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The Real Copenhagen Fraud?
Submitted by Leo Kolivakis, publisher of Pension Pulse.
Johann Hari reports in the Independent on the truths Copenhagen ignored (hat tip Tom Naylor):
So
that's it. The world's worst polluters – the people who are drastically
altering the climate – gathered here in Copenhagen to announce they
were going to carry on cooking, in defiance of all the scientific
warnings.
They didn't seal the deal;
they sealed the coffin for the world's low-lying islands, its glaciers,
its North Pole, and millions of lives.
Those of us who watched this conference with open eyes aren't
surprised. Every day, practical, intelligent solutions that would cut
our emissions of warming gases have been offered by scientists,
developing countries and protesters – and they have been systematically
vetoed by the governments of North America and Europe.
It's
worth recounting a few of the ideas that were summarily dismissed –
because when the world finally resolves to find a real solution, we
will have to revive them.
Discarded
Idea One: The International Environmental Court. Any cuts that leaders
claim they would like as a result of Copenhagen will be purely
voluntary. If a government decides not to follow them, nothing will
happen, except a mild blush, and disastrous warming. Canada signed up
to cut its emissions at Kyoto, and then increased them by 26 per cent –
and there were no consequences. Copenhagen could unleash a hundred
Canadas.
The brave, articulate Bolivian
delegates – who have seen their glaciers melt at a terrifying pace –
objected. They said if countries are serious about reducing emissions,
their cuts need to be policed by an International Environmental Court
that has the power to punish people. This is hardly impractical. When
our leaders and their corporate lobbies really care about an issue –
say, on trade – they pool their sovereignty this way in a second. The
World Trade Organisation fines and sanctions nations severely if (say)
they don't follow strict copyright laws. Is a safe climate less
important than a trademark?
Discarded Idea
Two: Leave the fossil fuels in the ground. At meetings here, an
extraordinary piece of hypocrisy has been pointed out by the new
international chair of Friends of the Earth, Nnimmo Bassey, and the
environmental writer George Monbiot. The governments of the world say
they want drastically to cut their use of fossil fuels, yet at the same
time they are enthusiastically digging up any fossil fuels they can
find, and hunting for more. They are holding a fire extinguisher in one
hand and a flame-thrower in the other.
Only
one of these instincts can prevail. A study published earlier this year
in the journal Nature showed that we can use only – at an absolute
maximum – 60 per cent of all the oil, coal and gas we have already
discovered if we are going to stay the right side of catastrophic
runaway warming. So the first step in any rational climate deal would
be an immediate moratorium on searching for more fossil fuels, and fair
plans for how to decide which of the existing stock we will leave
unused. As Bassey put it: "Keep the coal in the hole. Keep the oil in
the soil. Keep the tar sand in the land." This option wasn't even
discussed by our leaders.
Discarded Idea
Three: Climate debt. The rich world has been responsible for 70 per
cent of the warming gases in the atmosphere – yet 70 per cent of the
effects are being felt in the developing world. Holland can build vast
dykes to prevent its land flooding; Bangladesh can only drown. There is
a cruel inverse relationship between cause and effect: the polluter
doesn't pay.
So we have racked up a climate
debt. We broke it; they paid. At this summit, for the first time, the
poor countries rose in disgust. Their chief negotiator pointed out that
the compensation offered "won't even pay for the coffins". The cliché
that environmentalism is a rich person's ideology just gasped its final
CO2-rich breath. As Naomi Klein put it: "At this summit, the pole of
environmentalism has moved south."
When we
are dividing up who has the right to emit the few remaining warming
gases that the atmosphere can absorb, we need to realise that we are
badly overdrawn. We have used up our share of warming gases, and then
some. Yet the US and EU have dismissed the idea of climate debt out of
hand. How can we get a lasting deal that every country agrees to if we
ignore this basic principle of justice? Why should the poorest restrain
themselves when the rich refuse to?
A deal
based on these real ideas would actually cool the atmosphere. The
alternatives championed at Copenhagen by the rich world – carbon
offsetting, carbon trading, carbon capture – won't. They are a global
placebo. The critics who say the real solutions are "unrealistic" don't
seem to realise that their alternative is more implausible still:
civilisation continuing merrily on a planet whose natural processes are
rapidly breaking down.
Throughout the
negotiations here, the world's low-lying island states have clung to
the real ideas as a life raft, because they are the only way to save
their countries from a swelling sea. It has been extraordinary to watch
their representatives – quiet, sombre people with sad eyes – as they
were forced to plead for their own existence. They tried persuasion and
hard science and lyrical hymns of love for their lands, and all were
ignored.
These discarded ideas – and dozens
more like them – show once again that man-made global warming can be
stopped. The intellectual blueprints exist just as surely as the
technological blueprints. There would be sacrifices, yes – but they are
considerably less than the sacrifices made by our grandparents in their
greatest fight.We will have to pay higher
taxes and fly less to make the leap to a renewably powered world – but
we will still be able to live an abundant life where we are warm and
free and well fed. The only real losers will be the fossil fuel
corporations and the petro-dictatorships.
But our politicians have not chosen this sane path. No: they have
chosen inertia and low taxes and oil money today over survival
tomorrow. The true face of our current system – and of Copenhagen – can
be seen in the life-saving ideas it has so casually tossed into the
bin.
You can watch Johann
explaining some of the appalling loopholes being smuggled into the
Copenhagen treaty below.
You can watch Johann explaining some of the appalling loopholes being smuggled into the Copenhagen treaty below. Also, listen carefully to this CBC interview with James Hansen.
He's widely regarded as the most influential climate scientist in the
world and rightly dismisses cap & trade as pure "gimmickry".
It's a shame but it looks like Copenhagen was
another climatic bust, just like Kyoto and Rio were. Next up, the
global pension bust.
»
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http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/global_warming_fraud_and_the_f.html
....Several expeditions setting out for the Pole to "call attention" to the coming Arctic catastrophe had to stop short due to icy conditions. In one case, both women involved suffered serious frostbite.
Ironically, Obama arrived in Copenhagen greeted by a snowstorm and returned to Washington greeted by a record-breaking blizzard. Like God was laughing at his pretensions.
If CO2 emissions really bother you, you have no choice but to build lots of nuclear power plants and drive electric cars. Can't for the life of me understand how the carbon-phobes are the same crowd who are nuclear-phobes. Solar and wind will never produce enough energy in most of the world.
Long before CO2 is a potential problem, mankind will be partially obliterated by one or more of a variety of means: nuclear war, disease, famine, fresh water shortage, asteroid impact, solar flare, etc.
The CO2-phobes are a fad with their own fake science and fraudulent scientists, opportunistic politicians, sycophantic industrialists like GE and Siemens, and greedy financiers like Goldman Sachs who wish to trade carbon credits. What bull shit.
Anything for a headline, power, or a buck.
Usually "governments achieve the exact opposite of what the set out to achieve."
Not my saying but John Harvey-Jones, former ceo of ICI.
Also the right things often happen for the wrong reasons.
You might not like Leo or his reasons but he and people with that sort of view are more likley to get sustainable energy production up than any amount of "herding cats" at Copehaghen or Kyoto or wherever.
I for one, armed with various items of technology that didnt exist 30 years ago am in the process of reducing my heating and lighting bills to zero in a suburban house in a temperate zone.
Why?
Well , in a way that connects environment with economics at real ground level, when all that cash washing around in the Fed and BoE and just about every other inflated currency in existence hits and the cost of fuel rockets....I'm not really going to care as I wont have to buy any.
So I'm sort of saying forget Copenhagen etc, its just government freeloaders on expenses feeling important.
Just get on with it yourselves. We lead , governments will have to follow.
For all the wrong reasons the right thing can happen.
+ one fluorescent bulb.
Let's just call it "Weather Change", state that we only have three days, convene a conferences in a city with a large supply of limos and airports, and for heaven's sake do it during the goddamn summer at a hot place, like say Mexico.
The hoax of climate change is part of the delusion, created by The Beast, in order to gain power over mankind.
If you need me to explain this to you, the night is far spent. You have already been deceived, along with the rest of the sheeple, the lazy and lovers of kool-aid.
Leo, after reading this and your subsequent comments you now have zero credibility for me. Less than zero.
You mentioned that the "National Post carried an article from Agence France Press" but you failed to mention anything about that paper's extensive coverage of Climategate.
You appear to be a climate change fraud denier of the worst order which makes me wonder what else you selectively write. I can only assume that in your spare time you watch too much CBC and worship Suzuki.
Climategate is unfolding as Watergate did, slowly at first but very surely.
The IPCC is Madoff in a polar bear suit. Here's some of their fraudulent methods.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/the-smoking-gun-at-darwin-zero/
http://climateaudit.org/2009/12/10/ipcc-and-the-trick
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/BOMBSHELL.pdf
Climate change.....the last word......5billion years ago when the earth was very young, it was a molten mass of boiling rock....nowadays it is no longer molten at the suface, and has cooled to the point where the molten rock is 20-30 K metres below the surface on which we all stand. One day in the future ,it will be a cold solid sphere of rock through out. lets move on ...
The last post also illustrates why I should not read ZH after midnight.
Not quite - Earth should maintain a molten core for at least the next 3 to 4 billion years on its own, given the amount of U235 in or near the core, though the molten layer will probably shrink to about 40% of its present size (the crust will effectively become about 1600 km thick).
(Also, remember that the molten earth 3.5 billion years ago developed a crust pretty quickly, but that crust was cracked dramatically when a Mars sized planet hit the earth a little off-center, ejecting enough material to eventually form the Moon. The jagged pieces of that crust, once they recooled, separated from one another due to the proto-moon significantly increasing the radius of the earth, and in time became the tectonic plates. This is not conventional wisdom, just my own theory, but it seems to explain the obvious puzzle-piece like interconnectivity of the continents better than any I've heard. If you assume that much of the basaltic basin of the Pacific Ocean now resides above us as the moon (and if you note that none of the other terrestrial planets have plate tectonics and only Mars has moons (small, likely Jupiter-belt captures)) then a lot of existing tectonic theory makes sense.
However, the sun will increase in heat production over that time, so that by four billion years from now it will be hot enough to liquify the planet Mercury. Given solar tidal locking that will become more pronounced as the moon moves away from the Earth over that period, even by 3.5 billion years it's very likely that at least part of the planet (along the equator), may actually start to melt as well. By five billion years, the sun will be in its red giant phase, and the earth will either be a cinder or expelled, cannonlike, into interstellar space (possibly after having been turned into a cinder).
That assumes that we don't get caught up in the upheaval when we have our first collision with Andromeda about then, which could very well either send the Earth into intergalactic space (at which point it will end up cooling down pretty dramatically) or closer toward the center of the Milky Way, at which point it will either end colliding with or getting captured gravitationally by another star system along the way.
Stability is an illusion held by those with too short a time frame reference.
Leo .... what time frame are you using to arrive at your conclusions that global warming is taking place? Is it the past 10 years, the past 100 years, the past 500 years, the past 1,000 years, or what?
I'm curious, because the conclusions one arrives at regarding global warming depend on the time frame used to map the apparent temperature changes.
The latest from ... Alex Jones ?
There will be nowhere to run from the new world government
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/janetdaley/6845967/Therell...
Another excellent article from the Independent:
Joss Garman: Copenhagen - Historic failure that will live in infamy
Could not have summarized it better myself.
You might want to watch this video Leo.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOLkze-9GcI&feature=related
CO2 Prices Probably Will Fall on Climate Deal, Barclays Says
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aKnV.lL352jw&pos=12
Yep,
Scientists have managed to explain climate as a single variable system - yet they can`t even build a model.
LOL.
Climate Change so important and yet:
http://oversight.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=...
“GAO’s report makes it clear that EPA rushed to close libraries with little notice or input and disregarded concerns raised by EPA employees and in an EPA report,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. “Now all who rely on EPA libraries for information are paying the price. EPA must recognize the importance of its libraries to EPA staff and the public, fully consider the input of library users, and ensure that the libraries are available to meet users’ needs.”
Or maybe it's just a great way to get rid of inconvenient evidence. After all, an effective EPA would address polution and properly seperate that issue from Climate change.
I believe the importance of the EPA is well understood, and that's why it's libraries and data must disappear.
Interesting that President Obama is tied to the founding (back in 2000 )of the Chicago Climate Exchange (http://www.chicagoclimatex.com/content.jsf?id=1)
http://www.joycefdn.org/pdf/00_AnnualReport.pdf
Don't think we're not keeping score, Brother O.
Climatology and meteorology should not be confused. Climatology is for the most part an obscurantist field dreamed up by Maurice Strong and the Rothschilds in order to promote oligarchical hysteria around the world. Their goal is an absolutist one world government, and the elimination of 90-95% of the worlds population. The georgia guide stones proudly announce to the world that only 500,000,000 will be allowed to live when they are done.
All of the population bombs and "peak" everything are part of this. The program of oligarchy has not changed for thousands of years. Ancient Greek oligarchs believed that the legendary Trojan War was caused by over-population, with a teeming mass of humanity oppressing the breast of mother earth. For them all the killing was seen as a needed population reduction strategy at that time. Of course, we know that the world was actually very sparsely populated in those days.
The ultimate goal of every huckster is to get all of your money, and give you literally nothing in return. Thus far no one has been able to codify that into law around the world. The enemy of mankind wants to take plentiful things like air and water and attach "Life Taxes" to them. The people will be left paying taxes for nothing in return, with all the money going to a bank of the world or some such thing. The program is genocidal, and is expected to reap a harvest of death for the globalists of about 1 billion people dead in the first decade, maybe more if their entire program makes it through.
Oppose the obscurantism and hucksterism of whatever oligarchical program is being pushed at the moment. Believe that the world can be made better through development, and that humanity has value.
Peer review? Gimme a break.... If the stuff is written by a lucid mind cognizant of the facts, then it needs no review - "up" is up, or self-evident. If it is written by a monkey, however, then only monkeys are bound to review it - "up" is merely a hypothesis.
With the recent discovery of the foul smelling Pachauri. The search for Algore's evil twin is finally over!
The National Post carried an article from Agence France Press, World leaders hammered over climate accord. I changed my pic because I liked the one on ths article. No conspiracy there, I promise.
In engineering one is always encouraged to check one's answer.
The "Check" on human caused climate change is direct comparison to the other planets of our solar system. It would appear that big changes are occuring in the other planets.
There are no SUVs on Mars.
1. Big Government has all the data necessary to show a clear difference in earth climate change relative to other planets. Such demonstration would quickly clarify the issues. Such demonstration has not been forthcoming. In fact, what little climate data has been released shows a clear correlation between magnitude and direction of climate change on earth to that of the other planets. Note: the changes in the outer planets are massive, so it has nothing to do with solar activity.
2. Rex Murphy works for CBC. Why not link to his scathing ridicule against the bum hacker climategate fraudsters? I mean come on, if you can't subject these "scientists" to scrutiny, they have zero credibility.
3. Pollution is a problem. Pollution is a very big problem. Fixing pollution does not appear to be as profitable an endeavor as skimming taxation using climate based fraud schemes. Why don't the fraudsters focus on fixing pollution as well? Why, because then they would have to clean up their own mess. Not gonna happen any time soon...
If any one of these morons really believed in this crap they should all vow to live a life of poverty, reducing their "carbon footprint" to nothing. Make them live in a grass and mud hut down by a river somewhere. Make them go to the bathroom in a hole. Have them plant their own food. Lead by example, then maybe we can take you f*ckers seriously. Live by your own ideals first.
Gee, this could be a real problem; except for the fact that global warming is a HOAX.
From a concerned friend of mine who does not mince his words:
"what kind of idiot says that because it is not clear whether natural cycles of warming or greenshouse gases are causing the measured changes - in ocean acidity, average temperature and retreat of ice sheets, then we can go on pouring gasoline (literally and figuratively) on the fire?
So now global climate chaos is all a plot by Goldman Sachs? Dont these drongos know the difference between a conspirator and an opportunistic profiteer, the first dealing with cause, the second with how to manipulate the resulting problem (and "solutions) to his her own benefit."
dear leo, please ask your friend to read the telegraph article above and explain (no mincing needed) how us drongos should properly respond when his conspirator & profiteer are co-mingled in one person(s).
Mr Kolivakis;
After reading O.S.'s comment regarding Pachauri and his plot which quite possibly does include GS. Give me one good reason anyone should trust the IPCC.
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By RICHARD S. LINDZENFriendly
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Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned.
Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize apparent changes.
The general support for warming is based not so much on the quality of the data, but rather on the fact that there was a little ice age from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. At the same time that we were emerging from the little ice age, the industrial era began, and this was accompanied by increasing emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. CO2 is the most prominent of these, and it is again generally accepted that it has increased by about 30%.
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The defining characteristic of a greenhouse gas is that it is relatively transparent to visible light from the sun but can absorb portions of thermal radiation. In general, the earth balances the incoming solar radiation by emitting thermal radiation, and the presence of greenhouse substances inhibits cooling by thermal radiation and leads to some warming.
That said, the main greenhouse substances in the earth's atmosphere are water vapor and high clouds. Let's refer to these as major greenhouse substances to distinguish them from the anthropogenic minor substances. Even a doubling of CO2 would only upset the original balance between incoming and outgoing radiation by about 2%. This is essentially what is called "climate forcing."
There is general agreement on the above findings. At this point there is no basis for alarm regardless of whether any relation between the observed warming and the observed increase in minor greenhouse gases can be established. Nevertheless, the most publicized claims of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) deal exactly with whether any relation can be discerned. The failure of the attempts to link the two over the past 20 years bespeaks the weakness of any case for concern.
The IPCC's Scientific Assessments generally consist of about 1,000 pages of text. The Summary for Policymakers is 20 pages. It is, of course, impossible to accurately summarize the 1,000-page assessment in just 20 pages; at the very least, nuances and caveats have to be omitted. However, it has been my experience that even the summary is hardly ever looked at. Rather, the whole report tends to be characterized by a single iconic claim.
The main statement publicized after the last IPCC Scientific Assessment two years ago was that it was likely that most of the warming since 1957 (a point of anomalous cold) was due to man. This claim was based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.
Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.
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Of course, none of the articles stressed this. Rather they emphasized that according to models modified to account for the natural internal variability, warming would resume—in 2009, 2013 and 2030, respectively.
But even if the IPCC's iconic statement were correct, it still would not be cause for alarm. After all we are still talking about tenths of a degree for over 75% of the climate forcing associated with a doubling of CO2. The potential (and only the potential) for alarm enters with the issue of climate sensitivity—which refers to the change that a doubling of CO2 will produce in GATA. It is generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 will only produce a change of about two degrees Fahrenheit if all else is held constant. This is unlikely to be much to worry about.
Yet current climate models predict much higher sensitivities. They do so because in these models, the main greenhouse substances (water vapor and clouds) act to amplify anything that CO2 does. This is referred to as positive feedback. But as the IPCC notes, clouds continue to be a source of major uncertainty in current models. Since clouds and water vapor are intimately related, the IPCC claim that they are more confident about water vapor is quite implausible.
There is some evidence of a positive feedback effect for water vapor in cloud-free regions, but a major part of any water-vapor feedback would have to acknowledge that cloud-free areas are always changing, and this remains an unknown. At this point, few scientists would argue that the science is settled. In particular, the question remains as to whether water vapor and clouds have positive or negative feedbacks.
The notion that the earth's climate is dominated by positive feedbacks is intuitively implausible, and the history of the earth's climate offers some guidance on this matter. About 2.5 billion years ago, the sun was 20%-30% less bright than now (compare this with the 2% perturbation that a doubling of CO2 would produce), and yet the evidence is that the oceans were unfrozen at the time, and that temperatures might not have been very different from today's. Carl Sagan in the 1970s referred to this as the "Early Faint Sun Paradox."
For more than 30 years there have been attempts to resolve the paradox with greenhouse gases. Some have suggested CO2—but the amount needed was thousands of times greater than present levels and incompatible with geological evidence. Methane also proved unlikely. It turns out that increased thin cirrus cloud coverage in the tropics readily resolves the paradox—but only if the clouds constitute a negative feedback. In present terms this means that they would diminish rather than enhance the impact of CO2.
There are quite a few papers in the literature that also point to the absence of positive feedbacks. The implied low sensitivity is entirely compatible with the small warming that has been observed. So how do models with high sensitivity manage to simulate the currently small response to a forcing that is almost as large as a doubling of CO2? Jeff Kiehl notes in a 2007 article from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the models use another quantity that the IPCC lists as poorly known (namely aerosols) to arbitrarily cancel as much greenhouse warming as needed to match the data, with each model choosing a different degree of cancellation according to the sensitivity of that model.
What does all this have to do with climate catastrophe? The answer brings us to a scandal that is, in my opinion, considerably greater than that implied in the hacked emails from the Climate Research Unit (though perhaps not as bad as their destruction of raw data): namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming or of the greenhouse effect is tantamount to catastrophe. This is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. It is only such a scam that lends importance to the machinations in the emails designed to nudge temperatures a few tenths of a degree.
The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.
Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well.
Consider the following example. Suppose that I leave a box on the floor, and my wife trips on it, falling against my son, who is carrying a carton of eggs, which then fall and break. Our present approach to emissions would be analogous to deciding that the best way to prevent the breakage of eggs would be to outlaw leaving boxes on the floor. The chief difference is that in the case of atmospheric CO2 and climate catastrophe, the chain of inference is longer and less plausible than in my example.
Mr. Lindzen is professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Published: 8:30AM GMT 20 Dec 2009
The head of the UN's climate change panel - Dr Rajendra Pachauri - is accused of making a fortune from his links with 'carbon trading' companies. Photo: EPA
No one in the world exercised more influence on the events leading up to the Copenhagen conference on global warming than Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and mastermind of its latest report in 2007.
Although Dr Pachauri is often presented as a scientist (he was even once described by the BBC as “the world’s top climate scientist”), as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.
Related ArticlesWhat has also almost entirely escaped attention, however, is how Dr Pachauri has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations.
These outfits include banks, oil and energy companies and investment funds heavily involved in ‘carbon trading’ and ‘sustainable technologies’, which together make up the fastest-growing commodity market in the world, estimated soon to be worth trillions of dollars a year.
Today, in addition to his role as chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri occupies more than a score of such posts, acting as director or adviser to many of the bodies which play a leading role in what has become known as the international ‘climate industry’.
It is remarkable how only very recently has the staggering scale of Dr Pachauri’s links to so many of these concerns come to light, inevitably raising questions as to how the world’s leading ‘climate official’ can also be personally involved in so many organisations which stand to benefit from the IPCC’s recommendations.
The issue of Dr Pachauri’s potential conflict of interest was first publicly raised last Tuesday when, after giving a lecture at Copenhagen University, he was handed a letter by two eminent ‘climate sceptics’. One was the Stephen Fielding, the Australian Senator who sparked the revolt which recently led to the defeat of his government’s ‘cap and trade scheme’. The other, from Britain, was Lord Monckton, a longtime critic of the IPCC’s science, who has recently played a key part in stiffening opposition to a cap and trade bill in the US Senate.
Their open letter first challenged the scientific honesty of a graph prominently used in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and shown again by Pachauri in his lecture, demanding that he should withdraw it. But they went on to question why the report had not declared Pachauri’s personal interest in so many organisations which seemingly stood to profit from its findings.
The letter, which included information first disclosed in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, was circulated to all the 192 national conference delegations, calling on them to dismiss Dr Pachauri as IPCC chairman because of recent revelations of his conflicting interests.
The original power base from which Dr Pachauri has built up his worldwide network of influence over the past decade is the Delhi-based Tata Energy Research Institute, of which he became director in 1981 and director-general in 2001. Now renamed The Energy Research Institute, TERI was set up in 1974 by India’s largest privately-owned business empire, the Tata Group, with interests ranging from steel, cars and energy to chemicals, telecommunications and insurance (and now best-known in the UK as the owner of Jaguar, Land Rover, Tetley Tea and Corus, Britain’s largest steel company).
Although TERI has extended its sponsorship since the name change, the two concerns are still closely linked.
In India, Tata exercises enormous political power, shown not least in the way it has managed to displace hundreds of thousands of poor tribal villagers in the eastern states of Orissa and Jarkhand to make way for large-scale iron mining and steelmaking projects.
Initially, when Dr Pachauri took over the running of TERI in the 1980s, his interests centred on the oil and coal industries, which may now seem odd for a man who has since become best known for his opposition to fossil fuels. He was, for instance, a director until 2003 of India Oil, the country’s largest commercial enterprise, and until this year remained as a director of the National Thermal Power Generating Corporation, its largest electricity producer.
In 2005, he set up GloriOil, a Texas firm specialising in technology which allows the last remaining reserves to be extracted from oilfields otherwise at the end of their useful life.
However, since Pachauri became a vice-chairman of the IPCC in 1997, TERI has vastly expanded its interest in every kind of renewable or sustainable technology, in many of which the various divisions of the Tata Group have also become heavily involved, such as its project to invest $1.5 billion (£930 million) in vast wind farms.
Dr Pachauri’s TERI empire has also extended worldwide, with branches in the US, the EU and several countries in Asia. TERI Europe, based in London, of which he is a trustee (along with Sir John Houghton, one of the key players in the early days of the IPCC and formerly head of the UK Met Office) is currently running a project on bio-energy, financed by the EU.
Another project, co-financed by our own Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the German insurance firm Munich Re, is studying how India’s insurance industry, including Tata, can benefit from exploiting the supposed risks of exposure to climate change. Quite why Defra and UK taxpayers should fund a project to increase the profits of Indian insurance firms is not explained.
Even odder is the role of TERI’s Washington-based North American offshoot, a non-profit organisation, of which Dr Pachauri is president. Conveniently sited on Pennsylvania Avenue, midway between the White House and the Capitol, this body unashamedly sets out its stall as a lobbying organisation, to “sensitise decision-makers in North America to developing countries’ concerns about energy and the environment”.
TERI-NA is funded by a galaxy of official and corporate sponsors, including four branches of the UN bureaucracy; four US government agencies; oil giants such as Amoco; two of the leading US defence contractors; Monsanto, the world’s largest GM producer; the WWF (the environmentalist campaigning group which derives much of its own funding from the EU) and two world leaders in the international ‘carbon market’, between them managing more than $1 trillion (£620 billion) worth of assets.
All of this is doubtless useful to the interests of Tata back in India, which is heavily involved not just in bio-energy, renewables and insurance but also in ‘carbon trading’, the worldwide market in buying and selling the right to emit CO2. Much of this is administered at a profit by the UN under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) set up under the Kyoto Protocol, which the Copenhagen treaty was designed to replace with an even more lucrative successor.
Under the CDM, firms and consumers in the developed world pay for the right to exceed their ‘carbon limits’ by buying certificates from those firms in countries such as India and China which rack up ‘carbon credits’ for every renewable energy source they develop – or by showing that they have in some way reduced their own ‘carbon emissions’.
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’,
In 2008 he was made an adviser on renewable and sustainable energy to the Credit Suisse bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. He joined the board of the Nordic Glitnir Bank, as it launched its Sustainable Future Fund, looking to raise funding of £4 billion. He became chairman of the Indochina Sustainable Infrastructure Fund, whose CEO was confident it could soon raise £100 billion.
In the same year he became a director of the International Risk Governance Council in Geneva, set up by EDF and E.On, two of Europe’s largest electricity firms, to promote ‘bio-energy’. This year Dr Pachauri joined the New York investment fund Pegasus as a ‘strategic adviser’, and was made chairman of the advisory board to the Asian Development Bank, strongly supportive of CDM trading, whose CEO warned that failure to agree a treaty at Copenhagen would lead to a collapse of the carbon market.
The list of posts now held by Dr Pachauri as a result of his new-found world status goes on and on. He has become head of Yale University’s Climate and Energy Institute, which enjoys millions of dollars of US state and corporate funding. He is on the climate change advisory board of Deutsche Bank. He is Director of the Japanese Institute for Global Environmental Strategies and was until recently an adviser to Toyota Motors. Recalling his origins as a railway engineer, he is even a policy adviser to SNCF, France’s state-owned railway company.
Meanwhile, back home in India, he serves on an array of influential government bodies, including the Economic Advisory Committee to the prime minister, holds various academic posts and has somehow found time in his busy life to publish 22 books.
Dr Pachauri never shrinks from giving the world frank advice on all matters relating to the menace of global warming. The latest edition of TERI News quotes him as telling the US Environmental Protection Agency that it must go ahead with regulating US carbon emissions without waiting for Congress to pass its cap and trade bill.
It reports how, in the days before Copenhagen, he called on the developing nations which had been historically responsible for the global warming crisis to make ‘concrete commitments’ to aiding developing countries such as India with funding and technology – while insisting that India could not agree to binding emissions targets. India, he said, must bargain for large-scale subsidies from the West for developing solar power, and Western funds must be made available for geo-engineering projects to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
As a vegetarian Hindu, Dr Pachauri repeated his call for the world to eat less meat to cut down on methane emissions (as usual he made no mention of what was to be done about India’s 400 million sacred cows). He further called for a ban on serving ice in restaurants and for meters to be fitted to all hotel rooms, so that guests could be charged a carbon tax on their use of heating and air-conditioning.
One subject the talkative Dr Pachauri remains silent on, however, is how much money he is paid for all these important posts, which must run into millions of dollars. Not one of the bodies for which he works publishes his salary or fees, and this notably includes the UN, which refuses to reveal how much we all pay him as one of its most senior officials.
As for TERI itself, Dr Pachauri’s main job for nearly 30 years, it is so coy about money that it does not even publish its accounts – the financial statement amounts to two income and expenditure pie charts which contain no detailed figures.
Dr Pachauri is equally coy about TERI’s links with Tata, the company which set it up in the 1970s and whose name it continued to bear until 2002, when it was changed to just The Energy Research Institute. A spokesman at the time said ‘we have not severed our past relationship with the Tatas, the change is only for convenience’.
But the real question mark over TERI’s director-general remains over the relationship between his highly lucrative commercial jobs and his role as chairman of the IPCC.
TERI have, for example, become a preferred bidder for Kuwaiti contracts to clean up the mess left by Saddam Hussein in their oilfields in 1991. The $3 billion (£1.9 billion) cost of the contracts has been provided by the UN. If successful, this would be tenth time TERI have benefited from a contract financed by the UN.
Certainly no one values the services of TERI more than the EU, which has included Dr Pachauri’s institute as a partner in no fewer than 12 projects designed to assist in devising the EU’s policies on mitigating the effects of the global warming predicted by the IPCC.
But whether those 1,700 Corus workers on Teesside will next month be so happy to lose their jobs to India, thanks to the workings of that international ‘carbon market’ about which Dr Pachauri is so enthusiastic, is quite another matter.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/6847227/Questions-over-business-deals-of...
ouch
Bingo. Now we know that Algore and Dr Pauchari are beneficiaries. Follow the money, excellent post, good journalism at its best
Who else is making money here?
How can I make some money if the Crap and Tax bs gets passed?
I admire Leo's passion, frequently disagree with his posts, but at the same time look forward to having my assumptions provoked.
I can't agree with the three principles espoused: international court, leave fossils where they are, and climate debt. Why? Wholly political reasons. Human nature is such that the first would be abused, the second completely unrealistic anytime soon (but inevitable due to Peak Oil, not due to climate change), and out of the question as an immediate solution in terms of survival, and third, well, see number 1. These are really solutions that are "elitist" and centralizing in principle, and thus untenable due to their inherently totalitarian nature (albeit, arguably "for a good cause" - always a great intro to the arrival of government domination.) They can only be enforced in the context of some form of world government, the NWO, and that right now would hardly be "democratic." I can't agree with it, and offer simply that if it cannot be done by common agreement, then perhaps it won't get done and we will have climactic disasters. What's so scary about TEOTWAWKI? Adaptation is something we do very, very well.
That being said, Plan B is simply this: I think there is alot more evidence that is incontrovertible that Peak Oil is coming. That will kill a lot of people, as fossil fuels enable countless activities essential to survival. So do that which is possible. Encourage green energy by incentives and a systematic purging of counter-incentives (i.e., tax credits for drilling, etc.) that artificially support "cheap fuels." Phase out those incentives and apply them instead to wind, solar and, above all, efficiency, the cheapest form of new energy. Do this within the US. As Leo says, China's solar stocks are not a fad. And besides, we're not going to get China and India on board this train, and given their history and status as hungry, highly populated emerging countries, why on earth would they want to submit to international regulation, or be lectured on how they should run things from corrupt U.S. politicians, assorted international elitists and Goldman Sachs Manchurian candidates, the latter making their case for "saving the planet" just so they can leverage up, manipulate a phony industry called the "carbon trade?" and make immense profits. For themselves.
Let me tell you something: if GS wants it, run to the exit. Obama is a Goldmanite himself. Don't trust the elitists.
Second, it seems clear to me, based on very powerful arguments on both sides, that there is no genuine scientific consensus as to the cause of "global warming", or whether we have inalterably changed a rather vicious and very active climate cycle that seems to preexist our species appearance on the planet. For all I know, our presence and activities are holding off the next ice age. I read the Little Ice Age, and it was a mind opener. Indeed, one could definitely argue that the recent (in geological time) rise of humans is solely attributable to a brief but benign bout of climate warming that is doomed to cycle back. I am not persuaded enough to surrender our freedoms (what few we have left that matter) to some faceless cabal of global elitists.
Ned - If the rule of law is enjoying such a renaissance now in the developed world then why should we support the idea that this time it will be different, only on an international scale, without the opportunity for proper redress?
Regardless of what one may think on the subject of climate change sacrificing the foundation of the rule of law upon the altar of political expediency is a certain route to ruin. (Just look around you for evidence) Especially when the concept is considered as a super national status with due consideration to whom would be selected to wield this power.
It has been a pleasure to read you this year Ned. Have an excellent season.
And a distinct pleasure for me to read and ponder yours as well, Miles. Far more insightful than the incoherent ramblings I offer!
I saw Leo below took issue with my GS comment. I don't think there's a plot there, Leo - I just say that if GS is choosing a particular path to solve the "energy/climate change" problem, you can rest assured that such choice is driven solely by the Vampire Squid's perception that this is yet another market it can manipulate and exploit to its sole advantage, especially given its corporate policy of planting its operatives within the various governments that would be choosing the winners and losers in the vast regulatory scheme that would result. "Climate change" and the carbon trade is perfect for its modus operandi.
+10000 more.
I have to figure out how to make some $$$ out of all the Climate Fraud.
Start a tree farm and sell some credits? Help me out guys, if they are going perpitrate this FRAUD on is, at least we can make a buck...
+10000
Who needs Chinese solar stocks...
http://www.canada.com/life/Green+vibrators+promise+truly+sustainable+ple...
Green energy can power all revolutions, including the sexual revolution.
why does zero hedge allow propaganda posts by climate zealots on this website?????
is leo just stupid, or simply corrupt?
and he's not alone
h2o is the main greenhouse gas, not co2
I wish the folks who criticize the established scientific consensus would exercise the same standard of scrupulous investigation to the few outspoken skeptics like Monkton. Is he really the most credible person you have? Check into his background. Peer review is a critical check on all experts in any given field and I trust that process more than an active blogging campaign to get at the truth. There has been an organized PR campaign to cast doubt on the consensus view to further their interests and it has little to do with the health of the planet. That's not to say that there isn't any room for doubt, but I wish the skeptics rallying against the mainstream analysis would come up with credible peer reviewed studies that challenge the consensus view.
http://www.desmogblog.com/slamming-the-climate-skeptic-scam
http://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/monckton%20schulte%20oreskes%207%200%20(2).pdf
Well, Winisk, seems like everyone here I have two links to suggest. But they're both quite readable - one, a big-picture summary prepared by Andrei Illarianov for the Cato Institute (do read his CV), and another, MIT's Richard Muller, from your side of the aisle, commenting on the damage done at Hadley.
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/12/11/a-few-notes-on-climate-change/
http://www.technologyreview.com/Energy/13830/?a=f
“Kyoto is killing off the world economy like an ‘international Auschwitz’… The Kyoto Protocol is a death pact, however strange it may sound, because its main aim is to strangle economic growth and economic activity in countries that accept the protocol’s requirements.”
This from Illarionov, Putin's former economics advisor, and member of three think tanks that receive generous contributions from Exxon Mobil, is a person people should go to for an unbiased summary. Why is every climate change skeptic offered up to be a credible voice of opposition always seems to have connections to big oil. At first blush I question his agenda which is clearly about economic growth and not the health of our ecosystems.
PS - we merely want your highly decorated common champion Gore to debate him. We don't hold Monckton to the same status as a Lindzen or Christy.
Oh my - you are really going to trot out peer review? Really? If there is one takeaway from this whole affair, it should be that Peer Review™ is a corruptable tool used by those who would subvert the scientific process, not to be trusted until it is opened up to the same transparency that the data itself must be subjected to. I dare say, it is obvious you either have not read the UEA archives, or are yourself a tool of disinformation.
Since you are comfortable appealing to the authority of blogs, here is some light reading back at ya...
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/12/climategate-history...
http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/11/climategate-and-oth...
Peer review is an essential part of the scientific process. What exactly is the problem of putting one's studies or opinions up for review and scrutiny from people who have the breadth of knowledge to credibly ascertain the quality of the conclusions? Sorry I don't see your point how an avoidance of this would be beneficial in any way. It is by no means a perfect process but it is the best one there is to seperate out the junk from the good.
I haven't read the UEA archives. My time is limited and while I wish I had the luxury to delve into the complexities of this raging debate, I do not. Admittedly I am late to this party, but my cursory check on the major players suggest that the climate debate is so utterly manipulated and politicized that nothing good will ever come from it. I have no strong position one way as a matter of fact. My focus has simply been to question how a few renegade skeptics who have ties to Exxon Mobil or it's front groups should be listened to with the same degree of credibility as the global scientific consensus and a body of science that is unmatched by the opposing side.