Don Croft
10 Dec 2008 13:04
Subject: Richard’s Article on the Global Warming Scam
Paddy introduced me to Richard, who sent me the following. Actually, I posted it a few minutes ago but hackers ‘ate’ it. They also ate about half the email that I sent to Richard in response, so I’ll try again there, too Cool
The same artlcle link is in Paddy’s ‘Act Locally’ thread but I’m hoping to generate some discussion, perhaps based on what some of us have seen happening with climate after extensive gifting has been done in a region. ~Don
Dear Don,
Yes, I have written and spoken about global warming, and although there have been a few who were skeptical, I found most people were in agreement and were grateful for what I told.
You are quite right to make people aware of the global warming scam. So many good people have a concern for the environment which has been effectively used/hijacked by the elite. It saddens me that they have been taken in by long term, very clever propaganda that makes them equate care for the environment with CO2=global warming. A friend of mine told me recently that what I was saying was equivalent to getting into bed with George Bush. You can’t win them all…
Here is my article:
http://www.whale.to/b/phethean.html
feel free to use it as you want.
Also let me know if you see any errors in it. All the signs seem to point to quite a few years of cooling – but who knows? Me, I was looking forward to the warming!
Peter Taylor, a British climate scientist I refer to in my article, told me he was looking into property in Spain to ride out the cooling!
I appreciate the work you do. Thanks.
Kind regards,
Richard
Don Croft
10 Dec 2008 13:07
Subject: Re: Richard’s Article on the Global Warming Scam
What is the truth about Global Warming?
by Richard Phethean
Is the theory true that anthropogenic (man-made) carbon dioxide (CO2) is the terrible greenhouse gas it is made out to be, that it is rapidly driving up the temperature of the earth, and will have devastating consequences for life on earth, cause sea levels to rise dangerously, increase violent storms, cause widespread drought, increase the range of insect-borne diseases, and wreak untold economic damage to human society?
And is it the case that unless we act soon and change the way we live, cut carbon dioxide through strict taxes and put in place many other severe measures to restrict human CO2 output, invest in clean technologies and save the world, our children will never forgive us?
Is this, as the world’s media, environmental groups and many world leaders would have us believe, true?
Or is it, as a relatively smaller group of so-called “climate deniers� tell us, a hoax?
This is a critical debate, and one that has not really happened yet.
Former Vice President Al Gore, in his film “An Inconvenient Truth�, says “Isn’t there disagreement among scientists about whether the problem is real or not? Actually, not really.� We are led to believe that debate is over, because there is now a “consensus� of 2,500 of the world’s greatest scientists, who all “believe� in “climate change�. We are now being told that it is irresponsible to say anything against this consensus. (Actually “consensus� has nothing to do with science, but has everything to do with politics.) And what is happening to free speech?
We are led to believe that the “nay-sayers� are being funded by big oil and coal industries who are keen to play down the environmental damage caused by their fuels, and that the rest of the deniers “just haven’t got it�, are labelled “isolated fruit bats�, “living on another planet�, “flat-earthers� or equivalent to “holocaust deniers�. Do I detect intimidation? Climate change environmentalism is more and more taking on the nature of a religion, with its crusaders and moralistic extremism, and its detractors are increasingly being termed “heretics�, “climate deniers� (think about that one!) and “non-believers�. It is the moral and political cause of our age.
Not everyone is impressed with “An Inconvenient Truthâ€?. Professor Bob Carter of the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University, in Australia gives what, for many, is a surprising assessment: “Gore’s circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film, are commanding public attention.” Many others share that view.
One reviewer of Al Gore’s film “An inconvenient truthâ€? said it was “the most frightening film I have ever seen.â€? So, nothing new there – politicians often exaggerate external threats in order to frighten us into accepting their policies. Could parallels be drawn with the lies about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction?
So is it true that there are no respected, intelligent and honest climate scientists who reject the conventional wisdom on anthropogenic climate change? The answer is a simple and resounding “Noâ€?. There are literally thousands of concerned scientists who are complaining to governments, writing articles and books and making videos to prove their point – all based on sound science. See, for example, the Petition Project – http://www.petitionproject.org – where at the time of writing (August 2008) 31,000 American scientists, including 9,000 with PhDs, have signed this petition refuting the science behind the Kyoto global warming agreement.
Then there is the open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, where sixty prominent climate scientists call on the Canadian Prime Minister to revisit the science of global warming – [http://www.citizenreviewonline.org/apri
And these are the scientists that are courageous enough to stick their neck out, because many of their kind have endured intimidation, been discredited and have had their funding removed. 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. Some greens are calling for the “denial of climate change� to be made a criminal offence. It is therefore not surprising that many scientists choose to keep quiet and keep their jobs.
Long-standing climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Richard Lindzen writes about he and others were intimidated as long ago as 1992 by Al Gore. He speaks about
“…the silence of the scientific community when anti-alarmists were in the crosshairs of then-Sen. Al Gore. In 1992, Gore ran two congressional hearings during which he tried to bully dissenting scientists, including myself, into changing our views and supporting his climate alarmism. Nor did the scientific community complain when Mr. Gore, as vice president, tried to enlist Ted Koppel in a witch hunt to discredit anti-alarmist scientists – a request that Mr. Koppel deemed publicly inappropriate. And they were mum when subsequent articles and books by Ross Gelbspan libellously labeled scientists who differed with Mr. Gore as stooges of the fossil-fuel industry.â€?
Mr Lindzen continues: “Sadly, this is only the tip of a non-melting iceberg. In Europe, Henk Tennekes was dismissed as research director of the Royal Dutch Meteorological Society after questioning the scientific underpinnings of global warming. Aksel Winn-Nielsen, former director of the U.N.'s World Meteorological Organization, was tarred by Bert Bolin, first head of the IPCC, as a tool of the coal industry for questioning climate alarmism. Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.�
Many climate scientists are angry because they say that the science has been distorted. Very few people are listening to these voices. As the rhetoric from the media, the politicians and the reports from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are getting shriller and more extreme as the weeks pass by, these dissenting voices are being drowned out in the growing hysteria.
What is going on? Where is rational “scientific� debate these days?
Let us try to separate out the various issues and get things in perspective.
Firstly, there is no denying that humanity’s lifestyle is having adverse effects on the environment, and efforts to reduce pollution and moves toward clean technologies should be a high priority of every thinking person. In the hysteria around carbon dioxide, we should remember that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but there are many, very hazardous pollutants associated with our industrial consumer society – mercury, emitted into the atmosphere by coal power stations, sulphur and nitrogen oxides causing acid rain, plastics releasing gender-bending chemicals into the rivers and seas, agricultural pesticides, GM crops, radioactive depleted uranium illegally being used in missiles in war-torn areas such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and a hundred thousand other chemicals being put out into the environment day by day. There is relatively little media attention being paid to these aspects. Why?
Why are we putting all our environmental eggs into one basket of carbon?
The other side of this non-debate was well presented in the documentary “The Great Global Warming Swindle� that was broadcast by channel 4 in early 2007. It has been attacked and discredited by the media because of the claim that some contributors felt their statements were placed out of context and that some of the science was misrepresented. However, in this film, a number of highly respected climate scientists very clearly contest the idea that CO2 is causing significant global warming. Their message is a very compelling one, and one that needs to be taken seriously. (You can order a copy of the DVD from wagtv.com, and I suggest you do, as it shows clearly and in a fairly easy to understand way the other side of the story.) It seems to me that the offending footage has been removed in the new edition on DVD.
You may have read that Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley (former advisor to Margaret Thatcher) stated that he intends to distribute this documentary together with some content of his own to secondary schools in the UK as a direct riposte to the Government’s own distribution of An Inconvenient Truth. (The Independent, 15th October 2007). Christopher Monckton entered the global warming debate when he wrote 2 letters to the Daily Telegraph on 5th and 12th November, 2006, pointing out the many factual errors in Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truthâ€?. On 19th November, the telegraph published a riposte by Al Gore himself. Christopher Monckton responded in turn, answering and refuting Mr Gore’s points one by one, with devastating effectiveness. Al Gore did not continue the debate or change the message of his crusade. Is he serious about the science behind the anthropogenic (man-made) CO2-induced global warming hypothesis, or does he have other motives? (These documents can all be found online – see references below).
Some will ask “What’s the problem?� Surely, if the world’s leaders are finally coming round to creating policies to reduce pollution and invest in clean technologies, shouldn’t we be happy and support their initiatives? For me the first question is: What is the truth? What is the real problem? When we understand the reality of the problems we face, then we can tackle them appropriately. Reducing atmospheric CO2 is a very costly business – we are talking about spending trillions of pounds, including heavy taxes, carbon rationing, trading etc., so surely we need to be properly convinced that this is indeed money well spent and that carbon is indeed the bad guy, otherwise we should use our resources for a more useful purpose, for example, making clean drinking water available to all people in the developing world, as suggested by Bjorn Lomborg, “The Sceptical Environmentalist�.
The “save-the-planet� solutions that are usually being offered strike me as totally missing the point. One solution: buy a hybrid car to reduce fuel use. The hypocrisy is that a car uses more energy in its manufacture than it will ever use in its lifetime.
Another solution: use energy-saving light-bulbs. 2 problems here; one is that all compact fluorescent bulbs contain mercury and are therefore classed as hazardous waste and secondly, their light quality, flicker and electromagnetic radiations are far from harmless to humans. The mercury, if not properly recycled, will find its way into the environment and into the human food chain. The other problem with both these examples, and indeed with most of our consumer goods, is that the whole economy is based on planned obsolescence. Things are designed to wear out or become obsolete rather than to last a long time. In other words, the real solutions to our many problems lie at a much more fundamental level than those we are being offered. Our whole way of living, and in particular, the economic system needs to be put on trial. Catherine Austin Fitts (http://www.solari.com) calls our current economic system the “Tapeworm Economy� because it works essentially like a parasite, constantly drawing energy (money) from the host (you and me) towards the world’s controllers and the super-rich. Al Gore, the environmental crusader, is a prominent example; the electricity bill of his mansion is some 20 times that of the average American household, even as he is flying around the world in his private jet… He has stated that he does not intend to change his lifestyle, yet he exhorts everyone else to do so… Hmmm. Let us also not forget that Al Gore enthusiastically supported Clinton in the war in former Yugoslavia when the US dropped over 10,000 missiles containing depleted uranium, which resulted in catastrophic long-term consequences for human health and the environment.
The Science
Some basic facts:
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Atmospheric CO2 has increased from about 0.03% to about 0.04% over the last 100 years. Some of this is doubtlessly due to domestic and industrial sources. The majority of CO2 in the atmosphere is produced by nature.
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CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, so it will cause some warming of the atmosphere – probably not much. The warming effect of CO2 effect tapers off dramatically with increasing concentrations. Water vapour, by comparison, is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, and its effect is almost impossible to plot.
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The earth’s temperature has probably increased by about 0.6 degree centigrade (plus or minus 0.2 degrees) over the last 120 years. However, not all scientists agree that the temperatures have been correctly measured due to the urban heat island effect. It could be even less.
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Graphs of the earth’s temperature have been falsified in recent years by the IPCC. The famous “hockey-stickâ€? graph showing temperatures neatly matching CO2 levels, as initially presented my Michael Mann and used by the IPCC and Al Gore in his documentary, has been proven to be incorrect. This graph falsely shows a fairly level temperature over the last few hundred years, which suddenly rises in the 20th century in line with man’s CO2 output. In 2001, the IPCC suddenly switched from the previously published and universally-accepted graph which shows rhythmical variations of temperature – a rise during the lengthy medieval warm period from about 900 to 1300 AD when temperatures were significantly warmer than they are today, and a subsequent cooling during the “little ice ageâ€? during the 16th up to the 19th century. Temperatures dropped to the lowest point in the last 10,000 years at about 1875.
Why did the IPCC get rid of the medieval warming period and the following little ice age?
Could it be that these ups and downs give the global warming alarmists a big problem, because they show that rising and falling temperatures are disconnected from CO2 levels. It also shows a very inconvenient truth – earth’s temperatures have always gone up and down – the climate has always changed, and it has been much warmer as well as colder than today. If you look at temperature changes as shown in the graphs, which have now been verified as global changes through many independent studies of diverse proxy data from around the world, it is clear that the current warming period is not at all unusual, extreme or dangerous. (See, for example, the work of Soon and Balliunas.)
So we have, during the 20th century, been emerging from the little ice age, during which the temperature was the coldest for the last 10,000 years. And thank goodness the temperature is rising. In history, periods that were much warmer than currently, were invariably times of growth and prosperity. Vineyards, for example, were cultivated in England during the medieval warm period. On the other hand, cold spells and ice ages have been particularly challenging for humanity and other life forms. Further, colder periods, not warmer ones, are scientifically shown to result in increased stormy weather and more hurricanes, in complete contradiction to Al Gore’s statements and popular alarmism.
Al Gore is fond of showing two superimposed graphs of CO2 levels correlating very closely with temperatures on the time scale of several hundred thousand years, from which he draws the conclusion that higher CO2 levels cause global warming. This is the crux of his (and the IPCC’s) hypothesis. This seems to be very convincing until the graphs are studied more closely and it is discovered that the CO2 levels increased hundreds of years AFTER the temperature changes. (The time lag is in the range of 600 to 2000 years.) Obviously, CO2 cannot cause temperature change if it occurs afterwards. It is known that the reason for this phenomenon is that warmer sea temperatures cause the release of trapped CO2 from the oceans, which takes considerable time, because the oceans warm up very slowly. Carbon dioxide concentrations have never driven the climate. Al Gore and the IPCC are deceiving us with fake science.
Another anomalous factor is the lack of correlation of global temperature with CO2 levels during the 20th century. For example, from 1940 to 1975, CO2 levels increased while the measured global temperature decreased. So again, no correlation between temperature and CO2 levels. During this period of steady cooling, doom-laden scientists and the media were creating the fear that we were heading into an ice age… Well, at least one thing hasn’t changed, the fear-mongering has continued.
Another anomalous factor, given the increasing scaremongering of recent years, is that measured global temperatures have been fairly steady since 1998. Warming stopped in 1998! The earth’s mean temperature in 2006 was 0.125 degrees cooler than in 1998. Further, the figures for the period from 2007 to 2008 show a global cooling of about 0.7 degrees C., which effectively wipes out in one year all of the warming of the past 120 years! The cause of the cooling is undoubtedly the reduced output of the sun as shown by the remarkably low sunspot activity at the time of writing. This is not funny. A little ice-age or Maunder-type minimum could be with us within a few years unless the sun suddenly decides to behave differently, which is very unlikely. (The Maunder Minimum is the name given to the period roughly 1600 to 1700, the time of the “little ice ageâ€?, when sunspots became exceedingly rare.)
But what about the melting glaciers? Glaciers have always advanced and retreated and scientists do not know why.
But what about ice sheets falling into the sea in the arctic? A natural phenomenon, they always do every year as explained by Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Director of the International Arctic Research Centre, Alaska, who sees nothing unusual in the conditions in the arctic. He adds: “The press come to us all the time saying ‘we want to see the global warming disaster’ – I say ‘there is none’ Melting of the Arctic ice is very strongly influenced by Ocean currents such as the North Atlantic Oscillation which transports warm water up from warmer southern regions.
There has been much media coverage about the recent warming of the Arctic and melting of the ice, in particular from 2002 to 2007. (We should bear in mind that the arctic ice had also melted considerably during the 1940’s.)
We can consider the following potential causes for this (current) melt-down:
• warmer water is penetrating from further south in the Pacific and Atlantic;
• warmth is being carried by wind, cloud and precipitation from warmer ocean regions;
• carbon dioxide levels are trapping heat that would normally escape from the Arctic land, ocean and sea-ice surface;
• cloud cover changes have insulated ocean and land areas and prevented heat loss;
• UV fluctuations (or other forms of solar energy) have interfered with high level wind patterns.
(Peter Taylor, Ethos-UK)
Arctic sea ice extent in 2008 is slightly greater than in 2007, so a trend towards cooler conditions seems to be occurring.
But what about the sea level rising? Al Gore states that if Greenland’s ice should melt, then sea levels worldwide will rise by 20 feet. When challenged on this issue by geoscientists he replied, in his defence, that no one knows for certain how much the sea will rise! While it can theoretically be calculated that melting of all of Greenland’s ice could possibly result in a 20 foot rise of sea levels, it represents an extreme and unlikely scenario. I have seen a scientific study that indicates that in previous warm periods the bulk of Greenland’s ice sheet did not melt significantly, although large coastal areas were green and free of ice – hence the name Greenland. Climate science demonstrates that the earth has been much warmer and cooler than it is at present, the sea levels have risen and fallen, arctic ice has melted and formed again and life on earth, even polar bears, survived – they must have, because they are still with us today, and thriving very well! It seems likely that the sea levels will continue to rise a few more inches over the coming century, mostly due to thermal expansion of seawater, but any estimates are only guesswork. The biggest danger to low lying coastal regions is in fact storms and flash floods, which should decrease in intensity and frequency if the climate continues to get warmer. In fact, on average, tornados in the US have steadily decreased over the last 60 years. Why doesn’t the media tell us that?
According to many climate scientists, by far the most significant driver of earth’s temperatures is the sun. There is now a large body of research that shows an extremely close relationship between the sun’s rhythmical activity with earth’s mean temperature on larger as well as smaller (monthly, yearly, decadal) time scales. The warming of the atmosphere occurs not only because of the direct effect of the sun’s rays, but also because of a recently discovered amplifying effect. The increased solar wind during high sun activity deflects more cosmic rays, and this in turn has the effect of reducing nuclei that engender cloud formation, thus enhancing atmospheric warming. The sun’s rhythms are fairly regular, but complex. As an example, two of the rhythms of the sun are the 11-year sun spot cycle and the larger 1500-year Bond-cycle, and these correlate very closely with earth’s temperatures. Warm periods naturally occur every 1100 to 1500 years. (Tim Patterson, Fred Singer.)
So, to put it in a nutshell, the sun is the main driver of the climate and its effect is strongly mediated by cloud cover – i.e. more solar activity means less clouds and hence higher global temperatures. In comparison, the effect of carbon dioxide is represents about 10% or, at the most, 20% of the warming effect of the sun (and by consequence, clouds) over the last century (from Peter Taylor.)
A lot of media attention is being focussed on “positive feedback mechanisms�, i.e. those climatic events that reinforce and exaggerate any estimates of global warming. However, negative feedback mechanisms hardly get a mention. For example, increasing temperatures create more water vapour in the air, which gives rise to more clouds, which, overall, causes cooling. As with any living organism, the earth has powerful regulatory, homoeostatic controls – in other words, negative feedback mechanisms in living organisms generally predominate, and thus help to minimise any changes before they get too extreme.
The IPCC scientists predominantly use super-computer modelling to plot what will happen to the earth’s temperature if the concentration of CO2 would double. The idea of a super-computer sounds terribly impressive, but the outcomes of these models vary enormously, depending on the data that is put into them. Many of the parameters of the working of the earth’s biosphere are very poorly understood, and so a lot of guesswork has to go on. Garbage in, garbage out, as the old adage goes. The problem is that the earth’s climate system is so enormously complex and so the science of computer modelling has to involve a lot of guesswork. Any factors that are not understood are simply left out of the calculations, for example the effect of clouds, which as was argued earlier, represent one of the most significant drivers of climate.
For more science see:
http://www.petitionproject.org/gwda…ticle_HTML.html
and http://www.ethos-uk.com/downlo……index.html
Some Politics
Many scientists working for the United Nations IPCC have been dissatisfied with the attitude of the organisation. In very many cases, the so-called “Summary for Policy-Makers� has misrepresented the work of the scientists that has gone into the main report. The trend of change is invariably biased towards exaggeration of the role played by CO2 and towards alarmism. We are led to believe that the IPCC summaries represent a “consensus� of the scientists involved, whereas in fact there is no consensus. For example, one of the world’s leading experts on insect borne diseases, Professor Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute, resigned from the IPCC and asked that his name be removed from the list of contributing scientists because his contributions were thoroughly misrepresented. (After a long struggle, his request was only agreed to when he threatened legal action.) He challenges the alarmist statements made by the IPCC as well as Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth� about the potential spread of malaria to northern regions as a result of global warming. He argues that malaria is not only a “tropical disease� and its spread is not affected in a simplistic way by temperatures.
He adds: “I was horrified to read the 2nd and 3rd IPCC assessment reports, because there was so much misinformation without any kind of recourse to the scientific literature, the truly scientific literature of specialists in these fields.�
“The global warming alarm is dressed up as science, but it’s not science, it’s propaganda.â€? Prof. Paul Reiter
Professor Frederick Seitz, former president of the National Academy of Science is of a similar mind. The following is taken from a letter he wrote to the Wall Street Journal:
“I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report. … No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to manmade causes.�
So, are we being deliberately lied to? I am convinced the answer is yes. I know that many who are reading this will find it very hard to believe, because, if anthropogenic global warming is indeed a “swindle�, it is a pretty massive and all-pervasive one, and an awful lot of people are expending an awful lot of energy and money in trying to make us believe this “inconvenient truth�. “Global warming� is now a multi-billion dollar global business and tens of thousands of people’s livelihoods depend on it being a continued problem.
What, then could be the motivation?
Deborah Corey Barnes, Capital Research Centre, Foundation Watch (Online) supplies some insights:
“Al Gore’s crusade against carbon dioxide emissions could make him millions of dollars. With help from friends at Goldman Sachs, Gore has established a network of organizations to promote the “climate crisis�—and keep himself in the spotlight. Gore’s crusade already has had an enormous impact on corporate decision-making and government policies.�
“His principal regulatory tool is what’s called carbon credit trading. Under a so-called “cap and trade� system, government places a ceiling or “cap� on private sector emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gases.�
This system, which may sound market friendly, is something only a bureaucrat could dream up. The twist is that the carbon market exists only because the government’s imposition of a cap creates an artificial scarcity in the right to produce energy. In a cap and trade system, buyers will purchase their offsets from a broker or through an electronic trading platform. In Europe carbon trading is already a reality. Since 2005 carbon offsets have been traded electronically on the European Climate Exchange (ECX).�
“In one popular version of the carbon offset concept, firms earn credits by buying seedling trees for planting in less-developed countries. Supporters claim the CO2 uptake of the trees will balance out the carbon emissions of their industrial activity.�
But seedling trees take many decades before they absorb the quantity of CO2 that has been traded and “offset�. Where is the guarantee that these trees will be protected for the 30, 40 or 50 years that they grow? And when they do, sooner or later, die and rot away or are burned, all the CO2 will be released back into the atmosphere again. Never mind, money has been made and consciences appeased.
Deborah Corey Barnes continues:
“Despite its public relations value, scientists scoff at the notion that it’s possible to plant enough trees to balance out man’s production of carbon dioxide. The real problem is that every country’s government has an incentive to cheat on behalf of its domestic producers. This has been the European Union’s (EU) experience with the Emissions Trading System (ETS) that the EU established to implement the Kyoto Protocol. In just about every EU country except Britain, the credits allowed exceed the corresponding tons of emissions. Carbon offsets are no more than a marketing gimmick. Enron, like many of the very biggest businesses in America, saw Kyoto—and still see global warming laws and regulations—as the best price-fixing and subsidy-creating deal in history.�
“Al Gore is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). According to Gore, the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are going green. “Generation Investment Management (GIM), purchases—but isn’t a provider of—carbon dioxide offsets,� notes spokesman Richard Campbell.�
“GIM appears to have considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist: the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in the U.S. and the Carbon Neutral Company (CNC) in Great Britain.�
“Clearly, GIM is poised to cash in on carbon trading. The membership of CCX is currently voluntary. But if the day ever comes when federal government regulations require greenhouse gas emitters—and that’s almost everyone— to participate in cap-and-trade, then those who have created a market for the exchange of carbon credits are in a position to control the outcomes. And that moves Al Gore front and center.�
It seems to me inevitable that it is only a matter of time before carbon quotas, and carbon offsetting for every corporation and every individual will be required by law. So, on one level, Al Gore’s film could be seen as promotion for his investment company GIM.
A disturbing feature of these trends is that the line between government and big business is getting increasingly blurred. This is nowadays often referred to as public-private partnership. Others call it fascism.
Carbon dioxide is the new currency, and as with all trading schemes, there will be some big time winners, i.e. those who know how to manipulate the market, but for the average man in the street, it can only mean more taxes, financial burdens and massive restrictions on freedom.
So, in order to get us to give up our freedoms and accept these restrictions, we first need to be thoroughly convinced of the following ideas:
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Global warming and climate change will bring catastrophic problems for life on earth (we fear)
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You and I are to blame for these problems (we are guilty)
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The governments therefore have a “duty� to impose restrictions on our energy use and activities (we are meekly subservient)
Is this the way to save the environment? Or an excuse to implement more control through fear? Is it also a cop-out which will allow businesses to carry on doing exactly what they want, but now with a “clear conscience� because they have the excuse that they have “offset� or “bought� their “carbon emissions�? And who decides how to share out the quotas?
Another insight with far-reaching consequences comes from Senator James Inhofe (Oklahoma) who asks:
"With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phoney science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people?"
Inhofe has suggested that supporters of Kyoto such as Jacques Chirac are aiming at global governance. “Then your favourite Frenchman Jacques Chirac – he said Kyoto is not about, climate change, it represents the first component of an authentic global governance.â€? – from a speech by Senator James Inhofe.
Quoting Inhofe, the American Free Press stated, "It was an unguarded moment for Chirac. World government is the main goal of the secret Bilderberg group, of which he is a luminary." (Source Wikipedia)
