effects of CO2. Until that time, climatology was a rather quiet science (not something dealt with in newspaper headlines), but Thatcher put a great spotlight on it for her political purposes. Therefore, although the CO2 hypothesis is appropriate as a hypothesis in science, the IPCC was related to atomic power from its birth and its destiny was to predict a great disaster/catastrophe. This, in spite of the criticism that the IPCC is predicting the end of the world, although we are not doing very well at even predicting the next day’s weather or the severity of the next winter. Science was used for political purposes.

Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, IARC Founding Director and Professor of Physics, Emeritus, was the the director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks from its establishment in 1998 until January of 2007

The Copenhagen Communiqué on Climate Change by The Prince of Wales's Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change

The agreement must establish a global emissions cap and long-term reduction pathway for all greenhouse\par gas emissions and sources, for the period 2013 to 2050 (with interim targets). These targets will need to be guided by science to ensure global greenhouse gas concentrations are stabilised below critical\par thresholds. When stating this, we understand that there is an emerging consensus behind an objective of\par limiting global average temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels\par and that this will require global emissions to peak and begin to decline rapidly within the next decade. Even this scenario will require a reduction of 50-85% by 2050, according to the Fourth Assessment Report\par of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the later the peak in emissions, the\par greater and costlier the required reduction. There is nothing to be gained by delay.}

Number facing fuel poverty up 20%

The number of older people living alone and facing fuel poverty in NI this winter has risen by 20% on last year, according to the Housing Executive.Charities are asking for automatic payment of benefits for the elderly which will reduce the burden on the NHS and enable older people to stay warm.

Anne O'Reilly from Age NI said it was time for the Executive to act.She appealed for NI's political leaders "to escalate the Fuel Poverty Strategy to Executive level". Ms O'Reilly added "In 2008, Age NI warned our political leaders that older people were in the impossible position of having to choose between eating and heating their homes.

One in five households in fuel poverty

The Department of Energy and Climate Change statistics show 700,000 more UK families fell into fuel poverty in 2009, bringing the total to 5.5 million — one in five of all households. In the UK, fuel poverty is when a household needs to spend more than 10% of its income on fuel in order to heat its home to an adequate standard, and have hot water and run lights and appliances.

The department admitted that 100,000 more families in England alone were expected to go into fuel poverty this year.

The figures came less than a week after British Gas said its gas prices will rise by an average of 18% and electricity bills by 16%. Scottish Power has also raised its gas prices by 19% and electricity by 10%, while other power companies are expected to follow suit, blaming wholesale gas prices.

These values are completely consistent with estimates in the literature per extreme event. However, they are completely inconsistent with values stated by Stern (2006) who suggests that extreme event damages could be 0.5 to 1.0 percent of GWP by 2050. Oral statements by Lord Stern even suggest values as high as 5 percent of GWP by 2200. The Stern analysis has been criticized because it confuses changes caused by what is in harms’ way (baseline changes) with what is caused by climate change (Pielke 2007b). But even this mistake cannot justify the estimates by Lord Stern. The hypothesized damages quoted by Lord Stern are completely inconsistent with empirical evidence.

In fact, it (Grantham) refers to the wealthy chairman of GMO, a large investment management company: Jeremy Grantham. Grantham has donated £12million to the London School of Economics (LSE) to fund the institute. He has also forked out another £12million to Imperial College London for the similarly named Grantham Institute for Climate Change (1)

No wonder, then, that the chair of LSE, Howard Davies – once the head of the Financial Services Authority and a former deputy governor of the Bank of England – was more than a little fawning over the ‘extremely generous’ Grantham. The new LSE institute will be headed by Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the UK government-commissioned report.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/article/5799/

The last word goes to the contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who in his July letter to investors, noted: “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”

Global warming will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future. But how to make money
around this issue in the next few years is not yet clear to me. In a fast-moving fi eld rife with treacherous politics, there
will be many failures. Marketing a “climate” fund would be much easier than outperforming with it.

Stern launches carbon credit ratings agency

Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the UK’s Stern report on climate change, will launch a new carbon credit ratings agency on Wednesday, the first to score carbon credits on a similar basis to that used to rate debt.

The Grantham is chaired by Professor Lord Sir Nicholas Stern of Brentford, author of a rather influential report on the economics of climate change, and who stands to profit admirably from institutional environmentalism via his carbon credit reference agency. It is no surprise that Ward and Sir Nicholas find themselves in the same company department, given their shared interests. Stern is also Chair of the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP), which is funded by the UK government’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and which acknowledges that ‘Generous support for the Centre’s work is also provided by Munich Re’. Munich Re is the insurance giant that claims to know what the IPCC does not when it comes to the reality of climate change in the present.

http://www.climate-resistance.org/

Jeremy Grantham

Jeremy Grantham is the Chairman of the Board of Grantham Mayo Van Otterloo, an American investor well known among institutional investors, but relatively unknown to retail investors. He is regarded as a highly knowledgeable investor in various stock bond and commodity markets. Grantham started one of the world's first index funds in the early 1970s and currently manages approximately $120 billion US.[

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremy_Grantham

Cambridge economist Partha Dasgupta calls Stern's combination of pure rate of time preference and rate of risk aversion "patently absurd" as this would imply a savings rate of 97.5% while the observed rate is around 15% . Berkeley economist Hal Varian shares Dasgupta's critique.

Richard Tol, an environmental economist at the Economic and Social Research Institute and lead author (amongst a total of over 450 lead authors) for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that "If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a Masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a 'D' for diligence; but more likely I would give him an 'F' for fail.

But as Roger Pielke Jr – environmental sciences professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder – first noticed in a 2007 peer reviewed paper, the numbers in the Stern Review just don’t add up. He estimated that as much as 40 per cent of Stern’s projections for the costs of unmitigated climate change are a crock, based on misuse of a single study (Muir-Wood et al. 2006) about the effects of hurricanes.

Now, Pielke has noticed, some discreet, face-saving tinkering has been going on. In the original version of the Stern Review the estimated damage caused by hurricanes in “costs as a percentage of GDP” was 1.3 per cent. But in the new version in the British government online archive, this has now been sneakily amended to the rather more modest 0.13 per cent.

This is not, of course, the first time the Stern Review has been found wanting. Not long after his report came out, Dr Richard Tol, one of the world’s leading environmental economists, dismissed its more lurid projections as “preposterous”.

Dr Tol concluded: “In sum the Stern Review is very selective in the studies it quotes”, invariably seeking to emphasise only “the most pessimistic” of them. The report, Dr Tol added, could only be “dismissed as alarmist and incompetent.”

Climate Change Act has the biggest ever bill

Ed Miliband's legislation will cost us hundreds of billions over the next 40 years, says Christopher Booker

"The Principles of Climate Change Communication

Why were the principles created? The game is communicating climate change; the rules will help us win it. These principles were created as
part of the UK Climate Change Communications Strategy, an evidence-based strategy aiming to change public attitudes towards climate change in the
UK.
(This is a ‘short version’ of a far longer document of evidence that they claim (but I did not find it) can be found at www.defra.gov.uk.) There is plenty of evidence relating to attitudes towards and behaviour on climate change, general environmental behaviour change and the whole issue of sustainable development communication. As we reviewed the research for these principles, one ‘überprinciple’ emerged: “Changing attitudes towards climate change is not like selling a particular brand of soap – it’s like convincing someone to use soap in the first place.” At first glance, some of the principles may seem counterintuitive to those who have been working on sustainable development or climate change communications for many years. Some confront dearly cherished beliefs about what works; a few even seem to attack the values or principles of sustainable development itself. However, these principles are a first step to using sophisticated behaviour change modelling and comprehensive evidence from around the world to change attitudes towards climate change. We need to think radically, and the Rules of the Game are a sign that future campaigns will not be ‘business as usual’. This is a truly exciting moment. For the full evidence for these rules, and the climate change communications strategy itself, please visit: www.defra.gov.uk For the new UK
sustainable development strategy please visit:
www.sustainable-development.gov.uk

And it never was about the science, as Sam at Climatequotes.com (”remembering what they will want us to forget”) reminds us with this useful little delve into the Government archives. He shows how in 2003 the Department for Environment and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) deliberately set out to mislead the public about the dangers of “Climate Change”. Among the “experts” DEFRA invited to help talk up the threat were our old friends at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU).

What DEFRA was (and indeed, still is) after was “headline indicators” – ie scary scenarios with which to terrify the public into supine acceptance of the government’s high-tax, high-regulation green agenda. Here is one of its working group’s responses:

Here is some professional prepared material designed to destroy climate debate.

Figure 2 is a representation of the possible evolution of the climate change discourse. If it is right, it suggests that there is value in helping to ‘quieten’ the discourse, taking it out of argumentative mode. AsFuterra has suggested, we need to ‘forget the climate change detractors’ (Futerra Sustainability Communications Ltd 2005: 6) and work to establish a new form of common sense. In this new popular consensus, the taken-for-granted nature of climate change is treated as being beyond argument. In other words, there is no need to discuss it – we can just get on and do what is required.

http://www.ippr.org.uk/ecomm/files/warm_words.pdf

Commission on National Security in the 21st Century from the Institute for Public Policy Research

Supporting the Commission

ippr would like to thank the following organisations, who are supporters of all the Commission's activities:

We would also like to thank the following for their support of specific research streams feeding into the Commission’s deliberations:

If people won't listen to elected politicians, get someone more plausible to deliver the message.

The most convincing messengers are not boffins or journalists, local councillors or civil servants - we are most likely to believe our next door neighbour.

Ed Miliband - British government environment minister

"When you think about all the big historic movements, from the suffragettes, to anti-apartheid, to sexual equality in the 1960s, all the big political movements had popular mobilisation,"said Miliband. "Maybe it's an odd thing for someone in government to say, but I just think there's a real opportunity and a need here."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/08/ed-miliband-climate-politics-environment

Less than half the population believes that human activity is to blame for global warming, according to an exclusive poll for The Times.

The revelation that ministers have failed in their campaign to persuade the public that the greenhouse effect is a serious threat requiring urgent action will make uncomfortable reading for the Government as it prepares for next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen.

Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming.

What is not generally realised is that the UK Met Office has been, since 1990, at the very centre of the campaign to convince the world that it faces catastrophe through global warming. (Its website now proclaims it to be "the Met Office for Weather and Climate Change".) Its then-director, Dr John Houghton, was the single most influential figure in setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the chief driver of climate alarmism. Its Hadley Centre for Climate Change, along with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), was put in charge of the most prestigious of the four official global temperature records. In line with IPCC theory, its computers were programmed to predict that, as CO2 levels rose, temperatures would inevitably follow. From 1990 to 2007, the Department of the Environment gave the Met Office no less than £146 million for its "climate predictions programme".

But in the past three years, with the Met Office chaired by Robert Napier, a former global warming activist and previously head of WWF UK, its pretensions have been exposed as never before. The "Climategate" leak of documents from the CRU, along with further revelations from Russian scientists, have shown the CRU/Met Office alliance systematically manipulating temperature data, past and present, to show the world growing warmer than the evidence justified. And those same computers used to predict temperatures 100 years ahead for the IPCC have also been used to produce those weather forecasts that prove so consistently wrong.

In this new episode, which gets ever better towards the end, Curtis makes an effort to attack – in a compelling way – the basic errors in mainstream political eco-evangelism. After some half hour of drivel, he gets down to business and shows that systems analyst Jay Forrester, who designed early warning radar computer analysis systems in the 1950s, was behind the Limits to Growth Club of Rome environmentalism scam in the early 1970s. Forrester claimed to include feedback loops for all possibilities in the computer model he developed for the Club of Rome, but in fact omitted all feedback loops for human responses to overpopulation and the energy crisis, such as political actions.

In other words, the Club of Rome’s disaster predictions for overpopulation, starvation, lack of sufficient energy resources, and pollution were all based on the assumption that the world would not politically adapt to growth to compensate for them. As a result, the computer forecast led to a prediction with a false claim behind it: there will be disaster unless the world is stabilized in its present form to stop further growth. The more sensible option of naturally taking countermeasures against the undesirable effects of growth was neglected in favour of stabilizing the world in its present form. (This claim is identical to the Cold War era nuclear war propaganda “science”, which claimed that we will cease to exist if we don’t disarm, neglecting the fact that similar gas warfare lies in the 30s caused appeasement and ethnic minorities being exterminated not by bullets or bombs but by cold-blooded starvation and gas chambers in concentration camps.)

Dwight D. Eisenhower: Farewell Address

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present — and is gravely to be regarded.Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

Labour and the nuclear lobby

Anti-nuclear campaigners like to portray the government as being in the pocket of the nuclear industry.How else, they argue, do you explain the return to favour of an industry once written-off as dirty, dangerous and prohibitively expensive? The picture put forward by some critics is certainly a powerful one. It suggests the image of hapless ministers being schmoozed into submission by smooth-talking former party grandees now in the pay of nuclear multinationals.

EDF completes UK nuclear line-up

Less than two months after British Energy shareholders walked away from an earlier deal, EDF has bagged the UK nuclear power generator in a £12.4bn deal.

Selling British Energy to EDF is about more than just a handover of physical assets.

The deal also completes the line-up of participants in a nuclear race that will lead to the creation of two essentially new branches of Britain's nuclear industry. One is needed to clean up the mess left behind after half a century of nuclear weapons and energy production. The other is getting ready to build an entirely new generation of at least eight nuclear reactors, after the government gave the go-ahead for the rebirth of the nuclear industry early this year.

"The role for nuclear new-build as an integral part of UK energy policy is now firmly established," according to British Energy's chief executive, Bill Coley.

So indifferent is he to the formalities of family life that Mr Miliband is not even named on his son’s birth certificate. Following his unexpected elevation to the post of Leader of the Opposition, he is said to be planning to “get around” to marrying Miss Thornton, 40.

And it is almost certain that he will be more assiduous about the paperwork after the birth of his second child, who is due in November.

Miss Thornton is thought to be a somewhat reluctant political spouse. A former child actress who starred in the television show Dramarama, she went on to Cambridge and the Bar, becoming an environmental lawyer. The pair have been together for five years, and were sharing a home in north London when, in March 2009, The Daily Telegraph disclosed her identity for the first time – reporting that she worked in the nuclear industry at a time when Mr Miliband was responsible for energy policy.

He had provided officials at the Department for Energy and Climate Change with her name, but did not publish it on the publicly available register of ministerial interests, merely reporting that his girlfriend was an “environmental lawyer.” In fact, Miss Thornton was the “preferred counsel” for E. On, which was bidding for government contracts worth more than £20 billion to build new power stations.

E.ON and RWE to build £20bn UK nuclear reactors

E.ON and RWE, Germany's two largest utilities companies, are set to announce the creation of a joint venture to build at least four nuclear reactors in the UK at a cost of around £20 billion, The Times has learnt.

E.ON and RWE will announce details of the venture to build at least 6 gigawatts of new generating capacity, possibly as early as today.

The capacity would be equivalent to replacing almost 10 per cent of Britain’s existing total installed power generating capacity.

The two companies are expected to propose the construction of reactors at two existing nuclear sites they already control at Wylfa, on the island of Anglesey, where RWE has been granted approval for a connection to the National Grid, and at Oldbury, beside the River Severn in Gloucestershire, where E.ON has recently obtained similar permission.

In his first speech as Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband today vowed to reject the findings of focus groups that suggest there are no votes in green issues, pledging to stick by his belief that climate change represents the gravest threat to the world economy. "The focus groups will tell you that there are no votes in green issues," he told the Labour conference in Manchester. "Maybe not. But taking the difficult steps to protect our planet for future generations is the greatest challenge our generation faces."

He argued that climate change represented the greatest challenge to the current generation of politicians and warned that greenhouse gas emissions could not be curbed using the traditional approach to short-term politics."Climate change, just like the aging society, can't be tackled by the politics we have," he warned. "They don't lend themselves to the politics of now: instant results, instant votes, instant popularity. X-factor politics. So we can't be imprisoned by the focus groups. Politics has to be about leadership or it is about nothing."

Miliband was this week hailed by Friends of the Earth as the greenest of the three main party leaders thanks to his stint as energy and climate change secretary.

However, his lengthy speech touched only briefly on environmental issues and offered little in the way of firm policy commitments, instead focusing largely on his desire to lead a "new generation" of Labour politicians capable of challenging the coalition's "pessimistic" economic strategy. He attacked one aspect of the coalition's green record, slamming the decision to withdraw a loan to Sheffield Forgemasters designed to help the company produce specialist components for a new generation of British nuclear reactors. "When you deprive Sheffield Forgemasters of a loan, a loan from government which would be paid back, you deprive Britain of the ability to lead the world in new technology," he said. "It's not responsible, it's irresponsible."

Miliband is expected to try to promote a more interventionist low-carbon strategy than that adopted by the coalition, and spent much of the leadership campaign criticising the government's refusal to rule out cuts to key environmental programmes such as the feed-in tariff and plans to invest £60m to upgrade ports for the offshore wind industry.

This generation must reject the old ways of doing politics. And must speak to the issues our generation knows it must confront.

But taking the difficult steps to protect our planet for future generations is the greatest challenge our generation faces.

When I think about my son, in 20 years time he will be asking me whether I was part of the last generation not to get climate change or the first generation to get it.

And climate change, just like the aging society, can't be tackled by the politics we have.

They don't lend them selves to the politics of now: instant results, instant votes, instant popularity, X-factor politics.

So we can't be imprisoned by the focus groups. Politics has to be about leadership or it is about nothing.

New Labour produced a White Paper in May 2007 called The Energy White Paper: Meeting the Energy Challenge:

Keep It In The Family, Gordon

What makes this decision politically sensitive, is that Gordon Brown has close family connections to the nuclear industry. His younger brother Andrew Brown works for EDF Energy, the UK subsidiary of EDF, which operates nuclear power stations in France, and which is one of the leading companies pushing for a nuclear rebuild programme in the UK. Andrew Brown was appointed as EDF Energy's Head of Press on 13 September 2004.

EDF Energy calls for UK carbon floor price

LONDON, May 26 (Reuters) - Britain should encourage investment in low-carbon energy like nuclear power by setting a minimum charge that fossil fuel burning generators must pay to emit climate-warming carbon dioxide, EDF Energy said on Tuesday.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKLQ06362720090526

In 2000, the German government, consisting of the SPD and Alliance '90/The Greens officially announced its intention to phase out the use of nuclear power. Jürgen Trittin (from the German Greens) as the Minister of Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, reached an agreement with energy companies on the gradual shut down of the country's nineteen nuclear power plants and a cessation of civil usage of nuclear power by 2020.

A new study on behalf of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection is the first study to show reliable results: the risk of children under 5 years of age to contract leukaemia increases the closer they live to a nuclear power plant. This is the result of an investigation of the German Childhood Cancer Registry (GCCR) in Mainz carried out on behalf of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection. The investigation concludes that in the study period from 1980 to 2003, within a radius of 5 km around the reactors, 37 children contracted leukaemia. On the statistical average, 17 cases would have to be expected. About 20 cases can thus be attributed to the fact that they live within this radius.

The Vattenfall project in Berlin is only one example of a larger trend. Utility companies want to set up a total of 26 new coal-fired power plants in Germany during the coming years.

Police have clashed with activists trying to halt a train carrying nuclear waste from France to Germany.

Officers used batons, pepper spray, tear gas and water cannon to disperse about 250 activists who were trying to sabotage railway tracks.

The activists hurled fireworks at officers and set a police vehicle on fire, police said.

Earlier, the train was halted after activists lowered themselves on ropes from a bridge over the tracks.

The clashes near Dannenberg, northern Germany, followed peaceful protests against the train on Saturday by tens of thousands of people.

About a dozen protesters were injured on Sunday, demonstrators were quoted as saying by local media reports. Police gave no reports of injuries on their side.

The train, made up of 14 wagons containing 123 tonnes of reprocessed nuclear waste in glass and steel containers, is heading to a storage site in Gorleben, northern Germany.

The BBC's Berlin correspondent Stephen Evans says that the plan is to transfer the waste to lorries for the final part of the journey but the police and protesters are now trying to outmanoeuvre each other in the countryside along the route.

Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to extend the lifespan of Germany's 17 nuclear power plants despite strong public opposition has highlighted the issue of the waste trains.

US energy bill backs nuclear industry

The US nuclear energy industry is set to receive significant support for building new reactors, research and development, and training more highly-skilled staff under the Democratic climate change bill introduced to the Senate this week.

Increasing the supply of nuclear power is a key plank of the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act, introduced this week by Barbara Boxer of California, head of the Senate environment and public works committee, and by John Kerry of Massachusetts, chairman of the foreign relations committee.

The leaders of the environmental movement are predominantly from upper class backgrounds, particularly in Britain but also the financial elite in the United States. It suggests that they are motivated by right rather than left wing anti capitalism. There is a seperate page on that here

The arch Malthusian James Lovelock describes humans as a "pathogenic organism" and a "plague": "The human species is now so numerous as to constitute a serious planetary malady."

Dr Susan Blackmore said "there are too many people" and then said: "For the planet's sake, I hope we have bird flu or some other thing that will reduce the population, because otherwise we're doomed."

This dispute is threatening Al Gore's reputation as an environmentalist. He has close ties and a large financial stake in Occidental Petroleum, despite its poor environmental image. His father, Al Gore senior, was on Occidental's board for three decades. As vice president of the United States, his son helped the company win drilling concessions. The one company that has helped make him financially whole and has helped him politically is Occidental Petroleum. Charles Lewis, Center for Public Integrity

Piper Alpha was a North Sea oil production platform operated by Occidental Petroleum (Caledonia) Ltd.The platform began production in 1976, first as an oil platform and then later converted to gas production. An explosion and resulting fire destroyed it on July 6, 1988, killing 167 men,with only 59 survivors. The death toll includes 2 crewmen of a rescue vessel. Total insured loss was about £1.7 billion (US$ 3.4 billion). At the time of the disaster the platform accounted for approximately ten percent of North Sea oil and gas production, and was the worst offshore oil disaster in terms of lives lost and industry impact.

"We are developing the next generation of carbon-capture and storage technologies, as well as working on questions related to renewable energy," continues the institute's website. And these are areas where there is a lot of money to be made.

Meanwhile, sitting on the board of another virtuous-sounding group - the Alliance for Climate Protection (ACP) - is one of the world's most famous green champions, Al Gore, the former Democratic vice-president, who founded the organisation in 2006. Alongside him sits Theodore Roosevelt IV. An "active conservationist", Theodore the Fourth is a member of the Wilderness Society's governing council, chair of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a trustee for the World Resources Institute - and a managing director of Barclays Capital.

Consider another environmental-economics powerhouse, Generation Investment Management (GIM). Yes, Gore founded it, too, but this time with the aid of David Blood - chief executive of Goldman Sachs Asset Management from 1999 to 2003. Blood's personal mission is to make businesses more "ethical and sustainable", and to this end he has dedicated the company to "long-term investing and sustainability research". GIM focuses on "environmental degradation, poverty and development". Oh yes, one other thing: it is now valued at $2.2 billion (£1.5 billion).

U.N. ‘Climate Change’ Plan Would Likely Shift Trillions to Form New World Economy

A United Nations document on “climate change” that will be distributed to a major environmental conclave next week envisions a huge reordering of the world economy, likely involving trillions of dollars in wealth transfer, millions of job losses and gains, new taxes, industrial relocations, new tariffs and subsidies, and complicated payments for greenhouse gas abatement schemes and carbon taxes — all under the supervision of the world body.

Those and other results are blandly discussed in a discretely worded United Nations “information note” on potential consequences of the measures that industrialized countries will likely have to take to implement the Copenhagen Accord, the successor to the Kyoto Treaty, after it is negotiated and signed by December 2009. The Obama administration has said it supports the treaty process if, in the words of a U.S. State Department spokesman, it can come up with an “effective framework” for dealing with global warming.

On his 1998 tax returns under "supplemental income," Vice President Al Gore lists a $20,000 royalty payment from Union Zinc Inc. for the right to mine zinc from his 88-acre farm here in the verdant hills of the Cumberland River valley. In the 25 years he has held the zinc lease, Mr. Gore has earned more than $450,000.

The man who provided Mr. Gore with that farm and mineral lease is of some note as the 2000 presidential race begins. Mr. Gore's father, former Sen. Albert Gore Sr., acquired the land and mineral rights on what appears to be highly favorable terms from Armand Hammer, the late chairman of Occidental Petroleum Corp. Mr. Hammer, an influence peddler of the highest magnitude, trafficked in politicians of all parties and stripes; he pleaded guilty in 1975 to making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon's campaign in the Watergate affair. But the closest and most sustained of Mr. Hammer's connections seem to have been with the elder Mr. Gore and his family. It was the earliest of a number of controversial associations that tarnish the stiff Boy Scout image of Al Gore Jr.

He has made 100 million dollars as a political front man for Occidental Oil while claiming to be an environmentalist

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore left the White House seven years ago with less than $2 million in assets, including a Virginia home and the family farm in Tennessee. Now he's making enough to put $35 million in hedge funds and other private partnerships.

Rep. Blackburn: So you’re a partner in Kleiner Perkins. OK. Now they have invested about a billion dollars in 40 companies that are going to benefit from cap-and-trade legislation. So is the legislation that we are discussing here today, is that something that you are going to personally benefit from?

http://greenhellblog.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/gore-lies-to-congress-about-personal-finances/

Gore senior first met long-time Occidental CEO Armand Hammer at a cattle auction in the 1940s. When zinc ore was discovered on some of Gore's land, Hammer and Oxy bought it for twice the amount of the only other bid. Hammer then sold the land back to Gore while retaining the mineral rights. The elder Gore then sold the land to his son, Al Jr., who has received $20,000 yearly in mineral royalties from Occidental ever since. Two years after Gore Sr. was defeated in a bid for re-election to the Senate, he joined Occidental as a member of its board of directors and was rewarded with a $500,000 a year job working for an Oxy subsidiary.

Throughout his political life, Al Gore Jr. has received the favor the patronage of Occidental and Hammer's successor, CEO Ray Irani. And for every campaign finance violation Gore has committed, Irani seems to be lurking in the background. He was one of the contributors who slept in the Lincoln bedroom (a couple days later Irani wrote a $100,000 check to the DNC). When Al Gore made illegal fundraising calls from the White House, Irani was one of the recipients (he ponied up $50,000, according to a Harold Ickes memo unearthed during the investigation). In the Elk Hills sell-off , Irani and Oxy finally got the payoff worthy of their long patronage. It is a payoff crooked businessmen have dreamed of ever since the land was stripped from the Kitanemuks during the Gold Rush. Indeed, the history of Elk Hills and corruption is an old one. And it is a story most Americans have heard.

A Gore spokesman tried to deflect the charges of “do as I say, not as I do” by stating that the Gores “purchase offsets for their carbon emissions to bring their carbon footprint down to zero.” Gore himself has been very public about this approach to carbon neutrality, but not only is this claim not exactly true, it’s quite meaningless in terms of global warming.

First, Al Gore doesn’t purchase carbon offsets out of his own pocket and the actual economic cost, if any, to him is unknown.

The actual offset purchaser is a London-based investment firm, Generation Investment Management (GIM), that Al Gore co-founded with former Goldman Sachs executive David Blood and others in 2004.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,257958,00.html

But while the average US household consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy, the Gore home used nearly 221,000 kWh, more than 20 times the national average. Since the film's release, his home's energy consumption has increased from about 16,200 kWh per month in 2005 to 18,400 kWh per month last year.

Al Gore's father was sometimes known as "the distinguished senator from Occidental."

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore left the White House with less than $2 million US in assets, including a Virginia home and the family farm in Tennessee.

Controversial climate change boss uses car AND driver to travel one mile to office... (but he says YOU should use public transport)

Dr Pachauri’s neighbours include a former prime minister’s son and senior Indian business leaders. Indian steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, Britain’s richest man with an estimated £10.8billion fortune, owns a home in the same area.

Currently, homes of a similar size to Dr Pachauri’s are being advertised at prices of around £6million.

Explaining the area’s sky-high property prices, the director of an international property broker told India’s Economic Times: ‘This area has a certain snob value attached to it. Buying a house here means announcing to the world that one has arrived in life.’

Despite heading the UN body on climate change, Dr Pachauri has no background in environmental science. He began his career as a railway engineer, graduated in engineering and gained his doctorate in industrial engineering.

In an attack on Dr Pachauri in a Delhi magazine article on Friday, headlined The Great Climate Change Fraud, Indian commentator Ninad D. Sheth said: ‘Mr Pachauri has no training in climate science yet he heads the pontification panel which spreads the new gospel of a hotter world. How come?

Saving carbon emissions
Another eight companies have been licensed to sell or implement Teri’s biomass gassifiers which convert plant and wood residue to gas that drives an alternator to produce electricity. If an Australian government-funded project to develop a solar biomass-based cooling system works out, this too will convert into a series of licences. Eighty to 90 glass units in Firozabad near Agra use Teri’s pot furnace and several brick kilns use its vertical shaft brick kiln. According to Teri, its technologies helped the medium- and small-scale sector save around 350,000 tonnes of carbon emissions last year.

Questions over business deals of UN climate change guru Dr Rajendra Pachauri

It is one of these deals, reported in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, which is enabling Tata to transfer three million tonnes of steel production from its Corus plant in Redcar to a new plant in Orissa, thus gaining a potential £1.2 billion in ‘carbon credits’ (and putting 1,700 people on Teesside out of work).

More than three-quarters of the world ‘carbon’ market benefits India and China in this way. India alone has 1,455 CDM projects in operation, worth $33 billion (£20 billion), many of them facilitated by Tata – and it is perhaps unsurprising that Dr Pachauri also serves on the advisory board of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the largest and most lucrative carbon-trading exchange in the world, which was also assisted by TERI in setting up India’s own carbon exchange.

But this is peanuts compared to the numerous other posts to which Dr Pachauri has been appointed in the years since the UN chose him to become the world’s top ‘climate-change official’.

In 2007, for instance, he was appointed to the advisory board of Siderian, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specialising in ‘sustainable technologies’, where he was expected to provide the Fund with ‘access, standing and industrial exposure at the highest level’

Dr Pachauri repeatedly denied that Teri still has any links with the Tata Group, India's largest privately-owned business empire, with interests ranging from coal and steel to renewable energy, and which set up Teri as the Tata Energy Research Institute in 1974. He now claims that Teri has had no "direct links" with Tata since 1999 (or, in another interview, 2001). But it was not until 2003 that the name changed to The Energy and Resources Institute, and then a Teri spokesman explained that "we have not severed our links with the Tatas" and that the change of name was "only for convenience".

Indeed one of the Tata group of companies is still listed among Teri's corporate sponsors, several directors of Tata serve on Teri's Business Council for Sustainable Development, and one senior director serves on Teri's Advisory Board. Other links include the fact that Dr Pachauri and Ratan Tata, the head of the group, both serve on the Indian Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change, advising on all aspects of national climate policy.

Pachauri was on the Board of Directors of the Indian Oil Corporation (January 1999 to September 2003

On 20 April 2002, Pachauri was elected Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations panel established by the WMO and UNEP to assess information relevant for understanding climate change.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajendra_K._Pachauri

Dr Pachauri also keeps some ties with his roots. In his capacity as a former railway engineer, he is a member of the Policy Advisory Panel for the French national railway system, SNCF and has been since April 2007. Long before that, Dr Pachauri became the President of the Asian Energy Institute, a position he took on in 1992.

One of his most interesting - and possibly contentious - positions, however, is his previous directorship with and current post as "scientific advisor" to GloriOil Limited. This is a company he set up himself in late 2005 - two years after he had become chairman of the IPCC. He is described as its "founder". It was set up in Houston, Texas, to exploit patented processes developed by TERI - of which Pachauri is Director-General - known as "microbial enhanced oil recovery" (MEOR), designed to improve the production of mature oilfields. It now has annual revenues of $2.5 to 5 million.

A few eyebrows were raised in June 2007 when Kleiner Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm that preaches the need to invest in green technologies and reduce global warming, invested in GloriOil.

The firm had joined with TERI - Dr Pachauri's employer - and private equity investor GTI to invest $10 million in the company. Yet Kleiner's leading partner John Doerr had led a crusade to "stop the damage caused by global warming" and had publicly broken down in tears over the issue .

Rajendra K. Pachauri is the Director-General of TERI (The Energy Research Institute). He is an internationally recognized figure in energy and sustainable development, having served on numerous boards and committees as Director of the Oil and Natural Gas Company of India; Director of the Indian Oil Corporation, Limited; Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by World Meteorological Organization and Nations Environment Programme; Director of the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), Environment Agency, Government of Japan; Board of the International Solar Energy Society; Member of the World Resources Institute Council; Work Group Chairman of World Energy Council Committee on Developing Countries; President of the Asian Energy Institute; Member of the Panel of Eminent Persons on Power, Ministry of Power; Member of the Advisory Board on Energy, Government of India reporting to the Prime Minister of India; Member, National Environmental Council, Government of India under the Chairmanship of the Prime Minister of India; Member of the Oil Industry Restructuring Group, for the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, Government of India; Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India; and a Member of the International Advisory Board of Toyota Motors.

Pachauri chairs another panel, the judges of the 2010 Zayed Future Energy prize, an illustrious jury that includes former BP chairman Lord Browne, architect Norman Foster and the president of Iceland. Yesterday in Abu Dhabi, Pachauri took to the stage at the seven-star Emirates Palace hotel to hand out a large cash prize – to one of the companies he has been advising.

Last year the $1.5m award was given to Dipal Chandra Barua, an entrepreneur whose company, Grameen Shakti, trained women in rural Bangledesh to install solar energy systems. This year, Pachauri and his judges awarded the prize to car-making giant Toyota.

Arguably Toyota neither needs the money nor the recognition for its work on hybrid technologies. It's worth noting that until less than a year ago, Pachauri was also a member of Toyota's International Advisory Board. I asked Pachauri why Toyota had won, when giving the money to a smaller-scale venture could have had more impact. . .

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/01/guardian-on-pachauri.html

The Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Energy Policy at CEU was opened on April 21st by George Soros,

Greenpeace

It's time to take a stand on global warming. Dr. James Hansen, an internationally-recognized climate scientist, calls for Americans to take part in the Capitol Climate Action on March 2 at the Capitol power plant in Washington DC -- expected to be the largest display of civil disobedience against global warming in US history. Dr. Hansen warns that unless we stop burning coal, the country's largest source of global warming pollution, young people will inherit a dramatically different world than the one we know

How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely "NASA whistleblower" standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros' Open Society Institute , which gave him "legal and media advice"?

That's right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros' flagship "philanthropy," by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI's "politicization of science" program.

That may have meant that Hansen had media flacks help him get on the evening news to push his agenda and lawyers pressuring officials to let him spout his supposedly "censored" spiel for weeks in the name of advancing the global warming agenda.

Hansen even succeeded, with public pressure from his nightly news performances, in forcing NASA to change its media policies to his advantage. Had Hansen's OSI-funding been known, the public might have viewed the whole production differently. The outcome could have been different.

http://www.ibdeditorial.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=275526219598836

James E. Hansen, the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA, protested attempts to silence him after officials at NASA ordered him to refer press inquiries to the public affairs office and required the presence of a public affairs representative at any interview. The Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower protection organization and OSI grantee, came to Hansen's defense by providing legal and media advice. The campaign on Hansen's behalf resulted in a decision by NASA to revisit its media policy.

Is the analogy between climate change and Hitler’s atrocities appropriate?

If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains -- no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species

James Hansen, the world's most famous climate scientist recently endorsed an extreme eco fascist book by Keith Farnish calling for the destruction of industrial civilisation starting with acts of terrorism.
.
Farnish writes

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization

Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage.

Keith Farnish has it right: time has practically run out, and the 'system' is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests - they will not look after our and the planet's well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort. --Professor James Hansen, GISS, NASA

Hansen appeared along with a man of similar extremes, Zac Goldsmith, in a UK court to defend an 'act of of terrorism' against Kingsnorth power station. that resulted in £30,000 of damage .

Kingsnorth report in the Guardian

Hansen, a Nasa director who advises Al Gore, the former US presidential candidate turned climate change campaigner, told the court that humanity was in "grave peril". "Somebody needs to step forward and say there has to be a moratorium, draw a line in the sand and say no more coal-fired power stations."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/sep/11/activists.kingsnorthclimatecamp

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech (pdf) to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.

Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.

Tales from the climate-change crossroads

Four books by prominent global-warming pundits illustrate that exhortation and authority are not enough to solve the climate crisis — it is time for some humility, concludes Roger Pielke Jr.

Hansen's complaint that leaders of sovereign countries have not acceded to his demands implies a criticism of democracy, also present in Schneider's book. If science leads inexorably to particular political outcomes, then it would seem to favour autocratic forms of governance. The middle man — the general public — is easily ignored if heads of state need only hear the expert voice of science. Schneider worries that democracy finds it hard to deal with complex issues: if only the public understood the real risks, he explains, they would be “much more likely to send strong signals to their representatives”. He bemoans a public debate that includes the participation of “special interests” and that is filtered through an inept media, a perspective echoed by Hansen.

George Monbiot endorsed the actions of protesters who sabotaged Scottish mine equipment and encouraged future similar action.

But while the government undermines its own targets, some people in Scotland are putting its climate change policy into effect. The Scottish camp for climate action has declared war on opencast coal mining. Yesterday people associated with it did what the government should have done years ago, and cut the conveyor belt used to carry coal from the Glentaggart pit in Lanarkshire to the local rail terminal. Now they propose to take on other pits, as well as Scotland's biggest coal-burning power stations. They have chosen the right targets. Coal is the dirty word that threatens to destroy attempts at Copenhagen in December to prevent climate breakdown. If governments won't take it on, we must.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/aug/07/monbiot-scotland-climate-policy

In a spirit of curiosity rather than anger, I complained to various Scottish and British legal authorities - and got no replies.

Prestigious Panel Of Scientists, Leaders, And Activists To Advise Ten-Year Vision For The Earth Institute

The Earth Institute at Columbia University is pleased to announce the appointment of its first External Advisory Board, which includes an impressive range of global-view leaders such as philanthropist George Soros, Harvard Professor Edward O. Wilson, and musician/activist Bono.

Under the direction of international economist Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the Earth Institute supports pioneering projects in the biological, engineering, social, and health sciences, while actively encouraging interdisciplinary projects--often combining natural and social sciences--in pursuit of solutions to real world problems.

In its work, the Earth Institute remains mindful of the staggering disparities between rich and poor nations, and the tremendous impact that global-scale problems -- such as the AIDS pandemic, climate change and extreme poverty -- have on all nations.

London, 5 July: Technology to capture the carbon dioxide emitted from coal-fired power stations will be crucial in ensuring climate stability, according to economist Nicholas Stern and George Soros, a financier and philanthropist.

http://www.environmental-finance.com/onlinews/0705cap.htm

LAVISH subsidies and high electricity prices have turned Britain’s onshore wind farms into an extraordinary moneyspinner, with a single turbine capable of generating £500,000 of pure profit per year.

According to new industry figures, a typical 2 megawatt (2MW) turbine can now generate power worth £200,000 on the wholesale markets - plus another £300,000 of subsidy from taxpayers.

Since such turbines cost around £2m to build and last for 20 or more years, it means they can pay for themselves in just 4-5 years and then produce nothing but profit.

The lucrative outlook has led to a surge in planning applications for new windfarms. There are already 165 wind farms operating 1,944 turbines in Britain but another 34 are under construction, a further 118 have planning consent and 220 are under consideration, according to new figures from the British Wind Energy Association.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article3257728.ece

Leading by Example: The EU and Global Governance Conference on Global Governance Brussels, 12 May 2009

This more proactive approach is crucial, I believe, to achieve an international agreement at the UN Climate Conference in December. It's time to 'seal the deal' in Copenhagen, to demonstrate effective global governance on the defining challenge of our generation. And Europe is showing the way.

http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=SPEECH/09/239

A deal must include an equitable global governance structure. All countries must have a voice in how resources are deployed and managed. That is how trust will be built. Can we seal a comprehensive, equitable and ambitious deal in Copenhagen that will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global temperature rise to a scientifically safe level?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/opinion/26iht-edban.html?_r=3

The climate conference in Copenhagen is another step toward the global mangement of our planet

“But it is the awareness itself that will drive the change and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governance and global agreements.”

Putting the hippies on the payroll

Green Capitalism: Manufacturing Scarcity in an Age of Abundance, by James Heartfield

"In other words, green capitalism is not a passing fad adopted by a few corporate bosses, too spineless to stand up to the hippies; it expresses an essential feature of the social system. As Heartfield reminds us, the origins of modern environmentalism lie in the 1970s when the elite industrialists of the Club of Rome commissioned The Limits to Growth report. As the long post-war boom ended, arguing that the world was running out of resources was another way of saying that there was nothing left to redistribute, and that trade unions must settle for lower wages (p27). (Needless to say, the Club of Rome’s predictions about the exhaustion of natural resources were all confounded [p13]).

http://www.culturewars.org.uk/2008-03/heartfield.htm

In 1997 the Club of Rome collaborated with Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute to launch a new report "Factor Four" that promised to "halve resource use" while doubling wealth. The message was that you could get rich saving the planet. A privileged few did indeed double their wealth; but for the rest it was just a case of halving resources.

Immodestly, Lovins made his own California energy scheme the main example of savings in "Factor Four". His well-paid advice to the State of California was that it was a big mistake to adopt a system that rewarded increased electricity output with increased profits. Such a system would naturally tend to boost output. Instead, rewards for cutting energy use were needed. Rather than getting paid for additional megawatts the utility companies should be rewarded for saving power use: negawatts. The impact of Lovins' model on energy generation in California was decisive. "Around 1980, Pacific Gas and Electricity Company was planning to build some 10-20 power stations", according to Lovins.

But by 1992, PG&E was planning to build no more power stations, and in 1993, it permanently dissolved its engineering and construction division. Instead as its 1992 Annual Report pronounced, it planned to get at least three quarters of its new power needs in the 1990s from more efficient use by its customers.[4]

Of course the PG&E was not getting three quarters of its new power needs from anywhere: it had just reduced its output. But manufacturing energy scarcity did indeed grow somebody's cash wealth: Enron's. With these artificial caps on energy production the generating companies could start to hike up the charges to utility companies, including PG&E, now unable to meet its own customers' demands. Those energy companies were owned by Enron. Chief Executive Kenneth Lay turned Enron from a company that made its money generating power into one that made its money trading finance. Whatever else it was doing, there was no denying that Enron was cutting back its own CO2 emissions and getting rich doing it. One company memo stated that the Kyoto treaty "would do more to promote Enron's business than will almost any other regulatory initiative".[5]

Amory Lovins' negawatt revolution in California was Enron's wet dream. Having shut down its own generation capacity, PG&E was at the mercy of Enron's market manipulation. Buying surplus electricity on the open market PG&E was royally fleeced, losing US$12 billion. Utility bills rose by nine times between May 2000 and May 2001. Enron took advantage of the restricted market and cut electricity to California. They even invented reasons to take power plants offline while California was blacked out. Enron officials joked that they were stealing one million dollars a day from California.[6] The PG&E that Lovins held up as a model went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the State of California.

The oil companies were members of an anti global warming organisation called the Global Change Coalition until just before Kyoto was signed . Many jumped ship after the Americans managed to insert cap and trade into article 17 of the Kyoto Protocol on ther insistence of Enron and BP, even though the Senate was complete against it and voted 95-0 against ratification. The Global Change Coalition eventually disbanded in 2000, four years before Kyoto was ratified.

Corporate Climate Coup Confirmed

I described in some detail the corporate political agenda to derail the anti-globalization movement and the concurrent corporate economic agenda to supplant the moribund dot.com bubble with a new bonanza based upon carbon trading. I identified the central corporate players, notable among them the powerhouse investment bank Goldman Sachs, Generation Investment Management (Al Gore's Goldman Sachs spin-off), and two of the world's four largest oil companies, BP and Shell, both Goldman Sachs clients. The article pointed out how their campaign was grounded upon the restoration of faith in two of the main targets of the anti-globalization movement: the imagined beneficence of the self-regulating market and, most stridently, the allegedly unimpeachable authority of science. That ideological restoration effort is now doubly in doubt. As popular dismay mounts over the scurrilous surreality of the market-based carbon-trading scam, the corporate campaign has been thrown into possibly fatal disarray with the inelegant demolition of the preposterous pretensions of pure, peer-reviewed, science. And as the veil is lifted from the habitat of the gaming wizards of global warming, the UK Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, we would expect, given this historical review of the political economy of AGW, to find familiar faces, and we do. There they are, in the fine print of the history of the outfit (www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/about/history), among the funders of the Nobel-lauded independent minds that supposedly certified our sanity in this madness: BP and Shell. You guessed it.

A BBC poll, which surveyed 1,000 people, revealed that 25% of adults did not believe in global warming – a rise of 8% since a similar poll in November – and the percentage of those who thought climate change was a reality fell to 75%. Of those who believed, one in three felt climate change had been exaggerated. Only 26% of people thought climate change was "established as largely manmade".

India forms new climate change body

The Indian government has established its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the group headed by its own leading scientist Dr R.K Pachauri.

US to World Bank: Don't fund coal-fired plants

NEW DELHI: Close on the heels of the inconclusive end to the Copenhagen Accord, the US government has stepped up pressure on the World Bank not to fund coal-fired power plants in developing countries.

In a letter sent to the World Bank, a copy of which is with TOI, United States Executive Director Whitney Debevoise said, "The Obama Administration believes that the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have a potentially critical role to play in the future international framework for climate finance, and, in particular, to assist developing countries in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and strengthening their economies' resilience to climate risks.''

Chinese negotiators achieved their goal at Copenhagen climate talks in ensuring financial aid for developing nations was not linked to external reviews of China's environmental plans, its top climate envoy said today.

Britain, Sweden and other countries have accused China of obstructing the climate summit, which ended last month with a non-binding accord that set a target of limiting global warming to a maximum 2 degrees Celsius but was scant on details.

China would never accept outside checks of its plans to slow greenhouse gas emissions and could only make a promise of "increasing transparency," Xie Zhenhua, deputy head of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, said at a forum.

The reason the Met Office so persistently gets its seasonal forecasts wrong is that it has been hi-jacked from the role for which we pay it nearly £200 million a year, to become one of the world's major propaganda engines for the belief in man-made global warming. Over the past three years, it has become a laughing stock for forecasts which are invariably wrong in the same direction.

Also today, civil society organisations including Friends of the Earth, Avaaz and Tck Tck Tck have been thrown out of the conference. Incredibly, delegates and media have been told they will lose their accreditation if they talk to these banned

The number of deaths during the coldest three months of the year were up almost 50 per cent on the previous year to 36,700, sending an extra 10,000 pensioners to early graves, new figures showed yesterday.

The rise in "excess winter mortality" for England and Wales for the three months to February was the biggest for years and the highest total in a decade, sparking fresh calls for ministers to combat high energy prices.

The UK could face power shortages in the years ahead, according to the energy regulator, Ofgem.The regulator also warns that a significant number of consumers may not be able to afford the higher energy prices they will have to face.

Ofgem says there is "reasonable doubt" about whether the UK's energy market will be able to deliver sustainable supplies in the coming decade.

Chief executive Alistair Buchanan told BBC News: "Faced with the unprecedented challenge of carbon prices, the unprecedented challenge of the credit crunch and the unprecedented challenge of maintaining international supplies, we're looking at new solutions to protect security of supply."

The Liberal Party is in turmoil with the resignations of five frontbenchers from their portfolios this afternoon in protest against the emissions trading scheme.

Tony Blair is to lead a new international team to tackle the intractable problem of securing a global deal on climate change which would have the backing of China and America.

The former prime minister believes he can help prepare a blueprint for an agreement to cut carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, and has the backing of the White House, the UN and Europe, including Gordon Brown.

He told the Guardian he has been working on the project with a group of climate change experts since he left office last summer, and will publish an interim report to the G8 group of industrialised nations this summer

Tony Blair has taken a second big job with a leading financial player, attracted by the prospect of working on its climate-change initiative.

The former Prime Minister has joined Zurich, the Swiss company, as an adviser. The appointment, thought to be worth at least £500,000 a year, comes less than three weeks after he took a similar role with J P Morgan Chase, one of the biggest investment banks on Wall Street. That was believed to be a package worth about £2 million a year.

He will assist Zurich on “developments and trends in the international political environment”. His key interest, according to friends, was in its climate initiative, announced last week, developing products and research to combat global warming.

Tony Blair to earn millions as climate change adviser

Tony Blair is set to earn millions of pounds advising an American businessman on how to make money from tackling climate change.

The former prime minister will be paid at least £700,000 a year to act as a “strategic adviser” to Khosla Ventures, a venture capitalist firm founded by Indian billionaire Vinod Khosla.

The Californian company bankrolls businesses hoping to profit from technology that helps reduce global warming and carbon emissions.

Mr Blair secured the job thanks to his “influence” and high level international contacts, whom he will be expected to lean on to open doors.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair is joining US venture capital firm Khosla Ventures as an adviser.

The business, started in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of technology giant Sun Microsystems, specialises in environmentally-friendly technologies.

Khosla also backs start-ups in sectors such as mobile phones and the internet. It has not been disclosed how much Mr Blair will be paid.

According to Khosla, which last year raised $1.3bn (£900m) from private investors, Mr Blair will provide strategic advice regarding investments in environmentally friendly or helpful technologies.

Carbon capture and storage's role in preventing global disaster - Guardian articles sponsored by Shell !!

Commission on National Security in the 21st Century from the Institute for Public Policy Research

Supporting the Commission

ippr would like to thank the following organisations, who are supporters of all the Commission's activities:

We would also like to thank the following for their support of specific research streams feeding into the Commission’s deliberations:

But it's energy companies that have made windfall profits from government policies that push up the price of energy. Neither the environment nor the consumer has benefited. Taxes currently make up over two-thirds of the price of petrol and climate change policies make up 14% of the average household electricity bill.

The new emissions agreement is a disaster. Angela Merkel is prepared to go green only when it doesn't hurt big business.

So much for the Europeans leading the way on climate change. Even as our governments claim they want to drag the world into an effective climate agreement in Poznan in Poland, they have just pulled Europe out of one in Brussels.

The agreement they have just reached is a disaster. The 20% carbon cut they promise by 2020 falls miles short of what's needed, and they'll be able to buy most of it from abroad anyway. All this means, in a world which has to eliminate most of its carbon pollution, is that other countries, which have sold their easiest reductions to us, will then find it harder to make emissions cuts of their own. It's carbon colonialism, in which Europe picks the low-hanging fruit in developing countries, leaving them with much tougher choices later on.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/12/greenpolitics-poznan

The Vattenfall project in Berlin is only one example of a larger trend. Utility companies want to set up a total of 26 new coal-fired power plants in Germany during the coming years.

The greenwash comes in when ministers dress up a research programme into a possible technology for tomorrow as if it were a functioning system for preventing carbon dioxide getting into the air today. Even if all goes to plan, only a small fraction of the emissions from planned new coal-fired power stations will be captured until at least 2025, and possible much longer.

Atmospheric Physicist James A. Peden, formerly of the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburghalso critiqued RealClimate.org on June 24, 2008. Peden wrote, “'Real Climate' is a staged and contracted production, which wasn't created by 'scientists,' it was actually created by Environmental Media Services, a company which specializes in spreading environmental junk science on behalf of numerous clients who stand to financially benefit from scare tactics through environmental fear mongering.”

Monbiot’s metamorphosis

Monbiot compares Atlantic flying unfavourably with child molesting In the same newspaper as numerous advertisements for long haul trans Atlantic holidays.

A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees," threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the United Nations U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the...

The Cooling World

Newsweek, April 28, 1975

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

Having seen the CIA report mentioned in a 1976 Washington Post piece, but with no copy of it on the internet, I obtained the microfiche document from the British Library. The content of the report’s 36 pages is striking. It may have been written in 1974, but the depictions are uncannily familiar: climate change, it says, will lead to floods and famines, and leaders in climatology are issuing stark warnings about threats to ‘the stability of most states’. The only thing to differentiate it from today’s scaremongering is the fact that the CIA in 1974 was concerned about global cooling, not warming. The report even mentions a ‘consensus’ among scientists.

The document is embarrasing to read. The ‘new climatic era’ is described in 1974 as a harbinger of famine, starvation, refugees, floods, droughts, crop failures, monsoons and the cause of all kinds of meteorological phenomena. As expected, potential benefits are downplayed and potential harms highlighted: the Sahara is expected to expand, and world grain reserves may last less than one month, the report claimed. There is even a cursory list of past civilisations destroyed by climatic episodes: The Indus, the Hittites, the Mycenaean and the Empire of Mali.

According to the CIA, these climate models are being refined (as always) and the energy balance of the atmosphere is perfectly explicable without a single reference to greenhouse gases. Thanks to government intervention (of course), many famous scientists, until then victims of ‘personality clashes’, have managed to establish a ‘scientific consensus’ about ‘global climate change’, including vague threats about a ‘greater variability’ in climate and serious economic problems around the world. And not only that; they all agree on a series of proposals about the creation of new government agencies. This is exactly the agreed scientific position as reported at the time by Newsweek, the New York Times, the Washington Post and so on.

Panic about climate change is not an entirely contemporary phenomenon. In fact, 40 years ago, some scientists were similarly fearful about an impending climate catastrophe. The world would be harmed and life would become harsh, we were told. Policies were drawn up to deal with the coming change, and the scientists crossed their fingers. But there is one vital difference between the panic then and the panic now. It wasn’t global warming that was concerning scientists 40 years ago; it was global cooling.

Remember the mad cow scare?

Wednesday will mark the 10th anniversary of our costliest-ever food scare, unleashed by Stephen Dorrell's claim that there might be a link between eating beef and the brain disease CJD. The Observer predicted a million dead by 2016.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1513362/Christopher-Bookers-notebook.html

Earth Day, Then and Now

Imminent global famine caused by the explosion of the "population bomb" was the big issue on Earth Day 1970

Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off."

Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support...the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution...by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half...."

Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.
• Peter Gunter, professor, North Texas State University

We have about five more years at the outside to do something.
• Kenneth Watt, ecologist

Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.
• George Wald, Harvard Biologist

We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
• Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist

Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,
• Denis Hayes, chief organizer for Earth Day

Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….
• Life Magazine, January 1970

At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, its only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.
• Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist
We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones.
• Martin Litton, Sierra Club director

By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there wont be any more crude oil. Youll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy, and hell say, `I am very sorry, there isnt any.
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.
• Sen. Gaylord Nelson

The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.
• Kenneth Watt, Ecologist

Greenfield land would be turned into burial grounds for thousands of victims in the event of an avian flu pandemic, under emergency plans being considered by the Government.

A nationwide shortage of cemetery space means that room would be needed to bury as many as 400,000 victims. A search is now under way to find greenfield sites on the edge of cities. Mass burial pits for the dead have been ruled out. Instead the plan is to create dignified, landscaped cemeteries that could become a memorial for victims.

deal needs to be backed by money and the means to deliver it. Developing countries need funding and technology so they can move more quickly toward green growth. The solutions we discuss cannot be realized without substantial additional financing, including through carbon markets and private investment.

A deal must include an equitable global governance structure. All countries must have a voice in how resources are deployed and managed. That is how trust will be built.

The cozy corporate-climate relationship was pioneered by Enron, which bought up renewable energy companies and credit-trading outfits while boasting of its relationship with green interest groups. When the Kyoto Protocol was signed, an internal memo was sent within Enron that stated, "If implemented, [the Kyoto Protocol] will do more to promote Enron's business than almost any other regulatory business."

How secret US-China 'back channel' lead to climate deal

Fred Pearce, consultant

It looks like the long-anticipated climate wars between the US and China may not happen after all. This week, the two governments signed a "memorandum of understanding on enhancing cooperation on climate change, energy and the environment".

It's easy to be cynical about such bits of paper. And this one doesn't formally commit anyone to anything specific. But the promise it contains to work together to engineer a global deal on climate deal in Copenhagen in December and "accelerate the transition to a sustainable low-carbon global economy" is stunning in its scope.

In the 1980s the Greens experimented with various policies which would decriminalize sex with children. At its national conference in Lüdenscheid (March 1985) the Greens in North Rhine-Westphalia called for "nonviolent sexuality" between children and adults never to be subject to criminal prosecution. In 1987 the policy was " When young people have the desire for older peers outside the family, prevented either because their homosexuality is not accepted by their parents, or because they have pädosexuelle inclinations, be it for other reasons, they must be given the opportunity to do so.

India rejects emissions cuts for a decade

India will not discuss signing up to legally binding obligations to make absolute cuts in greenhouse gas emissions for at least 10 years, Jairam Ramesh, the country’s environment minister, said on Friday.

“In 2020, it’s conceivable that we might look at a limited target. But in 2009, no way,” said Mr Ramesh

BBC opinion poll in which the vast majority of recommendations were for sceptical comments

You cannot even make a dent in global warming, or environmental destruction, until you STOP population growth.

Population growth outstrips any and all environmental gains so quickly, that all other efforts are ineffective, and will continue to be so, until we face the fact there are too many people being added to the resources drain, every day.

Rick McDaniel, Lewisville, TX USA

Recommended by 168 people

Prove to me that there actually IS global warming and that it isn't part of a natural cycle and maybe we should start looking at it.

[BostinJack]

Recommended by 161 people

If global warming, caused by man, is a reality and life on earth faces eventual decimation why is the answer from politicians, who have surely seen the proof, that it is okay to carry on the way we are but we should just pay more tax?
Why do we need more housing which will cause more global warming?
Why do we need to expand airports?
The biggest problem facing the earth is over population but no politician in the establihment parties of all the major nations even mentions it.

Mark Rookes, Ely, United Kingdom

Recommended by 148 people

Ho-hum, here we go again. was wondering how long it would be before this tiresome topic was featured on HYS yet again.
How many more times?
GLOBAL WARMING is a massive scam invented by Al Gore in the 1980s and has ever since, been hijacked by MPs, celebs and other easily-led people as a means to tax and restrain the masses.
Meanwhile, CLIMATE CHANGE is a naturallly occuring event that cannot be prevented.

David, London, UK

Recommended by 107 people

Somebody did not get the memo...It's climate change now, not global warming. You can only protest global warming in a driving snowstorm so many times.

Steve M, North Carolina, United States

Recommended by 106 people

Global warming is real, but it's a natural event that has nothing to do with mankind, and there is nothing we can do to change it in any way.

Have a look at just how many of the scientists involved in the IPCC report that are now distancing themselves from the conclusions drawn.

Jon Cooper, Camborne, United Kingdom

Recommended by 100 people

Its a money making smokescreen.

Stanly Mathews, Gloucester, United Kingdom

Recommended by 94 people

Government maps show action is needed urgently if the UK is to avoid breaching health based air quality laws for nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a toxic gas, in London from 2010 to 2015 and beyond

Around this time, Mr. Carlin and a colleague presented a 98-page analysis arguing the agency should take another look, as the science behind man-made global warming is inconclusive at best. The analysis noted that global temperatures were on a downward trend. It pointed out problems with climate models. It highlighted new research that contradicts apocalyptic scenarios. "We believe our concerns and reservations are sufficiently important to warrant a serious review of the science by EPA," the report read.

The response to Mr. Carlin was an email from his boss, Al McGartland, forbidding him from "any direct communication" with anyone outside of his office with regard to his analysis. When Mr. Carlin tried again to disseminate his analysis, Mr. McGartland decreed: "The administrator and the administration have decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision. . . . I can only see one impact of your comments given where we are in the process, and that would be a very negative impact on our office." (Emphasis added.)

India rebuffs US carbon demands

By James Lamont in New Delhi, James Fontanella-Khan in Mumbai and Daniel Dombey in Washington

India on Sunday night rebuffed an appeal by Hillary Clinton, US secretary of state, to embrace a low-carbon future in which the two countries would work together to devise new ways of consuming and producing energy

India minister accuses west over glaciers

India's environment minister has accused the developed world of needlessly raising alarm over melting Himalayan glaciers. Jairam Ramesh has disputed the science behind claims that climate change is rapidly melting Himalayan glaciers, saying there is no evidence to support what he claimed were misleading scenarios painted by the west.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/43702396-77ea-11de-9713-00144feabdc0.html

Winnie, an enthusiastic young woman who worked in the Vestas restaurant and is now acting as a makeshift union representative, tells me the workforce was not properly unionised; management had allegedly made it clear that there would be consequences if the workers tried to organise.

Coal built China - and fuels its relentless growth today. Eighty per cent of China's electricity comes from coal, and there are plans for 544 new coal-fired power stations to meet an insatiable demand for energy.

Obama administration: Cap and trade could cost families $1,761 a year

The Obama administration has privately concluded that a cap and trade law would cost American taxpayers up to $200 billion a year, the equivalent of hiking personal income taxes by about 15 percent.

A previously unreleased analysis prepared by the U.S. Department of Treasury says the total in new taxes would be between $100 billion to $200 billion a year. At the upper end of the administration's estimate, the cost per American household would be an extra $1,761 a year.

A second memorandum, which was prepared for Obama's transition team after the November election, says this about climate change policies: "Economic costs will likely be on the order of 1 percent of GDP, making them equal in scale to all existing environmental regulation

China Shenhua Energy, the world's second-largest coal miner, has said it will invest $39.5bn (£24.2bn) over the next four years to hugely increase its production.

China is the world's biggest producer and user of coal, and more than 70pc of Chinese power stations are coal-fired

Shenhua has said it plans to double its annual coal production to 400m tons in the next five years in order to feed China's seemingly insatiable appetite for energy.

NEW YORK Berkshire Hathaway Inc.'s $44 billion deal to buy Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp. is basically a huge bet on coal, a fuel that powers Warren Buffett's power plants at his MidAmerican Energy utility and plays a major role in the railroad business.

While regulatory delays and uncertainty over climate-change legislation has slowed the addition of new U.S. coal plants, plenty of new facilities are expected to come on line in the United States, becoming prospects for future growth for the railroads.

Nine new coal plants have been permitted in the United States and 25 are under construction for a combined generation capacity of nearly 15,000 megawatts, according to an Oct. 9 report by the National Energy Technology Laboratory.

Moves by the Obama administration to curb emissions in proposed climate-change legislation are also anticipated to push the generation industry toward wider use of carbon-capture and storage technology at coal plants, which still supply nearly half of America's electricity.

With the U.S. economy poised for a rebound, both the coal-fired electricity industry and the railroads that haul the black rock are primed for growth, leading Buffett to describe his huge purchase as "an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States

Mr Der says putting carbon capture technology on existing coal plants would push up operating costs by 80 per cent.

Much of that will have to be passed on to consumers, who would want assurances it is safe to have large amounts of carbon stored locally. Paul Forrester, a partner at Mayer Brown, the law firm, says: "If you push 20 years' worth of CO 2 in the ground and it leaks out, you're back 30 years. We need it to stay there for ever.''

The "scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention" that starts on page 18 contains the provision for a "government." The aim is to give a new as yet unnamed U.N. body the power to directly intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all the nations that sign the Copenhagen treaty.

The reason for the power grab is clear enough: Clause after complicated clause of the draft treaty requires developed countries to pay an "adaptation debt" to developing countries to supposedly support climate change mitigation. Clause 33 on page 39 says that "by 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least $67 billion] or [in the range of $70 billion to $140 billion per year]."

The short answer is trillions of dollars over the next few decades. It is a significant sum but a relatively small fraction of the world’s total economic output. In energy infrastructure alone, the transformational ambitions that delegates to the United Nations climate change conference are expected to set in the coming days will cost more than $10 trillion in additional investment from 2010 to 2030, according to a new estimate from the International Energy Agency.

As scary as that number sounds, the agency said that the costs would ramp up relatively slowly and be largely offset by economic benefits in new jobs, improved lives, more secure energy supplies and a reduced danger of climate catastrophe. Most of the investment will come from private rather than public funds, the agency contends

Climategate: George Monbiot, the Guardian and Big Oil

But who is it that sponsors the Guardian’s Environment pages and eco conferences? Why, only that famous non-fossil-fuel company Shell. (Though I notice their logo no longer appears on top of the Guardian’s eco pages: has the Guardian decided the relationship was just too embarrassing to be, er, sustainable?)

And which company has one of the largest carbon trading desks in London, cashing in on industry currently worth around $120 billion – an industry which could not possibly exist without pan-global governmental CO2 emissions laws ? BP (which stands for British Petroleum)

And how much has Indian steel king Lakshmi Mittal made from carbon credits thanks to Europe’s Emissions Trading Scheme? £1 billion.

And which companies were the CRU scientists revealed cosying up to as early as 2000 in the Climategate emails? There’s a clue in this line here: “Had a very good meeting with Shell yesterday.”

And how much was Phil Jones, director of the discredited CRU, found to have collected in grants since 1990? £13.7 million ($22.7 million)

And why does this Executive Vice-Chairman of Rothschild’s bank sound so enthusiastic in this (frankly terrifying) letter about the prospects of the “new world order” (his phrase not mine) which result from globally regulated carbon trading?

Or how about this tiny $7o million donation to the climate change industry from the Rockefeller Foundation?

Now, something similar is happening in developing countries. Fertility is falling and families are shrinking in places— such as Brazil, Indonesia, and even parts of India—that people think of as teeming with children. As our briefing shows, the fertility rate of half the world is now 2.1 or less—the magic number that is consistent with a stable population and is usually called “the replacement rate of fertility”. Sometime between 2020 and 2050 the world’s fertility rate will fall below the global replacement rate

The Malthusians are right that the world’s population is still increasing and can do a lot more environmental damage before it peaks at just over 9 billion in 2050. That will certainly be the case if poor, fast-growing countries follow the economic trajectories of those in the rich world. The poorest Africans and Asians produce 0.1 tonnes of CO₂ each a year, compared with 20 tonnes for each American. Growth is helping hundreds of millions to escape grinding poverty. But if the poor copy the pattern of wealth creation that made Europe and America rich, they will eat up as many resources as the Americans do, with grim consequences for the planet. What’s more, the parts of the world where populations are growing fastest are also those most vulnerable to climate change, and a rising population will exacerbate the consequences of global warming—water shortages, mass migration, declining food yields.

THE lies, the untruths, the paranoid statements, the political point-scoring, the abuse of power, the secretive communications and the cover-ups - not to mention the huge cost to the taxpayer.

No, I don't mean the Chilcot Inquiry.

Though let's face it, that liars' convention should have been sponsored by Dulux given the amount of whitewash being used.

Nope. On this occasion my ire has been drawn to the rather inconvenient truths that have been uncovered, or should I say forcibly squeezed, from those whose main purpose in life has been to hysterically overstate the facts on the supposed threat of man-made global warming.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/papercolumnists/donaldmacleod/2831667/Inconveniently-for-the-experts-global-warming-is-a-con.html

In addition to enhancing oil extraction from the North Sea, the UK is busy opening up the deepwater oil and gas fields that are West of Shetland and around the Falklands.

That's why the oil industry calls environmentalists, 'our little carbon trading numpties'.

Air Pollution, Economic Activity and Respiratory Illness: Evidence from Canadian Cities, 1974-1994

Guelph economist Ross McKitrick, along with Gary Koop of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow and Lise Tole of the University of Edinburgh, analyzed a new database from 11 Canadian cities over a 20-year period. Unlike most earlier studies, this one included controls for effects of smoking and income.

They found no evidence that air pollution affected either hospital admission rates or time spent in hospitals. However, they did determine that both smoking and income levels directly affect respiratory health. Their findings appear this week in the journal Environmental Modelling and Software

Elsewhere in his remarks, he noted he was speaking on the night before the start of spring, “otherwise known to Al Gore as proof of global warming.”

Russia's top weatherman today announced that the winter now drawing to a close in Siberia may turn out to be the coldest on record.

'The winter of 2009-10 was one of the most severe in European part of Russia for more than 30 years, and in Siberia it was perhaps the record breaking coldest ever,' said Dr Alexander Frolov, head of state meteorological service Rosgidromet.

The only dissenting voice was Graham Stringer, who was also the only member with a science degree (BSc (Hons) in Chemistry).

**

One dissenting member of the committee, Labour MP Graham Stringer, said he was unhappy that neither of the independent reviews had a climate sceptic member.

"There should be a reputable scientist on the panel [who is] sceptical about man-made global warming," he said.

http://www.news.pushpi.com/tag/mp-graham-stringer

Britain brandishes olive branch to restart global climate change talks

Britain brandished a diplomatic olive branch today as it tried to restart global climate change negotiations with an initiative to heal the rift between rich and poor countries following the failure of the Copenhagen summit.

The diplomatic moves came as Gordon Brown met billionaire financier George Soros; Obama's economic adviser Larry Summers; economist Lord Nicholas Stern and other finance ministers to find ways to raise $30bn (£20bn) a year immediately and $100bn a year by 2020 to enable developing countries to adapt to climate change.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/mar/31/ed-miliband-restart-climate-change-talks?showallcomments=true#

The plan is to use western taxpayer's money to build infrastructure in order to help the poor people of the world cope with climate change. Especially countries like Guyana who's president welcomed the initiative..

Confidential document reveals Obama's hardline US climate talk strategy

Document outlines key messages the Obama administration wants to convey in the run-up to UN climate talks in Mexico in November

Titled Strategic Communications Objectives and dated 11 March 2010, it outlines the key messages that the Obama administration wants to convey to its critics and to the world media in the run-up to the vital UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico in November. (You can read the document text below).

Top of the list of objectives is to: "Reinforce the perception that the US is constructively engaged in UN negotiations in an effort to produce a global regime to combat climate change." It also talks of "managing expectations" of the outcome of the Cancun meeting and bypassing traditional media outlets by using podcasts and "intimate meetings" with the chief US negotiator to disarm the US's harsher critics.

But the key phrase is in paragraph 3 where the author writes: "Create a clear understanding of the CA's [Copenhagen accord's] standing and the importance of operationalising ALL elements."

This is the clearest signal that the US will refuse to negotiate on separate elements of the controversial accord, but intends to push it through the UN process as a single "take it or leave it" text. The accord is the last-minute agreement reached at the chaotic Copenhagen summit in December. Over 110 countries are now "associated" with the accord but it has not been adopted by the 192-nation UN climate convention. The US has denied aid to some countries that do not support the accord.

On the Energy Gap and Climate Crisis

3) If countries like China and India follow the American pattern in transportation, ballooning demand for oil is bound to be a disruptive influence on world affairs with or without the climate impact of all those additional emissions of greenhouse gases. Think of it this way; the United States, with 307 million ( heading toward 400 million) people, now consumes nearly 20 million barrels a day; India, with more than 1.1 billion people, is barely in first gear, currently using 2.67 million barrels of oil but poised for vastly increased demand. Add in projections of car use in Chinaand you see why status-quo fuel choices don’t hold up.

A BBC documentary about socialite Robin Birley and his carbon credits business venture in Africa should never have been broadcast, an internal inquiry by the corporation has found. Millions of viewers were misled because the sympathetic documentary shown on BBC World News failed to declare that it was financed by a secretive trust that was linked to Birley.

The BBC acted in response to an Observer investigation into Birley's "philanthropy capitalism" venture in Mozambique. Taxpayers' money was used to subsidise poor farmers there to protect forests and plant trees that absorb carbon dioxide. Envirotrade, Birley's company, then sells "carbon credits" to celebrities and businesses wanting to offset their emissions. Customers who used Birley's venture to offset emissions included the agency that handles Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

The fight against eco-imperialism

It is not acceptable to use climate change as an excuse to limit growth in poor countries as the west's carbon emissions rise

Last Thursday the World Bank approved a £2.4bn loan to build a huge new coal-fired power station in South Africa. The issue has exposed the rift between two central international goals – alleviating poverty and preventing global warming. South African ministers claimed that the project was essential for their country's development, while a concerted environmental campaign lobbied international governments to block the scheme. Amid concerns about global warming, this question of development versus environment may become one of the most contentious international issues over the next few years.

For Mr Cameron, the coalition is something of an environmental God-send. The Liberal Democrats were judged by far the greenest of the main parties by Friends of the Earth, and their presence in government gives weight to Mr Cameron's Vote Blue, Go Green slogan. The Liberal Democrat cohort also buffers the Prime Minister from his own back-benchers, many of whom are sceptical about man-made climate change.

In their first press conference Mr Cameron and Mr Clegg both pledged a low-carbon economy, but there will be doubts about whether low-carbon energy targets will be met and whether Conservatives will be prepared at this time to continue to underpin low-carbon jobs. Before the election, they indicated a determination to cut funds to the North-East, for instance, a major low-carbon hub. This may be a source of future tension. On broad energy policy there is, though, wide agreement on policy. Ministers will commit to a "huge" increase in energy from waste digestion by bacteria and the roll-out of "smart" interactive local electricity grids.

They will mandate a national recharging network for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, though it is not clear what "mandating" means and who is to be mandated.

No new coal power stations will be built unless they pass a carbon emissions standard, though the standard is still to be decided.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/science_and_environment/10112386.stm

Crisis in New Zealand climatology

The official archivist of New Zealand’s climate records, the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA), offers top billing to its 147-year-old national mean temperature series (the “NIWA Seven-station Series” or NSS). This series shows that New Zealand experienced a twentieth-century warming trend of 0.92°C.

The official temperature record is wrong. The instrumental raw data correctly show that New Zealand average temperatures have remained remarkably steady at 12.6°C +/- 0.5°C for a century and a half. NIWA’s doctoring of that data is indefensible.

The NSS is the outcome of a subjective data series produced by a single Government scientist, whose work has never been peer-reviewed or subjected to proper quality checking. It was smuggled into the official archive without any formal process. It is undocumented and sans metadata, and it could not be defended in any court of law. Yet the full line-up of NIWA climate scientists has gone to extraordinary lengths to support this falsified warming and to fiercely attack its critics.

For nearly 15 years, the 20th-century warming trend of 0.92°C derived from the NSS has been at the centre of NIWA official advice to all tiers of New Zealand Government – Central, Regional and Local. It informs the NIWA climate model. It is used in sworn expert testimony in Environment Court hearings. Its dramatic graph graces the front page of NIWA’s printed brochures and its website.

I pulled off into an unknown backstreet and drove in that urban style first pioneered by Jack Regan in The Sweeney. It was like slipping through a wormhole. For all I knew, I could have emerged in Romford. But miraculously we found ourselves, sometime later, on the M20 conducting a close study of the location of speed cameras.

Me and my iPad

The iPad finally goes on sale in the UK on Friday. But how good is it? Early adopters give us their views

Apple iPad: Alan Rusbridger's review

The Guardian's editor-in-chief talks to Jemima Kiss about his first impressions of the Apple iPad

An MEP last week lodged an official question asking what happened to the Danish registry while Hedegaard was climate minister, and what is being done across Europe to combat carbon fraud.

Denmark is now at the centre of a Europol investigation into carbon fraud worth €5bn (£4.3bn). An estimated 116 arrests have been made so far, around 30 of them in the UK.

But the confidential climate ministry report seen by the Guardian, entitled VAT Fraud in the European CO2 Quota Register Including the Danish, appears to have been signed with Hedegaard's initials, indicating she was made aware of the problem in August last year.

Reporters asked Graham several times about why he was supporting Lugar's bill, when just a few months ago he had argued that the Senate shouldn't pass a "half-assed" bill that lacked hard restrictions on carbon emissions. Graham replied that he now doesn't think pricing carbon is that important. "The science about global warming has changed," he noted, offhandedly. "I think they've oversold this stuff, quite frankly. I think they've been alarmist and the science is in question," Graham told reporters. "The whole movement has taken a giant step backward."

Recently, however, population has started to re-emerge as an issue of discussion among people working on environment and development issues.

High-profile champions such as Sir David Attenborough have spoken of its importance and the threats it may pose.

However, some economists and policymakers consider population growth a good thing, as it produces a swelling workforce capable of producing more goods and continued economic growth.

Jonathon Porritt, founder and director of the UK think tank Forum for the Future and a member of the Royal Society's working group, suggested the review could shed some objective light on the issues under dispute.

"What it can do is shed some light on the different interpretations that people draw from the underlying trends," he said.

Are you fed up with sceptics and pseudo-scientists dominating blogs and news articles with their denialist propaganda? Well, fight back! We are trying to create an online army of online volunteers to try and tip the balance back in the favour of scientific fact, not scientific fiction.

You will receive one e-mail alert per day containing links to various climate change news articles. We need you to politely explain in the comments section why global warming is actually happening and why it’s not a big conspiracy. You can contribute to as little or as many articles as you like, just dive in.

It comes from an organisation called the Campaign Against Climate Change. Its honorary president is George Monbiot;

Greenpeace International raised 127 Million Euros last year on the back of “Saving the Whales”.

Greenpeace Australia has about 18 million dollars in the bank. Greenpeace USA sits on tens of millions of dollars. Yet they claim they do not have the budget to return to the Southern Oceans yet they also claim they stopped the whalers for two weeks in January, and if such a claim is true then they should go back and stop them again…

My feelings are that Greenpeace has turned into a corporate monster hungry for your money and will say anything to get it!

Since when has Greenpeace actually “Saved a Whale” ? They run around the Southern Ocean chasing the Japanese whaling fleet, yet turn a blind eye to Norway and Iceland who are also killing whales against the international moritorium on whaling.

British Gas doubles profits on Big Freeze

The Big Freeze last winter fuelled a 98 per cent rise in British Gas profits, parent company Centrica has reported, as households face a £300-a-year rise in energy bills amid government green initiatives.

The news came after energy secretary Chris Huhne warned yesterday that the coalition government's green policies could increase the price of electricity by up to a third and gas by up to a fifth.

This would see the average family's annual energy bill soar by £300 to £1,100.

In the government's first annual energy statement to the House of Commons yesterday, Mr Huhne detailed plans to transform Britain's power system, slashing carbon emissions by 80 per cent over the next four decades.

Harvard puts tighter limits on medical faculty

Restricts involvement with health care industry

Harvard Medical School will prohibit its 11,000 faculty from giving promotional talks for drug and medical device makers and accepting personal gifts, travel, or meals, under a new policy intended partly to guard against companies’ use of Harvard’s prestige to market their products.

The conflict-of-interest rules also place stricter limits on the income faculty can earn from companies for consulting, joining boards, and other work; require public reporting of payments of at least $5,000 on a medical school website; and promise more robust internal reporting and monitoring of these relationships.

Harvard, which provides continuing medical education for tens of thousands of doctors worldwide, also will erect a more solid firewall between itself and health care companies during these courses. The greatest impact will be on Pri-Med, an annual conference for primary care doctors at a Boston convention center, which features Harvard-taught courses. Pharmaceutical companies pay for separate breakfast, lunch, and dinner lectures by non-Harvard specialists and even market products in restrooms. The industry program will be moved to a more separate location, and marketing signs will no longer be allowed in bathrooms.

BONN, Germany – Carbon taxes, add-ons to international air fares and a levy on cross-border money movements are among ways being considered by a panel of the world's leading economists to raise a staggering $100 billion a year to fight climate change.

British economist Nicholas Stern told international climate negotiators Thursday that government regulation and public money also will be needed to create incentives for private investment in industries that emit fewer greenhouse gases.

In short, a new industrial revolution is needed to move the world away from fossil fuels to low carbon growth, he said.

"It will be extremely exciting, dynamic and productive," said Stern, one of 18 experts in public finance on an advisory panel appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

A climate summit held in Copenhagen in December was determined to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide trapping the sun's heat. But the 120 world leaders who met in the Danish capital offered no ideas on how to raise that sum — $1 trillion every decade — prompting Ban to appoint his high-level advisory group.

The Copenhagen summit also resolved to mobilize a three-year emergency fund of $30 billion starting this year. It was unclear how much has been raised and disbursed so far.

The advisory panel, which began working in March, will present its final report to Ban in October, a month before the next decisive climate conference convenes in Cancun, Mexico.

It will analyze a range of options, Stern said, and governments must decide which to chose, how much to raise from each source, and how to distribute the money.

Potential revenue sources include auctioning the right to pollute, taxes on carbon production, an international travel tax, and a tax on international financial transactions, as well as government grants and loans. Each could produce tens of billions of dollars a year, Stern said.

"No one single source will deliver $100 billion by itself. There is no silver bullet, no hole in one," he said.

Private capital also will be crucial, and governments must adopt policies reducing the risk to investors, he said.

The panel's recommendations will weigh the practicality, reliability, and political acceptability of each method, he said.

The advisory panel is chaired by the prime ministers of Norway and Ethiopia and the president of Guyana. Its members include French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, White House economic adviser Lawrence Summers, billionaire financier George Soros and public planners from China, India, Singapore and several international banks.

The governments of 194 countries are negotiating an agreement to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which called on industrial nations to reduce carbon emissions by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. Unlike Kyoto, the next deal would set emission goals for developing countries, especially rapidly growing economies like China and India, in exchange for help with financing and technology.

The negotiating session in Bonn ends Friday, and delegates will meet once more in China before the Cancun ministerial conference.

"The high cost of wind power compared to gas-fired generation plant can easily be demonstrated using public data. For instance, Centrica, a major investor in both wind- and gas-fired generation, has published figures for its recently completed 885 MW Langage plant, which cost around £400 million2, or £450/kW, and for its 270 MW Lincs wind power project, which is estimated to cost £750 million3 or £2,800/kW. In this example, the unit capital cost of the wind power project is over six times that of the gas-fired project. The figures look even worse when calculated on an effective capacity basis. A CCGT (Combined Cycle Gas Turbine) would expect to be available to generate over 90% of the time, increasing its cost of effective capacity to £500/kW. A wind plant, by contrast, might expect to be available to generate (at best) 30% of the time, lifting its cost of effective capacity to £9,300/kW, over 18 times the cost of a CCGT.

NEW YORK (CBS) The suspect in the Discovery Channel hostage situation has been shot and killed by police. It is believed he was a man named James Lee.

Lee, a California native, reportedly managed the website savetheplanetprotest.com, which is described on what appears to be his MySpace page as his "idea to save the planet."

The site lists 11 programming demands for the Discovery Channel and its affiliate channels.

Lee apparently accused the Discovery Channel programs of "causing more harm than good," and said, "It's time to bring about new initiatives and try different approaches whether they are conventional or unconventional," in a Save The Planet Protest document dated Feb. 2008.

One of the demands on the Save The Planet website states: "Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! This is your obligation."

Our climate is changing. The scientific evidence is clear: our planet is getting warmer.1 Greenhouse gases (GHGs) - including carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, and chlorofluorocarbons - are increasing rapidly in our atmosphere

But believers cite a September 13 press release for the book Challenges of Change by retired NORAD officer Stanley A. Fulham, which predicted a fleet of UFOs would descend upon Earth's major cities on Wednesday, October 13.

Fulham stated the extraterrestrials would neither land nor make any communication with Earth on Wednesday. But their presence would be "the first in a series intended to avert a planetary catastrophe resulting from increasing levels of carbon-dioxide in the earth's atmosphere dangerously approaching a 'critical mass.' [...] They are aware from eons of experience with other planets in similar conditions their sudden intervention would cause fear and panic."

He asserts their contact with Earth is part of their process of leading mankind into accepting the "alien reality and technologies for the removal of poisonous gases from the earth's atmosphere in 2015, if not sooner."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/wpix-ufo-sighting,0,2283967.story

Austerity hypocrites have no right to attack Osborne

Liberal, left-wing and green-leaning commentators are outraged by George Osborne's spending review, claiming it will lower people's living standards and throw thousands on to the dole queue. Which is a bit rich, considering that many of the liberal intelligentsia have been agitating for austerity for years. Time and again, liberal thinkers have told us that we must learn to live with less "stuff", for the sake of our own sanity and for the good of the people-plagued planet. So don't be fooled by their crocodile tears today—they laid the cultural foundation stones for this age of hardship.These austerity hypocrites have short memories. This week, the Guardian's George Monbiot wrote an angry piece about the Tory-led cuts agenda, claiming that it will help the rich and hurt the rest.

"When we stagger out of our shelters to assess the damage, we'll discover that we have emerged into a different world, run for their benefit, not ours", he said.

This is the same Monbiot who wrote a piece in 2007 titled 'Bring on the recession'."I hope that the recession now being forecast by some economists materialises", he said, because only a recession could give us "the time we need to prevent runaway climate change".A recession would hurt poor people, he acknowledged—but that was a price worth paying to halt out-of-control economic growth.

Households face £769-a-year rise in power bills to 'rewire the nation' for green energy

5th October 2010

A £200billion plan to switch to green energy could cost households an average of £769 a year, it was claimed today.

Industry regulator, Ofgem, said a massive construction plan is needed to build new wind farms, power stations, including nuclear, and a modern national grid.

The first stage, a £32billion plan to build new pipelines and pylon networks, has been given the go-ahead.

Picking up the bill: Calculations put the cost of converting Britain to green energy at £769 a year

'Consumers must make their homes more energy efficient, reduce the amount of energy they use and make sure they are paying the lowest possible price for it,' he said.

Analyst at the M&C Energy Group, David Hunter, warned: 'Customers should expect a 60per cent hike in bills over the next decade or so.'

Richard Hall, energy expert at the customer body, Consumer Focus, said: 'While moves to make our energy supply more secure and efficient are essential, the costs involved are huge.

'Ofgem needs to be vigilant so that customers are not asked to write a blank cheque to fund them.

'Energy suppliers and generators will get huge benefits from infrastructure changes and must share in the costs.

'Measures are also needed to protect households at risk of fuel poverty from the disproportionate effects that price rises will have on the poorest consumers.'

Carbon tax and energy price hike to create 'perfect storm'

Published Date: 12 December 2010 By Nathalie Thomas BUSINESSES are facing a "perfect storm" from 2012 when they will be hit by a doubling in their energy bills at the same time as the UK government's controversial "carbon tax". Carbon Masters, a spin-out company from the University of Edinburgh, has calculated that most UK firms will be see their gas and electricity bills soar by 100 per cent between 2012 and 2016 while they will also be saddled with a carbon tax bill of ateast £42,000 under the government's Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) energy efficiency scheme.

Kevin Houston, chief executive of Carbon Masters, believes most companies are completely unprepared for the enormous jump in their energy costs from 2012 onwards.

The CRC scheme was set out by the previous Labour government in order to encourage large and medium-sized firms which use at least 6,000 megawatts a year to improve their energy efficiency.

The original scheme was designed to be tax neutral with the most energy efficient companies receiving their money back at the end of the year. However, under controversial changes announced by the coalition earlier this year, the funds raised will go to the Treasury, raising £1 billion for the depleted taxpayer's purse.

"People haven't quite woken up to the potential scale of this," Houston warned.

Iomart, the Scottish technology firm, has called on the government to differentiate between types of firm when they assess their carbon tax bills. Director Phil Worms said: "To be perfectly honest, the scheme is a PR puff. It doesn't look at the different type of users. It's bizarre to compare us to a local authority.

BBC - December 2010 update: Second coldest since 1659

DEATH rates are set to soar “scandalously” this winter as a new Arctic blast batters Britain with temperatures on a par with Siberia.

Experts predict a dramatic increase in cold-related fatalities as we suffer the bitterest winter in a century, causing 12 deaths every hour.Britons face spiralling energy bills while the death toll this winter could reach 35,000. There are also fears some mail may not reach its destination by Christmas Day because of the freeze. Forecasters said temperatures could plummet to record lows in the run-up to Christmas, putting tens of thousands of vulnerable people at risk.

Charities warned of pensioners suffering “Dickensian” conditions, resorting to riding on buses or huddling in shopping centres just to keep warm. Millions of Britons are being forced to turn down their thermostats as gas and electricity prices spiral. Jonathan Powell, senior forecaster with Positive Weather Solutions, said icy conditions were on the way back by the middle of next week after a brief weekend thaw. He said plummeting temperatures could even surpass the -27.2C (-17F) recorded in Braemar in 1982 – the coldest temperature in Britain. Studies show a drop in temperature of just one degree is followed by 200 heart attacks. People aged between 75 and 84 and those with a history of heart disease appear to be most vulnerable.

Last year the number of deaths linked to the cold weather reached nearly 28,000 in four months, sparking claims that the UK has the highest winter death rate in northern Europe.

Temperatures plummeted to the coldest on record for November in parts of the UK overnight.

Northern Ireland hit a new low of -9.5C (15F) at Lough Fea, Co Tyrone, and in Wales, a record minimum of -18C (0F) was reached at Llysdinam, in Powys.

However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

The effects of snow-free winter in Britain are already becoming apparent. This year, for the first time ever, Hamleys, Britain's biggest toyshop, had no sledges on display in its Regent Street store. "It was a bit of a first," a spokesperson said.

Fen skating, once a popular sport on the fields of East Anglia, now takes place on indoor artificial rinks. Malcolm Robinson, of the Fenland Indoor Speed Skating Club in Peterborough, says they have not skated outside since 1997. "As a boy, I can remember being on ice most winters. Now it's few and far between," he said.

Dr. Roy Spencer, who is in Cancun representing climate skepticism on behalf of CFACT writes on his blog:

Today’s my first full day in Cancun at COP-16, and as I emerged from my hotel room I was greeted by a brisk, dry, cool Canadian breeze.It was 54 deg. F in Cancun this morning — a record low for the date. (BTW, Cancun is nowhere near Canada).

Freeze of the century: Army called in to clear away snow in coldest December for 100 years

After a further 4in of snow fell yesterday the Met Office warned that – despite a brief respite this weekend – temperatures would stay ‘remarkably’ low for another fortnight. If that happens, this month could replace 1981 as the coldest December since records began in 1910.To do so, the average mean temperature for the month will have to be lower than 0.2c.

James Hansen 1986: Within 15 Years Temps Will be Hotter Than Past 100,000 Years.

25 metre rises in sea level, tropical temperatures in England, and widespread crop failures are only some of the predictions from Dr James Hansen. Here’s a selection of his predictions from the archives.

Going back to 1982, we find Hansen arguing that if fossil fuel use was restricted, England might be a tropical paradise by 2050. If we carried on as normal, the world would be back in the sort of heat last seen in the age of the dinosaurs.

By 1989, far from toning it down, Hansen was starting to really turn up the heat, predicting totally unprecedented warming so far as mankind was concerned:

And in 2006, he was still going strong. Unabashed by the failure of the world to warm significantly, Hansen was still predicting massive temperature increases. Remember that in the interview below, with a British newspaper, he is talking in degrees Celsius for temperature, and in metres (one metre = 3 feet) for sea level rise:

That’s a 25 metre – 75 feet – rise in sea level by the end of the century. So far, it doesn’t look like this one will fare any better than the rest.

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization

Stephen H. Schneider (born c. 1945) is Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University

On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but — which means that we must include all the doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands, and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we'd like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broadbased support, to capture the public's imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This 'double ethical bind' we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both. (Quoted in Discover, pp. 45–48, Oct. 1989.

Sir John Houghton, former co chair of the IPCC and head of world leading Hadley Centre for Climate .

"the quest for Gaia is an attempt to find the largest living creature on Earth."

The basic idea of the planet being a living being comes fron theosophy, particularly The Secret Doctrine by Russian spirit medium, Helena Blavatsky.

The Universal Life expresses itself on many levels, thus through the physical life of this planet, yet another greater life grows and breathes, the Earth Spirit - Gaia

The Secret Doctrine was also the source of the deep racial theories of the Nazis.

Blavatsky used "Root Race" as a technical term to describe human evolution over the large time periods in her cosmology. However, she also claimed that there were modern non-Aryan peoples who were inferior to Aryans. She regularly contrasts "Aryan" with "Semitic" culture, to the detriment of the latter, asserting that Semitic peoples are an offshoot of Aryans who have become "degenerate in spirituality and perfected in materiality. She also states that some peoples are "semi-animal creatures". These latter include "the Tasmanians, a portion of the Australians and a mountain tribe in China."

But it can't happen in a modern democracy. This is one of the problems. What's the alternative to democracy? There isn't one. But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

“The data doesn't matter. We're not basing our recommendations on the data. We're basing them on the climate models.”

"It doesn't matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true."

"No matter if the science of global warming is all phony... climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world."

"The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself."

"We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public's imagination... So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts... Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest."

"We've got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy."

"Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

"[The Earth Summit will play an important role in] reforming and strengthening the United Nations as the centerpiece of the emerging system of democratic global governance."

"The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security."

"I believe it is appropriate to have an 'over-representation' of the facts on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience."

Back before he became U.S. President Obama served on the board of directors for the Joyce Foundation when it gave CCX nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”

Essentially Obama helped fund the profiteers of the carbon taxation program that he then steered steered through Congress.

"The threat of environmental crisis will be the 'international disaster key' that will unlock the New World Order."

Mikhail Gorbachev, Former President of the Soviet Union, member of the Club of Rome

"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."

"We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries."

"Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure 'one world', if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."

*Other Club of Rome members include Tony Blair, George Soros Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Javier Solana, Kofi Annan, Bill Gates, The Dalai Lama, Hassan bin Talal, Javier Perez de Cuellar, Gro Harlem Bruntland, Robert Muller, Garret Hardin, King Juan Carlos of Spain and his wife Queen Sophia, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Prince Philippe of Belgium and many more people that include wealthy elites, 'new age spiritualists', former or current world political figures and former or current U.N. figures. *

Watch Lord Christopher Monckton (Former Adviser to Margaret Thatcher) Speaking in St. Paul on the real purpose of the Copenhagen Treaty - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stij8sUybx0

"… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.”

"A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions."

"I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today”

“We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal.”

In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it is just as bad not to say it.

"If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels."

As the conversation continued, the DC asked if Gifford was recording the discussion. "Quite possibly," she said.

During Tuesday's meeting she was taken to a Morrisons supermarket cafe in the the suburb of Anniesland. However it was back in the car, during the return journey, that Gifford asked how much she might earn.

"Are you recording this bit as well?" asked the assistant. Gifford laughed. "Ha ha," she said. "Quite possibly."

Last Saturday, the Guardian disclosed how undercover police tried to recruit Plane Stupid's Tilly Gifford to act as an informant in return for cash. Here she describes her week.

If Ms Gifford's account is reliable - and her secret recordings seem to offer a compellingly authentic insight - police are now busily infiltrating some activist environmental groups in an organised way, putting pressure on vulnerable suspects to inform, and then rewarding these informants - and thus compromising any evidence they might produce - with cash and offers of legal immunity. The observation of one officer that "UK plc can afford more than 20 quid" deserves to be remembered in the annals of policing for a long time to come.

Duncan Campbell and the BBC Zirkon spy satellite affair. BBC Glasgow was raided by Special Branch officers .

How going green may make you mean

According to a study, when people feel they have been morally virtuous by saving the planet through their purchases of organic baby food, for example, it leads to the "licensing [of] selfish and morally questionable behaviour", otherwise known as "moral balancing" or "compensatory ethics".

Digging up the roots of the IPCC

History of the Met Office Hadley Centre

The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black Black Oil

Should we believe anything the Met Office says?

Management of the Met Office

Our owner

Met Office Owner’s Council (MOOC)

Role and responsibility

UK looks to break climate logjam

Number facing fuel poverty up 20%

One in five households in fuel poverty

Stern launches carbon credit ratings agency

Climate Change Act has the biggest ever bill

Ed Miliband's legislation will cost us hundreds of billions over the next 40 years, says Christopher Booker

Supporting the Commission

Dwight D. Eisenhower: Farewell Address

EDF completes UK nuclear line-up

E.ON and RWE to build £20bn UK nuclear reactors

Keep It In The Family, Gordon

US energy bill backs nuclear industry

Tales from the climate-change crossroads

Corporate Climate Coup Confirmed

India forms new climate change body

US to World Bank: Don't fund coal-fired plants

France to rethink carbon tax plan

Tony Blair to earn millions as climate change adviser

Supporting the Commission

Monbiot’s metamorphosis

The Cooling World

Newsweek, April 28, 1975

Earth Day, Then and Now

How secret US-China 'back channel' lead to climate deal

India rejects emissions cuts for a decade

India rebuffs US carbon demands

Obama administration: Cap and trade could cost families $1,761 a year

China Shenhua Energy, the world's second-largest coal miner, has said it will invest $39.5bn (£24.2bn) over the next four years to hugely increase its production.

Climategate: George Monbiot, the Guardian and Big Oil

THE lies, the untruths, the paranoid statements, the political point-scoring, the abuse of power, the secretive communications and the cover-ups - not to mention the huge cost to the taxpayer.

Confidential document reveals Obama's hardline US climate talk strategy

On the Energy Gap and Climate Crisis

The fight against eco-imperialism

Crisis in New Zealand climatology

Me and my iPad

Apple iPad: Alan Rusbridger's review

British Gas doubles profits on Big Freeze

Harvard puts tighter limits on medical faculty

Restricts involvement with health care industry

Austerity hypocrites have no right to attack Osborne

Households face £769-a-year rise in power bills to 'rewire the nation' for green energy

5th October 2010

Carbon tax and energy price hike to create 'perfect storm'

BBC - December 2010 update: Second coldest since 1659

James Hansen 1986: Within 15 Years Temps Will be Hotter Than Past 100,000 Years.

How going green may make you mean