The IPCC’s Foul-Weather Friends

Hooray for plain speech: the Australian government is rejecting any measures of “socialism masquerading as environmentalism”.[i] It also rules out signing up for any more “climate change” fees at the Warsaw UN climate talk-fest this week.

The less-developed-countries with their well-developed begging-bowl techniques are seeking $US100b a year in special aid to deal with climate change. This is a step up from the $US30 billion new and extra climate money they got – or were supposed to get – from 2010-12 under UN  “Fast-Start” financing. (First World donors do a good job scamming aid to divert it back to their own commercial providers).[ii]

Global warming in fact stopped about 17 years ago, and future temperature change may be up, down or sideways, depending on whom in the polyglot community of ‘climate scientists’ one talks to. Hence the LDCs don’t have a strong case for getting lots of our money to abate climate problems.

However, climate change is not the point. The point is the money. Don’t take my word for it, the climate people have ‘fessed up. The world’s investigative-reporter hordes have let those confessions go through unremarked.

Ex-Prime Minister John Howard belled the cat only last week. He said,

“The flood of emails coming from the University of East Anglia, the admitted errors regarding the Himalayan Glaciers, as well as the nakedly political agendas of some of those allegedly giving impartial scientific advice have degraded the image of the IPCC as the unchallengeable body of scientific experts on global warming. For example, Otto Edenhoper, Co-Chairman of the IPCC Working Group III, and a lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, released in 2007, demonstrated his commitment to impartial scientific enquiry with his remarkable statement, “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.” Revealing his real agenda he has stated: “One must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.”

I’ve been a   connoisseur of such statements for half a decade. Here’s one from the top, from the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.  In a 5000-word interview with Nature he said his “cause” was not the global warming threat but something more important.[iii]

“I am not going to rest easy until I have articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development. That’s the real issue. Climate change is just a part of it.” [emphasis added].

The “major structural changes” he wants involve transferring wealth from the West to developing countries — such as India — leading to a convergence of living standards. The West thereby pays for its past sins of emission. Climate Professor Fred Singer waspishly described this as shifting money “from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor ones”.[iv]

Howard’s suspicion’s about the IPCC’s integrity, were as usual, perspicacious.

Dr Pachauri’s IPCC  was reviewed in 2010 by the InterAcademy Council in the wake of the Himalayan glaciers howlers in the 2007 IPCC report. The council’s recommendations included instituting a conflict-of-interest policy – surprisingly, a body influencing trillion-dollar programs had existed for 22 years without one. But Pachauri exempted all the scientists working on the Fifth Report (released last month) from conflict-of-interest guidelines because it wouldn’t be ‘fair’ to rope them into it retrospectively.[v]

How far ‘conflict of interest’ tests should go is a moot point, but I’d say that IPCC authors should at least be required to disclose any past payments from or affiliations to activist bodies, such as WWF. It was a WWF report, as it happened, that generated the Himalaya howlers.

Lo and behold, Pachauri’s own research institute TERI in New Delhi,  last February accepted money from WWF to help finance a TERI conference, as exposed by investigative journalist Donna Laframboise. [vi] If we liken Pachauri to a judge presiding over a science trial, it would be as if a defendant interrupted his murder trial to offer a donation to the judge’s pigeon-fancier society – and the judge accepted it.

John Howard has remarked on the socialist agenda implicit in the climate scare. But the agenda’s roots go further, to some sort of world governance ambition.

Robert Muller, former UN Assistant Secretary General, wrote in April, 1999: “In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government …  There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems… are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet.  We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways.”[vii]

In the early years of the warming scare, before skepticism gained a real head of steam, some very unguarded comments were made in high places. (I have sourced the quotes, to weed out any fictional ones).

Christine Stewart, then Canadian Minister of the Environment, speaking before editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald in 1998, said, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”[viii]

Stewart headed the Canadian delegation to the Kyoto climate change negotiations and signed the Kyoto Accord on behalf of Canada. Peter Menzies, of the Calgary Herald, quoted her as saying a year later that  she still did not know what the cost of Kyoto would be to Canada. She guessed it would be a two to three percent hit to Canada’s GDP over 20 years, but as Menzies put it, “Oh heck, what’s a loss of $ 100 billion dollars between friends if it’s going to help those nice Indonesians?” Canada would also be helping China to industrialise. Menzies: “Well, if it’s good for the Commies, I say, why not? I mean, what harm have they ever done?”[ix]

The summiteers at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit  were exceptional in candour. This summit got the global climate scare rolling. Former Senator Timothy Wirth, then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, told attendees: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”[x]

Wirth helped establish Al Gore’s 1988 Senate Science, Technology and Space hearings. Wirth later told PBS Frontline: “We called the Weather Bureau and found out what was historically the hottest day of the summer…so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it…we went in the night before and opened all the windows so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room.”[xi]

Wirth is the Vice Chair (until last January, President) of the United Nations Foundation and the Better World Fund.  The UNF, while supporting many good causes, also lobbies for funds for climate change zealotry.

Also speaking at the Rio conference was US Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick, who then headed the policy divisions of the State Department. He agreed that the embryo Kyoto Protocol should be approved whether it had anything to do with climate change or not: ” A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect.”[xii]

Another old-timer from the climate industry is Maurice Strong, head of the United Nations Environment Program when it joined with the World Meteorological Foundation to set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  He was the leading figure in organizing the Rio Summit.   At Rio, he suggested:  “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse. Isn’t it our job to bring that about?” [xiii]

Strong, co-father of the IPCC, didn’t exit the climate scene covered in glory. He was sidekick to then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. A 2005 inquiry found that in 1997, during the UN’s oil-for-food program, Strong had endorsed a USD1 million check to himself, from a crooked South Korean businessman via a Jordanian bank. Strong hastily stepped down from the UN and lit out to live in his Beijing apartment, in order to “sideline himself until the cloud was removed”. He claimed: “It just happened to coincide with the publicity surrounding my so-called nefarious activities. I had no involvement at all in Oil-for-Food … I just stayed out of it.”[xiv]

Annan  delivered this touching tribute to Strong: “I am grateful that I had the benefit of your global vision and wise counsel on many critical issues… Your unwavering commitment to the environment, multilateralism and peaceful resolution of conflicts is especially appreciated.”[xv]

Annan’s son Kojo was a marketing consultant to a Swiss-based inspection company Cotecna, which in 1998 won a $4.8m contract under the program. Kojo successfully sued the  London Sunday Times  for claiming he had confessed to wrong doing.

Kofi Annan was succeeded as UN Secretary-General by Ban Ki-moon, whom our ex-Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd used to call “Spanky Banky”, according to Barrie Cassidy’s book Party Thieves. Mr Ban does deserve a spanking for lusting after world hegemony. In the lead-up to the dud 2009 Copenhagen summit, he urged:    “A deal must include an equitable global governance structure. All countries must have a voice in how resources are deployed and managed.”[xvi]

The mainstream media has always gone along with the official scares.

Jim Sibbison, environmental journalist and former public relations official for the US Environmental Protection Agency, ‘fessed up in 1988: “We routinely wrote scare stories…Our press reports were more or less true…We were out to whip the public into a frenzy about the environment.”[xvii]

Ecologist Dr Patrick Moore was a co-founder of Greenpeace. He eventually parted ways and is now a source of such quotes as:

“We do not have any scientific proof that we are the cause of the global warming that has occurred in the last 200 years…The alarmism is driving us through scare tactics to adopt energy policies that are going to create a huge amount of energy poverty among the poor people. It’s not good for people and its not good for the environment…In a warmer world we can produce more food.”

Moore was asked who is promoting man-made climate fears and what are their motives? He replied:

“Scientists seeking grant money, media seeking headlines, universities seeking huge grants from major institutions, foundations, environmental groups, politicians wanting to make it look like they are saving future generations. And all of these people have converged on this issue…

  “There are many thousands of scientists’ who reject man-made global warming fears…It’s all based on computer models and predictions. We do not actually have a crystal ball, it is a mythical object.”[xviii]

True believers think the IPCC is run by the world’s top scientists, but the reality, as John Howard has twigged, is quite different (ignoring that national politicians on the IPCC have the final say over scientists anyway). The top-tier IPCC Bureau  oversees all IPCC publications. Its vice-chairs currently include a rep from Sierra Leone; and the Working Group 111 has co-chairs from Cuba and Mali, enough said.

Vice-chairs of Working Groups include persons from Morocco, Iran, Malaysia, Madagascar, Maldives (huh?), Peru, Sudan, and Mexico. The 14-member Task Force of National Greenhouse Gas Inventories includes persons from Zimbabwe (yes, you read that correctly), Bulgaria, Syria (yes, Syria), Tanzania, Thailand and Indonesia. Why? Because these plum science jobs have to be rationed out to both LDCs and people of the feminine gender, never mind screening in only top scientists.

The IPCC cast has included some odd thinkers. One of them is Australia’s own Emeritus Professor of Medicine David Shearman, an IPCC assessor for the third and fourth reports and founder of Doctors for the Environment Australia. In a book co-authored with a Joseph Smith in 2007 (the same year as the IPCC fourth report), they wrote:

Government in the future will be based upon . . . a supreme office of the biosphere. The office will comprise specially trained philosopher/ecologists. These guardians will either rule themselves or advise an authoritarian government of policies based on their ecological training and philosophical sensitivities. These guardians will be specially trained for the task. [p. 134][xix][xx]

 My favorite quote, however, is this one:

“In fact, the life of all mankind is in danger because of global warming resulting to a large degree from the emissions of the factories of the major corporations; yet despite that, the representative of these corporations in the White House insists on not observing the Kyoto accord, with the knowledge that the statistics speak of the death and displacement of millions of human beings because of global warming, especially in Africa.” 

The author: Osama bin Laden.[xxi]

Tony Thomas likes it hot, or at least, warmer. He blogs at tthomas061.wordpress.com