Saturday, December 08, 2007

Deniers In Paradise

The Heartland Institute has sent a team of global warming deniers (or, as I like to call them, Warmocaust Collusionists) to Bali to stir up any shit they're able to.

Unfortunately, these "dissenting scientists" have been told to bugger off by the U.N.:

The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) has been denied the opportunity to present at panel discussions, side events, and exhibits; its members were denied press credentials.

Reading through their line-up, man, its like the Rolling Stones are going on tour again. The old boys of the movement are all in Bali, including Vincent Gray (looks like he wrote his Wiki entry himself), and Christopher Monckton (who, incidentally, doesn't have a degree to his name).

One legitimate delegate has already run into Monckton at the event and got his ear talked off. Tim Lambert has the skinny on the Moncton's career as an all purpose wingnut.

They've managed to book themselves some pretty nice digs, at the Hotel Inna Putri Bali(pictured above), with published rates of about $200 to $300 per night.

Lavish facilities, exclusive privacy and an unobtrusive service that will make you feel like royalty. A stretch of white - sanded beach where the tide appears never to go out. Our broad range of suites and cottages offer luxurious seclusion

People think the denialist movement has become a joke, but there's a lot of dough still behind them. They've sent four people to Bali. I wonder how many groups were able to muster up the $$$ to send as many.

23 comments:

bigcitylib said...

Maybe. I hear they've had trouble pulling Baird out of the local leather bar.

Anonymous said...

"They've sent four people to Bali."

Would you be kind enough to tell me how many people the UN sent to Bali and could you please list the luxoury hotels in which they are roughing it, along with a calculation as to how much carbon their combined airflights have pumped into the atmosphere, to say nothing of their hotel air-conditioners blasting away all day and night.

I make no mention of the hot air emanating from any other orifices!
David Duff

PS: I am signing this and placing my site address above because I dislike the new 'Blogger' policy of not offering an automatic link to non-'Blogger' visitors.

Ti-Guy said...

Monckton even looks deliciously wingnutty. Check out the Marty Feldman eyes.

Would you be kind enough to tell me how many people the UN sent to Bali and could you please list the luxoury hotels in which they are roughing it, along with a calculation as to how much carbon their combined airflights have pumped into the atmosphere, to say nothing of their hotel air-conditioners blasting away all day and night.

You're the "evolution denier," aren't you? Do you people, like, have a special handshake or certain markings (such as a vestigial tail or superfluous nipples) that help you find each other?

Anyway, I'd answer your query (on behalf of BCL), but you'd just argue with the math.

bigcitylib said...

Ti-guy, he reminds me of Rodney Dangerfield.

bigcitylib said...

David,

I haven't been able to find out about delegation sizes, but would love to have a run down.

Still, pretty nice digs for 4 old farts, though, eh? I just hope they aren't tempted by the local cathouses.

Steve V said...

`The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) has been denied the opportunity to present at panel discussions, side events, and exhibits; its members were denied press credentials.`

You just know that several wingers are using this as evidence of the attempt to stifle honest debate.

bigcitylib said...

Steve V,

Naturally, but these guys are so low rent science wise that it would be ridiculous to give them any credibility. They're basically "think tank" scientists, guys that go around dressed in lab coats. Let them present and next it would, literally, be the Creationists.

Johnathon said...

The recent IPCC report deduced that there was a 90% probability that that most (not all) of the recent warming was due to increase in greenhouse gases

The main sources of uncertainty arise from our lack of knowledge of the level of natural variability and the size of some of the forcing factors including the cooling due to anthropogenic aerosols and changes in solar intensity.

This comes from Professor Mitchell who has spent over 30 years working in this field. He is a lead author in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and a world expert in the effects of greenhouse gases and related pollutants.

He said global warming is only as he puts it, "90% certainty".

But what is more important is the reason why he says its only 90%.

This is the biggest reason to doubt the science.

"The main sources of uncertainty arise from our lack of knowledge of the level of natural variability and the size of some of the forcing factors including the cooling due to anthropogenic aerosols and changes in solar intensity."

He admits that the main sources of UNCERTAINTY come from a "lack of knowledge".

We'll sir, if you have a "lack of knowledge" about a certain aspect of your theory, you certainly can't label your theory as a fact.

I leave you with one final fact.

"The fundamental basis of all sciences is that debate is never over, that questions must be asked and answered and issues raised in order for the science to be accurate"

So, again, I gave you two points from the leading scientist from the
IPCC.

The first is that global warming is only 90% certain( in his words).

The second is that "The main sources of uncertainty arise from our lack of knowledge of the level of natural variability and the size of some of the forcing factors including the cooling due to anthropogenic aerosols and changes in solar intensity."


You like to use the IPCC as proof that global warming is caused by humans, yet the IPCC's leading scientist agrees there is "UNCERTAINTY" regarding his theory.

What say you?

Johnathon said...

Here is more PROOF your global warming rhetoric is just that, rhetoric.

This is from the person who shared the NOBEL PEACE prize with Al Gore.


Christopher Monckton, Denpasar, Bali

As a contributor to the IPCC's 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my co-laureate's alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won this year's Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.

Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer weather.

My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem. The report's first table of figures - inserted by the IPCC's bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent - listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.

The result of this dishonest political tampering with the science was that the sum of the four items in the offending table was more than twice the IPCC's published total. Until I wrote to point out the error, no one had noticed. The IPCC, on receiving my letter, quietly corrected, moved and relabeled the erroneous table, posting the new version on the internet and earning me my Nobel prize.

The shore-dwellers of Bali need not fear for their homes. The IPCC now says the combined contribution of the two great ice-sheets to sea-level rise will be less than seven centimeters after 100 years, not seven meters imminently, and that the Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and 2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by natural causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago. Gore, mendaciously assisted by the IPCC bureaucracy, had exaggerated a hundredfold.

Recently a High Court judge in the UK listed nine of the 35 major scientific errors in Gore's movie, saying they must be corrected before innocent schoolchildren can be exposed to the movie. Gore's exaggeration of sea-level rise was one.

Others being peddled at the Bali conference are that man-made "global warming" threatens polar bears and coral reefs, caused Hurricane Katrina, shrank Lake Chad, expanded the actually-shrinking Sahara, etc.

At the very heart of the IPCC's calculations lurks an error more serious than any of these. The IPCC says: "The CO2 radiative forcing increased by 20 percent during the last 10 years (1995-2005)." Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant energy in the atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per million. In 2005 it was just 5percent higher, at 378 ppm. But each additional molecule of CO2 in the air causes a smaller radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the true increase in radiative forcing was 1 percent, not 20 percent. The IPCC has exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.

Why so large and crucial an exaggeration? Answer: the IPCC has repealed the fundamental physicalthe Stefan-Boltzmann equation - that converts radiant energy to temperature. Without this equation, no meaningful calculation of the effect of radiance on temperature can be done. Yet the 1,600 pages of the IPCC's 2007 report do not mention it once.

The IPCC knows of the equation, of course. But it is inconvenient. It imposes a strict (and very low) limit on how much greenhouse gases can increase temperature. At the Earth's surface, you can add as much greenhouse gas as you like (the "surface forcing"), and the temperature will scarcely respond.

That is why all of the IPCC's computer models predict that 10km above Bali, in the tropical upper troposphere, temperature should be rising two or three times as fast as it does at the surface. Without that tropical upper-troposphere "hot-spot", the Stefan-Boltzmann law ensures that surface temperature cannot change much.

For half a century we have been measuring the temperature in the upper atmosphere - and it has been changing no faster than at the surface. The IPCC knows this, too. So it merely declares that its computer predictions are right and the real-world measurements are wrong. Next time you hear some scientifically-illiterate bureaucrat say, "The science is settled", remember this vital failure of real-world observations to confirm the IPCC's computer predictions. The IPCC's entire case is built on a guess that the absent hot-spot might exist.

Even if the Gore/IPCC exaggerations were true, which they are not, the economic cost of trying to mitigate climate change by trying to cut our emissions through carbon trading and other costly market interferences would far outweigh any possible climatic benefit.

The international community has galloped lemming-like over the cliff twice before. Twenty years ago the UN decided not to regard AIDS as a fatal infection. Carriers of the disease were not identified and isolated. Result: 25 million deaths in poor countries.

Thirty-five years ago the world decided to ban DDT, the only effective agent against malaria. Result: 40 million deaths in poor countries. The World Health Organization lifted the DDT ban on Sept. 15 last year. It now recommends the use of DDT to control malaria. Dr. Arata Kochi of the WHO said that politics could no longer be allowed to stand in the way of the science and the data. Amen to that.

If we take the heroically stupid decisions now on the table at Bali, it will once again be the world's poorest people who will die unheeded in their tens of millions, this time for lack of the heat and light and power and medical attention which we in the West have long been fortunate enough to take for granted.

If we deny them the fossil-fuelled growth we have enjoyed, they will remain poor and, paradoxically, their populations will continue to increase, making the world's carbon footprint very much larger in the long run.

As they die, and as global temperature continues to fail to rise in accordance with the IPCC's laughably-exaggerated predictions, the self-congratulatory rhetoric that is the hallmark of the now-useless, costly, corrupt UN will again be near-unanimously parroted by lazy, unthinking politicians and journalists who ought to have done their duty by the poor but are now - for the third time in three decades - failing to speak up for those who are about to die.

My fellow-participants, there is no climate crisis. The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Take courage! Do nothing, and save the world's poor from yet another careless, UN-driven slaughter.


SO LETS SEE HERE.

The IPCC now says the combined contribution of the two great ice-sheets to sea-level rise will be less than seven centimeters after 100 years, not seven meters imminently, and that the Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and 2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by natural causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago. Gore, mendaciously assisted by the IPCC bureaucracy, had exaggerated a hundredfold.


HOW CAN YOU IDIOTS BELIEVE AN ORGANIZATION THAT LIES ABOUT HOW IT GETS IT RESULTS.

IT USES COMPUTER MODELS INSTEAD OF REAL WORLD OBSERVATIONS.

You leftist loons will realize how wrong you were today, in about 25 years.

By then the world as we know it will be the same as it is today.

Grow up dummies.

Ti-Guy said...

That was Fred Bracken, posting from prison.

bigcitylib said...

Particularly dumb. He reponds to a post about Monckton's absolute lack of credibility by posting a screed by, guess who, Monckton, as evidence against AGW.

Anonymous said...

"honest debate"

What "debate", we're0[ told it's beyond debate. It's "settled".

In effect, the sceintific process (where studies and counter studies and rigourous peer review is the standard) is no longer necessary.

The UN has decided it is so.

Scientists who seek to scrutinize, review, counter, and hypothesize(you know, the basic scientific process)are now considered "deniers".

BTW, funny how something so "settled" has been changed so much from those who say its "settled."

Instead of six meters rise in fifty years, the sea level is now supposedly going up six centemters in twice that time.

As reality fails to accord with the computer model, resolving what's "settled" will continue I suppose.

BTW did anyone bother to read what these very esteemed (yet banned from the UN) scientists found in their studies. I suppose not. It's now forbidden to listen.

Today's progressive left. Silencing the opposition, one esteemed scientist at a time.

Anonymous said...

BCL,

interesting how the personal attack dominates.

The points raised are never addressed with these "deniers". The last thing we'd want is a debate I guess. Why with it being "settled" and all.

Ti-Guy said...

Feel free to address the issues "Mr. Green" (aka Ding Dong, aka Biff). But this whining and trolling/sock-puppetting isn't "addressing the issues" so stop lying about that.

Anonymous said...

And the response to raising the very pressing issue of silencing rigourous scientific debate:

Name calling.

Ti-guy, the poster boy for today's progressive left.

Anonymous said...

"luxurious seclusion" Is someone watching Baird to see if he meets with any of those hellhounds?

Deno said...

My Hero!


A convenient £50m or $102 million for green GoreSteven Swinford
WHO would have thought that saving the planet could be such a lucrative business? Al Gore, the former US vice-president turned environmental campaigner, has made more than £50m in just seven years from his books, speeches and shrewd investments in technology and green ventures.

Gore, 59, a failed presidential candidate, has already reinvented himself from the nearly man of American politics into the first global green celebrity. This week he will pick up the Nobel peace prize in Oslo before flying to Bali to take centre stage at the United Nations climate change conference.

Today Gore commands between £50,000 and £85,000 a speech, holds stock options in Google worth £15m and has made as much as £4m from advances on his book deals. He is also advising a US venture capital company on how to invest a $600m green technology fund.

He has come a long way since losing the 2000 presidential election to George W Bush when, according to official documents, Gore was worth just £1m. His biggest assets were his two homes in Nashville, Tennessee, and Arlington, Virginia, valued at £375,000, and £500,000 invested in oil company shares.

But rather than dwell on his disappointment, Gore threw himself into the world of business.

Joel Hyatt, who chaired the democratic finance committee during the 2000 election and is now Gore’s business partner, said: “Al’s bouncing back from that experience has been quite extraordinary. It’s hard to move on from something like that but the fact he did is an incredible testament to his character.”

Gore began by joining Google as an adviser in 2001. At the time it was a relatively new and rising internet search engine. In March 2003 he joined the board of Apple, where he holds stock options that are now valued at about £3m. According to Hyatt, his interest in technology is long-standing. “Al has always had a real mind for gadgets and technology. He is a real geek in that regard.”

Gore has also invested a significant proportion of his wealth in Current TV, a cable channel on which viewers can broadcast their own video clips. It has 38m subscribers in the US and is now being shown in 8m homes in Britain.

At the same time Gore’s interest in green issues was coming to the fore, and his rise as a climate-change celebrity has proved highly lucrative.

Since the release of his documentary film An Inconvenient Truth, Gore has given 150 speeches a year.

His spokesman emphasised, however, that Gore waives his lecture fees for charities and schools and gives a proportion of his income to the Alliance for Climate Protection, of which he is chairman.

A contract for one of his speaking arrangements, released by the University of California under freedom of information requirements, reveals that Gore demands first class travel and accommodation and £500 a day for meals, phone calls and other expenses.

The contract stipulates that Gore’s car from the airport should be “a sedan, not a sports utility vehicle”.

Gore has written nine books, with advances worth between £3m and £4.5m, and has another planned for next year.

In 2003 he sold MetWest, an asset management firm he had started two years earlier, picking up a payout rumoured to be another £15m. In April 2004 he used the money to co-found Generation Investment Management, a London-based company that specialises in “sustainable” investments.

Today it manages more than £500m of assets, ranging from Novo Nordisk, a Danish drug maker, to Whole Foods Market, an organic retailer.

This month Gore joined the board of Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, venture capitalists whose investment helped fuel the dotcom boom and fund companies such as Amazon. Kleiner is now going green and has started a £300m fund for technologies that aim to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

It has already invested in 26 companies that make everything from electric cars to microbes that scrub oil wells.

Visit the UN's webpage on the Bali summit

Ti-Guy said...

God, I thought you had died from alcohol poisoning, Deno.

*sigh*...

Ti-Guy said...

By the way, Deno. You really should indicate where you got your cut 'n paste.

I love this response:

After a thorough review, it would appear my carbon footprint is negligible compared to that of Al Gore. I have a much smaller house, fewer cars, and take fewer plane rides. So, it would appear I've already done my part. Now, if we can only change the ways of hypercritical energy hogs who make tons of cash and pick up awards just for telling us to do what they refuse to do themselves, this whole Global Warming thing might actually be believable.

Ron Thornton, Edmonton, Ab, Canada


...they all sound the same.

Anonymous said...

For the record, Monckton is neither an IPCC contributor nor a member of the House of Lords. The veracity of his remarks goes downill from there.

Anonymous said...

Nice try steve bloom.

http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070201_monckton.pdf

I think the veracity of your remarks go downill from there.

Anonymous said...

There's ti-guy's usual debating tactic, making fun of the guy's appearance. He is a true liberal idiot; he'll buy anything anybody says as long as the seller looks good. 'Cool' is more important than substance to you, isn't it.

That says a lot about your psychological makeup, ti-guy.

Anonymous said...

anon 11:40, thanks for the link -- I especially liked the up-front unintended irony of "Brenchley."

But since you're a complete idiot, let me explain (on both points, since I'm not sure which one you were referencing):

Most hereditary peers (of which Monckton is certainly one) are not members of the House of Lords. In theory Monckton could be selected for such a role, but hasn't been.

There's a difference between commenters and contributors to the IPCC report. Anybody (you, me, Her Nibs) can comment on the drafts, while contributors are people whose work product appears in the report. Arguably a commenter could qualify as a contributor (as distinct from an author) if their comments were used in some substantive way, but safe to say Monckton's comments were roundly ignored.

You're welcome.