Greenpeace founder, Patrick Moore, delivers powerful annual lecture, praises carbon dioxide – full text

Posted on Wattsupwiththat.com by Anthony Watts on October 15th 2015

2015 Annual GWPF Lecture
Institute of Mechanical Engineers, London 14 October 2015

My Lords and Ladies, Ladies and Gentlemen.

Thank you for the opportunity to set out my views on climate change. As I have stated publicly on many occasions, there is no definitive scientific proof, through real-world observation, that carbon dioxide is responsible for any of the slight warming of the global climate that has occurred during the past 300 years, since the peak of the Little Ice Age. If there were such a proof through testing and replication it would have been written down for all to see.

The contention that human emissions are now the dominant influence on climate is simply a hypothesis, rather than a universally accepted scientific theory. It is therefore correct, indeed verging on compulsory in the scientific tradition, to be skeptical of those who express certainty that “the science is settled” and “the debate is over”.

But there is certainty beyond any doubt that CO2 is the building block for all life on Earth and that without its presence in the global atmosphere at a sufficient concentration this would be a dead planet. Yet today our children and our publics are taught that CO2 is a toxic pollutant that will destroy life and bring civilization to its knees. Tonight I hope to turn this dangerous human-caused propaganda on its head. Tonight I will demonstrate that human emissions of CO2 have already saved life on our planet from a very untimely end. That in the absence of our emitting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere from whence it came in the first place, most or perhaps all life on Earth would begin to die less than two million years from today.

But first a bit of background.

I was born and raised in the tiny floating village of Winter Harbour on the northwest tip of Vancouver Island, in the rainforest by the Pacific. There was no road to my village so for eight years myself and a few other children were taken by boat each day to a one-room schoolhouse in the nearby fishing village. I didn’t realize how lucky I was playing on the tide flats by the salmon-spawning streams in the rainforest, until I was sent off to boarding school in Vancouver where I excelled in science. I did my undergraduate studies at the University of British Columbia, gravitating to the life sciences – biology, biochemistry, genetics, and forestry – the environment and the industry my family has been in for more than 100 years. Then, before the word was known to the general public, I discovered the science of ecology, the science of how all living things are inter-related, and how we are related to them.

At the height of the Cold War, the Vietnam War, the threat of all-out nuclear war and the newly emerging consciousness of the environment I was transformed into a radical environmental activist. While doing my PhD in ecology in 1971 I joined a group of activists who had begun to meet in the basement of the Unitarian Church, to plan a protest voyage against US hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska.

We proved that a somewhat rag-tag looking group of activists could sail an old fishing boat across the north Pacific ocean and help change the course of history. We created a focal point for the media to report on public opposition to the tests.

When that H-bomb exploded in November 1971, it was the last hydrogen bomb the United States ever detonated. Even though there were four more tests planned in the series, President Nixon canceled them due to the public opposition we had helped to create. That was the birth of Greenpeace.

Flushed with victory, on our way home from Alaska we were made brothers of the Namgis Nation in their Big House at Alert Bay near my northern Vancouver Island home. For Greenpeace this began the tradition of the Warriors of the Rainbow, after a Cree Indian legend that predicted the coming together of all races and creeds to save the Earth from destruction. We named our ship the Rainbow Warrior and I spent the next fifteen years in the top committee of Greenpeace, on the front lines of the environmental movement as we evolved from that church basement into the world’s largest environmental activist organization.

Next we took on French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific. They proved a bit more difficult than the US nuclear tests. It took years to eventually drive these tests underground at Mururoa Atoll in French Polynesia. In 1985, under direct orders from President Mitterrand, French commandos bombed and sank the Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, killing our photographer. Those protests continued until long after I left Greenpeace. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that nuclear testing finally ended in the South Pacific, and it most other parts of the world as well.

Going back to 1975, Greenpeace set out to save the whales from extinction at the hands of huge factory whaling fleets. We confronted the Soviet factory whaling fleet in the North Pacific, putting ourselves in front of their harpoons in our little rubber boats to protect the fleeing whales. This was broadcast on television news around the world, bringing the Save the Whales movement into everyone’s living rooms for the first time. After four years of voyages, in 1979 factory whaling was finally banned in the North Pacific, and by 1981 in all the world’s oceans.

In 1978 I sat on a baby seal off the East Coast of Canada to protect it from the hunter’s club. I was arrested and hauled off to jail, the seal was clubbed and skinned, but a photo of me being arrested while sitting on the baby seal appeared in more than 3000 newspapers around the world the next morning. We won the hearts and minds of millions of people who saw the baby seal slaughter as outdated, cruel, and unnecessary.

Why then did I leave Greenpeace after 15 years in the leadership? When Greenpeace began we had a strong humanitarian orientation, to save civilization from destruction by all-out nuclear war. Over the years the “peace” in Greenpeace was gradually lost and my organization, along with much of the environmental movement, drifted into a belief that humans are the enemies of the earth. I believe in a humanitarian environmentalism because we are part of nature, not separate from it. The first principle of ecology is that we are all part of the same ecosystem, as Barbara Ward put it, “One human family on spaceship Earth”, and to preach otherwise teaches that the world would be better off without us. As we shall see later in the presentation there is very good reason to see humans as essential to the survival of life on this planet.

In the mid 1980s I found myself the only director of Greenpeace International with a formal education in science. My fellow directors proposed a campaign to “ban chlorine worldwide”, naming it “The Devil’s Element”. I pointed out that chlorine is one of the elements in the Periodic Table, one of the building blocks of the Universe and the 11th most common element in the Earth’s crust. I argued the fact that chlorine is the most important element for public health and medicine. Adding chlorine to drinking water was the biggest advance in the history of public health and the majority of our synthetic medicines are based on chlorine chemistry. This fell on deaf ears, and for me this was the final straw. I had to leave.

When I left Greenpeace I vowed to develop an environmental policy that was based on science and logic rather than sensationalism, misinformation, anti-humanism and fear. In a classic example, a recent protest led by Greenpeace in the Philippines used the skull and crossbones to associate Golden Rice with death, when in fact Golden Rice has the potential to help save 2 million children from death due to vitamin A deficiency every year.

The Keeling curve of CO2 concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere since 1959 is the supposed smoking gun of catastrophic climate change. We presume CO2 was at 280 ppm at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, before human activity could have caused a significant impact. I accept that most of the rise from 280 to 400 ppm is caused by human CO2 emissions with the possibility that some of it is due to outgassing from warming of the oceans.

NASA tells us that “Carbon Dioxide Controls Earth’s Temperature” in child-like denial of the many other factors involved in climate change. This is reminiscent of NASA’s contention that there might be life on Mars. Decades after it was demonstrated that there was no life on Mars, NASA continues to use it as a hook to raise public funding for more expeditions to the Red Planet. The promulgation of fear of Climate Change now serves the same purpose. As Bob Dylan prophetically pointed out, “Money doesn’t talk, it swears”, even in one of the most admired science organizations in the world.

On the political front the leaders of the G7 plan to “end extreme poverty and hunger” by phasing out 85% of the world’s energy supply including 98% of the energy used to transport people and goods, including food. The Emperors of the world appear clothed in the photo taken at the close of the meeting but it was obviously Photo-shopped. They should be required to stand naked for making such a foolish statement.

The world’s top climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change, is hopelessly conflicted by its makeup and it mandate. The Panel is composed solely of the World Meteorological Organization, weather forecasters, and the United Nations Environment Program, environmentalists. Both these organizations are focused primarily on short-term timescales, days to maybe a century or two. But the most significant conflict is with the Panel’s mandate from the United Nations. They are required only to focus on “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the atmosphere, and which is in addition to natural climate variability.”
So if the IPCC found that climate change was not being affected by human alteration of the atmosphere or that it is not “dangerous” there would be no need for them to exist. They are virtually mandated to find on the side of apocalypse.

Scientific certainty, political pandering, a hopelessly conflicted IPCC, and now the Pope, spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, in a bold move to reinforce the concept of original sin, says the Earth looks like “an immense pile of filth” and we must go back to pre-industrial bliss, or is that squalor?

And then there is the actual immense pile of filth fed to us more than three times daily by the green-media nexus, a seething cauldron of imminent doom, like we are already condemned to Damnation in Hell and there is little chance of Redemption. I fear for the end of the Enlightenment. I fear an intellectual Gulag with Greenpeace as my prison guards.

Let’s begin with our knowledge of the long-term history of the Earth’s temperature and of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere. Our best inference from various proxies back indicate that CO2 was higher for the first 4 billion years of Earth’s history than it has been since the Cambrian Period until today. I will focus on the past 540 million years since modern life forms evolved. It is glaringly obvious that temperature and CO2 are in an inverse correlation at least as often as they are in any semblance of correlation. Two clear examples of reverse correlation occurred 150 million years and 50 million years ago. At the end of the Jurassic temperature fell dramatically while CO2 spiked. During the Eocene Thermal Maximum, temperature was likely higher than any time in the past 550 million years while CO2 had been on a downward track for 100 million years. This evidence alone sufficient to warrant deep speculation of any claimed lock-step causal relationship between CO2 and temperature.

The Devonian Period beginning 400 million years ago marked the culmination of the invasion of life onto the land. Plants evolved to produce lignin, which in combination with cellulose, created wood which in turn for the first time allowed plants to grow tall, in competition with each other for sunlight. As vast forests spread across the land living biomass increased by orders of magnitude, pulling down carbon as CO2 from the atmosphere to make wood. Lignin is very difficult to break down and no decomposer species possessed the enzymes to digest it. Trees died atop one another until they were 100 metres or more in depth. This was the making of the great coal beds around the world as this huge store of sequestered carbon continued to build for 90 million years. Then, fortunately for the future of life, white rot fungi evolved to produce the enzymes that can digest lignin and coincident with that the coal-making era came to an end.

There was no guarantee that fungi or any other decomposer species would develop the complex of enzymes required to digest lignin. If they had not, CO2, which had already been drawn down for the first time in Earth’s history to levels similar to todays, would have continued to decline as trees continued to grow and die. That is until CO2 approached the threshold of 150 ppm below which plants begin first to starve, then stop growing altogether, and then die. Not just woody plants but all plants. This would bring about the extinction of most, if not all, terrestrial species, as animals, insects, and other invertebrates starved for lack of food. And that would be that. The human species would never have existed. This was only the first time that there was a distinct possibility that life would come close to extinguishing itself, due to a shortage of CO2, which is essential for life on Earth.

A well-documented record of global temperature over the past 65 million years shows that we have been in a major cooling period since the Eocene Thermal Maximum 50 million years ago. The Earth was an average 16C warmer then, with most of the increased warmth at the higher latitudes. The entire planet, including the Arctic and Antarctica were ice-free and the land there was covered in forest.

The ancestors of every species on Earth today survived through what may have been the warmest time in the history of life. It makes one wonder about dire predictions that even a 2C rise in temperature from pre-industrial times would cause mass extinctions and the destruction of civilization. Glaciers began to form in Antarctica 30 million years ago and in the northern hemisphere 3 million years ago. Today, even in this interglacial period of the Pleistocene Ice Age, we are experiencing one of the coldest climates in the Earth’s history.

Coming closer to the present we have learned from Antarctic ice cores that for the past 800,000 years there have been regular periods of major glaciation followed by interglacial periods in 100,000 year-cycles. These cycles coincide with the Milankovitch cycles that are tied to the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and its axial tilt. It is highly plausible that these cycles are related to solar intensity and the seasonal distribution of solar heat on the Earth’s surface. There is a strong correlation between temperature and the level of atmospheric CO2 during these successive glaciations, indicating a possible cause-effect relationship between the two. CO2 lags temperature by an average of 800 years during the most recent 400,000-year period, indicating that temperature is the cause, as the cause never comes after the effect.

Looking at the past 50,000 years of temperature and CO2 we can see that changes in CO2 follow changes in temperature. This is as one could expect, as the Milankovitch cycles are far more likely to cause a change in temperature than a change in CO2. And a change in the temperature is far more likely to cause a change in CO2 due to outgassing of CO2 from the oceans during warmer times and an ingassing (absorption) of CO2 during colder periods. Yet climate alarmists persist in insisting that CO2 is causing the change in temperature, despite the illogical nature of that assertion.

It is sobering to consider the magnitude of climate change during the past 20,000 years, since the peak of the last major glaciation. At that time there were 3.3 kilometres of ice on top of what is today the city of Montreal, a city of more than 3 million people. 95% of Canada was covered in a sheet of ice. Even as far south as Chicago there was nearly a kilometre of ice. If the Milankovitch cycle continues to prevail, and there is little reason aside from our CO2 emissions to think otherwise, this will happen gradually again during the next 80,000 years. Will our CO2 emissions stave off another glaciation as James Lovelock has suggested? There doesn’t seem to be much hope of that so far, as despite 1/3 of all our CO2 emissions being released during the past 18 years the UK Met Office contends there has been no statistically significant warming during this century.

At the height of the last glaciation the sea level was about 120 metres lower than it is today. By 7,000 years ago all the low-altitude, mid-latitude glaciers had melted. There is no consensus about the variation in sea level since then although many scientists have concluded that the sea level was higher than today during the Holocene Thermal optimum from 9,000 to 5,000 years ago when the Sahara was green. The sea level may also have been higher than today during the Medieval Warm Period.

Hundred of islands near the Equator in Papua, Indonesia, have been undercut by the sea in a manner that gives credence to the hypothesis that there has been little net change in sea level in the past thousands of years. It takes a long time for so much erosion to occur from gentle wave action in a tropical sea.

Coming back to the relationship between temperature and CO2 in the modern era we can see that temperature has risen at a steady slow rate in Central England since 1700 while human CO2 emissions were not relevant until 1850 and then began an exponential rise after 1950. This is not indicative of a direct causal relationship between the two. After freezing over regularly during the Little Ice Age the River Thames froze for the last time in 1814, as the Earth moved into what might be called the Modern Warm Period.

The IPCC states it is “extremely likely” that human emissions have been the dominant cause of global warming “since the mid-20th century”, that is since 1950. They claim that “extremely” means 95% certain, even though the number 95 was simply plucked from the air like an act of magic. And “likely” is not a scientific word but rather indicative of a judgment, another word for an opinion.

There was a 30-year period of warming from 1910-1940, then a cooling from 1940 to 1970, just as CO2 emissions began to rise exponentially, and then a 30-year warming from 1970-2000 that was very similar in duration and temperature rise to the rise from 1910-1940. One may then ask “what caused the increase in temperature from 1910-1940 if it was not human emissions? And if it was natural factors how do we know that the same natural factors were not responsible for the rise between 1970-2000.” You don’t need to go back millions of years to find the logical fallacy in the IPCC’s certainty that we are the villains in the piece.

Water is by far the most important greenhouse gas, and is the only molecule that is present in the atmosphere in all three states, gas, liquid, and solid. As a gas, water vapour is a greenhouse gas, but as a liquid and solid it is not. As a liquid water forms clouds, which send solar radiation back into space during the day and hold heat in at night. There is no possibility that computer models can predict the net effect of atmospheric water in a higher CO2 atmosphere. Yet warmists postulate that higher CO2 will result in positive feedback from water, thus magnifying the effect of CO2 alone by 2-3 times. Other scientists believe that water may have a neutral or negative feedback on CO2. The observational evidence from the early years of this century tends to reinforce the latter hypothesis.

How many politicians or members of the media or the public are aware of this statement about climate change from the IPCC in 2007?

“we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled nonlinear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

There is a graph showing that the climate models have grossly exaggerated the rate of warming that confirms the IPCC statement. The only trends the computer models seem able to predict accurately are ones that have already occurred.

Coming to the core of my presentation, CO2 is the currency of life and the most important building block for all life on Earth. All life is carbon-based, including our own. Surely the carbon cycle and its central role in the creation of life should be taught to our children rather than the demonization of CO2, that “carbon” is a “pollutant” that threatens the continuation of life. We know for a fact that CO2 is essential for life and that it must be at a certain level in the atmosphere for the survival of plants, which are the primary food for all the other species alive today. Should we not encourage our citizens, students, teachers, politicians, scientists, and other leaders to celebrate CO2 as the giver of life that it is?

It is a proven fact that plants, including trees and all our food crops, are capable of growing much faster at higher levels of CO2 than present in the atmosphere today. Even at the today’s concentration of 400 ppm plants are relatively starved for nutrition. The optimum level of CO2 for plant growth is about 5 times higher, 2000 ppm, yet the alarmists warn it is already too high. They must be challenged every day by every person who knows the truth in this matter. CO2 is the giver of life and we should celebrate CO2 rather than denigrate it as is the fashion today.

We are witnessing the “Greening of the Earth” as higher levels of CO2, due to human emissions from the use of fossil fuels, promote increased growth of plants around the world. This has been confirmed by scientists with CSIRO in Australia, in Germany, and in North America. Only half of the CO2 we are emitting from the use of fossil fuels is showing up in the atmosphere. The balance is going somewhere else and the best science says most of it is going into an increase in global plant biomass. And what could be wrong with that, as forests and agricultural crops become more productive?

All the CO2 in the atmosphere has been created by outgassing from the Earth’s core during massive volcanic eruptions. This was much more prevalent in the early history of the Earth when the core was hotter than it is today. During the past 150 million years there has not been enough addition of CO2 to the atmosphere to offset the gradual losses due to burial in sediments.

Let’s look at where all the carbon is in the world, and how it is moving around.

Today, at just over 400 ppm CO2 there are 850 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. By comparison, when modern life-forms evolved over 500 million years ago there was nearly 15,000 billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere, 17 times today’s level. Plants and soils combined contain more than 2,000 billion tons of carbon, more that twice as much as the entire global atmosphere. The oceans contain 38,000 billion tons of dissolved CO2, 45 times as much as in the atmosphere. Fossil fuels, which were made from plants that pulled CO2 from the atmosphere account for 5,000 – 10,000 billion tons of carbon, 6 – 12 times as much carbon as is in the atmosphere.

But the truly stunning number is the amount of carbon that has been sequestered from the atmosphere and turned into carbonaceous rocks. 100,000,000 billion tons, that’s one quadrillion tons of carbon, have been turned into stone by marine species that learned to make armour-plating for themselves by combining calcium and carbon into calcium carbonate. Limestone, chalk, and marble are all of life origin and amount to 99.9% of all the carbon ever present in the global atmosphere. The white cliffs of Dover are made of the calcium carbonate skeletons of coccolithophores, tiny marine phytoplankton.

The vast majority of the carbon dioxide that originated in the atmosphere has been sequestered and stored quite permanently in carbonaceous rocks where it cannot be used as food by plants.

Beginning 540 million years ago at the beginning of the Cambrian Period many marine species of invertebrates evolved the ability to control calcification and to build armour plating to protect their soft bodies. Shellfish such as clams and snails, corals, coccolithofores (phytoplankton) and foraminifera (zooplankton) began to combine carbon dioxide with calcium and thus to remove carbon from the life cycle as the shells sank into sediments; 100,000,000 billion tons of carbonaceous sediment. It is ironic that life itself, by devising a protective suit of armour, determined its own eventual demise by continuously removing CO2 from the atmosphere. This is carbon sequestration and storage writ large. These are the carbonaceous sediments that form the shale deposits from which we are fracking gas and oil today. And I add my support to those who say, “OK UK, get fracking”.

The past 150 million years has seen a steady drawing down of CO2 from the atmosphere. There are many components to this but what matters is the net effect, a removal on average of 37,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere every year for 150 million years. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere was reduced by about 90% during this period. This means that volcanic emissions of CO2 have been outweighed by the loss of carbon to calcium carbonate sediments on a multi-million year basis.

If this trend continues CO2 will inevitably fall to levels that threaten the survival of plants, which require a minimum of 150 ppm to survive. If plants die all the animals, insects, and other invertebrates that depend on plants for their survival will also die.

How long will it be at the present level of CO2 depletion until most or all of life on Earth is threatened with extinction by lack of CO2 in the atmosphere?

During this Pleistocene Ice Age, CO2 tends to reach a minimum level when the successive glaciations reach their peak. During the last glaciation, which peaked 18,000 years ago, CO2 bottomed out at 180 ppm, extremely likely the lowest level CO2 has been in the history of the Earth. This is only 30 ppm above the level that plants begin to die. Paleontological research has demonstrated that even at 180 ppm there was a severe restriction of growth as plants began to starve. With the onset of the warmer interglacial period CO2 rebounded to 280 ppm. But even today, with human emissions causing CO2 to reach 400 ppm plants are still restricted in their growth rate, which would be much higher if CO2 were at 1000-2000 ppm.

Here is the shocking news. If humans had not begun to unlock some of the carbon stored as fossil fuels, all of which had been in the atmosphere as CO2 before sequestration by plants and animals, life on Earth would have soon been starved of this essential nutrient and would begin to die. Given the present trends of glaciations and interglacial periods this would likely have occurred less than 2 million years from today, a blink in nature’s eye, 0.05% of the 3.5 billion-year history of life.

No other species could have accomplished the task of putting some of the carbon back into the atmosphere that was taken out and locked in the Earth’s crust by plants and animals over the millennia. This is why I honour James Lovelock in my lecture this evening. Jim was for many years of the belief that humans are the one-and-only rogue species on Gaia, destined to cause catastrophic global warming. I enjoy the Gaia hypothesis but I am not religious about it and for me this was too much like original sin. It was as if humans were the only evil species on the Earth.

But James Lovelock has seen the light and realized that humans may be part of Gaia’s plan, and he has good reason to do so. And I honour him because it takes courage to change your mind after investing so much of your reputation on the opposite opinion. Rather than seeing humans as the enemies of Gaia, Lovelock now sees that we may be working with Gaia to “stave of another ice age”, or major glaciation. This is much more plausible than the climate doom-and gloom scenario because our release of CO2 back into the atmosphere has definitely reversed the steady downward slide of this essential food for life, and hopefully may reduce the chance that the climate will slide into another period of major glaciation. We can be certain that higher levels of CO2 will result in increased plant growth and biomass. We really don’t know whether or not higher levels of CO2 will prevent or reduce the eventual slide into another major glaciation. Personally I am not hopeful for this because the long-term history just doesn’t support a strong correlation between CO2 and temperature.

It does boggle the mind in the face of our knowledge that the level of CO2 has been steadily falling that human CO2 emissions are not universally acclaimed as a miracle of salvation. From direct observation we already know that the extreme predictions of CO2’s impact on global temperature are highly unlikely given that about one-third of all our CO2 emissions have been discharged during the past 18 years and there has been no statistically significant warming. And even if there were some additional warming that would surely be preferable to the extermination of all or most species on the planet.

You heard it here. “Human emissions of carbon dioxide have saved life on Earth from inevitable starvation and extinction due to lack of CO2”. To use the analogy of the Atomic Clock, if the Earth were 24 hours old we were at 38 seconds to midnight when we reversed the trend towards the End Times. If that isn’t good news I don’t know what is. You don’t get to stave off Armageddon every day.

I issue a challenge to anyone to provide a compelling argument that counters my analysis of the historical record and the prediction of CO2 starvation based on the 150 million year trend. Ad hominem arguments about “deniers” need not apply. I submit that much of society has been collectively misled into believing that global CO2 and temperature are too high when the opposite is true for both. Does anyone deny that below 150 ppm CO2 that plants will die? Does anyone deny that the Earth has been in a 50 million-year cooling period and that this Pleistocene Ice Age is one of the coldest periods in the history of the planet?

If we assume human emissions have to date added some 200 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, even if we ceased using fossil fuels today we have already bought another 5 million years for life on earth. But we will not stop using fossil fuels to power our civilization so it is likely that we can forestall plant starvation for lack of CO2 by at least 65 million years. Even when the fossil fuels have become scarce we have the quadrillion tons of carbon in carbonaceous rocks, which we can transform into lime and CO2 for the manufacture of cement. And we already know how to do that with solar energy or nuclear energy. This alone, regardless of fossil fuel consumption, will more than offset the loss of CO2 due to calcium carbonate burial in marine sediments. Without a doubt the human species has made it possible to prolong the survival of life on Earth for more than 100 million years. We are not the enemy of nature but its salvation.

As a postscript I would like to make a few comments about the other side of the alleged dangerous climate change coin, our energy policy, in particular the much maligned fossil fuels; coal, oil, and natural gas.

Depending how it’s tallied, fossil fuels account for between 85-88% of global energy consumption and more than 95% of energy for the transport of people and goods, including our food.

Earlier this year the leaders of the G7 countries agreed that fossil fuels should be phased out by 2100, a most bizarre development to say the least. Of course no intelligent person really believes this will happen but it is a testament to the power of the elites that have converged around the catastrophic human-caused climate change that so many alleged world leaders must participate in the charade. How might we convince them to celebrate CO2 rather than to denigrate it?

A lot of nasty things are said about fossil fuels even though they are largely responsible for our longevity, our prosperity, and our comfortable lifestyles.

Hydrocarbons, the energy components of fossil fuels, are 100% organic, as in organic chemistry. They were produced by solar energy in ancient seas and forests. When they are burned for energy the main products are water and CO2, the two most essential foods for life. And fossil fuels are by far the largest storage battery of direct solar energy on Earth. Nothing else comes close except nuclear fuel, which is also solar in the sense that it was produced in dying stars.

Today, Greenpeace protests Russian and American oil rigs with 3000 HP diesel-powered ships and uses 200 HP outboard motors to board the rigs and hang anti-oil plastic banners made with fossil fuels. Then they issue a media release telling us we must “end our addiction to oil”. I wouldn’t mind so much if Greenpeace rode bicycles to their sailing ships and rowed their little boats into the rigs to hang organic cotton banners. We didn’t have an H-bomb on board the boat that sailed on the first Greenpeace campaign against nuclear testing.

Some of the world’s oil comes from my native country in the Canadian oil sands of northern Alberta. I had never worked with fossil fuel interests until I became incensed with the lies being spread about my country’s oil production in the capitals of our allies around the world. I visited the oil sands operations to find out for myself what was happening there.

It is true it’s not a pretty sight when the land is stripped bare to get at the sand so the oil can be removed from it. Canada is actually cleaning up the biggest natural oil spill in history, and making a profit from it. The oil was brought to the surface when the Rocky Mountains were thrust up by the colliding Pacific Plate. When the sand is returned back to the land 99% of the so-called “toxic oil” has been removed from it.

Anti-oil activists say the oil-sands operations are destroying the boreal forest of Canada. Canada’s boreal forest accounts for 10% of all the world’s forests and the oil-sands area is like a pimple on an elephant by comparison. By law, every square inch of land disturbed by oil-sands extraction must be returned to native boreal forest. When will cities like London, Brussels, and New York that have laid waste to the natural environment be returned to their native ecosystems?

The art and science of ecological restoration, or reclamation as it is called in the mining industry, is a well-established practice. The land is re-contoured, the original soil is put back, and native species of plants and trees are established. It is possible, by creating depressions where the land was flat, to increase biodiversity by making ponds and lakes where wetland plants, insects, and waterfowl can become established in the reclaimed landscape.

The tailings ponds where the cleaned sand is returned look ugly for a few years but are eventually reclaimed into grasslands. The Fort McKay First Nation is under contract to manage a herd of bison on a reclaimed tailings pond. Every tailings pond will be reclaimed in a similar manner when operations have been completed.

As an ecologist and environmentalist for more than 45 years this is good enough for me. The land is disturbed for a blink of an eye in geological time and is then returned to a sustainable boreal forest ecosystem with cleaner sand. And as a bonus we get the fuel to power our weed-eaters, scooters, motorcycles, cars, trucks, buses, trains, and aircraft.

To conclude, carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life, the staff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on Earth.

I am honoured to have been chosen to deliver your annual lecture.

Thank you for listening to me this evening.

I hope you have seen CO2 from a new perspective and will join with me to Celebrate CO2!


Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
26 octobre 2015

JUSTIN TRUDEAU: CANADA ELECTS HANDSOME BERNIE SANDERS

by BEN SHAPIRO
21 Oct 2015

New Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has been fêted for his heartthrob status, his shirtless photos, and his mop of tousled hair. Unfortunately, that’s all that distinguishes him from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)16%.

Within 24 hours of his election, Trudeau announced that he would pull Canada out of the war against the Islamic State. At a press conference conducted in French, Trudeau said he had spoken with President Obama about “the commitments I have made around ending the combat mission.” Canada, said Trudeau, is still “a strong member of the coalition against ISIL,” but he said that his Liberal regime would be “moving forward with our campaign commitments in a responsible fashion.”

That’s no surprise coming from the uber-leftist Trudeau, who said back in July that Canadian terrorists shouldn’t be stripped of their citizenship under Bill C-24, which would allow the Canadian government to remove citizenship from dual citizens convicted of terrorism, treason, or espionage, according to the Huffington Post. Trudeau said, “I’ll give you the quote so that you guys can jot it down and put it in an attack ad somewhere that the Liberal Party believes that terrorists should get to keep their Canadian citizenship. Because I do. And I’m willing to take on anyone who disagrees with that.” Trudeau also told the biggest Islamic conference in Canada that he would repeal C-24.

Trudeau’s sudden love for radical Islam isn’t so sudden. As the Toronto Sun reported, Trudeau met with members of a radical mosque labeled by U.S. intelligence as an al Qaeda recruitment center in March 2011. Trudeau claimed he knew nothing about that, but CBC had done a full expose of the mosque in 2006.

He’s also a tepid supporter of Israel. In 2015, he trivialized the Holocaust by comparing it to government actors not supporting the wearing of the Islamic niqab by women. “We should all shudder to hear the same rhetoric that led to a ‘none is too many’ immigration policy toward Jews in the ‘30s and ‘40s being used to raise fears against Muslims today,” he said.

Trudeau places all of this support for radical Islam under the rubric of multiculturalism; he explained, “Liberals believe in a Canada that is united, strong not in spite of its differences, but precisely because of them.”

And Trudeau’s love for tyrants crosses all religious and ethnic boundaries. In 2013, Trudeau announced, “There’s a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime.” That, of course, was wrong both morally and factually: China is a brutal tyranny, and their supposed economic boom is at least half-fake, given their artificial boost through inflation, which ended this year in a stock market collapse. Trudeau sounds very much like Barack Obama circa 2011, when he said that it would be easier to be president of China.

Trudeau wants to use the government of Canada to crack down on private business, supporting a bill that would add “gender identity” and “gender expression” to protected classes under criminal law. Effectively, this means that all businesses would be subject to the whims of their employees as to what sex the employees think they are that day. Firing someone for cross-dressing at work would become illegal.

That’s just the beginning of the agenda. Trudeau wants climate change legislation, an actual quota for women in government, more gun control, legalized pot, and perhaps even legalized euthanasia and prostitution. Most of all, he wants to dramatically raise taxes on the rich.

More fundamentally, Trudeau wants to use the power of Canadian government to permanently enshrine a leftist power base. In June, he said he would push rules making voting mandatory and make it easier for far-left parties like the Green Party to receive seats. Trudeau also wants to discard “first-past-the-post” voting, which allows someone to win with a plurality of votes rather than a majority.

Trudeau is the Canadian Sanders – or Hillary Clinton. But being a heartthrob has no bearing on the success of socialism, as Argentinian president Christina Fernandez de Kirchner demonstrates in living color.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book, The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.

Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
22 octobre 2015

Gagner au change

Nathalie Elgrably-Levy, économiste

JdeQ, 18 octobre 2015


Si les sondages disent vrai, Justin Trudeau sera élu demain. Il a articulé sa campagne électorale autour du slogan «Changer ensemble», grossièrement plagié sur celui employé par Obama, et cette stratégie semble porter ses fruits.

Il est légitime de souhaiter un changement. Mais changer de premier minis­tre, ce n’est pas comme changer de marque de céréales. L’enjeu est trop important pour se laisser influencer par l’esthétique de l’emballage et quelques astuces marketing. Il faut gagner au change!

Parlons économie

En matière économique, la machine anti-Harper s’est ingéniée à diaboliser le Parti conservateur. Pourtant, le Canada est cité en exemple en Europe pour sa stabilité économique et son excel­lente gestion de la pire crise finan­cière depuis la Deuxième Guerre mondiale.

S’il est élu, le Parti libéral nous engagera effectivement sur une autre trajectoire.

Les conservateurs ont admirablement redressé les finances publiques, engrangé un surplus budgétaire, réduit la TPS de deux points sans hausser les impôts, augmenté le plafond du CELI, introduit le fractionnement du revenu, respecté les compétences provinciales et présenté deux accords de libre-échange qui contribueront grandement à la prospérité du Canada.

Notons également que M. Harper a pris pour habitude de donner la priorité au français lors de ses conférences de presse. Pour l’avenir, M. Harper promet une «loi verrou» interdisant toute augmentation de la charge fiscale des Canadiens et des charges sociales pour les travailleurs et les entreprises.

S’il est élu, le Parti libéral nous engagera effectivement sur une autre trajectoire. Encore plus à gauche que le NPD, il annonce des dépenses de 150 milliards $, soit des dépenses 19 fois plus élevées que celles prévues par les conservateurs, ce qui nous garantit des déficits substantiels et une dette nettement plus lourde. Il promet de taxer davantage les riches et d’abolir le fractionnement du revenu, mais de réduire les impôts de la classe moyenne. Il entend intervenir dans les compétences provinciales, dont la Santé, et ainsi réveiller d’anciennes dispu­tes dont on pourrait bien se passer.

Identité et sécurité

Sur le plan de l’identité et de la sécurité, les conservateurs entendent poursuivre leur opposition au port du niqab lors des cérémonies d’assermentation ainsi qu’au moment de recevoir des services gouvernementaux. M. Trudeau estime que le port du niqab est convenable.

Les conservateurs ont adopté le projet de loi C-24 visant à retirer la citoyen­neté à un terroriste. M. Trudeau considère au contraire qu’un terroriste mérite de la conserver. Les conservateurs sont disposés à accueillir des réfugiés syriens, mais à condition de les filtrer méticuleusement.

M. Trudeau, lui, veut ouvrir grand les frontières sans prendre de précautions particulières.

Les conservateurs jugent nécessaire de combattre les terroristes djihadistes de l’État islamique pour stopper leurs ambitions génocidaires et assurer la protection des Canadiens pendant qu’il est encore temps. M. Trudeau veut plutôt que le Canada cesse ses interventions contre l’ÉI. À l’instar du calife de la communauté musulmane ahmadie, il préfère déclamer le slogan «Paix pour tous, haine pour personne».

Sans doute espère-t-il attendrir le cœur des fous d’Allah grâce à d’aussi belles paroles!

On peut avoir des griefs contre M. Harper. Nul ne peut plaire à tous, tout le temps et dans tous les domaines.

Mais gagnerons-nous vraiment à congédier M. Harper pour le remplacer par M. Trudeau? Le CV de ce dernier ne lui permettrait même pas d’être embauché pour gérer une PME. Allons-nous lui donner les clés du Canada?


Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
21 octobre 2015

Idéologie climatique : l’inquiétante dérive

par Tous les, contrepoints.org
30 août

Par Thierry Levent

Chaque jour qui nous rapproche de la conférence climatique parisienne (COP21) suscite des prises de positions de plus en plus délirantes voire inquiétantes. Ainsi : « La criminalisation de la pensée déviante est en marche, et l’on peut compter sur nos intellectuels pour aider avec enthousiasme à sa mise en place ». En effet, l’appel récent pour stopper les crimes climatiques, soutenu par des intellectuels, relayé fébrilement par la presse, ne laisse plus la place au doute. Nous sommes bien engagés vers une dérive idéologique totalitaire qui ne dit pas son nom.
Consommer du pétrole s’apparente selon les signataires à un crime contre le climat. « Nous avons employé le terme de crime climatique, un terme fort, pour éveiller les consciences », indique Christophe Bonneuil, historien, chargé de recherche au CNRS et co-initiateur de cette initiative qui va rester dans les annales.

Par extension naturelle, les climatosceptiques participent activement à ce délit. Toute réflexion scientifique hétérodoxe argumentée sur le thème du réchauffement climatique anthropique (RCA) est impitoyablement connotée et censurée.

Outre la censure médiatique organisée (impossible de lire ou d’entendre dans les médias français la moindre analyse critique), le discrédit à l’œuvre utilise des arguments les plus éhontés. Ainsi le journal Les Échos, n’hésite pas à associer créationnisme et climato-scepticisme. Les mécanismes à l’œuvre consistant à discréditer une communauté scientifique et de citoyens qui osent douter, sont ceux utilisés par les activistes de Greenpeace envers le nucléaire ou les faucheurs volontaires de José Bové pour les OGM. Tous soutiens ou analyses favorables vous font passer pour un criminel doublé d’un suppôt du « grand capital qui s’en met plein les poches ». Le tout avec le soutien actif des médias et la complaisance de la justice. Il faut relire à ce sujet l’ouvrage de G. Rivière-Wekstein1 sur les méthodes de ces militants écologistes radicaux qui ont pris la science en otage (destruction de champs, opérations commandos, flicage d’agriculteurs, montages financiers et manipulation médiatique). L’impunité est quasiment totale, la désinformation atteinte, la peur et le doute instillés dans l’opinion publique. La peur irrationnelle des OGM interdit tout débat.

Sous couvert du fumeux concept de science citoyenne cher à Jacques Testard, signataire de l’appel, l’objectif est d’assécher la « mauvaise » science pour favoriser les « bons » axes de recherche. Encore une fois, l’exemple des OGM est caricatural. En effet des activistes anti-OGM font dorénavant partie des instances décisionnelles concernant la recherche sur les biotechnologies. Autrement dit, cette filière est sinistrée car idéologiquement incompatible avec ce que ces gens pensent être juste. L’extension à d’autres axes de recherche est évidemment envisageable pour ne pas dire à l’œuvre. La chimie, les nanotechnologies, le nucléaire, et d’autres peuvent donc se faire du souci si cette tendance se confirme.

Le copié-collé avec la science climatique est évident. Le même Testard voulait déjà traîner en son temps C. Allègre devant un tribunal international pour crime contre l’humanité (émission « À voix nue » sur France Culture) au motif de son scepticisme. Nombre de scientifiques doutant de la doxa du GIEC hésitent et rechignent à juste titre à manifester leurs interrogations.

Il est donc assez comique de lire Hervé le Treut, climatologue et directeur de l’Institut Pierre-Simon Laplace en première ligne sur le réchauffement climatique bien entendu anthropique : « J’en veux aux climato-sceptiques et aux médias d’avoir confisqué le mot de ­ »sceptique » à leur seul usage. Tout chercheur digne de ce nom devrait s’afficher comme sceptique, puisque le doute est l’essence même de la démarche scientifique. »

Un tas de gens s’échinent à faire part de leur scepticisme éclairé avec le succès médiatique que l’on sait. Par contre les signataires de l’appel eux ne doutent de rien.

Le délire climatique actuel et les crises de nerf de quelques centaines de militants écolos à jour de leur cotisation, risquent de nous faire rire, mais jaune dans très peu de temps. Le réchauffement géopolitique, lui, tend inéluctablement vers l’incandescence malgré les lunettes roses, vertes, bleues ou étoilées. Et le maudit CO2 n’est pour rien dans les vagues d’immigrations actuelles contrairement à ce que nous raconte l’inénarrable Pierre Radanne au CV scientifique évanescent !

Il sera alors temps de demander son avis à Nicolas Hulot, nouveau commandeur des croyants thermoclimatiques engagés, sur les vraies priorités… il sera trop tard.


Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
18 septembre 2015

La Bullshit Québecor

Je suis un amateur de hockey et un amateurs des Remparts de Québec depuis des années.

À chaque saison, j'assiste à des matchs avec mes enfants et ma conjointe ainsi qu’avec des amis.

Or, le jour de la mise en vente des billets pour le match inaugural de la saison 2015-2016 des Remparts, j'ai tenté, comme plusieurs autres, de me procurer des billets.

Malheureusement, à 13h, il était déjà trop tard. Tous les billets s'étaient envolés.

Je me suis dit: "Too bad, je n'avais qu'à m'y prendre plus tôt". Je ne doutais pas que le Centre Vidéotron serait plein pour l'occasion, mais j'avais sous-estimé la rapidité avec laquelle les billets s'envoleraient.

Quoi qu'il en soit, hier, après un souper tardif, à cause des pratiques de hockey de mon fils et de ma fille, nous nous sommes tous assis pour regarder le match.

Durant, les cérémonies, ma blonde me fit remarquer qu'il y avait beaucoup de sièges vides dans les gradins inférieurs. Je lui ai répondu que des gens s'étaient sûrement laissé distraire par les divers éléments de ce building fabuleux et qu'ils n'avaient tout simplement pas encore regagné leur place.

Toutefois, ces sièges sont demeurés vides durant tout le match.

Comment pouvait-il y avoir autant de bancs vides alors que je n'avais même pas pu me procurer, ne serait-ce que 2 places non-contigües?

La seule chose pouvant expliquer ce phénomène, selon moi, est la bonne vieille méthode des billets donnés.

En fait, on ne vend pas tous les billets, car on en a gardé de côté, une grosse quantité, pour faire croire à une vente éclair. Les billets qui n'étaient pas vraiment à vendre seront alors donnés à travers toutes sortes de promotions.

C'est ce qu'on appelle la manière Nordiques! En effet, l'organisation avait employé cette stratégie pour essayer de remplir le Colisée durant les années où l'équipe de la NHL en arrachait. Combiné à cela, on annonçait le nombre de billets "vendus" au lieu d'annoncer le nombre de spectateurs présents.

Eh bien, c'est exactement la bullshit qu'on s'est fait servir par Québecor, hier.
Probablement obsédé par l'obligation de renvoyer une image parfaite aux gouverneurs de la ligue nationale de hockey, Québecor n'a pas voulu prendre la chance de laisser aux seuls amateurs des Remparts et aux payeurs de taxes curieux de voir le Centre Vidéotron, le soin de définir le portrait qui serait tiré de l'inauguration.

Tous les billets devaient être "vendus" en moins d'une heure, un point c'est tout.

Anyway, on ferait ce qu'il faut pour annoncer 18259 spectateurs, fantômes inclus, le soir de l’événement.

Suis-je scandalisé? Franchement, non. Aucun citoyen de la ville de Québec et ancien fan des Nordiques n'a le droit de l'être.

La bullshit Québecor a remplacé la bullshit Aubut.

C'est quand même dommage pour deux raisons, selon moi.

La première étant que même si la vente de billets pour le match inaugural avait pris plus d'une heure, le centre Vidéotron aurait accueilli 18259 spectateurs qui, à fortiori, auraient vraiment voulu être là.

La seconde raison, c'est évidemment le spectacle désolant de ces nombreux bancs vides alors qu'on annonçait pompeusement une salle comble.

Le mensonge était flagrant et gênant.

L'expérience des Nordiques nous l'a amplement enseigné. Les gens qui se font donner des billets sont beaucoup moins empressés à se déplacer pour assister aux événements. Ils sont tout simplement moins assidus.

Labeaume nous dira-t-il que les chiffres de Québecor sont gonflés, comme il l’a fait pour Expo Québec? Certainement pas, car il n'a pas intérêt à le faire.

Rappelez-vous que la ville doit éponger 50% du déficit d'exploitation de l'amphithéâtre, le cas échéant, et ce, jusqu'à effacement complet du loyer payé par Québecor, tant qu'il n'y aura pas de club de la NHL dans le building.

La bullshit Labeaume s'additionnera donc à celle de Québecor.

À court terme, ce n'est pas une si mauvaise nouvelle car Québecor sera bien mal venu de présenter des chiffres déficitaire alors que publiquement il exagère les chiffres des assistances. Ça peut même "protéger" la ville, en quelque sorte.

Toutefois, à long terme, le mensonge ne pourra indéfiniment gommer la réalité qui, elle, n'aura jamais changé.

Raison de plus pour que nous souhaitions tous, ardemment, que Québecor réussisse à attirer la NHL, le plus rapidement possible.

Et cela n'a rien à voir avec l'amour du hockey.

Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
13 septembre 2015

Illustration du délire médiatique suivant la mort de l'enfant migrant, Ailan Kurdi

Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
10 septembre 2015

Patrick Moore, co-fondateur de Greenpeace, à propos du CO2.

Patrick Moore a quitté Greenpeace lorsqu'il s'est aperçu que la politique avait pris le pas sur la science, au sein de l'ONG



Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
28 août 2015

Anne-Marie Dussault démasquée

Un homme passe en entrevue à l'émission 24/60 sur RDI.

Il est là parce qu'il amasse des fonds pour les femmes victimes de viol et d'exploitation sexuelle afin de les sortir de leur enfer et pour les soigner.

Voici la fin de l'entrevue où, bien malgré elle, Anne-Marie Dussault dévoile le mépris qu'elle a pour Stephen Harper et les juifs orthodoxe en passant par un lien douteux. Malaise...




Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
26 août 2015

Black lives matter's bullshit (A mother really aware of the hypocrisy)

Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
23 août 2015

#AuditSuzuki

Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
20 août 2015

La réponse la plus intelligente et la plus finement exprimée par un politicien... Oups, une politicienne. (Let's meet with Carly Fiorina)

Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
12 août 2015

I’m being prosecuted for calling human rights commissions “crazy”

Nobel Prize-Winning Scientist Who Endorsed Obama Now Says Prez. is Ridiculous & Dead Wrong on Global Warming

By: Marc Morano - Climate DepotJuly 6, 2015 8:34 PM

Climate Depot Exclusive

Dr. Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Prize-Winner for physics in 1973, declared his dissent on man-made global warming claims at a Nobel forum on July 1, 2015.
“I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem,” Dr. Giaever announced during his speech titled “Global Warming Revisited.”

Giaever, a former professor at the School of Engineering and School of Science Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, received the 1973 physics Nobel for his work on quantum tunneling. Giaever delivered his remarks at the 65th Nobel Laureate Conference in Lindau, Germany, which drew 65 recipients of the prize. Giaever is also featured in the new documentary “Climate Hustle”, set for release in Fall 2015.

Giaever was one of President Obama’s key scientific supporters in 2008 when he joined over 70 Nobel Science Laureates in endorsing Obama in an October 29, 2008 open letter. Giaever signed his name to the letter which read in part: “The country urgently needs a visionary leader…We are convinced that Senator Barack Obama is such a leader, and we urge you to join us in supporting him.”

But seven years after signing the letter, Giaever now mocks President Obama for warning that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change”. Giaever called it a “ridiculous statement.”

“That is what he said. That is a ridiculous statement,” Giaever explained.

“I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong. Dead wrong,” Giaever said.

“How can he say that? I think Obama is a clever person, but he gets bad advice. Global warming is all wet,” he added.

“Obama said last year that 2014 is hottest year ever. But it’s not true. It’s not the hottest,” Giaever noted. [Note: Other scientists have reversed themselves on climate change.

The Nobel physicist questioned the basis for rising carbon dioxide fears.
“When you have a theory and the theory does not agree with the experiment then you have to cut out the theory. You were wrong with the theory,” Giaever explained.

Global Warming ‘a new religion’

Giaever said his climate research was eye opening. “I was horrified by what I found” after researching the issue in 2012, he noted.

“Global warming really has become a new religion. Because you cannot discuss it. It’s not proper. It is like the Catholic Church.”

Concern Over ‘Successful’ UN Climate Treaty

“I am worried very much about the [UN] conference in Paris in November. I really worry about that. Because the [2009 UN] conference was in Copenhagen and that almost became a disaster but nothing got decided. But now I think that the people who are alarmist are in a very strong position,” Giaever said.

“The facts are that in the last 100 years we have measured the temperatures it has gone up .8 degrees and everything in the world has gotten better. So how can they say it’s going to get worse when we have the evidence? We live longer, better health, and better everything. But if it goes up another .8 degrees we are going to die I guess,” he noted.

“I would say that the global warming is basically a non-problem. Just leave it alone and it will take care of itself. It is almost very hard for me to understand why almost every government in Europe — except for Polish government — is worried about global warming. It must be politics.”

“So far we have left the world in better shape than when we arrived, and this will continue with one exception — we have to stop wasting huge, I mean huge amounts of money on global warming. We have to do that or that may take us backwards. People think that is sustainable but it is not sustainable.

On Global Temperatures & CO2

Giaever noted that global temperatures have halted for the past 18 plus years.

The Great Pause lengthens again: Global temperature update: The Pause is now 18 years 3 months (219 months)

Giaever accused NASA and federal scientists of “fiddling” with temperatures.

“They can fiddle with the data. That is what NASA does.”

“You cannot believe the people — the alarmists — who say CO2 is a terrible thing. Its not true, its absolutely not true,” Giaever continued while showing a slide asking: ‘Do you believe CO2 is a major climate gas?’

“I think the temperature has been amazingly stable. What is the optimum temperature of the earth? Is that the temperature we have right now? That would be a miracle. No one has told me what the optimal temperature of the earth should be,” he said.

“How can you possibly measure the average temperature for the whole earth and come up with a fraction of a degree. I think the average temperature of earth is equal to the emperor’s new clothes. How can you think it can measure this to a fraction of a degree? It’s ridiculous,” he added.

Silencing Debate

Giaever accused Nature Magazine of “wanting to cash in on the [climate] fad.”

“My friends said I should not make fun of Nature because then they won’t publish my papers,” he explained.

“No one mentions how important CO2 is for plant growth. It’s a wonderful thing. Plants are really starving. They don’t talk about how good it is for agriculture that CO2 is increasing,” he added.

Extreme Weather claims

“The other thing that amazes me is that when you talk about climate change it is always going to be the worst. It’s got to be better someplace for heaven’s sake. It can’t always be to the worse,” he said.
“Then comes the clincher. If climate change does not scare people we can scare people talking about the extreme weather,” Giaever said.

“For the last hundred years, the ocean has risen 20 cm — but for the previous hundred years the ocean also has risen 20 cm and for the last 300 years, the ocean has also risen 20 cm per 100 years. So there is no unusual rise in sea level. And to be sure you understand that I will repeat it. There is no unusual rise in sea level,” Giaever said.

“If anything we have entered period of low hurricanes. These are the facts,” he continued.

“You don’t’ have to even be a scientist to look at these figures and you understand what it says,” he added.

“Same thing is for tornadoes. We are in a low period on in U.S.”

Media Hype

“What people say is not true. I spoke to a journalist with [German newspaper Die Welt yesterday…and I asked how many articles he published that says global warming is a good thing. He said I probably don’t publish them at all. Its always a negative. Always,” Giever said.

Energy Poverty

“They say refugees are trying to cross the Mediterranean. These people are not fleeing global warming, they are fleeing poverty,” he noted.

“If you want to help Africa, help them out of poverty, do not try to build solar cells and windmills,” he added.

“Are you wasting money on solar cells and windmills rather than helping people? These people have been misled. It costs money in the end to that. Windmills cost money.”

“Cheap energy is what made us so rich and now suddenly people don’t want it anymore.”

“People say oil companies are the big bad people. I don’t understand why they are worse than the windmill companies. General Electric makes windmills. They don’t tell you that they are not economical because they make money on it. But nobody protests GE, but they protest Exxon who makes oil,” he noted.

Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society (APS) on September 13, 2011 in disgust over the group’s promotion of man-made global warming fears.

In addition to Giaever, other prominent scientists have resigned from APS over its stance on man-made global warming.

Giaever has become a vocal dissenter from the alleged “consensus” regarding man-made climate fears. He was featured prominently in the 2009 U.S. Senate Report of (then) Over 700 Dissenting International Scientists from Man-made global warming. Giaever, who is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and won the 1973 Nobel Prize for Physics.

Giaever was also one of more than 100 co-signers in a March 30, 2009 letter to President Obama that was critical of his stance on global warming.

Giaever is featured on page 89 of the 321 page of Climate Depot’s more than 1000 dissenting scientist report (updated from U.S. Senate Report). Dr. Giaever was quoted declaring himself a man-made global warming dissenter. “I am a skeptic…Global warming has become a new religion,” Giaever declared. “I am Norwegian, should I really worry about a little bit of warming? I am unfortunately becoming an old man. We have heard many similar warnings about the acid rain 30 years ago and the ozone hole 10 years ago or deforestation but the humanity is still around,” Giaever explained. “Global warming has become a new religion. We frequently hear about the number of scientists who support it. But the number is not important: only whether they are correct is important. We don’t really know what the actual effect on the global temperature is. There are better ways to spend the money,” he concluded.

Giaever also told the New York Times in 2010 that global warming “can’t be discussed — just like religion…there is NO unusual rise in the ocean level, so what where and what is the big problem?”


Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
7 juillet 2015 


 By: Marc Morano - Climate Depot 

L'opportunisme et le spectacle

Lorsque Julie Snyder a eu besoin d'être drôle, elle s'est mise en couple avec Stéphane Laporte.

Lorsque Julie Snyder a eu besoin de faire carrière en France, elle a embrassé Michel Drucker.

Lorsque Julie Snyder a eu besoin de contrats de production chez TVA, elle s'est unie a Pierre-Karl Péladeau.

Maintenant, Julie Snyder a besoin de crédits d'impôt...

Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
30 juin 2015

La poule aux oeufs climatiques

Le blogue de Reynald Du Berger
Climat, science et société

Dans les années 1970, quand je faisais mes premières armes comme membre d’une équipe de recherche, j’ai passé des soirées entières à rédiger des demandes de subventions avec mes collègues. Nos chances de succès dépendaient entre autres de notre capacité à démontrer au jury, comment notre recherche allait aider à résoudre des problèmes criants pour les Canadiens et ainsi contribuer à leur bien-être. Je devais par exemple, convaincre les examinateurs que la connaissance de l’épaisseur et de la structure de la croûte terrestre à travers le Front du Grenville aiderait à l’exploration minière dans les régions de l’Abitibi et de Chibougamau. Nous utilisions même les prévisions du Club de Rome, sur l’épuisement des ressources minérales, aussi fausses que celles du GIEC sur l’apocalypse climatique, pour justifier nos recherches.

Le 25 novembre 1988, un tremblement de terre important m’offrait une occasion en or de mettre à niveau mon laboratoire de sismologie. Des milliers de personnes au Saguenay étaient sous le choc. Quelques dizaines de millions$ de dommages matériels seulement, mais beaucoup de peur, d’angoisse, qui se traduisaient par des insomnies. Un soir, on a réuni des centaines de personnes dans le sous-sol d’une église, afin que les psychologues tentent d’apaiser leurs craintes. En vain. Ces gens voulaient plutôt entendre des sismologues, des spécialistes qui leur expliquent ce qui s’était passé et ce qui risquait d’arriver. Comment agir avant, pendant et après un séisme. En plus de mon enseignement, j’avais deux nouvelles tâches qui me tombaient dessus inopinément : je devais relever quotidiennement mes sismographes sur le terrain et répondre à cette population angoissée, par des présentations sur les séismes avec diapositives dans les écoles et foyers de personnes âgées. Une fois, je suis sorti d’une de ces séances avec une tourtière et une paire de pantoufles en phantex! Une mère m’a téléphoné pour me remercier d’avoir visité la classe de 2ième année de son fils; « pour la première fois, il a dormi tout seul dans sa chambre au sous-sol » me dit-elle avec reconnaissance et émotion. Une dame artiste peintre, dont l’atelier se trouvait dans le sous-sol de sa demeure, n’y était pas retournée depuis un mois. Je l’ai prise par la main et nous y sommes descendus ensemble; un des murs avait été enfoncé par le mouvement sismique. Elle y descendait toute seule le lendemain.  Il m’est arrivé de trouver dans ma case à courrier à l’université, des petits messages d’encouragement  de la part de compagnons ou compagnes de travail qui me disaient être fiers de travailler dans la même université que moi. J’aurais pu me faire une grosse tête et surtout profiter de la peur et de l’angoisse de ces gens pour leur demander de me « récompenser » au moyen de subventions de recherche. J’ai plutôt choisi de faire passer le bien-être de mes concitoyens avant mes intérêts personnels. J’ai obtenu par la suite de généreuses subventions de la part de mon université, du gouvernement et de firmes privées, sans vraiment les avoir sollicitées.

C’est Richard Lindzen, climatologue au MIT qui rappelait combien la peur est un outil efficace pour aller chercher des subventions de recherche. Ce fut d’abord la peur du cancer, puis celle des soviétiques (course à l’espace et surtout aux armements) et maintenant peur du réchauffement climatique d’origine anthropique. Vous avez davantage de chances d’obtenir de l’argent de quelqu’un en lui braquant un revolver sur la tempe qu’en sollicitant simplement sa gratitude nous rappelle Lindzen. Et si en plus de leur faire peur, vous les rançonnez à la manière de certains biologistes forestiers, en leur offrant la rémission annuelle (les Pâques carboniques) de leurs péchés carboniques contre une pénitence imposée selon leurs émissions, vos chances sont encore meilleures. Plusieurs chercheurs à l’éthique élastique ont compris cela et l’exploitent, et pas seulement des scientifiques du climat, mais des chercheurs dans des domaines aussi éloignés – en apparence- du climat que l’hydrogéologie, la foresterie, la zoologie, la botanique, la glaciologie, la géologie, la géophysique, la médecine, et même l’anthropologie, etc… Comment un hydrogéologue peut-il en arriver à identifier un changement climatique global pour expliquer le comportement d’une nappe phréatique locale? Comment un de mes voisins hydraulicien peut-il prédire que les crues de ma rivière seront ni de plus en plus fréquentes et de plus en plus sévères, à cause d’événements météorologiques « extrêmes » causés bien sûr par le réchauffement climatique? Et cette hausse « accélérée » du niveau des océans qui forcera des millions de « réfugiés du climat » à exiger asile dans les pays riches et capitalistes, responsables de leur malheur… ça ne vous émeut point, bande de climato-sceptiques!?

Quelqu’un a-t-il fait une étude sur le nombre de demandes de subventions de recherche provenant de chercheurs dans tous ces domaines, de la médecine à la botanique, en passant par la géologie, qui arriment leurs demandes de subventions à ce pseudo-problème de réchauffement climatique anthropique? Ils ont flairé une énorme et bien grasse poule aux œufs d’or et ils ont bien l’intention de continuer de l’exploiter, aussi longtemps que leurs concitoyens auront peur. Mois je tente de lui tordre le cou. 

MÔMAN !… VIENS M’CHARCHER !!!

Le blogue de Reynald Du Berger
Climat, science et société

C’est le cri déchirant qu’on a tous entendu dans les médias, surtout à Radio-Canada. Cri canadien , mais poussé surtout par des Québécois, provenant du camp « de base » situé en effet à la base de l’Everest. Plutôt que nous montrer des Népalais braves et courageux aux prises avec leur tâche de venir en aide à leurs concitoyens victimes de ce drame , les médias de Radio-Canada ont préféré nous montrer et nous faire entendre les plaintes larmoyantes de pleurnichards qui reprochent à leur gouvernemaman canadien de ne pas les avoir pris en charge et sortis illico du pétrin dans lequel ils se sont pourtant fourrés en toute connaissance de cause.

Mais qui sont ces Canadiens « pognés » au Népal par des routes bloquées par des avalanches et des glissements de terrain? De jeunes cadres en congé? des étudiants en sciences molles de l’UQAM en « sabbatique » entre deux manifs? et qui veulent démontrer ainsi leurs prouesses d’alpinistes à des amis en grimpant sur des tas de cailloux qu’une chèvre peut escalader plus rapidement et avec plus d’élégance? Si seulement ils s’agissait de travailleurs bénévoles humanitaires. Non, la plupart ne sont là que pour le « trip » et pour ainsi épater leur galerie.

Ont-ils seulement pris le temps de consulter le site « conseils aux voyageurs canadiens » avant de choisir d’aller tenter cette aventure?

J’ai visité une soixantaine de pays, dont plusieurs qualifiés de « pays de cul » par les proches qui voulaient m’en dissuader. Plusieurs de ces pays – Libye, Syrie, Liban, Iran, Yémen- avaient des alertes rouges. J’y suis allé quand-même, en assumant les risques. Avant de partir, j’ai prévenu mes proches et ma famille, que si jamais j’étais dans la merde, il ne fallait pas demander au gouvernement canadien de me venir en aide. J’avais lu les consignes claires du gouvernement, j’avais choisi d’y aller quand-même et j’assumais les risques, risques de catastrophes naturelles ou d’enlèvements comme au Yémen.

À Bosra en Syrie, j’ai été encerclé par un groupe de jeunes de l’Université de Damas qui ont finalement ouvert le cercle qu’ils avaient formé autour de moi, mais seulement après que j’eus prononcé un serment d’allégeance à Ben Laden – c’est la seule fois où j’ai parlé arabe- . J’ai assumé le risque. En Iran, j’ai été repéré deux fois par la police religieuse et il aurait pu m’en cuire vu les contacts pourtant interdits que j’ai eus avec des ingénieurs et étudiants iraniens.

Voici , pour les exaltés et potentiels ascenseurs d’Everest qui ne peuvent se retenir, la consigne canadienne pour le Népal.

Voici des consignes que j’ai choisi d’ignorer mais en assumant pleinement les conséquences.  »

YÉMEN – ÉVITEZ TOUT VOYAGE

Affaires étrangères, Commerce et Développement Canada recommande d’éviter tout voyage au Yémen, étant donné que les conditions de sécurité se sont détériorées considérablement et que les étrangers courent des risques extrêmes. Il n’est plus possible de quitter le pays par des moyens commerciaux. Si vous demeurez au Yémen, trouvez un abri sauf et restez-y, sauf si vous pouvez trouver un moyen sécuritaire de quitter le pays. La capacité du gouvernement du Canada à offrir de l’assistance consulaire au Yémen est extrêmement limitée. Voir Sécurité pour plus de renseignements.

LIBYE – ÉVITEZ TOUT VOYAGE

Affaires étrangères, Commerce et Développement Canada recommande d’éviter tout voyage en Libye en raison de l’insécurité persistante dans l’ensemble du pays : un conflit armé y fait rage depuis longtemps, il y a un risque élevé d’attentats terroristes, la situation politique est imprévisible et le taux de criminalité élevé. Si vous vous trouvez actuellement en Libye, vous devriez quitter ce pays dès maintenant par le moyen le plus sûr.

La capacité du gouvernement du Canada à fournir des services consulaires aux citoyens canadiens qui se trouvent en Libye est extrêmement limitée. L’ambassade du Canada en Libye, à Tripoli, a suspendu ses activités jusqu’à nouvel ordre. Les représentants canadiens ont quitté le pays. Les Canadiens qui se trouvent en Libye devraient communiquer avec l’ambassade du Canada en Tunisie, à Tunis, ou avec le Centre de surveillance et d’intervention d’urgence à Ottawa pour obtenir une assistance consulaire d’urgence. Il est vivement conseillé aux Canadiens de s’inscrire auprès du service d’Inscription des Canadiens à l’étranger.

Les Canadiens qui se rendent en Libye ou qui y séjournent malgré cet avertissement doivent s’assurer que leurs documents de voyage sont en règle, limiter leurs déplacements et se tenir au courant des dernières nouvelles. Des incidents violents peuvent se produire soudainement, et l’on court de grands risques de se trouver au mauvais endroit au mauvais moment. Faites preuve d’une extrême prudence, ayez un plan d’urgence et soyez constamment sur vos gardes.

Faudra-il des panneaux de rappel à ce fameux « camp de base » à l’adresse des Canadiens «  Grimpez à vos risques et périls » après la mise en garde ignorée par plusieurs et pourtant claire pour plusieurs pays à la situation politique ou géologique instable?

Les Québécois , contrairement au reste de la francophonie, ont l’habitude de regrouper des expressions qu’ils ne savent pas utiliser comme « ça m’interpelle, ça me gêne, ça m’attriste, ça me chagrine, ça me touche, ça me dérange, ça m’émeut , ça me peine etc » par une seule expression passe-partout, « ça vient m’charcher! »

Le sort de ces pauvres Népalais me chagrine, mais ne reprochons pas au Canada ne ne pas aller « charcher » ces aventuriers téméraires qui n’ont même pas pris le soin de lire le mode d’emploi du bourbier dans lequel ils se sont volontairement enlisés.


Le blogue de Reynald Du Berger Climat, science et société 

100 reasons why climate change is natural

HERE are the 100 reasons, released in a dossier issued by the European Foundation, why climate change is natural and not man-made:

By CHARLOTTE MEREDITH
00:00, Tue, Nov 20, 2012


1) There is “no real scientific proof” that the current warming is caused by the rise of greenhouse gases from man’s activity.

2) Man-made carbon dioxide emissions throughout human history constitute less than 0.00022 percent of the total naturally emitted from the mantle of the earth during geological history.

3) Warmer periods of the Earth’s history came around 800 years before rises in CO2 levels.

4) After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions but global temperatures fell for four decades after 1940.


After World War II, there was a huge surge in recorded CO2 emissions

5) Throughout the Earth’s history, temperatures have often been warmer than now and CO2 levels have often been higher – more than ten times as high.

6) Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time.

7) The 0.7C increase in the average global temperature over the last hundred years is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term, natural climate trends.

8) The IPCC theory is driven by just 60 scientists and favourable reviewers not the 4,000 usually cited.

9) Leaked e-mails from British climate scientists – in a scandal known as “Climate-gate” - suggest that that has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming

10) A large body of scientific research suggests that the sun is responsible for the greater share of climate change during the past hundred years.

11) Politicians and activiists claim rising sea levels are a direct cause of global warming but sea levels rates have been increasing steadily since the last ice age 10,000 ago

12) Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London says climate change is too complicated to be caused by just one factor, whether CO2 or clouds

13) Peter Lilley MP said last month that “fewer people in Britain than in any other country believe in the importance of global warming. That is despite the fact that our Government and our political class—predominantly—are more committed to it than their counterparts in any other country in the world”.

14) In pursuit of the global warming rhetoric, wind farms will do very little to nothing to reduce CO2 emissions

15) Professor Plimer, Professor of Geology and Earth Sciences at the University of Adelaide, stated that the idea of taking a single trace gas in the atmosphere, accusing it and finding it guilty of total responsibility for climate change, is an “absurdity”

16) A Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist, Willie Soon, said he is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in papers that support the proposition that the earth faces a climate crisis caused by global warming.

17) The science of what determines the earth’s temperature is in fact far from settled or understood.

18) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, CO2 is a minor greenhouse gas, unlike water vapour which is tied to climate concerns, and which we can’t even pretend to control

19) A petition by scientists trying to tell the world that the political and media portrayal of global warming is false was put forward in the Heidelberg Appeal in 1992. Today, more than 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners, from 106 countries have signed it.

20) It is claimed the average global temperature increased at a dangerously fast rate in the 20th century but the recent rate of average global temperature rise has been between 1 and 2 degrees C per century - within natural rates

21) Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, Poland says the earth’s temperature has more to do with cloud cover and water vapor than CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.

22) There is strong evidence from solar studies which suggests that the Earth’s current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades

23) It is myth that receding glaciers are proof of global warming as glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for many centuries

24) It is a falsehood that the earth’s poles are warming because that is natural variation and while the western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer we also see that the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder

25) The IPCC claims climate driven “impacts on biodiversity are significant and of key relevance” but those claims are simply not supported by scientific research

26) The IPCC threat of climate change to the world’s species does not make sense as wild species are at least one million years old, which means they have all been through hundreds of climate cycles

27) Research goes strongly against claims that CO2-induced global warming would cause catastrophic disintegration of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets.

28) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels are our best hope of raising crop yields to feed an ever-growing population

29) The biggest climate change ever experienced on earth took place around 700 million years ago

30) The slight increase in temperature which has been observed since 1900 is entirely consistent with well-established, long-term natural climate cycles

31) Despite activist concerns over CO2 levels, rising CO2 levels of some so-called “greenhouse gases” may be contributing to higher oxygen levels and global cooling, not warming

32) Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures

33) Today’s CO2 concentration of around 385 ppm is very low compared to most of the earth’s history – we actually live in a carbon-deficient atmosphere

34) It is a myth that CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas because greenhouse gases form about 3% of the atmosphere by volume, and CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere

35) It is a myth that computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming because computer models can be made to “verify” anything

36) There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that global warming will cause more storms and other weather extremes

37) One statement deleted from a UN report in 1996 stated that “none of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases”

38) The world “warmed” by 0.07 +/- 0.07 degrees C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 degrees C expected by the IPCC

39) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says “it is likely that future tropical cyclones (typhoons and hurricanes) will become more intense” but there has been no increase in the intensity or frequency of tropical cyclones globally

40) Rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be shown not only to have a negligible effect on the Earth’s many ecosystems, but in some cases to be a positive help to many organisms

41) Researchers who compare and contrast climate change impact on civilizations found warm periods are beneficial to mankind and cold periods harmful

42) The Met Office asserts we are in the hottest decade since records began but this is precisely what the world should expect if the climate is cyclical

43) Rising CO2 levels increase plant growth and make plants more resistant to drought and pests

44) The historical increase in the air’s CO2 content has improved human nutrition by raising crop yields during the past 150 years

45) The increase of the air’s CO2 content has probably helped lengthen human lifespans since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution

46) The IPCC alleges that “climate change currently contributes to the global burden of disease and premature deaths” but the evidence shows that higher temperatures and rising CO2 levels has helped global populations

47) In May of 2004, the Russian Academy of Sciences published a report concluding that the Kyoto Protocol has no scientific grounding at all.

48) The “Climate-gate” scandal pointed to a expensive public campaign of disinformation and the denigration of scientists who opposed the belief that CO2 emissions were causing climate change

49) The head of Britain’s climate change watchdog has predicted households will need to spend up to £15,000 on a full energy efficiency makeover if the Government is to meet its ambitious targets for cutting carbon emissions.

50) Wind power is unlikely to be the answer to our energy needs. The wind power industry argues that there are “no direct subsidies” but it involves a total subsidy of as much as £60 per MWh which falls directly on electricity consumers. This burden will grow in line with attempts to achieve Wind power targets, according to a recent OFGEM report.

51) Wind farms are not an efficient way to produce energy. The British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) accepts a figure of 75 per cent back-up power is required.

52) Global temperatures are below the low end of IPCC predictions not at “at the top end of IPCC estimates”

53) Climate alarmists have raised the concern over acidification of the oceans but Tom Segalstad from Oslo University in Norway , and others, have noted that the composition of ocean water – including CO2, calcium, and water – can act as a buffering agent in the acidification of the oceans.

54) The UN’s IPCC computer models of human-caused global warming predict the emergence of a “hotspot” in the upper troposphere over the tropics.  Former researcher in the Australian Department of Climate Change, David Evans, said there is no evidence of such a hotspot

55) The argument that climate change is a of result of global warming caused by human activity is the argument of flat Earthers. 

56) The manner in which US President Barack Obama sidestepped Congress to order emission cuts shows how undemocratic and irrational the entire international decision-making process has become with regards to emission-target setting.

57) William Kininmonth, a former head of the National Climate Centre and a consultant to the World Meteorological Organisation, wrote “the likely extent of global temperature rise from a doubling of CO2 is less than 1C. Such warming is well within the envelope of variation experienced during the past 10,000 years and insignificant in the context of glacial cycles during the past million years, when Earth has been predominantly very cold and covered by extensive ice sheets.”

58) Canada has shown the world targets derived from the existing Kyoto commitments were always unrealistic and did not work for the country.

59) In the lead up to the Copenhagen summit, David Davis MP said of previous climate summits, at Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and Kyoto in 1997 that many had promised greater cuts, but “neither happened”, but we are continuing along the same lines.

60) The UK ’s environmental policy has a long-term price tag of about £55 billion, before taking into account the impact on its economic growth.

61) The UN’s panel on climate change warned that Himalayan glaciers could melt to a fifth of current levels by 2035. J. Graham Cogley a professor at Ontario Trent University, claims this inaccurate stating the UN authors got the date from an earlier report wrong by more than 300 years.

62) Under existing Kyoto obligations the EU has attempted to claim success, while actually increasing emissions by 13 per cent, according to Lord Lawson. In addition the EU has pursued this scheme by purchasing “offsets” from countries such as China paying them billions of dollars to destroy atmospheric pollutants, such as CFC-23, which were manufactured purely in order to be destroyed.

63) It is claimed that the average global temperature was relatively unchanging in pre-industrial times but sky-rocketed since 1900, and will increase by several degrees more over the next 100 years according to Penn State University researcher Michael Mann. There is no convincing empirical evidence that past climate was unchanging, nor that 20th century changes in average global temperature were unusual or unnatural.

64) Michael Mann of Penn State University has actually shown that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age did in fact exist, which contrasts with his earlier work which produced the “hockey stick graph” which showed a constant temperature over the past thousand years or so followed by a recent dramatic upturn.

65) The globe’s current approach to climate change in which major industrialised countries agree to nonsensical targets for their CO2 emissions by a given date, as it has been under the Kyoto system, is very expensive.

66) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had emailed one another about using a “trick” for the sake of concealing a “decline” in temperatures when looking at the history of the Earth’s temperature.

67) Global temperatures have not risen in any statistically-significant sense for 15 years and have actually been falling for nine years. The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed a scientific team had expressed dismay at the fact global warming was contrary to their predictions and admitted their inability to explain it was “a travesty”.

68) The IPCC predicts that a warmer planet will lead to more extreme weather, including drought, flooding, storms, snow, and wildfires. But over the last century, during which the IPCC claims the world experienced more rapid warming than any time in the past two millennia, the world did not experience significantly greater trends in any of these extreme weather events.

69) In explaining the average temperature standstill we are currently experiencing, the Met Office Hadley Centre ran a series of computer climate predictions and found in many of the computer runs there were decade-long standstills but none for 15 years – so it expects global warming to resume swiftly.

70) Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: “The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the Earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope.  Such hysteria (over global warming) simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth.”

71) Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol’s status as the flagship of the fight against climate change it has been a failure.

72) The first phase of the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which ran from 2005 to 2007 was a failure. Huge over-allocation of permits to pollute led to a collapse in the price of carbon from €33 to just €0.20 per tonne meaning the system did not reduce emissions at all.

73) The EU trading scheme, to manage carbon emissions has completely failed and actually allows European businesses to duck out of making their emissions reductions at home by offsetting, which means paying for cuts to be made overseas instead.

74) To date “cap and trade” carbon markets have done almost nothing to reduce emissions.

75) In the United States , the cap-and-trade is an approach designed to control carbon emissions and will impose huge costs upon American citizens via a carbon tax on all goods and services produced in the United States. The average family of four can expect to pay an additional $1700, or £1,043, more each year. It is predicted that the United States will lose more than 2 million jobs as the result of cap-and-trade schemes.

76) Dr Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has indicated that out of the 21 climate models tracked by the IPCC the differences in warming exhibited by those models is mostly the result of different strengths of positive cloud feedback – and that increasing CO2 is insufficient to explain global-average warming in the last 50 to 100 years.

77) Why should politicians devote our scarce resources in a globally competitive world to a false and ill-defined problem, while ignoring the real problems the entire planet faces, such as: poverty, hunger, disease or terrorism.

78) A proper analysis of ice core records from the past 650,000 years demonstrates that temperature increases have come before, and not resulted from, increases in CO2 by hundreds of years.

79) Since the cause of global warming is mostly natural, then there is in actual fact very little we can do about it. (We are still not able to control the sun).

80) A substantial number of the panel of 2,500 climate scientists on the United Nation’s International Panel on Climate Change, which created a statement on scientific unanimity on climate change and man-made global warming, were found to have serious concerns.

81) The UK’s Met Office has been forced this year to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has been shattered by revelations about the data.

82)  Politicians and activists push for renewable energy sources such as wind turbines under the rhetoric of climate change, but it is essentially about money – under the system of Renewable Obligations. Much of the money is paid for by consumers in electricity bills. It amounts to £1 billion a year.

83) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had tampered with their own data so as to conceal inconsistencies and errors. 

84) The “Climate-gate” scandal revealed that a scientific team had campaigned for the removal of a learned journal’s editor, solely because he did not share their willingness to debase science for political purposes.

85) Ice-core data clearly show that temperatures change centuries before concentrations of atmospheric CO2 change. Thus, there appears to be little evidence for insisting that changes in concentrations of CO2 are the cause of past temperature and climate change.

86) There are no experimentally verified processes explaining how CO2 concentrations can fall in a few centuries without falling temperatures – in fact it is changing temperatures which cause changes in CO2 concentrations, which is consistent with experiments that show CO2 is the atmospheric gas most readily absorbed by water.

87) The Government’s Renewable Energy Strategy contains a massive increase in electricity generation by wind power costing around £4 billion a year over the next twenty years. The benefits will be only £4 to £5 billion overall (not per annum). So costs will outnumber benefits by a range of between eleven and seventeen times.

88) Whilst CO2 levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout history, the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased since the beginning of the industrial revolution, and the growth rate has now been constant for the past 25 years.

89) It is a myth that CO2 is a pollutant, because nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere and human beings could not live in 100% nitrogen either: CO2 is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is and CO2 is essential to life.

90) Politicians and climate activists make claims to rising sea levels but certain members in the IPCC chose an area to measure in Hong Kong that is subsiding. They used the record reading of 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level.

91) The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998.

92) If one factors in non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements show little, if any, global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).

93) US President Barack Obama pledged to cut emissions by 2050 to equal those of 1910 when there were 92 million Americans. In 2050, there will be 420 million Americans, so Obama’s promise means that emissions per head will be approximately what they were in 1875. It simply will not happen.

94) The European Union has already agreed to cut emissions by 20 percent to 2020, compared with 1990 levels, and is willing to increase the target to 30 percent. However, these are unachievable and the EU has already massively failed with its Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), as EU emissions actually rose by 0.8 percent from 2005 to 2006 and are known to be well above the Kyoto goal.

95) Australia has stated it wants to slash greenhouse emissions by up to 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020, but the pledges were so unpopular that the country’s Senate has voted against the carbon trading Bill, and the Opposition’s Party leader has now been ousted by a climate change sceptic.

96) Canada plans to reduce emissions by 20 percent compared with 2006 levels by 2020, representing approximately a 3 percent cut from 1990 levels but it simultaneously defends its Alberta tar sands emissions and its record as one of the world’s highest per-capita emissions setters.

97) India plans to reduce the ratio of emissions to production by 20-25 percent compared with 2005 levels by 2020, but all Government officials insist that since India has to grow for its development and poverty alleviation, it has to emit, because the economy is driven by carbon.

98) The Leipzig Declaration in 1996, was signed by 110 scientists who said: “We – along with many of our fellow citizens – are apprehensive about the climate treaty conference scheduled for Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997” and “based on all the evidence available to us, we cannot subscribe to the politically inspired world view that envisages climate catastrophes and calls for hasty actions.”

99) A US Oregon Petition Project stated “We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of CO2, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”

100) A report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change concluded “We find no support for the IPCC’s claim that climate observations during the twentieth century are either unprecedented or provide evidence of an anthropogenic effect on climate.”


Yannick Gagné
Libre@penseur
22 avril 2015