The Man-Made Global Warming Hoax, the 'Green Religion' and One-World Government

World leaders have paid little attention to the scandals surrounding global warming. Nothing is going to stop them from pushing forward on climate legislation -- not the damaging emails showing scientists manipulated statistics, not the 'accidental' deletion of raw data, not the leaked documents exposing that 'climate financing' will go straight to the IMF and World Bank, not the mistakes in the IPCC Climate Report, not evidence that solar cycles and sunspot activity may be a primary factor in climate fluctuations, not proof that the world entered a global cooling period in 1998, not snow in 49 of the 50 states -- because fighting global warming and saving the planet are causes that unite the nations in 'earth worship,' the new world religion and the foundation for one-world government.

U.N. Climate Panel Admits Dutch Sea Level Flaw

Reuters
February 13, 2010

The U.N. panel of climate experts overstated how much of the Netherlands is below sea level, according to a preliminary report on Saturday, admitting yet another flaw after a row last month over Himalayan glacier melt.

A background note by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said a 2007 report wrongly stated that 55 percent of the country was below sea level since the figure included areas above sea level, prone to flooding along rivers.

The United Nations has said errors in the 2007 report of about 3,000 pages do not affect the core conclusions that human activities, led by burning fossil fuels, are warming the globe.

"The sea level statistic was used for background information only, and the updated information remains consistent with the overall conclusions," the IPCC note dated February 12 said.

Skeptics say errors have exposed sloppiness and over-reliance on "grey literature" outside leading scientific journals. The panel's reports are a main guide for governments seeking to work out costly policies to combat global warming.

The 2007 report included the sentence:

"The Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea level rise and river flooding because 55 percent of its territory is below sea level."

"A preliminary analysis suggests that the sentence discussed should end with: 'because 55 percent of the Netherlands is at risk of flooding'," the IPCC note said.

The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, the original source of the incorrect data, said on February 5 that just 26 percent of the country is below sea level and 29 percent susceptible to river flooding.

The IPCC said the error was widespread -- it quoted a report from the Dutch Ministry of Transport saying "about 60 percent" of the country is below sea level, and a European Commission study saying "about half."

The panel expressed regret last month after admitting that the 2007 report exaggerated the pace of melt of the Himalayan glaciers, which feed rivers from China to India in dry seasons, in a sentence that said they could all vanish by 2035.

The 2035 figure did not come from a scientific journal.

EDITORIAL: Osama and Obama on Global Warming

Discredited climate theories make strange bedfellows

The Washington Times
February 2, 2010

In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama said there was "overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change." In his most recent message to the world, Osama bin Laden said that climate change "is not an intellectual luxury but an actual fact." It's nice to see these two leaders can agree on something.

The hitch is that the man-caused catastrophic global warming theory is dead, and it needs to be buried. Evidence had been mounting for years that there were problems with the global warming model; most telling was that the globe refused to warm up. Carbon emissions continued apace, but the world began cooling. This is why true believers abandoned the "global warming" brand name and tried to shift the debate to the more ambiguous label "climate change," which is something the rest of us like to refer to as "weather."

The dam broke with Climategate when hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit revealed that global warming advocates had for years attempted to hide conflicting data and silence their professional critics. British authorities have determined that the university broke freedom-of-information laws by denying information to scientists seeking to check claims that global warming was caused by human activity.

Evidence is emerging that the data had been rigged all along. Russian analysts noted that British temperature calculations excluded data from 40 percent of Russian territory, much of which showed no increase in temperature in the past 50 years. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also cherry-picked data, cutting Canadian data sources from 600 to 35 and relying on only one monitor for all of Canada above the Arctic Circle. This was done even though Canada operates 1,400 weather stations, 100 of which are in the Arctic.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is having its own scandal regarding a finding in its Nobel Peace Prize-winning 2007 report that glaciers in India were rapidly disappearing. It is now revealed that this dramatic claim was based not on years of patient observation and research but anecdotes from a hiking magazine and a student's master's thesis. IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri knew about the erroneous information before December's Copenhagen climate summit but maintained the falsehood. He even denounced a report from India that showed the glaciers were in far less jeopardy as "unsubstantiated research." Last month, Mr. Pachauri published a sexually explicit novel, further diminishing his professional reputation.

Climate scientists have to come to grips with some highly inconvenient truths. World temperatures continue to decline as carbon emissions increase. Chilly Scotland is facing its coldest winter in a century. Arctic sea ice is not vanishing. Polar bears are experiencing a baby boom. Water vapor appears to play as important a role in the climate as carbon emissions. Sunspot activity may be more important than both combined.

Meanwhile, climate change fanatics seek to blame capitalism and productivity for global warming, global cooling, too much snow, not enough snow, hurricanes, tornadoes and even the Haiti earthquake.

The simplistic and increasingly discredited theory of carbon-based, man-caused global warming needs to be discarded, and the scientists who sought to squelch skeptics and artificially inflate their own reputations must be disciplined. Alas, Mr. Obama and Mr. bin Laden need to update their talking points.

I think some people -- the Mother Earth people, the back-to-the-land crowd, those still stuck in the sixties -- just won't be happy until everyone is living in caves and teepees and dancing around fires naked all night long, celebrating being one with the dirt. - johnqpublic1, EDITORIAL: Osama and Obama on Global Warming, February 2, 2010

Blizzard of Lies: Debunking the Warm-Air-Holds-More-Moisture Defense

NewsBusters
February 12, 2010

Update: Rush cites this article to rip global warmist hypocrisy.

On today's show, Rush Limbaugh cited NewsBusters and read from this article to demonstrate the global warmists' hypocrisy:

"When there is less snow, they say it's because of global warming. When there is more snow, they say it's because of global warming. Now you cannot have it both ways."

Rush played several clips of Dem senators in recent years attributing the lack of snow to global warming. Listen to Rush [Editor's Note: I am note a Rush Limbaugh fan, but he is right about the man-made global warming hoax] cite NewsBusters and blast the warmists here.

By now, we're all familiar with the global warmists' attempt to explain away the record-breaking mid-Atlantic blizzards. Take this, for example, from the New York Times [emphasis added]:

"government and academic studies had consistently predicted an increasing frequency of just these kinds of record-setting storms, because warmer air carries more moisture."

So more snow fell from Philly to DC because the temperatures were warmer than normal during the blizzards? That got me wondering: just what were the temperatures in DC on the snow days, and how do they compare to the norm? And guess what?

DC has been hit by three major snowstorms this winter:

• 16.4 inches on December 18–19,
• 18.0 inches on February 5–6, and
• about 12 inches on February 10.

Let's compare DC's actual temps with normal temps for those days.

Bottom line: the temperature was colder than average on every one of the snow days. On average, the snow days were about eight degrees [or 22 percent] colder than normal.

To spin these facts as proof that the blizzards are evidence of global warming because "warm air holds more moisture" is bunk.

Will the MSM note this little analysis?

Sunspots and Climate Change
It’s the Sun, stupid!
IceAgeNow.com - It’s the Sun, stupid!
PhysicalGeography.net - Causes of Climate Change
Encyclopedia of Earth - Causes of climate change
How Strongly Does the Sun Influence the Global Climate?
Sunspots May Cause Climate Fluctuations

49 States Dusted with Snow; Hawaii's the Holdout

The Associated Press
Febuary 12, 2010

Forget red and blue — color America white. There was snow on the ground in 49 states Friday. Hawaii was the holdout... More than two-thirds of the nation's land mass had snow on the ground when the day dawned, and then it snowed ever so slightly in Florida to make it 49 states out of 50 ...

The idea of 50 states with snow is so strange that the federal office that collects weather statistics doesn't keep track of that number and can't say whether it has ever happened. The office can't even say whether 49 out of 50 has ever taken place before.

Snow experts at the Global Snow Lab were combing their records but said it may be days before they find out if there has ever been a 50-for-50 snow day. Their best suspect — Jan. 19, 1977 — had snow in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia, but then Robinson looked for snow in South Carolina and couldn't find any.

As of early Friday morning, 67.1 percent of the U.S. had snow on the ground, with the average depth a healthy 8 inches. Normally, about 40 or 50 percent of the U.S. has snow cover this time of year, Robinson said... This is after a month that saw the most snow cover for any December in North America in the 43 years that records have been kept. And then came January 2010, which ranked No. 8 among all months for North American snow cover, with more than 7.03 million square miles of white.

The all-time record is February 1978, with 7.31 million square miles. There is a chance this February could break that. There is also a chance that this could go down as the week with the most snow cover on record, Robinson said.

Stay tuned. The weather pattern is in a snow rut ...

How Do We "Come Out of Confusion?"

In a Geological Society of America abstract, Dr. Don Easterbrook, Professor of Geology at Western Washington University, presents data showing that the global warming cycle from 1977 to 1998 is now over and we have entered into a new global cooling period that should last for the next three decades. He also suggests that since the IPCC climate models are now so far off from what is actually happening, that their projections for both this decade and century must be considered highly unreliable. - Implications of PDO, NAO, Glacial Fluctuations, and Sun Spot Cycles for Global Climate in the Coming Decades (PDF)

World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop since 2007.
Source: hadCRUT

By Brandon T. Ward
January 4, 2010

Why do so many people find it difficult to come to the realization that there truly is a plan for global government? The Bible talks about a world government materializing before the end of this age, yet many remain oblivious to this fact. Why do so many people find it difficult to see through the lies we are fed concerning “climate change?”

I think there are some people who just refuse to believe any of the documentation on these subjects because they can’t handle it. They don’t want their boat to be rocked if you will. Then there are those who don’t even know it’s going on. They are too wrapped up in TV shows and the like. But there has to be another element to this.

And with all deceivableness of unrighteousness in them that perish; because they received not the love of the truth, that they might be saved. - II Thesselonians 2:10

And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie. - II Thesselonians 2:11

That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness. - II Thesselonians 2:12

Do you have pleasure in unrighteousness? Or do you love God and His truth? If you love the Lord and His Word, He will keep you from believing a lie. Ask Him for knowledge; ask Him for wisdom.

In July, the Pope called for world government by stating that we needed a “true world political authority.” In December, the Pope made the following statement:

"It is important to acknowledge that among the causes of the present ecological crisis is the historical responsibility of the industrialized countries."

The Pope should understand that “climate change” is a lie, it’s not something man has caused; rather, it’s the natural cycles of the sun and its effect on our planet. The Pope continued by saying:

"This means that technologically advanced societies must be prepared to encourage more sober lifestyles, while reducing their energy consumption and improving its efficiency."

This is all being done under the guise of “climate change;” let the world unite as one to stop this disaster, we are told.

Meanwhile, the past few years have brought us stories with titles like these: Beijing, coldest in 40 years, Iowa temps 'a solid 30 degrees below normal, Vermont sets 'all-time record for one snowstorm,' and World copes with Arctic weather. This is nothing man caused, but is the natural cycle of things.

While world leaders were meeting in Copenhagen to discuss “climate change,” a blizzard came down on their heads. It seems every time there is some “climate change” meeting there is always snow. I have noticed this in the United States, where the government has discussed this same topic. Divine joke? Pretty coincidental if you ask me.

While man-made “climate change” has been discovered to be officially a scam with the recent release of emails by climate scientists, people are still clinging to the idea, as we see with the Pope, among others (No the Pope is not the antichrist; we will be covering this topic very soon). Obama’s science officials have defended the false notion of man-made “climate change” even after the release of these emails.

If you are old enough to remember, in 1975 the government pushed the idea of a new “ice age!” That didn't happen either, did it?

With all of the information readily available about the falsification of climate change, the world's governments still band together to try and change something they have no effect on, nor can change. Don't you find that intriguing? The real agenda is for a global government or new world order, if you will. With that said, we should take steps to help reduce pollution, which does affect all of us. That doesn't mean we need world government!

So what did United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton do? Donate 100 billion of your tax dollars to the scam known as “global warming.” Did you get a say in it? Of course not, neither did you when it came to the trillions of dollars corporations and banks received in the recent bailouts. Folks, this is all by design.

So with all of this information so readily available, why is it so difficult for some to see the truth? That not only “climate change” is a lie, but it’s part of the big push for a new world order, global government, or whatever you wish to call it. If you can’t see through these lies, man’s lies, how will you ever stand against Satan and his lies? As we are told, the antichrist (Satan) will do great wonders when he arrives on earth.

And he doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men. - Revelation 13:13

And deceiveth them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast. - Revelation 13:14

Therefore, how can we come out of confusion? By asking the Lord for wisdom and understanding, as Proverbs 2:6 declares:

"For the LORD giveth wisdom: out of his mouth cometh knowledge and understanding.”

Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
Ocean Warming: The New Bluff in Climate Alarmism (PDF)
Snow Can't Cool Global Warming Talk (Video)
FOX News (February 9, 2010) - Amid the blizzard and record snowfall on Capitol Hill, Obama calls for the creation of a new federal office to study global warming.
Pacific islands ‘growing not shrinking’ due to climate change

The Scriptures Must Be Fulfilled, Which Means a One-World Religion and Government Will Be Established

"We shall have world government whether or not you like it, by conquest or consent." - Statement by Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) member James Warburg to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17, 1950 (click here for more quotes)

Despite Research Dispute, the White House Believes 'Climate Change Is Happening'

By Tony Romm, The Hill
November 30, 2009

The White House on Monday made exceptionally clear that it wants nothing to do with the furor over documents that global warming skeptics say prove the phenomenon is not a threat.

Despite the incident, which rocked international headlines last week, climate science is sound, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs stressed this afternoon, and the White House nonetheless believes "climate change is happening."

"I don't think that's anything that is, quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore," he said during Monday's press briefing.

Climate change skeptics have asserted over the past week that the publication of more than 1,000 private e-mails and documents once housed in the University of East Anglia's computer system refutes most modern global warming evidence.

The documents, unearthed by a blogger who hacked into Climate Research Unit's (CRU) private system, have since touched off an international debate over the veracity of those scientists' works.

But the dispute is proving especially troublesome for the Obama administration as it prepares to head to Copenhagen next week for a climate change summit -- a forum the president will attend.

Not only has the White House faced criticism from the left for offering too few concessions ahead of the meet, it is now fielding dissatisfaction from the right for participating in a summit sponsored in part by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- one of the research organs touched by the CRU spat.

"I think there's no real scientific basis for the dispute of this," responded Gibbs to questions about those scientists' credibility.

Nevertheless, congressional Republicans this week hope to ramp up their criticism of both global warming policy and the science that informs it.

Most vocal seems to be Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Inhofe demanded on Friday a hearing into the IPCC's research to determine whether it "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not."

"[T]his thing is serious, you think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with," he told reporters, noting it was "interesting" the e-mails surfaced before the Copenhagen summit.

The Meaning of Climategate

By William Anderson, LewRockwell.com
December 12, 2009

Almost anyone who can read has heard about the "Climategate" scandal in which emails between the scientists that have been at the forefront of promoting the apocalyptic views of "climate change" were hacked and then made public. The snippets I have read confirm my worst fears, as we are seeing exactly what happens when the political process completely hijacks science.

As an Austrian economist, I don't worship at the feet of the "scientific community," in large part because the "scientific community" is able to engage in trickery but defend its actions in the name of "preserving science." However, because of my own experience in publishing papers in refereed journals and knowing the experiences of others, I can see what has been happening over the past decade in "climate science," and I can tell you that while it is not rigged, it is close to being so.

Modern science is all about receiving grants, and the biggest checkbooks are those wielded by governments, and governments expect certain results. For example, the government two decades ago funded research into the alleged "acid rain" problems, and the researchers reached very different conclusions than what the U.S. Government, and especially Congress and the George H.W. Bush administration (and his William Reilly-led EPA), had wanted to see.

Acid rain, apparently, was not going to destroy U.S. forests, lakes, and rivers; and the government was ticked, really ticked. The EPA attempted to destroy the career of one scientist, Edward Krug, who had a paper in the prestigious Science in 1983 that demonstrated that lakes with high acidity were located in watersheds where the soil happened to be acidic. Furthermore, as Krug and other researchers noted, acid lakes existed in many places around the globe hundreds of years before "industrial society" became the norm.
This researched "watershed-based" conclusion (which now is the accepted theory of lake and stream acidification, not "acid rain") was unacceptable to the EPA, and the agency engaged in a shameful campaign against Krug, something I documented in a January, 1992, cover story article in Reason. During my research for the article, one person told me that there would be no such government study for "global warming," indicating that the government would ramrod through the policies it wanted whether or not they actually were necessary.

However politicized "acid rain" might be, it did not fire up the environmentalist and leftist communities like "global warming" (later changed to "climate change").
 
This was not the first time that the environmentalists had tried to claim that capitalism was creating hazards with the weather. In 1975, Newsweek had a cover story in which it claimed that industrial society was pushing the globe into a new Ice Age. However, in a move that mirrored George Orwell's 1984 (in which the people of Oceania are told that they are not at war with Eurasia, but rather East Asia, and that Goldstein had tricked them), in little more than a decade, the movement had turned not from cooling but to warming.
 
All the movement needed was a figurehead, and to the forefront came two men, James Hansen, a NASA scientist, and Al Gore, who had been a U.S. Senator, Vice-President to Bill Clinton, and the loser of a highly-controversial U.S. Presidential election. Gore already had published his apocalyptic tome, Earth in the Balance, before becoming Veep, in which he claimed that industrial society was killing the planet and only a global "Marshall Plan" complete with near-dictatorship by the authorities could "save" us.

Gore had latched onto the "global warming" mantra in the late 1980s and championed Hansen, who told a congressional committee in 1988 that a drought that year was being caused by "unprecedented global warming." (The summer of 1989 was cool and wet, but the True Believers also laid that situation at the feet of "climate change.") However, the people-are-causing "global warming" advocates needed something to jump-start their campaign, and three researchers, including Michael E. Mann of Penn State, came to the rescue with the infamous "hockey stick" study.

Anyone who was familiar with the history of climate is familiar with the Medieval Warm Period of 1,000 years ago, as well as the "Little Ice Age," a period of cooling that lasted from the mid-1500s to the late 1800s. These periods of warming and cooling occurred long before what we know as a modern economy with its supposed "spewing" of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which means that both of these climate patterns could not have been caused by human activity.

Obviously, this was of huge concern to those who claim that people are causing the changes in temperature, so the "scientists" simply made the Medieval Warm Period disappear by tricking the data. In 1999, three scientists, including Mann, published a paper which showed average global temperatures to be relatively steady for thousands of years, but suddenly shooting up in the last few decades, a "hockey stick" approach. Gore and his environmental allies now had the ammunition they needed.

In his Oscar-winning movie, An Inconvenient Truth (which departed from the truth in many places), Gore used the "hockey stick" graph as "proof" that the discussion over global warming needed to end. The results were in, and now what was needed was action, ACTION! The fact that the scientists refused to release the data used in their study, which is a fundamental breach of what is supposed to be scientific method, was shooed away as being something akin to a conspiracy theory by the "deniers," who were labeled Enemies of the People. Scientists who dissented found themselves being bullied (journals refusing to publish their papers) and being denounced by environmentalists, other scientists, government officials and, of course, Gore and Hansen. (Both Gore and Hansen have called for criminal prosecutions of corporate executives of companies that have helped to fund any study that disagrees with what Gore and Hansen declare to be the truth.)

In the Climategate emails, the scientists described their strategy of reviewing each others' papers, shutting down scientists who disagreed, hiding their data, and admitting to fudging the numbers in order to obtain the results they wanted. Furthermore, because many of them were using funds allocated by U.S. Government agencies, what they did was fraud, and many people have gone to prison for much less.

Austrian economists are quite familiar with the drill here. First, the advocates of a position, be it mainstream economics or human-caused climate change, make sure that no dissenting papers can be published. Second, after having successfully shut out the opposition, they claim that the theories of the Austrians or dissenters "fail the market test" because their views don't appear in the mainstream literature. The logic is circular, but it sure appeals to the True Believers.

It is interesting to see the response of Gore, the New York Times, the White House, and others who have been demanding that modern life be shut down for an economic regime that is more to the liking of the global-warming crowd. (The economic and political elites pushing these bogus theories have wonderful futures planned for us; they just have no intention of joining us for meals in unheated buildings, while we eat our gruel. Heated and cooled residences with plenty of good food will be their future.)

So far, the response from The Usual Suspects has been a repeat of the "Wizard of Oz" in which the Wiz bellows, "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" The New York Times recently editorialized:

The theft of thousands of private e-mail messages and files from computer servers at a leading British climate research center has been a political windfall for skeptics who claim the documents prove that mainstream scientists have conspired to overstate the case for human influence on climate change.

They are using the e-mail to blast the Obama administration's climate policies. And they clearly hope that the e-mail will undermine negotiations for a new climate change treaty that begin in Copenhagen this week.

No one should be misled by all the noise. The e-mail messages represent years' worth of exchanges among prominent American and British climatologists. Some are mean-spirited, others intemperate. But they don't change the underlying scientific facts about climate change.

Funny, when the Times runs stories using material that has been stolen, they never refer to it as "stolen." Indeed, as one who has published many academic papers (and I always make my data available for inspection), I can smell a fix as well as the next person.
 
Of course, with the Times, it only gets better. The public editor who defended the newspaper's abysmal and utterly dishonest coverage in the infamous Duke Lacrosse Non-Rape Case, had this to say about the recent events:

As for not posting the e-mail, Revkin said he should have used better language in his blog, Dot Earth, to explain the decision, which was driven by advice from a Times attorney. The lawyer, George Freeman, told me that there is a large legal distinction between government documents like the Pentagon Papers, which the Times published over the objections of the Nixon administration, and e-mail between private individuals, even if they may receive some government money for their work. He said the Constitution protects the publication of leaked government information, as long as it is newsworthy and the media did not obtain it illegally. But the purloined e-mail, he said, was covered by copyright law in the United States and Britain.

This is a howler, a real howler. This is the same New York Times that gleefully published illegal leaks from federal prosecutors in the Michael Milken and Martha Stewart cases, which meant that the newspaper was aiding and abetting the commission of real felonies. The Times is a newspaper that does what it wants from publishing illegal (and untrue) material to seizing property by eminent domain so the paper could build a brand new headquarters in Manhattan. The idea that the paper suddenly decided to be "law-abiding" by not breaking "copyright law" is a joke, a real joke. Please do not tell me that the 800-pound gorilla is afraid of a few mice!

As governments are meeting in Denmark for yet another "climate change" summit, I am reminded that what really is happening is that the economic and political elites have decided they have had enough of the rabble and are going to put us in our places. That their actions are violent and fraudulent and have been duly exposed clearly is not a hindrance to them.
 
Keep in mind that I am not presenting my own "hockey stick" view of global temperatures. Indeed, for the last century or so, global temperatures have risen, but one must remember that the period preceding them was very cold, and cold weather means crop failures and starvation. Furthermore, the issue is not whether we have seen changes in temperatures around the world, but whether or not the human issuance of a gas that makes up approximately 0.4 of one percent of the atmosphere is the cause.

However, instead of wanting to know the truth, the elites have decided what we are supposed to believe as the truth. In my view, the release of these emails is as important in exposing the dishonesty of the "climate change" crowd as the Pentagon Papers were in exposing the dishonesty of the U.S. Government as it was ravaging Vietnam. 

William L. Anderson, Ph.D. [send him mail], teaches economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, and is an adjunct scholar of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He also is a consultant with American Economic Services. Visit his blog.

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given. 

Climate Smokescreen At the New York Times

By K. Daniel Glover, Accuracy In Media
November 25, 2009

When holier-than-thou New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin decided not to publish e-mails that expose climate scientists as frauds because they were obtained illegally, Times watchers (including this one) rightly cried “Hypocrisy!”

One recent and one distant case of the newspaper rejecting Revkin’s new standard of journalistic ethics leapt to mind. In December 2005, the Times ran a front-page expose on the Bush administration’s covert wiretapping program against presumed terrorists even after being warned that it could jeopardize national security. And in 1971, the Times made history by publishing the Pentagon Papers about U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

But a far better example of the paper’s hypocrisy has escaped notice — until now. In May 1994, the Times published a series of stories about the tobacco industry that were based on the pre-Internet equivalent of leaked e-mails. The paper’s coverage later led to a book by reporter Philip J. Hilts titled Smokescreen: The Truth Behind The Tobacco Industry Cover-up.

The circumstances surrounding the tobacco industry then and the climate science community now are remarkably similar, yet the Times reached exact opposite conclusions about how to cover the news. This time Revkin and the paper, as well as much of the mainstream media, have created a smokescreen to protect fraudulent scientists whose agenda they support.

Tobacco Under Fire

Democrats began targeting the tobacco industry after Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., led the charge as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health and the Environment.

Waxman’s probe led to a dramatic April 14, 1994 hearing where top executives from tobacco companies swore under oath that nicotine is not addictive. At about the same time, a whistleblower contacted Hilts and handed over internal memorandums that proved the Brown & Williamson tobacco company had known the health dangers of tobacco for decades.

Like “hide the decline” from the hacked global warming e-mails, the Brown & Williamson documents had a memorable money quote:

“Moreover, nicotine is addictive… We are, then, in the business of selling nicotine, an addictive drug.”

Hilts described the revelations in an interview with PBS for its “Smoke In The Eye” special:

Once we got these papers in hand, it became very clear that they knew a lot very early on, that they were deliberately hiding things, and that they were deliberately trying to keep them out of court and so on — at the same time saying these things were not true, saying cigarettes are not addictive, and yet they have their own studies which show how addictive it is and exactly how the addiction works and so on… They did all kinds of studies on the hazards of cigarettes and inhalation of tobacco and so on and found a lot of problems. Well, we never heard about this, but they knew it all early on.

Brown & Williamson, along with the rest of the tobacco industry, understandably wanted to quash publicity of the documents. The company convinced a judge in tobacco-friendly Kentucky to impose an injunction against their release because Merrill Williams, a temporary paralegal assigned to Brown & Williamson, allegedly stole them.

The company felt compelled to fight release of the documents.

“They’ve been hiding this for years,” Hilts told PBS. “It would make them lose case after case in court.”

But the Times, motivated by a commitment to journalistic integrity and the First Amendment, defied the injunction and published its stories.

“Oddly enough there were virtually no legal concerns at the Times,” Hilts said, adding that “all the way along, the lawyers … were very supportive. They really wanted to see the stories in the paper.”

Hilts criticized ABC for not reporting on the documents even though the network had them before he did.

“Lawyers for the entertainment business are more skittish, are more difficult,” he told PBS, “and in fact they get involved in the news more, probably more than they should… I don’t think, in newspapers, reporters would put up with that.”

Hot Global Warming E-mails
 
Print reporters without links to the entertainment industry may well be more committed to battling media lawyers in order to break major news, but they clearly are not immune to self-censorship. Unlike Hilts, Revkin chose not to post the global warming e-mails.
His defense:

“The documents appear to have been acquired illegally and contain all manner of private information and statements that were never intended for the public eye.”

If Hilts and other journalists had neglected their duty like Revkin and company are in covering “ClimateGate,” the tobacco industry never would have been forced to settle with state prosecutors in 1998 and might not have been subjected to federal regulation this year.

Michael Moore, the former Mississippi attorney general who led the legal fight against the tobacco industry in the 1990s, called the Brown & Williamson papers “probably still the most damming documents ever produced against the industry.” Hilts said they “probably are the single-most important pieces of paper in the history of tobacco versus public health.”

The global warming e-mails revealed last week are just as significant. “This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” climate expert Patrick Michaels said. Even British writer and environmental activist George Monbiot acknowledged that the e-mails are a “major blow” and urged Phil Jones, the head of the climate research unit that was hacked, to resign. 

The timing of the climate e-mail hacking also is reminiscent of the tobacco timeline in 1994 — and thus equally newsworthy. Just as whistleblowers started pushing documents into the media while the Food and Drug Administration and Congress weighed tobacco regulation, the global warming e-mails were posted online days before world leaders gather in Copenhagen next month to ponder draconian rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions.

And as with the tobacco documents, the global warming e-mails focus on scientific research.

“These behind-the-scenes discussions among leading global-warming exponents are remarkable both in their candor and in their sheer contempt for scientific objectivity,” Rochester Institute of Technology professor Ivan Kenneally wrote in The New Atlantis.

“There can be little doubt after even a casual perusal that the scientific case for global warming and the policy that springs from it are based upon a volatile combination of political ideology, unapologetic mendacity and simmering contempt for even the best-intentioned disagreement.”

It’s the News Judgment, Stupid
 
The hacking angle to ClimateGate is a legitimate one to pursue, but it is not the most important angle. The appropriate response is for journalists at The New York Times and elsewhere to behave as they did after Hilts exposed the stolen tobacco documents in 1994.

“We had more papers after that,” Hilts said. “We went around and found more stuff. More people started coming out of the woodwork and so on. So it was a pivotal moment.”

Fourteen years ago, the Times scolded CBS for self-censorship when it decided to spike an interview with tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand, who later became the central character in the 1999 movie “The Insider.” The network later reversed course and aired the interview.

Hopefully Andrew Revkin and the Times will redeem themselves and do likewise by giving the global warming e-mails the scrutiny they deserve.

(Author’s note: I covered the 1994 tobacco debate for Congressional Quarterly and attended the game-changing hearings with Hilts. Thanks to blogger James Joyner for jogging my memory.)

K. Daniel Glover is the online communications strategist for Accuracy In Media. He has worked as an editor, writer and new media specialist in the Washington area since 1991, spending most of that time at National Journal and Congressional Quarterly.

Who’s to Blame for Climategate?

By Gordon Rayner, Telegraph
November 27, 2009

The drab, drum-shaped home of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit is an anonymous little outpost, blending seamlessly with its chunky concrete neighbours on a windswept campus just outside Norwich. To the uninitiated, it has the look of a Seventies bus station waiting for the council to pull it down.

Unlikely as it may seem, however, this little corner of East Anglia is now ground zero in a controversy which just might influence the entire future of our planet.

A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal emails written by scientists working at the CRU were obtained by a hacker and posted on the internet, some of which appeared to show that researchers had deliberately faked evidence of global warming by manipulating statistics.
At first, the fallout was restricted to a row between climate change experts, played out in scientific journals and specialist internet blogs, but in the past few days, as the ripples have spread around the globe, “Climategate” has become a white hot political issue which has been seized upon by global warming sceptics and now threatens to overshadow next month’s crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen...

Phil Jones, the 57-year-old director of the CRU, is the man who has suddenly found himself the number one target of climate change conspiracy theorists the world over after he sent the most damaging of all the emails exposed by the anonymous hacker.

In one message, dated November 1999, he wrote:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline.”

Gotcha! say the global warming sceptics who have argued for years that average temperatures on Earth are, in reality, either stable or going down. Professor Jones defended himself by claiming the word “trick” was used out of context and simply referred to a legitimate method of handling data. But there was more.

An email sent by one of Prof Jones’s colleagues said:

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

Prof Jones, whose department has for years refused to release its raw data on temperatures, wrote another email in which he said:

Sceptics “have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send it to anyone.”

By chance, he now admits he has “accidentally” deleted some of the raw data.

Another message said the CRU’s method of collating data “renders the station counts totally meaningless… so, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!”
Prof Jones, who at first refused to confirm even that the emails were genuine, finally issued a statement on Wednesday, in which he said:

“My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well.”

On that point, at least, no one is likely to argue with him.

Although Prof Jones is not what you could call a household name (though he soon might be) he is, without doubt, one of the world’s most influential proponents of the theory of man-made global warming.

The CRU has the largest archive of global temperature data in the world, and its research formed the basis of the United Nations’ key document on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of 2007.

But Prof Jones has been embroiled in controversy before. Three years ago, a report commissioned by the US House of Representatives energy and commerce committee claimed that a clique of just 43 scientists, including Prof Jones and one of his CRU colleagues, was stifling open debate on climate change.

Little wonder, then, that climate change deniers are hailing the emails as final proof that global warming is nothing more than a hoax which is being covered up by governments who have themselves been duped.

Suddenly, Phil Jones is the name on the lips of every Right-wing commentator in the US, some of whom have warned that President Obama is being tricked into making the most expensive mistake in history by backing emission caps and carbon trading legislation that will cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has described the emails as a “game-changer” for Obama cap and trade bills. Fox’s climate change commentator, John Lott, suggested that Prof Jones was guilty of an “unprecedented co-ordinated campaign to hide scientific information.” Meanwhile Matt Drudge, arguably the most influential reporter on the internet and the man who broke the story of President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, has helped direct millions of hits to websites reporting on the email scandal by featuring it prominently on his Drudge Report website...

Prof Jones is in little doubt that the timing of the leak – two weeks before the start of the Copenhagen conference – was a “concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change” at the most sensitive possible time. Next month’s Copenhagen conference has been billed as the last chance for world leaders to prevent an irreversible change to the planet’s climate. Unless they can reach a binding agreement on reducing global emissions, mankind could face a bleak future, according to the majority of the scientific community.

The hacker who exposed the emails no doubt hopes Climategate will tip the scales decisively against an agreement – an outcome which is likely to be supported by a minority of hardliners in the US, such as Bryan Zumwalt, legislative counsel for Republican senator David Vitter, who said earlier this week that:

The CRU emails were evidence of what “could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history” and suggested that “nearly all of the international data and models supporting the theory of global warming would have been influenced by data corruption and fraud.”

However Bob Ward, a climate change expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, believes world leaders will pay little attention to the scandal surrounding the CRU, arguing that politics, not science, will decide the fate of the Copenhagen summit.

“The politicians won’t be swayed by this,” he said. “It’s basic physics that the world is being warmed by greenhouse gases, and politicians can see through the sceptics’ arguments. If Copenhagen fails to produce an agreement, it won’t be because of these emails. And in the US, President Obama’s cap and trade bills will be decided by 12 or 13 Democratic senators who represent states with large coal and oil reserves.”

Mr Ward does not believe the emails reveal any evidence of impropriety, but supported Lord Lawson’s calls for an independent investigation so the matter can be cleared up. He said:

“I don’t believe there is any evidence here of fraud, but it’s regrettable that this has happened and I regret the fact that some members of the research community have dismissed out of hand those who have tried to make a counter-argument.”

Whether or not Climategate influences the outcome of the Copenhagen summit, it seems that its long-term legacy will be to make the ongoing war of words between “warmists” and “coolists” more poisonous than ever.

Related:

• United Nations to Probe Climate E-Mail Leak
• UN says climate finale may have happy ending
• Copenhagen: 'long way to go' to convince sceptics
• Ambitious carbon pricing won't hurt recovery, says IMF
• U.N. summit in Copenhagen to pave way for global government
• Obama to Use EPA to Declare CO2 a Dangerous Pollutant
• Historic EPA Finding: Greenhouse Gases Harm Humans
• Climate treaty endangers U.S.
• Climategate: Obama’s rule by EPA decree is a coup d’etat against Congress, made in Britain
• UK’s richest man could make more than £1bn from carbon trading scheme

United Nations' Climate Change Shakedown

Science or Nonscience?

By Clifford F. Thies, Mises Daily
December 5, 2009

Hacked or possibly leaked emails appear to indicate that a lot of what passes for climate-change science is propaganda. Data appears to have been filtered, altered or falsified in order to deny the obvious:

The earth is not continuing to warm up in accordance with climate change models; global temperature has been fluctuating for hundreds of thousands of years due to natural variation; and the earth is no warmer nowadays than it has been at several prior times in history.

The black mark earned by alarmists during the 1970s, for predicting continued global cooling, may be replicated for global-warming alarmists. The real tragedy, however, may be that -- one day -- scientists will cry wolf to a public that has learned to ignore them.

By now, anybody who is serious about the possibility of global warming knows that the "hockey-stick" theory promulgated by the UN a few years ago is bunk.

This theory held that there was no meaningful variation in global temperature during the past several thousand years until recently, when capitalism began to harness industrial power. That this theory was advanced by a scientist who was a socialist might raise a question about its validity.

"Science" is not, as some people imagine, memorizing a list of facts (such as the names of the planets). Nor is the progress of science determined by laboratory experiments. This is because, at the edge of our knowledge, accepted laboratory experiments don't exist and, in certain fields, laboratory experiments might not even be possible. Rather, the progress of science is determined by free inquiry, open discussion, and transparency among those engaged in a discipline.

There should be no pretense that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an unbiased organization. It was formed by the United Nations specifically to study "the risk of human-induced climate change." The guilty party is, thus, pre-identified and all that remains is to collect the evidence.

Periodic reports of the IPCC proclaimed, ever more authoritatively, that the trend of global warming that was occurring at the time was due to human activity.

The second report, in 1996, said "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on climate change."

The third, in 2001, presented "new and stronger evidence." This report included the hockey stick and the whacky idea that the trend of rising global temperature over the prior three centuries (or, since the so-called "Little Ice Age") was due to human activity.

The fourth, in 2007, which dropped the most embarrassing claims, nevertheless claimed that "most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations."

This all seemed plausible at the time because of the warming trend. But, recently, global temperatures have been moderating and, besides, as the emails show, scientists were altering the evidence all the while.

Now You See It

Below I have a chart with the history of global temperature as it was known at the time of the 2001 report. As the chart makes clear, global temperature began to recover from the Little Ice Age about three hundred years ago. Juxtaposed against the rising trend are several cycles of 30 to 40 years length, including the one I show in red, which caused a lot of alarmists during the 1970s to say that industrial activity was causing global cooling.

Now You Don't

Publishing the actual history of global temperature would question the hypothesis that human activity was causing it to rise. Or, to quote an email of one of the supposedly esteemed scientists promoting the UN climate change agenda, it would provide "fodder" for the "skeptics." So, here is the chart that they published.

When, following its publication by the UN, the hockey-stick theory was reviewed by the National Academy of Science, it was found to be "not inconsistent" with the data available at the time. This is a fancy way of saying that no more than the usual amount of subjective interpretation was involved. A scientist who is a socialist will of course tend to stop investigating when he has "proved" that capitalism, by enabling a growing population to live at increasingly higher standards of living, is actually a bad thing. Contrariwise, a scientist who is a capitalist will have the opposite tendency.

In spite of these prejudices, there is hope for progress in science because, as long as we have free inquiry, the data will eventually have its turn to speak. This kind of give-and-take goes on all the time in scientific disciplines. But hiding evidence, as we now know was being done, is academic fraud. It should cause the National Academy of Sciences to reconsider its exoneration of the errors in the hockey-stick theory.

So What Do the Data Say?

A great deal of data has been gathered since the UN began its "bum rush" on free enterprise. First, we have much more evidence of natural variation from the past, based on a wide variety of proxies for temperature. During the past few thousand years, there were two periods during which global temperature was as high or higher than it now is.

Correlating warm and cool periods with what we know about history, warmer times have been times of human flourishing, expanding economic activity, scientific progress, and cultural expression. And cooler times have been times of starvation, disease, and the collapse of civilization. If we could control global temperature, our focus would be more on avoiding global cooling than it would be on avoiding global warming.

Second, we know that, at least thus far, we really don't know much about the causes of climate change. The computer models that incorporate the greenhouse-gas theory are being massively contradicted by current readings. That is, CO2 is continuing to build up in the atmosphere, and yet global temperature is moderating rather than continuing to rise.

It might be, as the historical evidence can be interpreted as suggesting, that variation of CO2 in the atmosphere is an effect rather than a cause of global temperature, since CO2 levels appear to lag variation in global temperature.

The issue is certainly deserving of continuing study.

Third, we know that the scaremongers associated with the IPCC cannot be trusted. As important as the planet is, we need a community of climatologists that is not precommitted to a theory or -- worse yet -- to a policy prescription. The UN agenda is obviously driven by the many despotic nations of the world that seek to use climate change to shake down the wealthy nations of the world, in concert with an intellectual elite that favors socialism over capitalism and with special-interest groups seeking massive government subsidies. The Kyoto Treaty, which imposes limits only on certain nations (the wealthier ones), could never work, since it will only shift industrial activity to nations without limits (the poorer ones), with no net reduction in carbon emissions.

Finally, we know that, with regard to all scarce resources, a market approach is to be preferred to a socialist approach, especially a one-world-government socialist approach.

A market approach to environmental policy would not only achieve whatever goals are set efficiently, given the technologies currently available; it will induce the discovery of new technologies, making what seems costly and maybe even impossible today achievable with increasingly higher standards of living tomorrow.

Unlike socialism, capitalism does not rely on fear. Capitalism relies on belief, belief in the inexhaustible creativity of free persons.

Clifford F. Thies is the Eldon R. Lindsay Chair of Free Enterprise at Shenandoah University in Winchester, VA. Send him mail. See Clifford F. Thies's article archives.

Return to The Lamb Slain Home Page

You Want to Talk About a Carbon Footprint?

The global warming/climate change mythology is the greatest hoax the private International Monetary/Banking Cartel has ever tried to pull off: With the passage of the Copenhagen Climate Treaty provisions, world governance and unlimited taxes will fall into the hands of private, monopoly capitalists while many socialists, communists, and environmentalists ignorantly support this international takeover, falsely thinking that the treaty’s many laws, regulations, and directives are socialistic, and will thus help improve our badly deteriorating environment... The “Redemption for sale” provisions of all carbon emission’s regulations, directives and laws will channel hundreds of billions – if not trillions – of American dollars, European Euros, and scores of other currencies to our “friends” in the International Banking Cartel, by way of their so-called World Bank, with little to none being spent on the crying needs of our dying environment. - J. Speer-Williams, Globalist Carbon Tax Scheme: Redemption for Sale, Infowars.com, December 12, 2009

Carbon Capitalists Warming to Climate Market Using Derivatives

Estimates of the potential size of the U.S. cap-and-trade market range from $300 billion to $2 trillion.

By Lisa Kassenaar, Bloomberg
December 4, 2009

Across Uganda, thousands of women warm supper over new, $8 orange-painted stoves. The clay-and- metal pots burn about two-thirds the charcoal of the open-fire cooking typical of East Africa, where forests are being chopped down in the struggle to feed the region’s 125 million people.

Four thousand miles away, at the Charles Hurst Land Rover dealership in southwest London, a Range Rover Vogue sells for 90,000 pounds ($151,000). A blue windshield sticker proclaims that the gasoline-powered truck’s first 45,000 miles (72,421 kilometers) will be carbon neutral.

That’s because Land Rover, official purveyor of 4x4s to Queen Elizabeth II, is helping Ugandans cut their greenhouse gas emissions with those new stoves.

These two worlds came together in the offices of Blythe Masters at JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Masters, 40, oversees the New York bank’s environmental businesses as the firm’s global head of commodities. JPMorgan brokered a deal in 2007 for Land Rover to buy carbon credits from ClimateCare, an Oxford, England-based group that develops energy-efficiency projects around the world. Land Rover, now owned by Mumbai-based Tata Motors Ltd., is using the credits to offset some of the CO2 emissions produced by its vehicles.

For Wall Street, these kinds of voluntary carbon deals are just a dress rehearsal for the day when the U.S. develops a mandatory trading program for greenhouse gas emissions. JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs Group Inc., and Morgan Stanley [a spinoff of JPMorgan] will be watching closely as 192 nations gather in Copenhagen next week to try to forge a new climate-change treaty that would, for the first time, include the U.S. and China.

U.S. Cap and Trade

Those two economies are the biggest emitters of CO2, the most ubiquitous of the gases found to cause global warming. The Kyoto Protocol, whose emissions targets will expire in 2012, spawned a carbon-trading system in Europe that the banks hope will be replicated in the U.S.

The U.S. Senate is debating a clean-energy bill that would introduce cap and trade for U.S. emissions. A similar bill passed the House of Representatives in June. The plan would transform U.S. industry by forcing the biggest companies -- such as utilities, oil and gas drillers and cement makers -- to calculate the amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they emit and then pay for them.

Estimates of the potential size of the U.S. cap-and-trade market range from $300 billion to $2 trillion.

Banks Moving In

Banks intend to become the intermediaries in this fledgling market. Although U.S. carbon legislation may not pass for a year or more, Wall Street has already spent hundreds of millions of dollars hiring lobbyists and making deals with companies that can supply them with “carbon offsets” to sell to clients.

JPMorgan, for instance, purchased ClimateCare in early 2008 for an undisclosed sum. This month, it paid $210 million for Eco-Securities Group Plc, the biggest developer of projects used to generate credits offsetting government-regulated carbon emissions. Financial institutions have also been investing in alternative energy, such as wind and solar power, and lending to clean-technology entrepreneurs.

The banks are preparing to do with carbon what they’ve done before: design and market derivatives contracts that will help client companies hedge their price risk over the long term. They’re also ready to sell carbon-related financial products to outside investors.

Masters says banks must be allowed to lead the way if a mandatory carbon-trading system is going to help save the planet at the lowest possible cost. And derivatives related to carbon must be part of the mix, she says. Derivatives are securities whose value is derived from the value of an underlying commodity -- in this case, CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

‘Heavy Involvement’

“This requires a massive redirection of capital,” Masters says. “You can’t have a successful climate policy without the heavy, heavy involvement of financial institutions.”

As a young London banker in the early 1990s, Masters was part of JPMorgan’s team developing ideas for transferring risk to third parties. She went on to manage credit risk for JPMorgan’s investment bank.

Among the credit derivatives that grew from the bank’s early efforts was the credit-default swap. A CDS is a contract that functions like insurance by protecting debt holders against default. In 2008, after U.S. home prices plunged, the cost of protection against subprime-mortgage bond defaults jumped. Insurer American International Group Inc., which had sold billions in CDSs, was forced into government ownership, roiling markets and helping trigger the worst global recession since the 1930s.

Lawmakers Leery

Now, that story -- and the entire role the banks played in the credit crisis -- has become central to the U.S. carbon debate. Washington lawmakers are leery of handing Wall Street anything new to trade because the bitter taste of the credit debacle lingers. And their focus is on derivatives. Along with CDSs, the most-notorious derivatives are the collateralized-debt obligations they often insured. CDOs are bundles of subprime mortgages and other debt that were sliced into tranches and sold to investors.

“People are going to be cutting up carbon futures, and we’ll be in trouble,” says Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington state. “You can’t stay ahead of the next tool they’re going to create.”

Cantwell, 51, proposed in November that U.S. state governments be given the right to ban unregulated financial products.

“The derivatives market has done so much damage to our economy and is nothing more than a very-high-stakes casino -- except that casinos have to abide by regulations,” she wrote in a press release.

Jet Fuel, Wheat

In carbon markets, many of the derivatives would be futures, options and swaps that would allow a company to lock in a price for carbon like it would for any other commodity related to its business, Masters says. Such derivatives are negotiated every day by airlines trying to guarantee future prices for jet fuel and farmers setting a future price for their wheat crop. A large, liquid market in carbon credits would serve to keep their price low, JPMorgan says.

“The reason why this is important is not because it’s going to create a new forum for us to buy and sell; it’s because the scale of what’s being contemplated here is absolutely enormous,” Masters says. “It’s going to affect your kids and my kids. The worst thing would be to introduce legislation that doesn’t achieve the environmental goal; that would be a crime of epic proportions.”

Not Convinced

Michelle Chan, a senior policy analyst in San Francisco for Friends of the Earth, isn’t convinced.

“Should we really create a new $2 trillion market when we haven’t yet finished the job of revamping and testing new financial regulation?” she asks. Chan says that, given their recent history, the banks’ ability to turn climate change into a new commodities market should be curbed.

“What we have just been woken up to in the credit crisis -- to a jarring and shocking degree -- is what happens in the real world,” she says.

Even George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator, says money managers would find ways to manipulate cap-and-trade markets.

“The system can be gamed,” Soros, 79, remarked at a London School of Economics seminar in July. “That’s why financial types like me like it -- because there are financial opportunities.”

Masters says U.S. carbon markets should be transparent and regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Standardized derivatives contracts -- securities that can be bought and sold by anyone -- should be traded on exchanges or centrally cleared, she says. The British-born Masters, who has an economics degree from Cambridge University, took over JPMorgan’s commodities business in 2007.

Allowances, Offsets

In a U.S. cap-and-trade market, the government would allot tradable pollution permits, called allowances, to emitters of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. The market would also likely include offsets -- credits generated by companies such as Eco-Securities that would have to demonstrate to U.S. agencies running the program that the offsets mitigate carbon pollution.

Point Carbon, an Oslo-based firm that analyzes environmental markets, estimates that by 2020 the U.S. carbon market could surge to more than $300 billion. That’s based on an assumption that the allowances, each representing a ton of carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere, would trade for $15. Bart Chilton, a commissioner of the CFTC, which would likely be one of the regulators of the carbon market, says it could grow as large as $2 trillion.

Goldman Building

As they wait for a U.S. cap-and-trade system to be introduced, the big banks are busy building, not trading. Goldman Sachs, for example, has fewer than 10 traders dedicated to carbon around the world.

“Carbon right now is not about sitting in front of a screen and clicking,” says Gerrit Nicholas, Goldman’s head of North American environmental commodities. “It’s all about running around talking to clients about what they can expect, how big it can be and what their risk is.”

Abyd Karmali, who heads global carbon emissions at Bank of America Merrill Lynch in London, says companies, banks and investors are all watching Congress.

“A lot of people are focused on Copenhagen, but what happens in Washington on federal cap and trade is, arguably, more important,” says Karmali, who’s president of the Carbon Markets and Investors Association, an international trade group. “This market is still in its very early stages. U.S. cap and trade would make an order of magnitude of difference.”

‘Ruinous Course’

Although U.S. President Barack Obama and his economic team support cap and trade, Washington politics could defeat it. The House bill passed in June by just seven votes, and senators on both sides of the aisle worry that imposing pollution caps on industry will result in higher energy bills for consumers at a time when U.S. unemployment tops 10 percent. Karl Rove, former president George W. Bush’s deputy chief of staff, wrote in Newsweek magazine in November that cap and trade “would put America on a ruinous course.”

Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who in 2006 called Nobel Prize winner and former Vice President Al Gore “full of crap” on global warming, boycotted committee meetings on the Senate bill in November.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said on Nov. 18 that climate-change legislation may not be discussed until the spring, prompting speculation among others in the Senate that the bill won’t be passed before Congressional elections in 2010. The Obama administration is also driving to overhaul U.S. health care and develop proposals to push down unemployment.

House, Senate Bills

U.S. cap and trade, as currently configured in both the House and Senate bills, would mean the government sets an upper limit on emissions of seven greenhouse gases, including CO2, methane and nitrous oxide, for thousands of power plants, refineries and factories. Over time, the caps would fall, pushing emitters to adopt clean-air technology.

The government would give some pollution allowances to companies free to help them meet their caps during the first years of the program. Emitters who invest in cutting their pollution would have allowances to sell; those that don’t would have to buy.

The allowances -- similar to those that sold in Europe in mid-November for 13.5 euros ($20) -- would be tradable on an exchange or, if Congress allows it, between parties in an over-the-counter market. The credits garnered through offset projects such as the stoves in Uganda are distinct from allowances in that they may be generated on the other side of the world.

Accounting for Carbon

U.S. companies would account for carbon in long-term strategic plans, bankers say. For instance, utilities such as American Electric Power Co., which produces power from coal, would hedge the price of carbon over periods as long as a decade or more. Columbus, Ohio-based AEP is the biggest U.S. greenhouse gas emitter in the Standard & Poor’s 500, according to the London-based Carbon Disclosure Project, which collects such data. Companies like AEP would retain financial institutions to come up with customized derivatives contracts to help them manage their risk.

Derivatives contracts designed for a particular company or transaction, known as over-the-counter derivatives, are a hot-button issue in the larger debate over how the U.S. banking system should be regulated. Most CDSs and CDOs are OTC derivatives. They are created and traded privately -- not on any exchange -- and can be illiquid and opaque, says Andy Stevenson, a financial analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group that supports the Senate legislation. The House cap-and-trade bill bans OTC derivatives, requiring that all carbon trading be done on exchanges.

OTC Derivatives

The bankers say such a ban would be a mistake. OTC derivatives are a $600 trillion market, much of which consists of interest-rate swaps designed to hedge risks for individual companies.

“It’s a concern of ours if they limit the market,” says Pat Hemlepp, a spokesman for AEP. “It reduces the options when it comes to cap and trade, and we have told people that on the Hill. We do feel it’s best to have banks and other parties able to participate.”

The banks and companies may get their way on carbon derivatives in separate legislation now being worked out in Congress. In October, the House Financial Services Committee, headed by Representative Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts, approved a bill that would require collateral for all derivatives trading between financial institutions. And broker-dealers such as JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs would be forced to clear most derivatives contracts on regulated exchanges or through so-called swap-execution facilities. However, the new rules would not apply to end-users -- companies such as AEP that use derivatives to hedge operational risks.

Price Collar

The Senate environment bill, dubbed Kerry-Boxer for Senators John Kerry of Massachusetts and Barbara Boxer of California, the two Democrats who introduced it, contains little detail on how the cap-and-trade market would work. It sets a price floor of $11 per ton on carbon. The bill also creates a strategic reserve of allowances that the government could use to flood the market if the price of carbon shoots up.

“It will be the best-regulated market in the country,” Stevenson says. “The effort is to make all of the trading known to the regulator. That wasn’t the case in the mortgage market.”

Wall Street sees profits at every stage of the carbon-trading process. Banks would make money by helping clients manage their carbon risk, by trading carbon for their own accounts and by making loans to companies that invest to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Chicago Climate Exchange

A clear U.S. price on carbon, determined in a large market, would help drive billions of dollars into investments to clean the air, says Richard Sandor, founder and chairman of the Chicago Climate Exchange and the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange. He is also the principal architect of the interest-rate futures market.

“What’s important is the price signal,” Sandor says. “It will stimulate inventive activity and cause behavior to change.”

The Chicago Climate Exchange, the biggest U.S. voluntary greenhouse-gas-emissions trading system, trades 180,000 tons of carbon a day, up from 40,000 tons in 2006.

Over time, carbon, like other commodities, needs markets linked around the world, Goldman’s Nicholas says.

“If you believe the science and that something needs to be done about this, the market probably needs to be big,” he says. “Carbon could become an important commodity. I’m not saying it will be bigger than others, but it will be another important business for us.”

Polluters Only

Critics, including Senator Cantwell, espouse a smaller, less complex market in which pollution permits would be publicly exchanged only among fossil-fuel producers. Such a system may block progress on the environmental goals, says JPMorgan’s Masters.

“We say, ‘Let’s incentivize people to have the lowest-cost opportunities to avoid carbon emissions,’” she says.

Masters has been dealing with complex securities since she did a summer internship on JPMorgan’s London derivatives desk while she was at Cambridge. She joined the desk full time soon after graduating in 1991. The derivatives group’s task was to find ways to spread the risk of JPMorgan’s loans, partly to reduce the amount of capital it was required to hold in reserve against them.

Offloading Risk

In 1994, Exxon Corp. needed a credit line after it was threatened with a $5 billion fine for spilling 10.8 million gallons (40.9 million liters) of oil into the ocean off Alaska in 1989. Masters asked the London-based European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to take on the Exxon risk in exchange for an annual fee paid by JPMorgan, according to “Fool’s Gold,” a book by Gillian Tett (Free Press, 2009) that chronicles the history of credit derivatives at JPMorgan. The loan would remain on JPMorgan’s books and be insured by the EBRD, an international bank owned by 61 countries that supports development projects in Central Europe.

The bankers called the contract a credit-default swap.

Masters left the credit derivatives unit in 2001 to do other jobs at the bank. From 2004 to 2007, she served as chief financial officer of the investment bank. Since she took over the commodities division in 2007, its staff has almost doubled to 400 employees. The firm added Bear Energy to the division when it acquired Bear Stearns Cos. in the March 2008 heat of the credit crisis.

In December 2008, Masters led the purchase of UBS AG’s agriculture business and Canadian commodities operations. She now sits in a corner office in Bear’s former Madison Avenue tower. Outside her glass door are rows of traders making markets in metals and oil futures.

Subprime Carbon

Friends of the Earth’s Chan is working hard to prevent the banks from adding carbon to their repertoire. She titled a March FOE report “Subprime Carbon?” In testimony on Capitol Hill, she warned:

“Wall Street won’t just be brokering in plain carbon derivatives -- they’ll get creative.”

Sitting in Cafe Madeleine, a small sandwich shop on a hilly stretch of California Street in San Francisco, Chan, 37, talks over coffee about her campaign. She’s brought her own ceramic mug from her crammed office across the street.

Chan started at FOE -- the biggest network of environmental groups in the world, with offices in 77 countries -- on a six- month fellowship after she graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1994. Her first job was to pin responsibility for what FOE regarded as environmentally damaging projects on the banks that loaned the enterprises money.

Three Gorges Dam

In 1997, Chan uncovered and helped publicize loans to China’s Three Gorges Dam by banks including Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. Since then, Wall Street banks have sought Friends of the Earth’s help in burnishing their environmental image.

In 2005, Chan worked with Goldman Sachs to write an environmental policy statement for the firm, she says.

Carbon isn’t like other commodities, Chan says. The government’s goal to reduce pollution means it will gradually diminish the number of allowances it issues, and that will be a powerful incentive for speculators to try to corner the market and drive up the price, she says.

While banks say they’re a long way from packaging securities from environmental credits now, Chan points to two deals that Zurich-based Credit Suisse Group AG completed in 2007 and 2008 that each combined more than 20 different offset projects, then sliced them into tranches and sold them to investors. The securities were the equivalent of carbon CDOs, Chan says.

Boom and Bust

Chan has an ally in hedge fund manager Michael Masters, founder of Masters Capital Management LLC, based in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. He says speculators will end up controlling U.S. carbon prices, and their participation could trigger the same type of boom-and-bust cycles that have buffeted other commodities.

In February 2009 House testimony, Masters -- who is no relation to Blythe Masters -- estimated that the early 2008 price bubbles in crude oil, corn and other commodities cost U.S. consumers more than $110 billion.

The hedge fund manager says that banks will attempt to inflate the carbon market by recruiting investors from hedge funds and pension funds.

“Wall Street is going to sell it as an investment product to people that have nothing to do with carbon,” he says. “Then suddenly investment managers are dominating the asset class, and nothing is related to actual supply and demand. We have seen this movie before.”

Companies Need Banks

Still, companies need the financial markets to help them drive down their greenhouse gas emissions at a reasonable price, says the NRDC’s Stevenson.

“There are trillions of dollars needed to make this transition, and companies need the banks,” says Stevenson, a former trader for London-based hedge fund firm Brevan Howard Asset Management LLP.

Stevenson dismisses as overblown the concern that banks will soon be packaging greenhouse gas allowances into securities that look like CDOs. The banks stand to make more money, he says, as lenders to companies that need to invest in new power plants and factories to reduce their emissions.

“I would argue that this is only a bonanza for the banks in that they get to go back to their day jobs -- which is lending money,” Stevenson says. “I’m suspect of them generating a lot from carbon trading itself in the early years.”

Northeast Test Case

A relatively small-scale cap-and-trade effort called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative tells a cautionary tale. RGGI is a CO2 reduction program established by a group of northeastern and mid-Atlantic states in 2003 with a goal of cutting CO2 emissions from power plants in the region 10 percent by 2018. Ten states are now members. Trading in the companies’ pollution permits began in September 2008 -- in the middle of the financial crisis. As of mid-November 2009, prices of the pollution permits were down 50 percent, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, the 10 best-performing investment funds with climate change or clean energy as a central goal all plunged 40 percent or more in 2008, according to data compiled by London- based New Energy Finance. The shrinking global economy sapped momentum for developing new environmental projects.

“To mobilize capital now and begin a transformation to new energy technologies is a very risky business,” says Ken Newcombe, founder of C-Quest Capital, a Washington-based carbon finance business that invests in offsets. “Returns have to be reasonable to take on those risks.”

Risk Capital Vital

Newcombe is the former head of Goldman’s U.S. carbon market origination and sales department and one of the world’s first carbon traders. He holds a Ph.D. in energy and natural resource development from the Australian National University. Private money, including capital from banks, hedge funds and other investors, must keep flowing into the system to realize global environmental goals that the Copenhagen meetings will try to hash out, he says.

“The ultimate objective is economic efficiency,” Newcombe says. “How can we reduce the cost of implementing important public policy? Having a pool of risk capital is absolutely vital to the smooth introduction of a cap-and-trade regime in the U.S.”

As Washington debates climate policy in the shadow of the recent financial meltdown, lawmakers have a right to be wary, Newcombe says.

“There’s legitimate concern that there may be unseemly profits or untenable risks,” he says. “But a problem now is that the critical objective of stabilizing the financial system could lead to an overregulation of the carbon market.”

‘Such a Fog’

Meanwhile, the industrial firms that would be affected by cap and trade are eager for the game to begin, says Lew Nash, a Morgan Stanley executive director and the firm’s U.S. point person on the carbon markets.

“There is such a fog right now in terms of how the legislation is going to work,” Nash says. “There is a real economic desire here for price signals that will permit the market to properly price carbon. Our customers have little choice but to participate in this evolving market.”

Nash says his clients aren’t just looking for help figuring out how to use carbon trading to manage their emissions caps. Pricing carbon will also set the tone for strategic investments. If a company wants to build a new factory, for instance, it’s going to need to factor prospective carbon emissions into its construction and operational plans, Nash says.

Supporters of cap and trade see, over many years, a remaking of the U.S. industrial landscape and a sharp reduction in the gases that cause global warming. Little will happen, though, until the debate is resolved between the bankers who want more liquidity.

Copenhagen Con Men Launch Global Carbon Tax Heist
Paul Joseph Watson - While flying into Danish capital on luxurious private jets and being shuttled around in limousines, climate crooks get ready to rape the middle class
Cap and Trade is a Goldman Sachs and Enron Scam
NoWorldSystem - Enron, one of the most corrupt gangsters besides the Goldman Sachs mafia also take part in this new carbon-credit scheme.
Cap and Trade Is a Tax and It’s a Great Big One
Heritage Foundation - It will hurt senior citizens, the poor, and the unemployed the worst.
How Goldman Sachs Made Tens of Billions Of Dollars from the Economic Collapse of America
California watchdog sees climate policy job losses
Reuters - California is likely to see modest job losses in the near term from its aggressive climate change policy due to higher energy costs and other factors.
Bernie Sanders compares climate skeptics to Nazi deniers
Politico - Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is comparing climate change skeptics to those who disregarded the Nazi threat to America in the 1930s
The Globalist Push to Crush the Rich Nations in Preparation for Global Carbon Tax and NWO
Mark Matheny - My friends, it looks as though his plans are coming to fruition.
Stern backs $100bn IMF climate fund plan
Environmental Finance - A climate fund proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 has won support from climate change economics guru Nicholas Stern.