Scientists threatened for 'climate denial'

[jasons2k]

It's too bad when people take it this far:

Scientists threatened for 'climate denial'
By Tom Harper, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:24am GMT 11/03/2007

Scientists who questioned mankind's impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.

They say the debate on global warming has been "hijacked" by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

advertisementOne of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.

"Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened," said the professor.

"I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal."

Last week, Professor Ball appeared in The Great Global Warming Swindle, a Channel 4 documentary in which several scientists claimed the theory of man-made global warming had become a "religion", forcing alternative explanations to be ignored.

Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - who also appeared on the documentary - recently claimed: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges.

"Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science."

Dr Myles Allen, from Oxford University, agreed. He said: "The Green movement has hijacked the issue of climate change. It is ludicrous to suggest the only way to deal with the problem is to start micro managing everyone, which is what environmentalists seem to want to do."

Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, said: "Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system."

[Cyclenall]

This makes me angry. It appears free speech is coming to a end rapidly on this issue. This makes me wonder if something sinister is going on behind the scenes and it looks that way .

They say the debate on global warming has been "hijacked" by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

I think there is truth to this.

[x-y-no]

Obviously, death threats are unacceptable.

But I don't see what cause he has to complain about being called a "denier" if he's participating in accusing thousands of honest climate scientist of perpetrating a "swindle".

[JBG]

This makes me angry. It appears free speech is coming to a end rapidly on this issue. This makes me wonder if something sinister is going on behind the scenes and it looks that way .

They say the debate on global warming has been "hijacked" by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

I think there is truth to this.

Google the names "Maurice Strong", "Desmarais" and "Jean Chretien" together, throw in "Tongsun Park" (not sure of spelling on that one) and you'll get a picture of the slimy activities on this front.

Excerpted below is one of the results of this search, on Foxnews, a mainstream source (link). So this is not limited to the right-wing press. Please note, I have highlighted the sections about the Rio Conference of 1992 for a reason. That was the conference that eventually spawned the 1997 Kyoto Treaty.

This indeed appears to be part of a swindle.
=====================================================================
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Foxnews
By Claudia Rosett and George Russell

[align=center]At the United Nations, the Curious Career of Maurice Strong[/align]

NEW YORK — Before the United Nations can save the planet, it needs to clean up its own house. And as scandal after scandal has unfolded over the past decade, from Oil for Food to procurement fraud to peacekeeper rape, the size of that job has become stunningly clear.

But any understanding of the real efforts that job entails should begin with a look at the long and murky career of Maurice Strong, the man who may have had the most to do with what the U.N. has become today, and still sparks controversy even after he claims to have cut his ties to the world organization.

From Oil for Food to the latest scandals involving U.N. funding in North Korea, Maurice Strong appears as a shadowy and often critically important figure.

Strong, now 77, is best known as the godfather of the environmental movement, who served from 1973-1975 as the founding director of the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) in Nairobi. UNEP is now a globe-girdling organization with a yearly budget of $136 million, which claims to act as the world’s environmental conscience. Strong consolidated his eco-credentials as the organizer of the U.N.’s 1992 environmental summit in Rio de Janeiro, which in turn paved the way for the controversial 1997 Kyoto Treaty on controlling greenhouse gas emissions.


But his green credentials scarcely begin to do justice to Strong’s complicated back-room career.

*snip*

Along the way, Strong has also been caught up in a series of U.N. scandals and conflicts of interest. These extend from the notorious Oil-for-Food program to the latest furor over cash funneled via U.N. agencies to the rogue regime of North Korea, which involves, among other things, Strong’s creative use of a little-known, U.N.-chartered educational institution called the University for Peace. Above all, the tale of Maurice Strong illustrates the way in which the U.N., with its bureaucratic culture of secrecy, its diplomatic immunities, and its global reach, lends itself to manipulation by a small circle of those who best know its back corridors.

*snip*

South Korean diplomats have downplayed any connections between Ban and Strong. But one of Ban’s first acts when he took charge at the U.N. last month was to appoint as his head of management a Strong protégé, Alicia Barcena, a Mexican environmentalist. It was Strong who brought Barcena into the U.N. orbit, in 1991, to help organize the Rio summit on the environment, which he chaired in 1992. To prepare and then follow up on the Rio agenda, Strong founded a network called the Earth Council Alliance, in which Barcena served until 1995 as the founding director of the flagship chapter, based in Costa Rica. She then moved on to jobs inside the U.N. system, including work with UNEP and UNDP. When Strong took charge of the University for Peace along with his other projects eight years ago, he invited the Costa Rica Earth Council to move its offices onto the university campus, where it was absorbed into the U Peace structure and curriculum.

*snip*

Means to an End

*snip*

The U Peace report concludes, for example, with proposals for a $1.4 million energy project for North Korea, one third of that supported in cash and in-kind by the government of North Korea, and the rest to be funded by $150,000 from the UNDP and $750,000 from a U.N. outfit called the Global Environment Facility, or GEF.

The GEF, spawned by the 1992 Rio conference (which Strong chaired) is a joint effort of UNEP (which Strong founded) and the World Bank (where Strong was appointed in 1995 as a senior adviser to the president) and the UNDP (run from 1999-2005 by Strong’s former World Bank colleague, Mark Malloch Brown, and from 2005 to the present by another of Strong’s former World Bank colleagues, Kemal Dervis).

*snip*

All this is just a sampling of the tangled nest of personal relationships, public-private partnerships, murky trust funds, unaudited funding conduits, and inter-woven enterprises that the modern U.N. has come to embody—and which Maurice Strong has done so much to create. Yet another potential conflict of interest involves a company called Zenon Environmental Inc., a manufacturer of water purification equipment, which in April, 2000 was registered as an approved Canadian vendor to the U.N. procurement department. Six months later, Strong joined Zenon’s board, and remained there through at least 2005, while also serving as a special adviser to Annan. Zenon was acquired last year by General Electric, and the board was dissolved.

To clean up the U.N., Ban has called for auditors to work their way through the offices and agencies of the system one by one, starting with operations in North Korea. That circuitous approach is unlikely to work. To cut to the core, the real starting point could well be for Ban to launch an investigation into the past and current career of Maurice Strong himself.

Claudia Rosett is a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. George Russell is executive editor of FOX News.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,250789,00.html

[Aquawind]

No Surprise.. The enviromentalists have used terroristic tactics for years. Their protecting mother earth and humans are abusing her according to them. They have elevated it to a religion and now have an excuse to kill if we don't play along. Earth the other religion. Humans are way down the chain so everyone go disembowel yourselves so the planet can cool off...

[JBG]

No Surprise.. The enviromentalists have used terroristic tactics for years. Their protecting mother earth and humans are abusing her according to them. They have elevated it to a religion and now have an excuse to kill if we don't play along. Earth the other religion. Humans are way down the chain so everyone go disembowel yourselves so the planet can cool off...

It may be that way for the sheople who are manipulated. I doubt it's a religion for Maurice Strong. If it is, he's a "priest" like Tammy Fae Baker is, and profiting mightily from it.

[x-y-no]

Excerpted below is one of the results of this search, on Foxnews, a mainstream source (link). So this is not limited to the right-wing press.

Opinions differ, I guess.

[x-y-no]

No Surprise.. The enviromentalists have used terroristic tactics for years. Their protecting mother earth and humans are abusing her according to them. They have elevated it to a religion and now have an excuse to kill if we don't play along. Earth the other religion. Humans are way down the chain so everyone go disembowel yourselves so the planet can cool off...

Oh come on!

The tiny minority of potentially violent nuts in the environmental movement are no more representative than the nuts who attack abortion doctors are of the pro-life movement.

[Aquawind]

nice analogy.. You said it not me.. The thing is the pro-lifers are just that all about human life.. The enviromentalists value the planet over humans often. Everyone agrees we need to be more conservative.. No I would say the enviromentists are gaining strength and attitude with this GW talk, thus they are going to try to ride the wave stronger than ever before. With more new ignorant people joining alongside the long time GW proponents with envoromentalist views and were going to see more threats because their are more ignorant radicals. This is worldwide and not just over US debate.

[x-y-no]

I thought it was a perfectly fair analogy. My point being that there are going to be a small fraction of kooks in pretty much any sufficiently large group of people and it's entirely wrong to generalize the behavior of that small kooky fringe to the entire group.

If enviromentists are gaining strength and there's a wave to ride to effective action, that's all good IMHO. It's our solemn duty to be good stewards of the Earth - a duty we've shirked too often and too long.

[Matt-hurricanewatcher]

Global warming is being caused by the "sun",,,I have every right to say that as fact. Why because data shows Mars and 3 or 4 other planets doing just that,. For these people to say that are planet will warm 2 to 8 degrees in 93 years is off the wall, in even more weird then my thinking. Why did it warm in the first place you my ask? Easy we came out of a little ice age, a period of little to no sun spots=it had a lot to do with the suns output. Why is it so hard to understand that the sun is the number one controler of the climate? Yes Co2 levels have risen but it appears that the Co2 is not warming the planet, but instead data shows the warming is in fact increasing the Co2. That also shows to the sun. My option is just as good as anyones.

In my friends if it warms any where near 5 degrees by 2100, then we are in serious trouble. But I don't think that will happen. Heck Antartic and Greenland has increasing glaciers, only the western part of Antartic is melting, why. Beacuse it sticks out to the ocean. So this is my American first Admendment rights signing off.

[Aslkahuna]

Actually, you can't use Jupiter as an example because that Planet generates it's own heat to drive its weather systems. Uranus is undergoing a major seasonal change right now as is Triton. In the latest issue of S&T there is a quote by Jean Meeus from a March 2006 paper that discusses the Solar effect on the current warming and that quote states the 25-35% of the observed warming in the 1980-2000 period was caused by Solar effects. They also state that the anthropogenic factor is real and increasing.

Steve

[Yarrah]

Global warming is being caused by the "sun",,,I have every right to say that as fact.

Sure, the solar activity has increased since 1700 and this increase has undoubtly had an effect on the climates around the world. But this solar activity has been pretty constant the last 50 years, while temperatures have been rising quickly. There has to be another factor which increases the temperatures.

Yes Co2 levels have risen but it appears that the Co2 is not warming the planet, but instead data shows the warming is in fact increasing the Co2. That also shows to the sun. My option is just as good as anyones.

I think there's still a concensus about the fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that increasing amounts of CO2 in an atmopshere will warm it.

In my friends if it warms any where near 5 degrees by 2100, then we are in serious trouble. But I don't think that will happen. Heck Antartic and Greenland has increasing glaciers, only the western part of Antartic is melting, why. Beacuse it sticks out to the ocean. So this is my American first Admendment rights signing off.

Yes, some glaciers are indeed growing (even though most of them have retreated). But there's a good explaination of that. This article might be interesting: Global Warming boosts Glaciers

[x-y-no]

Global warming is being caused by the "sun",,,I have every right to say that as fact. Why because data shows Mars and 3 or 4 other planets doing just that,.

The data for the Mars claim is only concerning one small area of the south polar region for a very short time (less than 4 Earth years). It is not global data. I'm continually perplexed at why anyone who feels free to ignore the vast global data set we have on Earth would take that smal, short-term, regional data from Mars and confidently infer a long-term global trend.

Pluto is warming because it's entering the part of its orbit where it is closest to the sun.

And the bottom line is we've been monitoring solar irradiance closely for several decades now and there simply is no increase capable of causing even a significant fraction of the currently observed warming.

For these people to say that are planet will warm 2 to 8 degrees in 93 years is off the wall, in even more weird then my thinking. Why did it warm in the first place you my ask? Easy we came out of a little ice age, a period of little to no sun spots=it had a lot to do with the suns output. Why is it so hard to understand that the sun is the number one controler of the climate?

If by "these people" you mean climate scientists, then there is no dispute on "their" part that a significant fraction of the warming in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was due to solar forcing. You're not saying anything that isn't right there in the IPCC reports. Nobody disputes that there are natural as well as human-induces forcings. That's why so much work goes into quantifying those forcings. And that'a how we've arrived at the results expressed in the AGW "consensus." Ignoring all that or ascribing it to some vast conspiracy won't change the facts.

Yes Co2 levels have risen but it appears that the Co2 is not warming the planet, but instead data shows the warming is in fact increasing the Co2. That also shows to the sun. My option is just as good as anyones.

No, the data does not show that the currently observed increase in CO2 is caused by warming. For one thing, the ice core records clearly show a lag of several centuries in the CO2 feedback (this makes sense since the feedback comes from outgassing of the oceans and mixing down warming into the abyssal oceans takes time) wheras the current increase is leading the warming. Furthermore, isotopic analysis unequivacally shows that the CO2 increase comes from fossil carbon.

In my friends if it warms any where near 5 degrees by 2100, then we are in serious trouble. But I don't think that will happen. Heck Antartic and Greenland has increasing glaciers, only the western part of Antartic is melting, why. Beacuse it sticks out to the ocean. So this is my American first Admendment rights signing off.

Nobody disputes your right to say anything you want, no matter how contrafactual. But nobody is obligated to take anything you say seriously, especially when what you are saying is so far removed from the facts.

[Matt-hurricanewatcher]

If I remember right the last major ice age was about 10f colder globally then it currently is. That had glaciers 2 miles thick over Canada,,,,In the last hundred years we warmed about .06c-1f. Enough to bring avg snowfall for portland oregon from 10+ a year to 2 inches. Lets say it warms 2 degrees in 93 years, meaning it no longer snows in Portland, unless a perfect set up. That would stink. I could almost believe that 2 degrees is possible because last century saw 1 degree. But 5-8 degrees? That seems harder to image. Things would get bad very fast.

You do have good points,,,We will just have to wait in see.

[Hybridstorm_November2001]

I hope posting this link doesn't cross the line of rules for the forums. No political intent is behind this, I assure everyone, I'm only letting people know what just happened concerning this issue:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/04/02/scotu ... index.html

[Aslkahuna]

First off, Solar activity has NOT been increasing steadily since the 1700's. We came out of the Maunder Minimum about then and had a very large cycle in 1780. After that, the sunspot numbers showed the classic cyclic pattern but there was a very signficiant drop off in numbers in the late 19th into the 20th Century with Solar maxima being much lower. Then in 1946 we entered a period of very strong activity with Cycle 19 (1957) peaking at the highest maximum ever observed. From Cycle 18 through Cycle 23 we have been at the highest level of Solar activity since the invention of the Telescope. It would stand to reason that we should soon enter a period of reduced activity if not a total minimum (incidentally a report in S&T indicates that Alpha Centauri A may be entering such a minimum itself) as recently suggested by Russian scientists. That would reduce the Solar effect and may even become a negative effect. However, there will always be natural controls to the climate so the anthropogenic effects can never become 100%. As I mentioned earlier, a number of Planets are having seasonal changes which affects their temperatures. Pluto has actually passed perihelion (did so in 1989) and is now receding from the Sun and has become further out than Neptune again.

Steve

[Ptarmigan]

First off, Solar activity has NOT been increasing steadily since the 1700's. We came out of the Maunder Minimum about then and had a very large cycle in 1780. After that, the sunspot numbers showed the classic cyclic pattern but there was a very signficiant drop off in numbers in the late 19th into the 20th Century with Solar maxima being much lower. Then in 1946 we entered a period of very strong activity with Cycle 19 (1957) peaking at the highest maximum ever observed. From Cycle 18 through Cycle 23 we have been at the highest level of Solar activity since the invention of the Telescope. It would stand to reason that we should soon enter a period of reduced activity if not a total minimum (incidentally a report in S&T indicates that Alpha Centauri A may be entering such a minimum itself) as recently suggested by Russian scientists. That would reduce the Solar effect and may even become a negative effect. However, there will always be natural controls to the climate so the anthropogenic effects can never become 100%. As I mentioned earlier, a number of Planets are having seasonal changes which affects their temperatures. Pluto has actually passed perihelion (did so in 1989) and is now receding from the Sun and has become further out than Neptune again.

Steve

The study of climate is relatively recent. Yes, many planets are undergoing climate change. As I always say, climate on Earth or any other planet, is dynamic, always changing. Nothing is static.

[Aslkahuna]

I think the point trying to be made here is that those who have the audacity to suggest that there may be more than just an anthropogenic component to the observed warming are being ostracized even despite the fact that there is evidence for an anthropogenic component there is no evidence that it is the ONLY component.

Steve

[Ptarmigan]

I think the point trying to be made here is that those who have the audacity to suggest that there may be more than just an anthropogenic component to the observed warming are being ostracized even despite the fact that there is evidence for an anthropogenic component there is no evidence that it is the ONLY component.

Steve

Sounds a lot like witch hunt. It's like the past again, when something changes in the weather, they need a whipping boy.