Global-warming theology
THE WASHINGTON TIMES Friday, December 4, 2009
Belief in global warming had long had a tinge of theology about it, a form of cultism that adherents and defenders elevated to a holy crusade.
Any who questioned the orthodoxy were branded as heretics. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that climate-change skepticism is "treason" and exhorted that "we need to start treating [skeptics] as traitors." In 2007, the Weather Channel's Heidi Cullen said that meteorologists who were skeptical of man-made global warming should be decertified. The e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit reveal systematic attempts by high priests of this religion to silence scientists who disputed their rigged findings.
The purveyors of the global-warming theology certainly benefited. They enjoyed professional success, received millions of dollars in grants, had influence in policy circles, were invited to international conferences and found personal validation and fame. Never before had it been sexy to have "climate scientist" on your resume.
Proper science unlocks secrets; it does not create them. The scientific method is a social enterprise and requires openness to function properly. Data must be freely available and methodologies subject to strict scrutiny in order to assess whether results can be verified, reproduced and subjected to reliability tests. There is no reason to trust any results based on hidden data and some very good reasons to distrust them. This is the gist of a prospective lawsuit against NASA by Christopher C. Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which calls on the space agency to produce the climate data it has been keeping under wraps. These data are not classified information and should be part of the public record. NASA's stonewalling is suspicious and could augur that another scandal is brewing.
Global warming was an academic Ponzi scheme. Its leading proponents were mini-Madoffs, peddling a vision of global catastrophe to gullible activists, bureaucrats and policymakers. The vision was so vast, the fear it inspired so pervasive, that it seized popular imagination, aided ably by hucksters like former Vice President Al Gore and his science-fiction feature film "An Inconvenient Truth." But like any Ponzi scheme, global warming only worked if everyone kept investing and no one looked at the books. Once the truth came out - of manipulated findings, phony data, rigged peer-review processes and intimidation of skeptics - the scheme began to collapse.
Yet even as the edifice comes down, the adherents of the orthodoxy say that there is nothing to see, that this is all a distraction from the business at hand, that there is still no time to lose, full steam (or solar power) ahead. But it is far too late for that. The veil has been pierced, the myth revealed, the scales have fallen from the people's eyes. The pagan priests are fleeing the temple, their sacred idols are being pulled down, their holy works renounced. Their god, finally, is dead.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Climategate 32
Media complicity in Climategate
Washington Times Monday, December 7, 2009
A tale of destroyed documents, fraud, conspiracy and the misuse of millions of government dollars would seem to have all the juicy ingredients of a scandal that journalists would kill to cover. However, the mainstream media apparently doesn't think that Climategate is news. ABC News hasn't deemed the story newsworthy. Neither has CBS nor NBC. If Americans only got their news from the networks, they would not know about the global-warming fraud or would merely think there was a simple misunderstanding about what scientists meant in some vague e-mails
Never mind that two major universities have at least temporarily removed prominent academics from heading major climate research facilities. Never mind that there are real questions raised about the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) controversial assessment report that the Obama administration and global-warming advocates have continually hyped in order to advance their case for new global regulations to curtail purported global warming.
Liberal news agencies might be casting a blind eye at this controversy, but even left-wing comedians such as "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart take these events seriously enough to make fun of the defenses being offered by the scientists caught in the scandal. Take one of Mr. Stewart's jokes regarding the now infamous e-mail about the "trick of adding in the real temps to each series ... to hide the decline [in temperature]." A Tuesday repartee follows:
Mr. Stewart: "It's nothing. He was just using a trick to hide the decline. It is just scientist speak for using a standard statistical technique recalibrating data in order to trick you into not knowing about the decline. But here is what is great about science in disagreement. We go back and look at the raw data."
Announcer: "University scientists say raw data from the 1980s was thrown out."
Jon Stewart: "Why would you go and throw out data from the 1980s? I still have Penthouses from the 1970s."
Despite cracks on late-night TV, the scandal is not considered newsworthy by the major television networks. The Media Research Center reported that through Tuesday, "none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed Climategate or the incriminating [East Anglia climate scientist Phil] Jones development. ... This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal."
The networks found plenty of airtime to cover rumored family problems plaguing professional golfer Tiger Woods. Yet, even though there is climate-regulation legislation pending in Congress that could cost Americans trillions of dollars, network producers don't see anything newsworthy in a scandal exposing fraud in global-warming research. Such omissions make mainstream news complicit in the cover-up.
Washington Times Monday, December 7, 2009
A tale of destroyed documents, fraud, conspiracy and the misuse of millions of government dollars would seem to have all the juicy ingredients of a scandal that journalists would kill to cover. However, the mainstream media apparently doesn't think that Climategate is news. ABC News hasn't deemed the story newsworthy. Neither has CBS nor NBC. If Americans only got their news from the networks, they would not know about the global-warming fraud or would merely think there was a simple misunderstanding about what scientists meant in some vague e-mails
Never mind that two major universities have at least temporarily removed prominent academics from heading major climate research facilities. Never mind that there are real questions raised about the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) controversial assessment report that the Obama administration and global-warming advocates have continually hyped in order to advance their case for new global regulations to curtail purported global warming.
Liberal news agencies might be casting a blind eye at this controversy, but even left-wing comedians such as "The Daily Show's" Jon Stewart take these events seriously enough to make fun of the defenses being offered by the scientists caught in the scandal. Take one of Mr. Stewart's jokes regarding the now infamous e-mail about the "trick of adding in the real temps to each series ... to hide the decline [in temperature]." A Tuesday repartee follows:
Mr. Stewart: "It's nothing. He was just using a trick to hide the decline. It is just scientist speak for using a standard statistical technique recalibrating data in order to trick you into not knowing about the decline. But here is what is great about science in disagreement. We go back and look at the raw data."
Announcer: "University scientists say raw data from the 1980s was thrown out."
Jon Stewart: "Why would you go and throw out data from the 1980s? I still have Penthouses from the 1970s."
Despite cracks on late-night TV, the scandal is not considered newsworthy by the major television networks. The Media Research Center reported that through Tuesday, "none of the broadcast network weekday morning and evening news shows addressed Climategate or the incriminating [East Anglia climate scientist Phil] Jones development. ... This marked 12 days since the information was first uncovered that they have ignored this global scandal."
The networks found plenty of airtime to cover rumored family problems plaguing professional golfer Tiger Woods. Yet, even though there is climate-regulation legislation pending in Congress that could cost Americans trillions of dollars, network producers don't see anything newsworthy in a scandal exposing fraud in global-warming research. Such omissions make mainstream news complicit in the cover-up.
Climategate 31
Climategate: The Silence is Deafening from the Corporate Media
J Speer-Williams
Infowars
November 28, 2009
By now most of us in the alternative media are aware of the some 61 megabytes of global warming research data of emails, documents, and computer code released by whistleblowers (or hackers), that have exposed climate scientists, at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, as the frauds they’ve proven themselves to be.
This decade of emails and documents clearly concludes that global warming scientists have manipulated scientific data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures; and the fact that, there has been no statistically significant global warming for fifteen years, but our world has experienced a rapid and significant cooling for nine years.
So breath-taking has been this leaked data, to date, it has produced some startling headlines in the alternative media:
(1) Climategate: Greatest Scandal in Modern Science!”
(2) “Climategate? Smoking Gun? Blood in the Water?”
(3) “Global Warming Scientists Seek to Protect Their Government Funding by Corrupting the
Peer-review Process.”
(4) “Climate Bombshell: Hackers {or Whistleblowers] Leak Emails Showing Conspiracy.”
(5) “Email Leaks Turn Up Heat on Global Warming Advocates.”
(6) “Climategate Scientists Caught Red-handed in Monumental Fraud.”
(7) “Bad Scientists? No Criminals!”
Now, these global warming scientists, who have been so severely exposed for the frauds they are, are crying, “Persecution!”. While their own emails prove they have been very busy planning how best to get tenured professors fired, who will not shallow the rotten fish of anthropogenic global warming, how to black-ball them from scientific journals, and prevent them from participating in the peer-review process.
Persecution? No, prosecution in a criminal court of law is what they deserve.
Even Obama’s Climate Czar, John P. Holdren has been exposed, by these emails, for the fraud he is, proving Holdren’s avid global warming advocacy has been more driven by politics than science.
Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is no stranger to extremist views: In a 1977 book, Holdren co-authored (Ecoscience – Population, Resources, Environment), he campaigned for compulsory abortion, mass sterilization, involuntary infertility, a one-child policy, and global governance.
In another of Holdren’s books (Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions), he even argued that babies were not human beings.
Mr. Holdren, there’s no question babies are human. The real question is are you a human being?
These academic and governments fraudsters, along with their corporate media counterparts, account for the fact that many people have been denied the truth regarding the man-made global warming myths.
The so-called “consensus” establishing the validity of the man-made global warming theories does not exist; the mainstream, corporately owned media merely tell us it does; and, do not expect “our” media to widely broadcast anything about these email exposures; many people will never hear of them.
When caught red-handed in their lies, the corporate media always has but one response: Utter silence, waiting for the smoking gun to cool, and then be forgotten. But if the red-hot pistol doesn’t cool quickly enough, the whole corrupted system of the controlled press goes into over-drive, preparing for a workable gambit: Which is usually their tried and true method of creating controversy, something relatively easy for them to do. And once an issue enters the world of controversy, the Establishment usually wins the info wars of public opinion, because they get the most words, the loudest words, and the last words. And after all, they represent authority.
Trial and error is employed to find the kindling that will ignite the fires of controversy. Usually the first maneuver is tested with some secondary official, from some secondary country, to gage the effectiveness of the ploy. This process has already begun with Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer.
Ms. Cramer has claimed that the East Anglia University whistleblowers, or hackers, altered 61 metabytes of computer data before leaking the files, in spite of the fact such a statement, has to date, never been made by the man-made global warming advocates, who wrote it all .
If Ms. Cramer’s allegations gain traction, expect to hear more about how the whistle-blowers falsified the data. We may even hear of innocent people coming to trial, falsely confessing they were the ones who “altered” all the emails, before releasing them. But, with enough mind control, I could be convinced, I was the one who falsified them, even though I know so little about computers, I can hardly use my Apple program to write this sentence.
Ms. Cramer, in her outrage, screamed, “This is just criminal. It’s unacceptable.”
What is acceptable Ms. Cramer, the death of a billion starving people, and the guaranteed poverty of the rest of us, due to the pending Cap and Trade legislation in Washington, and the coming international laws, directives, regulations, and more laws, that will inhibit the farming of food and the means to get it to market, with few of us having enough money to buy food if it were available?
Am I exaggerating? I hope so, but believe not.
J Speer-Williams
Infowars
November 28, 2009
By now most of us in the alternative media are aware of the some 61 megabytes of global warming research data of emails, documents, and computer code released by whistleblowers (or hackers), that have exposed climate scientists, at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain, as the frauds they’ve proven themselves to be.
This decade of emails and documents clearly concludes that global warming scientists have manipulated scientific data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures; and the fact that, there has been no statistically significant global warming for fifteen years, but our world has experienced a rapid and significant cooling for nine years.
So breath-taking has been this leaked data, to date, it has produced some startling headlines in the alternative media:
(1) Climategate: Greatest Scandal in Modern Science!”
(2) “Climategate? Smoking Gun? Blood in the Water?”
(3) “Global Warming Scientists Seek to Protect Their Government Funding by Corrupting the
Peer-review Process.”
(4) “Climate Bombshell: Hackers {or Whistleblowers] Leak Emails Showing Conspiracy.”
(5) “Email Leaks Turn Up Heat on Global Warming Advocates.”
(6) “Climategate Scientists Caught Red-handed in Monumental Fraud.”
(7) “Bad Scientists? No Criminals!”
Now, these global warming scientists, who have been so severely exposed for the frauds they are, are crying, “Persecution!”. While their own emails prove they have been very busy planning how best to get tenured professors fired, who will not shallow the rotten fish of anthropogenic global warming, how to black-ball them from scientific journals, and prevent them from participating in the peer-review process.
Persecution? No, prosecution in a criminal court of law is what they deserve.
Even Obama’s Climate Czar, John P. Holdren has been exposed, by these emails, for the fraud he is, proving Holdren’s avid global warming advocacy has been more driven by politics than science.
Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, is no stranger to extremist views: In a 1977 book, Holdren co-authored (Ecoscience – Population, Resources, Environment), he campaigned for compulsory abortion, mass sterilization, involuntary infertility, a one-child policy, and global governance.
In another of Holdren’s books (Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions), he even argued that babies were not human beings.
Mr. Holdren, there’s no question babies are human. The real question is are you a human being?
These academic and governments fraudsters, along with their corporate media counterparts, account for the fact that many people have been denied the truth regarding the man-made global warming myths.
The so-called “consensus” establishing the validity of the man-made global warming theories does not exist; the mainstream, corporately owned media merely tell us it does; and, do not expect “our” media to widely broadcast anything about these email exposures; many people will never hear of them.
When caught red-handed in their lies, the corporate media always has but one response: Utter silence, waiting for the smoking gun to cool, and then be forgotten. But if the red-hot pistol doesn’t cool quickly enough, the whole corrupted system of the controlled press goes into over-drive, preparing for a workable gambit: Which is usually their tried and true method of creating controversy, something relatively easy for them to do. And once an issue enters the world of controversy, the Establishment usually wins the info wars of public opinion, because they get the most words, the loudest words, and the last words. And after all, they represent authority.
Trial and error is employed to find the kindling that will ignite the fires of controversy. Usually the first maneuver is tested with some secondary official, from some secondary country, to gage the effectiveness of the ploy. This process has already begun with Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer.
Ms. Cramer has claimed that the East Anglia University whistleblowers, or hackers, altered 61 metabytes of computer data before leaking the files, in spite of the fact such a statement, has to date, never been made by the man-made global warming advocates, who wrote it all .
If Ms. Cramer’s allegations gain traction, expect to hear more about how the whistle-blowers falsified the data. We may even hear of innocent people coming to trial, falsely confessing they were the ones who “altered” all the emails, before releasing them. But, with enough mind control, I could be convinced, I was the one who falsified them, even though I know so little about computers, I can hardly use my Apple program to write this sentence.
Ms. Cramer, in her outrage, screamed, “This is just criminal. It’s unacceptable.”
What is acceptable Ms. Cramer, the death of a billion starving people, and the guaranteed poverty of the rest of us, due to the pending Cap and Trade legislation in Washington, and the coming international laws, directives, regulations, and more laws, that will inhibit the farming of food and the means to get it to market, with few of us having enough money to buy food if it were available?
Am I exaggerating? I hope so, but believe not.
Climategate 30
Climategate: the loonies are out of the asylum
By James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com
Truth to left-liberals is like garlic to vampires, so I suppose it’s no wonder the world’s watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) have been reacting so badly to Climategate.
A few days ago we had the hugely entertaining spectacle of climate activist Ed Begley Jr losing the plot completely on Fox news. (aka Tofu-crazed Vegan Goes Postal).
Yesterday, I understand, decrepit Politburo chief Gordon Brown decided that climate change sceptics – Does he mean me? He surely does! – were “flat-earthers.” I consider this perhaps the greatest badge of honour of my entire career. It’s like being called a “gibbering lunatic” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “a dangerous nutcase” by Charles Manson, “a sinister, slippery snake” by Lord Mandelson, “an utter bastard” by Joe Stalin.
And now, in case you missed it, I offer some delightful Newsnight footage of a very frustrated Professor Watson from UEA being goaded to the point of rude-wordery by the japesome Marc Morano. These climate fear promoters: they just don’t like it up ‘em!
By James Delingpole is a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything. He is the author of numerous fantastically entertaining books including Welcome To Obamaland: I've Seen Your Future And It Doesn't Work, How To Be Right, and the Coward series of WWII adventure novels. His website is www.jamesdelingpole.com
Truth to left-liberals is like garlic to vampires, so I suppose it’s no wonder the world’s watermelons (green on the outside, red on the inside) have been reacting so badly to Climategate.
A few days ago we had the hugely entertaining spectacle of climate activist Ed Begley Jr losing the plot completely on Fox news. (aka Tofu-crazed Vegan Goes Postal).
Yesterday, I understand, decrepit Politburo chief Gordon Brown decided that climate change sceptics – Does he mean me? He surely does! – were “flat-earthers.” I consider this perhaps the greatest badge of honour of my entire career. It’s like being called a “gibbering lunatic” by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “a dangerous nutcase” by Charles Manson, “a sinister, slippery snake” by Lord Mandelson, “an utter bastard” by Joe Stalin.
And now, in case you missed it, I offer some delightful Newsnight footage of a very frustrated Professor Watson from UEA being goaded to the point of rude-wordery by the japesome Marc Morano. These climate fear promoters: they just don’t like it up ‘em!
Climategate 25
Climategate: the UN investigation will be a whitewash
By Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.
It is rather ironic that the United Nations, a world body that has done more to push the global warming agenda that any other organization, is now vowing to investigate the leaked Climategate emails. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told BBC Radio 4:
We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it. We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.
Forgive my scepticism over this, but the United Nations happens to be one of the most inefficient, corruption-riddled, unaccountable and untransparent entities on the face of the earth. It is hard to see how the UN is going to conduct this kind of inquiry with a straight face, let alone an ounce of credibility. I spent several years working on UN issues in Washington, and served as an expert on the Gingrich-Mitchell Congressional mandated Task Force on the United Nations, and nothing I have seen of the UN convinces me that it is capable of carrying out a remotely objective investigation.
And who is the man in charge of the United Nations whitewash/inquiry? Rajendra Pachauri is one of the world’s biggest prophets of climate change doom, which he argues is “the greatest challenge facing humanity.” Last year he shared the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the IPCC with Al Gore. Like his colleague Lord Stern, Pachauri ludicrously believes that people should eat less meat to curb carbon emissions.
We don’t need a fake UN panel on Climategate. What is needed is a full Senate investigation as well as Parliamentary inquiry into a massive scandal with major implications for both the US and the UK and their future approach to the global warming issue. And if Congressional hearings are held, who better to have leading the charge on Capitol Hill than the brilliant James Delingpole, who deserves huge credit for almost single-handedly bringing the Climategate débacle to the attention of the American public.
By Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.
It is rather ironic that the United Nations, a world body that has done more to push the global warming agenda that any other organization, is now vowing to investigate the leaked Climategate emails. Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told BBC Radio 4:
We will certainly go into the whole lot and then we will take a position on it. We certainly don’t want to brush anything under the carpet. This is a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.
Forgive my scepticism over this, but the United Nations happens to be one of the most inefficient, corruption-riddled, unaccountable and untransparent entities on the face of the earth. It is hard to see how the UN is going to conduct this kind of inquiry with a straight face, let alone an ounce of credibility. I spent several years working on UN issues in Washington, and served as an expert on the Gingrich-Mitchell Congressional mandated Task Force on the United Nations, and nothing I have seen of the UN convinces me that it is capable of carrying out a remotely objective investigation.
And who is the man in charge of the United Nations whitewash/inquiry? Rajendra Pachauri is one of the world’s biggest prophets of climate change doom, which he argues is “the greatest challenge facing humanity.” Last year he shared the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the IPCC with Al Gore. Like his colleague Lord Stern, Pachauri ludicrously believes that people should eat less meat to curb carbon emissions.
We don’t need a fake UN panel on Climategate. What is needed is a full Senate investigation as well as Parliamentary inquiry into a massive scandal with major implications for both the US and the UK and their future approach to the global warming issue. And if Congressional hearings are held, who better to have leading the charge on Capitol Hill than the brilliant James Delingpole, who deserves huge credit for almost single-handedly bringing the Climategate débacle to the attention of the American public.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Climategate 26
Taking the private jet to Copenhagen
Any celebrity flying the green flag needs glittering eco-credentials. But how do they justify the fleet of customised planes, the luxury homes and the posse of servants?
The Sunday Times November 29, 2009
Hypocrisy is the vice we find hardest to forgive, but it’s also the one we most enjoy discovering in others. And nothing piques our interest more than eco-hypocrisy as practised by the “green” celebrities who have been spouting green virtue but spewing out hundreds of tons of carbon from their private jets or multiple holiday homes around the globe.
There was Sheryl Crow, who had called upon the public to refrain from using more than one square of toilet paper per visit (“except on those pesky occasions when two or three are required”) and who was leading a Stop Global Warming concert tour across America. It was revealed that while Crow travelled in a biodiesel tour bus, her 30-person entourage followed in a fleet of 13 gas-guzzling vehicles.
John Travolta notoriously encouraged the British public to do its bit to fight global warming — after flying into London on one of his five, yes, five private jets (one of which is a Boeing 707). In 2006 his piloting hobby produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions, more than a hundred times the output of the average Briton, according to the Carbon Trust.
It is less well known that Tom Cruise — who has campaigned for the LA-based environmental group Earth Communications Office — also has an air fleet and a licence to pilot his five planes, including a top-of-the-line customised Gulfstream jet he bought for his wife, Katie Holmes.
Harrison Ford, who is vice-chairman on the board of Conservation International, voices public-service messages for an environmental federation called EarthShare, and once shaved his chest hair to illustrate the effects of deforestation, is another hobby pilot. He once owned a Gulfstream but now makes do with a smaller Cessna Citation Sovereign eight-seater jet, four propeller planes and a helicopter.
Oprah Winfrey, who preaches eco-virtue from her TV pulpit, travelled in a 13-seat Gulfstream IV private jet for years — the preferred model for celebrities and the super-rich. (She has replaced it with a faster Bombardier Global Express.) The public first became aware of her private-jet habit when her plane had to make a forced landing in California in 2005; it was reminded of it this year after one of her stewardesses was fired for allegedly having sex with the pilot while Oprah and other passengers were asleep.
Jennifer Aniston told reporters that to save the Earth’s precious water resources she brushes her teeth while in the shower. But she also flew a hairdresser to Europe to accompany her on a recent publicity tour for the film Marley & Me.
Perhaps more egregious, because she is a much more in-your-face global-warming campaigner, is Dame Trudie Styler, film financier and wife of Sting. Not only do she and her husband run seven homes and travel between them in private jets and a fleet of cars, but in 2007 an employment tribunal revealed Styler was furious when her pregnant chef refused to travel 100 miles to prepare some soup and salad. (The chef had regularly made the trip in the past, travelling by train and taxi.) And Sting recently had to contend with accusations that the Police were “the dirtiest band in the world” because of the scale of their last tour and the carbon footprint of the fans who went to see them.
This spring Styler was accused of hiring a private jet to take her and an eight-person entourage from New York to Washington, DC, for the White House correspondents’ dinner, even though there are dozens of scheduled shuttle flights she could have taken, not to mention fast trains. Strangely, Sting flew commercial to the same dinner. When challenged, Styler reportedly defended herself by saying: “Yes, I do take planes. My life is to travel and to speak out about the horrors of an environment that is being abused at the hands of oil companies.”
U2’s latest world tour features three stages and a giant claw that ensures as many spectators as possible get a decent view. Alas, transporting the whole shebang around the world is estimated by carbonfootprint.com to produce the carbon equivalent of the annual emissions of 6,500 British homes — or a rocket trip to Mars and back.
Coldplay’s Chris Martin has been fingered as one of music’s biggest eco-hypocrites. George Monbiot, a writer and environmental campaigner, noted on his blog that Martin flew thousands of miles on his private jet, including brief trips between LA and nearby Palm Springs. Monbiot calculated that Martin’s trips back and forth to see his family produced 250 times the carbon emissions of an average Briton.
Monbiot also cited an interview Martin gave in which he discussed his angry global-warming song, then boasted about his family’s profligate private jet use, saying of his daughter: “As she gets older, hopefully she’ll come and see us when she wants. I always thought it’d be cool to be in school and say, ‘I’m not coming in today — I’m off to Costa Rica to see my dad play.’ I do think that wins you a few points.” Martin replied to criticism by pointing out that he paid for the planting of mango trees to offset the carbon emissions of his tours and flights home.
There are endless other examples of hypocrisy by green politicos. David Cameron was once photographed virtuously riding his bike to the House of Commons, with his official car behind him, carrying his suit and briefcase. Ken Livingstone, who swore he would make London the world’s greenest city when he was mayor, made scores of arguably unnecessary flights to foreign destinations. The supposedly green Barack Obama had a St Louis chef flown 850 miles just to make pizza at the White House.
At the end of the film An Inconvenient Truth, the unbearably earnest former presidential candidate Al Gore asked his audience: “Are you ready to change the way you live?” His own huge Nashville mansion consumed over 20 times the electricity of an average American home. Indeed, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, it burnt twice as much power in the month of August 2006 than most American homes do in an entire year. Another inconvenient truth revealed that the former senator spent $500 a month just to heat the indoor swimming pool in his lavish domestic establishment. The 100ft houseboat he bought in 2008, on the other hand, was said to be powered by biodiesel.
Gore gave the usual response of the green celebrity caught not practising what they preach. He said he made up for his consumption of electricity and production of carbon dioxide by buying carbon offsets — some from his own offset company.
SUVs and four-wheel-drive cars are another eco-sin green celebs find hard to resist. Those who have harangued the public against driving these wicked vehicles — but who turn out to have recently owned at least one themselves — include Barbra Streisand, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz.
Of course, the SUV is often parked next to a virtuous Toyota Prius hybrid electric car, but the former doesn’t exactly cancel out the latter. However, as one Hollywood agent told me, the real reason so many people in Tinseltown drive a Prius is because “it’s the only car you can drive which costs under $35,000 which doesn’t make everyone think that your career has gone down the toilet”.
It was just as green activists began worrying about eco-fatigue — the green equivalent of compassion fatigue — two years ago that the first wave of celebrity eco-hypocrisy stories hit. The first thing these stories did was make us feel better about our own relatively minor eco-failings. They also allowed us to vent the irritation we feel about being lectured by actors, rock stars and lesser species of celebrity.
There is something annoying about the way “ordinary” people are being told they must give up their “addiction” to cheap travel, when no leading Hollywood star — not even Leonardo DiCaprio, who often flies commercial — can bring themselves to relinquish the private jet.
Yet there is something absurd about criticising celebrity eco-hypocrites. People who become film stars and rock gods usually do so because they want to join the jet set, and the jet-set life is inherently wasteful. It’s the profligacy that makes it fun and gives it its status. They are unable to give up their private jets because celebrity status is connected to travelling in the most exclusive way possible. Hence, just about all the things celebrities do to get away from “civilians” are unsustainable in green terms.
There are notable exceptions to the rule of green-celebrity hypocrisy. Ed Begley Jr from St Elsewhere and Best in Show became a vegan in 1970, bought one of the first electric cars, and has lived for years in a self-sufficient house that uses not just solar and wind energy but a toaster powered by a stationary bicycle. And unlike so many green celebrities, Begley Jr has a sense of humour about his crusade: on an episode of The Simpsons in which he plays himself, he is shown driving a vehicle powered entirely “by my own sense of self-satisfaction”.
The famous neo-hippie Woody Harrelson lives in a sustainable community in Hawaii, grows most of his food, uses only solar power, wears hemp clothes, eschews animal products, and fuels his car with biodiesel. Brad Pitt has done more than tell other people how to change the planet. His charity Make It Right New Orleans has built 13 ultra-energy-efficient greenhouses in an area devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
The Copenhagen summit next week will generate vast quantities of hot air. It will see 16,500 people coming in from 192 countries. That amounts to 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide, roughly the same as the carbon emissions of Morocco in 2006. Also, the organisers will lay 900 kilometres of computer cable and 50,000 square miles of carpet. More than 200,000 meals will be served and visitors will drink 200,000 cups of coffee — at least that will be organic.
When asked if the carbon footprint might have been reduced by turning Copenhagen into a video conference, a spokesman for the event said: “For such a major agreement, people need to meet together and negotiate face to face. We have delegates from all over the world. Video-conferencing systems are extremely useful, but they don’t match the personal touch. This is one of the main factors in having a good conference.”
Some of the charges laid against celebrities who are allegedly hypocritical about their green commitments are either unfair or don’t really stand up when examined closely. In 2008, Sting took a lot of flak when a US watchdog organisation, Charity Navigator, rated his Rainforest Foundation as one of New York’s worst charities. This was because only 41% of almost $2.2m raised at a Rainforest Foundation concert made its way to projects on the ground.
But while many leading charities spend at least 75% of their income on projects rather than fundraising and salaries, it is normal for charity concerts and balls to cost almost as much as they raise. Many of the better-known mega-charities spend a shockingly large amount of what they get from the public on fundraising, image advertising and swanky offices, but are not subject to the same scrutiny as organisations set up by a superstar.
It is also worth looking at the agenda of the green critics who slam celebrities for their eco-hypocrisy. They believe anything short of the immediate adoption of a pre-industrial way of life akin to that of peasant villages in the Middle Ages is a sellout. For them, Sting’s Rainforest Foundation is unforgivably capitalist.
Perhaps it is better that public figures say the right thing, even if they are not doing it themselves. Does it really matter that much that those who ask us to behave better are imperfect in their own behaviour? You could argue that if Trudie Styler believes that GM food, which she fiercely campaigns about, is a bigger threat than global warming, she is entitled to do so, and to fly her organic non-GM products from her Tuscan estate to the counters of Selfridges.
After all, it seems fairly clear that celebrity advocacy of green lifestyles does actually work, at least in the sense that it has made green concerns extremely fashionable.
Some of the nastiest accusations of hypocrisy have been thrown at the Prince of Wales. The “Green Prince” has been mocked for, among other alleged crimes, chartering a plane to South America to raise eco-awareness. Prince Charles’s spokespeople responded saying it would have been impossible to make 48 appointments across three countries in 10 days by regularly scheduled flights.
Unlike the common run of “green celebrities”, at least the Prince of Wales publishes annually an exhaustive green audit of all his homes and activities. Its content includes the paper usage of his household, the fact that his thirsty Aston Martin runs on bio-ethanol from wine wastage, and that his emissions for non-official travel are less than half of what they were two years ago.
If film stars and rock stars followed his lead by publishing their own eco-audits, the public might be more likely to listen to their exhortations.
Any celebrity flying the green flag needs glittering eco-credentials. But how do they justify the fleet of customised planes, the luxury homes and the posse of servants?
The Sunday Times November 29, 2009
Hypocrisy is the vice we find hardest to forgive, but it’s also the one we most enjoy discovering in others. And nothing piques our interest more than eco-hypocrisy as practised by the “green” celebrities who have been spouting green virtue but spewing out hundreds of tons of carbon from their private jets or multiple holiday homes around the globe.
There was Sheryl Crow, who had called upon the public to refrain from using more than one square of toilet paper per visit (“except on those pesky occasions when two or three are required”) and who was leading a Stop Global Warming concert tour across America. It was revealed that while Crow travelled in a biodiesel tour bus, her 30-person entourage followed in a fleet of 13 gas-guzzling vehicles.
John Travolta notoriously encouraged the British public to do its bit to fight global warming — after flying into London on one of his five, yes, five private jets (one of which is a Boeing 707). In 2006 his piloting hobby produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions, more than a hundred times the output of the average Briton, according to the Carbon Trust.
It is less well known that Tom Cruise — who has campaigned for the LA-based environmental group Earth Communications Office — also has an air fleet and a licence to pilot his five planes, including a top-of-the-line customised Gulfstream jet he bought for his wife, Katie Holmes.
Harrison Ford, who is vice-chairman on the board of Conservation International, voices public-service messages for an environmental federation called EarthShare, and once shaved his chest hair to illustrate the effects of deforestation, is another hobby pilot. He once owned a Gulfstream but now makes do with a smaller Cessna Citation Sovereign eight-seater jet, four propeller planes and a helicopter.
Oprah Winfrey, who preaches eco-virtue from her TV pulpit, travelled in a 13-seat Gulfstream IV private jet for years — the preferred model for celebrities and the super-rich. (She has replaced it with a faster Bombardier Global Express.) The public first became aware of her private-jet habit when her plane had to make a forced landing in California in 2005; it was reminded of it this year after one of her stewardesses was fired for allegedly having sex with the pilot while Oprah and other passengers were asleep.
Jennifer Aniston told reporters that to save the Earth’s precious water resources she brushes her teeth while in the shower. But she also flew a hairdresser to Europe to accompany her on a recent publicity tour for the film Marley & Me.
Perhaps more egregious, because she is a much more in-your-face global-warming campaigner, is Dame Trudie Styler, film financier and wife of Sting. Not only do she and her husband run seven homes and travel between them in private jets and a fleet of cars, but in 2007 an employment tribunal revealed Styler was furious when her pregnant chef refused to travel 100 miles to prepare some soup and salad. (The chef had regularly made the trip in the past, travelling by train and taxi.) And Sting recently had to contend with accusations that the Police were “the dirtiest band in the world” because of the scale of their last tour and the carbon footprint of the fans who went to see them.
This spring Styler was accused of hiring a private jet to take her and an eight-person entourage from New York to Washington, DC, for the White House correspondents’ dinner, even though there are dozens of scheduled shuttle flights she could have taken, not to mention fast trains. Strangely, Sting flew commercial to the same dinner. When challenged, Styler reportedly defended herself by saying: “Yes, I do take planes. My life is to travel and to speak out about the horrors of an environment that is being abused at the hands of oil companies.”
U2’s latest world tour features three stages and a giant claw that ensures as many spectators as possible get a decent view. Alas, transporting the whole shebang around the world is estimated by carbonfootprint.com to produce the carbon equivalent of the annual emissions of 6,500 British homes — or a rocket trip to Mars and back.
Coldplay’s Chris Martin has been fingered as one of music’s biggest eco-hypocrites. George Monbiot, a writer and environmental campaigner, noted on his blog that Martin flew thousands of miles on his private jet, including brief trips between LA and nearby Palm Springs. Monbiot calculated that Martin’s trips back and forth to see his family produced 250 times the carbon emissions of an average Briton.
Monbiot also cited an interview Martin gave in which he discussed his angry global-warming song, then boasted about his family’s profligate private jet use, saying of his daughter: “As she gets older, hopefully she’ll come and see us when she wants. I always thought it’d be cool to be in school and say, ‘I’m not coming in today — I’m off to Costa Rica to see my dad play.’ I do think that wins you a few points.” Martin replied to criticism by pointing out that he paid for the planting of mango trees to offset the carbon emissions of his tours and flights home.
There are endless other examples of hypocrisy by green politicos. David Cameron was once photographed virtuously riding his bike to the House of Commons, with his official car behind him, carrying his suit and briefcase. Ken Livingstone, who swore he would make London the world’s greenest city when he was mayor, made scores of arguably unnecessary flights to foreign destinations. The supposedly green Barack Obama had a St Louis chef flown 850 miles just to make pizza at the White House.
At the end of the film An Inconvenient Truth, the unbearably earnest former presidential candidate Al Gore asked his audience: “Are you ready to change the way you live?” His own huge Nashville mansion consumed over 20 times the electricity of an average American home. Indeed, according to the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, it burnt twice as much power in the month of August 2006 than most American homes do in an entire year. Another inconvenient truth revealed that the former senator spent $500 a month just to heat the indoor swimming pool in his lavish domestic establishment. The 100ft houseboat he bought in 2008, on the other hand, was said to be powered by biodiesel.
Gore gave the usual response of the green celebrity caught not practising what they preach. He said he made up for his consumption of electricity and production of carbon dioxide by buying carbon offsets — some from his own offset company.
SUVs and four-wheel-drive cars are another eco-sin green celebs find hard to resist. Those who have harangued the public against driving these wicked vehicles — but who turn out to have recently owned at least one themselves — include Barbra Streisand, Gwyneth Paltrow and Cameron Diaz.
Of course, the SUV is often parked next to a virtuous Toyota Prius hybrid electric car, but the former doesn’t exactly cancel out the latter. However, as one Hollywood agent told me, the real reason so many people in Tinseltown drive a Prius is because “it’s the only car you can drive which costs under $35,000 which doesn’t make everyone think that your career has gone down the toilet”.
It was just as green activists began worrying about eco-fatigue — the green equivalent of compassion fatigue — two years ago that the first wave of celebrity eco-hypocrisy stories hit. The first thing these stories did was make us feel better about our own relatively minor eco-failings. They also allowed us to vent the irritation we feel about being lectured by actors, rock stars and lesser species of celebrity.
There is something annoying about the way “ordinary” people are being told they must give up their “addiction” to cheap travel, when no leading Hollywood star — not even Leonardo DiCaprio, who often flies commercial — can bring themselves to relinquish the private jet.
Yet there is something absurd about criticising celebrity eco-hypocrites. People who become film stars and rock gods usually do so because they want to join the jet set, and the jet-set life is inherently wasteful. It’s the profligacy that makes it fun and gives it its status. They are unable to give up their private jets because celebrity status is connected to travelling in the most exclusive way possible. Hence, just about all the things celebrities do to get away from “civilians” are unsustainable in green terms.
There are notable exceptions to the rule of green-celebrity hypocrisy. Ed Begley Jr from St Elsewhere and Best in Show became a vegan in 1970, bought one of the first electric cars, and has lived for years in a self-sufficient house that uses not just solar and wind energy but a toaster powered by a stationary bicycle. And unlike so many green celebrities, Begley Jr has a sense of humour about his crusade: on an episode of The Simpsons in which he plays himself, he is shown driving a vehicle powered entirely “by my own sense of self-satisfaction”.
The famous neo-hippie Woody Harrelson lives in a sustainable community in Hawaii, grows most of his food, uses only solar power, wears hemp clothes, eschews animal products, and fuels his car with biodiesel. Brad Pitt has done more than tell other people how to change the planet. His charity Make It Right New Orleans has built 13 ultra-energy-efficient greenhouses in an area devastated by Hurricane Katrina.
The Copenhagen summit next week will generate vast quantities of hot air. It will see 16,500 people coming in from 192 countries. That amounts to 41,000 tons of carbon dioxide, roughly the same as the carbon emissions of Morocco in 2006. Also, the organisers will lay 900 kilometres of computer cable and 50,000 square miles of carpet. More than 200,000 meals will be served and visitors will drink 200,000 cups of coffee — at least that will be organic.
When asked if the carbon footprint might have been reduced by turning Copenhagen into a video conference, a spokesman for the event said: “For such a major agreement, people need to meet together and negotiate face to face. We have delegates from all over the world. Video-conferencing systems are extremely useful, but they don’t match the personal touch. This is one of the main factors in having a good conference.”
Some of the charges laid against celebrities who are allegedly hypocritical about their green commitments are either unfair or don’t really stand up when examined closely. In 2008, Sting took a lot of flak when a US watchdog organisation, Charity Navigator, rated his Rainforest Foundation as one of New York’s worst charities. This was because only 41% of almost $2.2m raised at a Rainforest Foundation concert made its way to projects on the ground.
But while many leading charities spend at least 75% of their income on projects rather than fundraising and salaries, it is normal for charity concerts and balls to cost almost as much as they raise. Many of the better-known mega-charities spend a shockingly large amount of what they get from the public on fundraising, image advertising and swanky offices, but are not subject to the same scrutiny as organisations set up by a superstar.
It is also worth looking at the agenda of the green critics who slam celebrities for their eco-hypocrisy. They believe anything short of the immediate adoption of a pre-industrial way of life akin to that of peasant villages in the Middle Ages is a sellout. For them, Sting’s Rainforest Foundation is unforgivably capitalist.
Perhaps it is better that public figures say the right thing, even if they are not doing it themselves. Does it really matter that much that those who ask us to behave better are imperfect in their own behaviour? You could argue that if Trudie Styler believes that GM food, which she fiercely campaigns about, is a bigger threat than global warming, she is entitled to do so, and to fly her organic non-GM products from her Tuscan estate to the counters of Selfridges.
After all, it seems fairly clear that celebrity advocacy of green lifestyles does actually work, at least in the sense that it has made green concerns extremely fashionable.
Some of the nastiest accusations of hypocrisy have been thrown at the Prince of Wales. The “Green Prince” has been mocked for, among other alleged crimes, chartering a plane to South America to raise eco-awareness. Prince Charles’s spokespeople responded saying it would have been impossible to make 48 appointments across three countries in 10 days by regularly scheduled flights.
Unlike the common run of “green celebrities”, at least the Prince of Wales publishes annually an exhaustive green audit of all his homes and activities. Its content includes the paper usage of his household, the fact that his thirsty Aston Martin runs on bio-ethanol from wine wastage, and that his emissions for non-official travel are less than half of what they were two years ago.
If film stars and rock stars followed his lead by publishing their own eco-audits, the public might be more likely to listen to their exhortations.
Climategate 25
Denying the global-cooling cover-up
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 THE WASHINGTON TIMES
President Obama's climate czar, Carol M. Browner, claims that Climategate is not important and that global warming is settled science. "[The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has] been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real," she said last week, six days after the scandal first broke about fudged global-warming research.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs repeated the claim yesterday. This obtuseness exposes the Obama administration's complicity in aiding and abetting the fraud involved to stir up climate-change hysteria.
Responsibility for continuing to perpetuate this scandal goes all the way to the top. Mr. Obama ignored and thus belittled the controversy when he announced that he would be attending the upcoming Copenhagen global warming conference on Dec. 7. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is disregarding the fact that the very people caught up in Climategate are the very same ones who wrote the U.N. climate report that will form the basis of discussion at Copenhagen.
Ms. Browner might believe that there is no debate among scientists about global warming, but the lengths to which the authors of the U.N.'s IPCC controversial assessment report were willing to go belies that the science on the subject is anything but settled. For example, Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the influential University of East Anglia, wrote in an e-mail: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Mr. Jones and Mr. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, were contributing authors to the United Nations report.
The partners in pettifoggery have yet to get their various stories straight. Mr. Jones has confirmed that the incriminating message is in fact an e-mail that he sent. But when reached over the weekend, Mr. Trenberth told The Washington Times, "I can reassure you that no such thing occurred." Mr. Trenberth, however, would not answer several questions about why Mr. Jones would make the claim he did to other academics. Mr. Trenberth also declined to answer any questions about whether he had ever talked to Mr. Jones about these topics.
Professor Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, took the ruse a step further and threatened journals that had the gall to publish academic research at odds with the global-warming theocracy. Upset that the journal Climate Research had published such a paper, Mr. Mann wrote: "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."
Given Mr. Jones' frequent reference to destroying e-mails and the ensuing criticism from officials at his university for his destruction of them, the full extent of the global-warming deception is unlikely to ever be known. But revelations to date are concerning enough.
The destruction of data and e-mails, the refusal to respond to Freedom of Information requests and plotting to exclude from the IPCC report studies that questioned global warming are serious violations of academic standards. Obama administration officials are trying to dismiss this climate-change scandal, but doing so shows how they prioritize liberal politics over scientific integrity.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 THE WASHINGTON TIMES
President Obama's climate czar, Carol M. Browner, claims that Climategate is not important and that global warming is settled science. "[The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has] been studying this issue for a very long time and agree this problem is real," she said last week, six days after the scandal first broke about fudged global-warming research.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs repeated the claim yesterday. This obtuseness exposes the Obama administration's complicity in aiding and abetting the fraud involved to stir up climate-change hysteria.
Responsibility for continuing to perpetuate this scandal goes all the way to the top. Mr. Obama ignored and thus belittled the controversy when he announced that he would be attending the upcoming Copenhagen global warming conference on Dec. 7. Unfortunately, the Obama administration is disregarding the fact that the very people caught up in Climategate are the very same ones who wrote the U.N. climate report that will form the basis of discussion at Copenhagen.
Ms. Browner might believe that there is no debate among scientists about global warming, but the lengths to which the authors of the U.N.'s IPCC controversial assessment report were willing to go belies that the science on the subject is anything but settled. For example, Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the influential University of East Anglia, wrote in an e-mail: "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!" Mr. Jones and Mr. Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, were contributing authors to the United Nations report.
The partners in pettifoggery have yet to get their various stories straight. Mr. Jones has confirmed that the incriminating message is in fact an e-mail that he sent. But when reached over the weekend, Mr. Trenberth told The Washington Times, "I can reassure you that no such thing occurred." Mr. Trenberth, however, would not answer several questions about why Mr. Jones would make the claim he did to other academics. Mr. Trenberth also declined to answer any questions about whether he had ever talked to Mr. Jones about these topics.
Professor Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, took the ruse a step further and threatened journals that had the gall to publish academic research at odds with the global-warming theocracy. Upset that the journal Climate Research had published such a paper, Mr. Mann wrote: "I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal."
Given Mr. Jones' frequent reference to destroying e-mails and the ensuing criticism from officials at his university for his destruction of them, the full extent of the global-warming deception is unlikely to ever be known. But revelations to date are concerning enough.
The destruction of data and e-mails, the refusal to respond to Freedom of Information requests and plotting to exclude from the IPCC report studies that questioned global warming are serious violations of academic standards. Obama administration officials are trying to dismiss this climate-change scandal, but doing so shows how they prioritize liberal politics over scientific integrity.
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