A readable but revealing summary of what really happened at the UNFCC meeting on climate change in Bali. And why the ordinary people of the world should be very, very afraid.Bali diary
Fortnight Of The Undead
By Christopher Monckton in Nusa Dua, Bali
Down the Poxy, our local fleapit late on a Saturday night, voodoo flicks like Night Of The Undead were always popular when I was a lad. To shrieks of scornful merriment from the teenage audience, mindless zombies would totter aimless across the clumsily-constructed sets with lugubrious expressions frozen on their messily-made-up death-masks until the hero, with the lurv interest wrenched screeching from the clutches of the late Baron Samedi and draped admiringly on her rescuer’s extravagantly-muscled arm, triumphantly saved the day.
Thus it was in Bali during the Fortnight Of The Undead. There was surreality in the air. The overwhelming majority of the governmental delegates, journalists, quango stallholders, fortune-hunters and environmental lobbyists who attended the UN climate conference in the soulless Nusa Dua conference centre tottered aimlessly among the clumsily-constructed sets with lugubrious expressions frozen on their messily-made-up death-masks. Monckton’s Rule: the further Left, the tackier the make-up. The only laughter came from our gallant band of doubters, the heroes of this otherwise gloomy production.
I nearly didn’t go to Bali. The UN, which had not wanted any dissent at this carefully-staged event, rejected my journalistic credentials out of hand, and without explanation. However, a non-government organization came to the rescue and the high priests didn’t dare to say No a second time. That would have looked too obvious. I proved my journo-cred by writing a major article in the Jakarta Post on day 1 of the conference, cheekily claiming my share of the Nobel Prize because the IPCC had made a correction to its latest Holy Book at my suggestion, and concluding that, since our influence on the climate is a non-problem, and the correct approach to a non-problem is to do nothing, my fellow-participants should have the courage to do nothing and push off home.
The Post circulated the article to all delegates and syndicated it worldwide, provoking weeping and gnashing of dentures among the zombies at my challenge to the scientific accuracy of the Holy Books of the IPCC. I don’t think the UN will dare to question my journalistic credentials again.
The UN’s sinister bureaucrats were furious that their attempt to stop me writing in the newspapers from the conference had failed. So they interrupted a presentation by me to delegates, threatened to have me thrown out by Security if I addressed any meeting open to the Press in the conference venues, and cancelled without reason a room they had previously booked for our team’s daily conferences. The room wasn’t even needed for someone else: it stood empty. So we mounted a demo outside the conference: half a dozen scientists (and me) in white lab-coats and (for some reason) wrap-around shades, holding a banner saying, “New science drives out old fears: Kyoto 2 is not needed”.
The UN, whose pot-bellied goons had taken over the entire Nusa Dua conference zone from the leaner and more competent Indonesian and Balinese security forces, moved us on within minutes, while allowing anti-nuclear protesters, Greens and even Hilary Benn, described as a UK Minister, to mount demonstrations for hours on end.
The official propaganda mantra at the conference, first suggested by a UK pressure-group last year and now enthusiastically adopted by the UN, was that “The Science Is Settled”. The zombies, led by the outgoing and incoming conference chairmen, recited this mantra with glazed but increasingly desperate pietism.
An IPCC lead author came to one of the press conferences we managed to hold before the UN showed its alarm at our effect on the delegates by shutting us down. He said a mere layman like me had no business challenging the supposed “consensus”. And he tried to maintain that a table of figures in the latest Holy Book had been added up correctly when, as a slide I was showing made quite clear, it had not added up to within a factor of two of the right answer. In the land of the zombies, two plus two equals nine.
Outside the conference hall, I went up to a fragrant Japanese lady manning one of the exhibits set up by the ever-growing number of taxpayer-funded quangos with bewildering but important-sounding initials that are profiting by the lavish State handouts available to anyone willing to proselytize for the cult of the wrathful God Siotu. “What disasters?” I enquired, with an expression of shambling, potty-Peer innocence. This usually provoked a lurid list of plagues, droughts, floods, deaths, cataclysms and mass extinctions worthy of St. John the Divine at his most hyperbolic. The UK High Court judge who condemned Al Gore for exaggerations of this sort would have locked up most of the stallholders and sent me the key.
But this lady had somehow escaped the zombies. She drew me to one side and whispered, “Don’t tell my boss, but two-thirds of the delegates here are mad.” They would have been mad, if they’d had minds at all. One of the most enduring impressions on all of our team was that the Enlightenment has been switched off. Enter the Dark Age of Unreason. Ever since the high priests tampered with the scientists’ text of the IPCC’s 1995 Holy Book, deleting multiple references to the absence of credible evidence for any anthropogenic effect on climate and inserting the directly contrary statement that there was now a discernible human influence, anyone who dares to check the science is regarded as a heretic for daring to question the Holy Books of voodoo. Never mind the facts: just believe the nonsense, even when it doesn’t add up.
I couldn’t resist baiting the stallholder at the stand run by a certain national weather bureau. This particular tax-gobbler, reliably Messianic in its Siotological fervour, had a childishly imaginative poster that ramped up the imagined disasters as global temperature rose by each additional degree Celsius. At just 2 degrees, the poster said the Greenland ice sheet would be permanently destabilized. Oo-er. The message was illustrated by the usual picture of a glacier calving spectacularly into the water.
“‘Scuse me,” I said, Earl-of-Emsworth expression in place, “but isn’t that a picture of a glacier that cuts across a freshwater lake in Argentina?” For it wasn’t Greenland. It looked suspiciously like a grainy vid-grab from the traditional collapsing-glacier footage shown every few minutes on the unspeakable BBC. As the waters of the freshwater lake build up behind the glacier, it breaks apart spectacularly every eight years. Or rather, as I pointed out to the stallholder, every five years these days, because much of the southern hemisphere is cooling. This image did not demonstrate “global warming” but regional cooling.
The stallholder robotically reached for the IPCC’s latest Holy Book and showed me graphs of sharply-rising temperatures in South Africa, Australasia and South America. She didn’t show me the Antarctic, of course: that has been cooling for half a century. It had not occurred to the poor dear to wonder why the IPCC’s temperature graphs for all continents but one were shown as rising steeply in recent years, when the global mean temperature has not shown any statistically-significant rise since the IPCC’s previous Holy Book came out in 2001. The thing about stable average temperatures is that if some have risen others must have fallen. Or so it seems to me. But then I’m not a zombie.
“Anyway,” I said, “doesn’t the 2007 rewrite of the Holy Book say that the Greenland Ice Sheet would only lose significant ice-mass if a temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius or more were to be sustained for several millennia?” That, after all, was what a UK High Court judge had recently found, when he condemned Al Gore’s ludicrous hundredfold exaggeration of sea-level rise as alarmist and told ministers to correct this and eight other flagrant errors in Gore’s rocky-horror movie before exposing hapless schoolchildren to it.
Here’s a question. If the science behind the scare is as certain as the zombies say, why are they so terrified of a few doubters? Google me and you’ll find hundreds of enviro-loony websites, such as Wikipedia, now an international music-hall joke for inaccuracy, that call me a fraud (for writing about climate science when I’m not a climate scientist), a plagiarist (for citing learned papers rather than making up scare stories), and a liar (for saying I’m a member of the House of Lords when – er – I’m a member of the House of Lords, though, being merely hereditary, I don’t have a seat there).
One of these bedwetting sites even has a “Monckton Watch” page, with a hilarious collection of colourful stories, including the story of how I told the stallholder that much of the southern hemisphere was cooling. No mention that the location of the BBC’s favourite glacier has indeed been cooling. And, of course, no mention of the elephant in the room – that a national weather bureau had flagrantly exaggerated the Holy Book’s official ramblings about Greenland on its silly, taxpayer-funded poster.
You’ll find precious little science on the zombie websites. They specialize in global whingeing ad hominem, rather than scientific argument ad rem. The frenetic personal assaults have become so self-evidently ludicrous that I’m getting an increasing number of emails from people who have first heard of my work from the Kool-Aid slurpers and have gone on to find, to their surprise, that the peer-reviewed science to which my climate papers politely draw attention does suggest that the Holy Books have exaggerated both the influence of Siotu over temperature and the consequences of warmer weather.
An example. A couple of months back I posted a paper citing peer-reviewed evidence that the fingerprint of greenhouse-gas warming – temperature rising over the decades at a rate three times faster six miles up in the tropical troposphere than at the surface – is absent from all of the real-world records of actual temperature change throughout the past half-century. During the Bali conference, I presented my own linear regression analysis going back 25 years and demonstrating that the rate of change in temperature falls with altitude, while the IPCC’s models predict that if CO2 is at fault it should be increasing with altitude. Two days later our team of heroes had the pleasure of circulating to delegates a paper just published by the formidable John Christy and his colleagues, spectacularly and definitively confirming this result.
We circulated a one-page summary of the Christy paper showing the tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” as predicted in the Holy Book, and the total absence of the “hot-spot” in the observed data. We explained that, in the words of Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT, who knows more about the bad behaviour of the atmosphere than anyone, the missing “hot-spot” means that the IPCC’s estimate of the impact of greenhouse-gas enrichment on temperature is at least a threefold exaggeration.
As I was handing our flyer round the Press tent, a “development journalist” angrily said: “How dare you criticize the IPCC’s scientists?” I sat down and said: “I don’t attack the scientists, though they certainly attack me. I attack the bad science.”
“Well, then,” he said, “how dare you substitute your judgment for that of thousands of climate scientists?” I said that the crucial chapter in the Holy Book attributing rising temperatures to Siotu had been written by only 53 people, not all of whom were scientists, and that – by coincidence – 53% of the comments by 60 reviewers had been rejected by the authors of the chapter. Not exactly the 2,500 scientists claimed by the high priests, and not exactly a consensus either.
I explained that I was an old-fashioned scribbler who had been taught to be sceptical of all sides of every debate, and that the authors of the Holy Book were obviously not good at sums. “Give me an example,” he said. So I did.
The Holy Book saith: “The CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20% during the last 10 years (1995-2005).” Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant energy in the atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per million. In 2005 it was just 5% higher, at 378 ppm. But each additional molecule of CO2 in the air causes a smaller radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the true increase in radiative forcing was 1%, not 20%. The high priests have exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.
“So how are you so nauseatingly certain that you’re right?” he asked. “Well,” I said, “because I worked out that the proportionate increase in CO2 between 1995 and 2005 was 5%, not 20%, and then did a simple calculation from this to work out the radiative forcing. It’s called ‘checking’.” He looked baffled. Voodoo has indeed replaced science, and the paradox is that the new religion claims to worship science.
The zombies seem listlessly incapable of checking even the most elementary facts. Take Yvo de Boer, the UN archpriest at the conference. He made an impassioned speech saying that the sceptics had had their day and that everyone now accepted that, for instance, the island nations of the Pacific were facing an imminent threat from rising sea levels. Er, no. Corals have been around for 275 million years. They’ve survived temperatures up to 7 degrees Celsius warmer than today’s. And has it never occurred to the poor sap to wonder why, after a rise of 400 feet in sea level over the past 10,000 years, the sea has – by some startling concidence – exactly reached the surface of all the coral atolls?
No, it’s not a coincidence, because corals grow to meet the light. They can outpace at least ten times the Holy Books’ high-end estimate of sea-level rise, which is anyway down by a third since just six years ago. We know this, because the mean centennial rate of sea-level rise since the end of the last Ice Age has been – get this – at least double the high priests’ highest estimate of future sea-level rise. Nine-tenths of the land-based ice sheets of the world have already melted. There’s so little left that even if it began to melt (which it won’t) the rise in sea level would be very, very slow.
The new Australian prime minister got a dutiful round of applause from the zombies when he announced that his first official act had been to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. He didn’t tell them that back home he’d also let it be known that Australia had not the slightest intention of complying with the protocol. But then, practically no one else is complying with it either.
For me, it was this laughable disconnection between rhetoric and reality that was the most striking feature of the conference. Anyone with half a brain can see, after making the most elementary of enquiries, that greenhouse gases can’t have all that much effect on temperature, that even if they did the consequences would be minimal and largely beneficial. For this reason – since Heaven has a sense of humour – global temperature has now been stubbornly failing to rise for the best part of a decade, and (unless you’re James Hansen, who started the scare in the first place) 2007 will yet again fail to be a “record year for temperature” – and the zombies go back only 150 years.
Since CO2 can’t be exercising more than a minuscule influence on temperature, and since the temperature is accordingly failing to rise as predicted (or, in the past seven years, at all), the entire conference was unnecessary, but the zombies didn’t know, and they didn’t care, and – either way – they were getting rich at taxpayers’ expense thanks to the most elaborately-conceived scare of modern times.
Bryan Leyland, the leader of our delegation and an engineer far too highly-qualified to be an IPCC reviewer, asked the IPCC lead author how many more years of temperatures failing to rise as predicted would convince him to give up the pretence that the IPCC’s predictions have any connection with reality. Answer came there none.
I had a quiet word with the US delegation before the conference began, just to confirm that they were not about to go soft and goofy as Australia has done. A solidly-constructed Congressman gave me the clear message that as long as George Bush was in the White House there would be no nonsense. That meant that both this conference and the next one – at Poznan in Poland this time next year – will merely mark time until President Bush isn’t. Nothing can happen until Copenhagen in two years’ time.
I also said Konichi-wa to the Japanese delegation, whose members diligently turned up half an hour before each session, while the rest were still drying out their hangovers. They politely read our daily messages to delegates, and joined the US and Canada as the pariahs of the conference, refusing to shuffle along with the zombies.
The Luxembourgeois delegation were not so polite. A peasant-faced minister took one look at the High Court judge’s list of the errors in Al Gore’s movie and rudely tore it up in front of me, throwing the pieces on to the floor. Not enough Luxe, too much bourgeois, one feels. Unusual animation for a zombie, though. One of his colleagues began collecting up copies of the judge’s list of Gore’s bloopers as I was distributing them. I remonstrated politely and she desisted, deciding to go and complain to Security instead. On the way, she murmured that she had a black belt in karate. “So do I,” I said, with equal mendacity, trying my geriatric best to look like James Bond.
Back at the Poxy, the only time the zombies used to show any animation was when Baron Samedi came on set. They would set up an eerie, unpleasant keening, and would jerk chaotically in their frenzied excitement. So it was in Bali when, on the eve of the closing Friday, not so much Baron Samedi as Baron Thursdi, Al Gore private-jetted and motorcaded in with his vast retinue to receive the plaudits of the faithful, and to hell with the carbon footprint. Gore did what I had been taught never to do. He attacked his own country for withstanding the voodoo cult. The zombies loved it. The keening and screeching and jerking were exactly as I had remembered them.
Gore needs to pretend that the situation is urgent when it is becoming increasingly plain to everyone that it isn’t. The robust corn-stalk chewers of Iowa, polled recently about election issues, ranked “global warming” so low that fewer than one in 200 thought it mattered at all.
Therefore, to whip up the flagging panic that keeps the gravy-train of “global warming” rolling, Baron Thursdi came up with a new, improved list of 50 errors and exaggerations:
• Floods in 18 countries, plus Mexico: Four errors in one. First, individual extreme-weather events cannot be attributed to “global warming”. Secondly, the number of floods is not unprecedented, though TV makes them more visible than before. Thirdly, even if the floods were caused by warming, the fact of warming does not tell us the cause. Thirdly – and it was astonishing how few of the zombies knew this – there has been no statistically-significant increase in mean global surface temperature since the last IPCC Holy Book in 2001. “Global warming” has stopped.
• The Arctic ice-cap will be gone within 5 to 7 years: Six errors in one. First, as a paper published by NASA during the conference demonstrates, Arctic warming has nothing much to do with “global warming”: instead, as numerous studies confirm, it is chiefly caused by decadal alterations in the ocean circulation affecting the region. Thirdly, it was warmer in the Arctic in the 1940s than it is today. Fourthly, thinner pack-ice is surprisingly resistant to melting, so the ice-cap will probably be still there for many years to come, even if (which is unlikely) the warming trend resumes. Fifthly, the ice-cap was probably absent during the mediaeval warm period, and almost certainly absent during the Bronze Age climate optimum, when temperatures were higher than today’s for almost 2,000 years. Sixthly, the Greenland ice sheet melted completely away 850,000 years ago. There cannot have been an Arctic ice-cap then. So the disappearance of the Arctic ice-cap, even if it occurred, would be neither unprecedented nor alarming
.
• Forest fires are causing devastation: Five errors in one. First, most forest fires are caused by humans – power-lines sparking in the wind, carelessly-tossed cigarette-butts, or even arson. Secondly, individual events of this kind cannot be attributed to “global warming”. Thirdly, warmer weather is generally wetter weather, because – as the Clausius-Clapeyron relation demonstrates – the space occupied by the atmosphere can carry near-exponentially greater concentrations of water vapour as the weather becomes warmer. Fourthly, it has not got warmer since 2001, so there is no factual basis whatsoever for attributing more forest fires to warmer weather. Fifthly, the fact of warming does not tell us the cause.
• Many cities are short of water: Four errors in one. First, water shortages arise from too much demand on too little supply. Secondly, one cannot attribute individual events of this kind to “global warming”. Thirdly, there has been no “global warming” for the best part of a decade. Fourthly, the fact of warming does not tell us the cause.
• There are more severe storms: Six errors in one. First, the scientific literature is divided on the question whether warmer weather will intensify storms. Secondly, the scientific literature is unanimous that the warmer weather which stopped happening in 2001 has not in fact caused more severe storms: the number of landfalling Atlantic hurricanes shows no trend for 100 years, and, in the 30 years for which we have records, the number of tropical cyclones and of typhoons has actually fallen steadily. Thirdly, outside the tropics warmer weather is likely to mean fewer severe storms. Fourthly, even if there had been more severe storms, they cannot be attributed to “global warming”. Fifthly, there has not been any “global warming” for the past seven years. Sixthly, even if there had been any warming, the fact of warming does not tell us the cause.
- West Antarctica has lost an area the size of California: Four errors in one. First, the bulk of Antarctica is cooling (Doran et al., 2004). Secondly, Gore’s movie says there were seven areas the size of Rhode Island that had melted (in total, 1/55 of the size of Texas), so his figures are inconsistent. Thirdly, Antarctic sea-ice extent reached record levels in September this year. Fourthly, even if Antarctica had warmed, the fact of warming does not tell us the cause.
- Deserts are growing: Three errors in one. First, some deserts are growing; others are not. Secondly, Gore’s movie says the southern Sahara is plagued by new drought, but the Sahara has shrunk by 300,000 square kilometres in the past 30 years, giving place to vegetation. Nomadic tribes are returning to territories they have not occupied in living memory. Thirdly, the fact of warming does not tell us the cause.
• Sea level is rising: Eight errors in one. First, sea level has been rising ever since the end of the last Ice Age. Secondly, it has been rising at a mean rate of 4 feet per century, more than double the latest Holy Book’s highest estimate of future sea-level rise. Thirdly, Gore himself does not believe his ridiculous estimate that the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets will raise sea level by 20 feet imminently: he has just bought a $4 million condo in the St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco, a few feet from the Bay. Fourthly, the Holy Book shows that the combined contribution of these two ice sheets to sea-level rise over the next 100 years will be just two and a half inches. Fifthly, most of the 1 ft 5 in sea level rise that is the IPCC’s best estimate over the coming century will occur not from ice-melt but from thermosteric expansion of sea-water. Sixthly, Nils-Axel Morner, the world’s greatest expert on sea level, says even the IPCC’s forecast is exaggerated. Seventhly, the UK High Court judge condemned Gore for his “alarmist” exaggeration of sea-level rise, yet Gore seems unwilling to accept that he has erred. Eighthly, even if sea-level were rising at record rates, which it is not, the fact of the warming that caused the increase does not tell us the cause of the warming.
• CO2 is “global warming pollution”: Seven errors in one. First, CO2 is a naturally-occurring substance, not a pollutant. Secondly, CO2 concentrations, in geological terms, are at record low levels – less than 400 parts per million compared with 7,000 ppm in the Cambrian era. Thirdly, CO2 is food for trees and plants. With chlorophyll and sunlight, it is an essential constituent in photosynthesis, without which there would be no plant life as we know it. Fourthly, CO2 is harmless to animals even at very high concentrations – indeed, the concentration in the room where Gore spoke, with a thousand zombies yelling lustily, is likely to have well above 1000 ppm, but none of the zombies came to harm. Fifthly, CO2 is harmless to plants even at concentrations of 10,000 ppm, as laboratory tests have demonstrated. Sixthly, you breathe out CO2 every time you exhale. Seventhly, CO2 forms the bubbles in sparkling drinks like Coca-Cola and champagne, and it also forms the spaces between the solid matter in bread. For all these reasons, it is not a pollutant, and we are doing no more than to restore to the atmosphere the normal levels that have harmlessly prevailed in the past, playing their part in the emergence and development of life itself.
• Venus has experienced a runaway greenhouse effect, and the EU says Earth is the sister planet of Venus: Four errors in one. First, Venus is much closer to the Sun than the Earth is, and the incoming solar radiation of 236 watts per square meter at the surface is far too little to create a runaway greenhouse effect. Secondly, the surface temperature on Venus, chiefly because of its proximity to the Sun, is 455 degrees C, compared with the Earth’s 15 degrees C. Gore mentioned these figures, but led the audience falsely to imagine that the difference in temperature is chiefly attributable to the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere of Venus. Thirdly, CO2 concentration reached 7000 parts per million in the Cambrian era, compared with less than 400 ppm today, and temperature rose only to 22 degrees Celsius, so Gore’s comparison with the 455 degrees C obtaining on the surface of Venus is a 20-fold exaggeration of the maximum temperature likely to arise on Earth. Fourthly, a concentration of 7000 parts per million could only be reached if today’s concentration were to increase 18-fold. In 1994 Gore said that there were canals on Mars, with water in them. Best not to take his word on other planetary bodies. He would have been more to the point if he had admitted that warming has recently been observed on Mars, on the surface of Jupiter, on the largest of Neptune’s moons and even on distant Pluto. All those SUVs in space, one supposes. Or could the guilty party, perhaps, be the Sun, which has been more active in the past 70 years than at almost any similar period in at least the past 11,400 years?
• The IPCC’s 2007 Holy Book is “unanimous”: Five errors in one. First – and this cannot be repeated often enough – science is not a democratic process, and it does not matter how many scientists reach a conclusion if that conclusion is contrary to the objective truth. Secondly, the Holy Book is in fact very far from unanimous: it quotes numerous peer-reviewed papers that disagree with its conclusions. Thirdly, the Holy Book fails to quote many hundreds of further peer-reviewed papers that disagree with its conclusions. Fourthly, the IPCC’s Holy Books are divided into chapters, each with about 50 authors, and the authors sign off only on their own chapters. Fifthly, the high priests of voodoo try to secure unanimity by rejecting the nomination of authors, such as Paul Reiter, who knows that malaria is not a tropical disease and would not be spread by “global warming”, whose views are known to be contrary to the teachings of the Holy Books. Fifthly, Chris Landsea, an expert on hurricanes, resigned from the IPCC process, condemning it as unduly political, when Kevin Trenberth, his lead author, appeared on a public platform advocating the notion that “global warming” causes more frequent hurricanes. He is by no means the only resigner from the supposedly “unanimous” IPCC process.
* Svante Arrhenius made 10,000 calculations 116 years ago, demonstrating that temperature would rise “many degrees” in response to CO2 doubling: 4 errors in one. First, Arrhenius’ paper making that erroneous claim was published in 1896, 111 years ago, not 116. Secondly, his calculations are now known to have been inaccurate, since he had relied upon lunar spectral data that were defective. Thirdly, Arrhenius could have spared himself the trouble of his 10,000 calculations if he had used the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation, which integrates radiant-energy emission spectra across all wavelengths and converts the energy to temperature. In 1906, once he had come across the equation, he wrote a little-known paper in German, in which he revised his calculations and concluded that the warming in response to a CO2 doubling would be 1.6 degrees C, or exactly half the IPCC’s exaggerated current central estimate. Fourthly, even this estimate is probably too high.
As with the 35 errors in Gore’s movie, so with the 50 in his speech to the zombies in Bali, comfortably exceeding his personal best – all the errors tend towards an extreme and scientifically-unwarranted exaggeration of the imagined threat posed by “global warming”. The zombies, of course, lapped up every word handed down from on high by Baron Thursdi, for Bali was a science-free, fact-free zone, question-free zone. The probability that all 43 of Gore’s latest errors could have pointed by mere accident and ignorance in the direction of excessive alarm is less than one in a million billion.
Therein lies a danger that Gore has not yet seen. For he failed, yet again, to declare his financial interest before whipping up worldwide alarm with his trademark errors and exaggerations in Bali. He is a director of Lehman Brothers, a global finance house that wants to control the worldwide managed market in carbon-emissions trading. He founded his own “green” corporation, Generation Investment Management. He is a paid member of the Board of a renewable-energy company. In the UK, if he made a speech containing so many deliberate and unidirectional errors as he did in Bali, and if he failed to declare his financial interest, he would be committing a criminal offence.
It is surely only a matter of time before a complaint is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that, through the numerous, extreme and scientifically-unwarranted exaggerations which Gore has relentlessly continued to peddle notwithstanding the warning in the UK judge’s verdict, he is in effect fraudulently promoting a false prospectors to potential investors. Indeed, his exaggerations are on such a scale, and have commanded such attention, and have done so much damage, that he may even have committed an offence under the Federal racketeering statute. I wanted to ask Gore about his failure to disclose his financial interest, but – as usual – he does not dare to take questions.
The day Gore spoke in Bali, I received an email (one of hundreds from all over the world in response to my article in the Jakarta Post) from one of the Port Commissioners of Washington State. He said his fellow-Commissioners, solely on the basis of Gore’s rantings, were proposing to increase the height of the sea-walls by 20 feet. Real economic and environmental harm is now being caused by these unscientific exaggerations, which have gained credence among the zombies merely by their repetition on the lips of a former Vice-President of the United States.
The US delegation did not crumble in Bali. It stood firm in the cause of right and truth and common sense. So it was not possible for the zombies to go as far as they wanted in inflicting pointless, economically-disastrous and climatically-irrelevant policies on the world. For the sake of being seen to do something while they wait for Copenhagen, they have laboriously drawn up a “Bali Roadmap”. Like the Middle East Roadmap, the Bali Roadmap is a non-map of a non-existent road to nowhere. Meantime, we have alarmed the alarmists, and that is a first step towards the dawn of truth.To view the original article http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=178&Itemid=1 |
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/gold/t24_au_en_usoz_2.gif)
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/silver/t24_ag_en_uskg_2.gif)
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/base/spot-copper-5y.gif)
![[Most Recent Quotes from www.kitco.com]](http://www.kitconet.com/charts/metals/platinum/t24_pt_en_usoz_2.gif)
