Climate science dicked by Dead-Eye Cheney

From Rolling Stone -- The Secret Campaign of President Bush's Administration To Deny Global Warming.

clipped from www.rollingstone.com It is no secret that industry-connected appointees within the White House have worked actively to distort the findings of federal climate scientists, playing down the threat of climate change. But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove. An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration scientists and climate-policy officials - confirms that the White House has implemented an industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate polluters.

World Wolfowitz Bank almost solves climate change - for big fossil-fuel

A pro fossil-fuel agenda has been smuggled into the World Bank by another controversy-causing Wolfowitz Human Resources placed candidate. This time it's the former conservative finance minister from El Salvador, and strong Iraq war advocate, Mr Juan José Daboub, who is raising the hackles of senior staff.

The outcome of his intentions would have been to make developing countries completely reliant of fossil-fuels, and given developed countries less reason to stick to an international framework for greenhouse gas emissions reductions, like the Kyoto Protocol.

I have one question; If they were so wrong about the Iraq cake-walk, yet are still so cavalier, why on earth would you trust them on climate change, and our children's futures? Do we want the planet to resemble Iraq today, in twenty years?

Dr. Robert Watson, the Bank's chief climate scientist, co-chair of the 1995 IPCC working group and veteran of the US Whitehouse culture war on climate science, doesn't.

clipped from www.climatesciencewatch.org Wolfowitz deputy’s efforts to undercut climate change text in World Bank strategy paper Posted on Thursday, April 26, 2007 One of Paul Wolfowitz’s two handpicked deputies, Juan José Daboub, tried to water down references to climate change in one of the World Bank’s main environmental strategy papers, the bank’s chief scientist Robert Watson told the Financial Times. In Dr. Watson, Daboub picked the wrong person to try to get around in Cooney-izing climate change text in an official report.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

The relationship of truth to science

Seed Magazine explores an interesting topic in their latest edition.

clipped from www.seedmagazine.com Seed editor-in-chief Adam Bly on truth in science. by Adam Bly Posted April 30, 2007 10:17 AM We are living in a moment where our traditional sources of truth—legacy news outlets, heads of state, community leaders, etc.—have diminished in standing. Our collective cynicism, mirrored in our media through satire and irony, has helped expose an assault on reason and the often corrupt machinations of politics. And we're left having shifted the power equation but desperately lacking new ideas to fill the void that we have revealed. So now what? We are urgently in need of rational thought. We crave truth. Where does science fit in this pursuit?

Global Warning Climate Change

IPCC Report specifics for Australia

IPCC Report implications for Australia:

* more drought, fires and inundation caused by sea-level rises
* withdrawal on private insurance on coastal properties
* increased water security problems
* areas of the coast, especially Cairns and south-east Queensland, face increased risks from sea-level rises and "increases in the severity and frequency of storms and coastal flooding"


"Hot spot" regions:

* the Murray-Darling Basin
* south-east Queensland
* Kakadu
* the Queensland wet tropics
* the Snowy Mountains
* the drought-prone south-west of Western Australia


Are Aussies seriously going to stand back and let this happen to our World Heritage sites? Or the rest of the planet? :::[SMH]

The draft summary noted that many of these hot spots include World Heritage sites, but the Federal Government had this reference cut during the process where every line of the report's summary for policy makers is debated.

It's time to vote in a government that serious about dealing with climate change and vote out the one that would betray our trust... and then get on with the job of saving those sites as best we can. It's going to be a long haul, inter-generational. And we have to start now.

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Hansen to Congress: Big Brother censoring climate science for big oil

James Hansen heads the NASA Institute for Space Studies. On Monday he revealed to the US Congress the extent the Administration is censoring climate science. :::[SMH: Scientists Muzzled, Congress told]

THE Bush Administration has run a systematic campaign to play down the dangers of climate change, demanding hundreds of politically motivated changes to scientific reports and muzzling a pre-eminent expert on global warming, the US Congress has been told.

The testimony on Monday to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform painted the Administration as determined to maintain its line on climate change even when it clashed with the findings of scientific experts.

James Hansen, who heads the Goddard Institute for Space Science in New York, said in testimony: "The effect of the filtering of climate change science during the current Administration has been to make the reality of climate change less certain than the facts indicate, and to reduce concern about the relation of climate change to human-made greenhouse gas emissions."

Since the Democratic takeover of Congress in January the committee's chairman, Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, has led efforts to uncover the extent of White House interference with scientific debate.

The Administration has moved to exercise control over environmental agencies by installing political appointees including a former oil industry lobbyist, Philip Cooney, as chief of staff of the Council on Environmental Quality. Mr Cooney told the committee: "My sole loyalty was to the President and advancing the policies of his Administration."

...while taking no heed of the tax-paid science. Hmmm. Funny ideas on loyalty.

Documents released on Monday show that in 2003 Mr Cooney and other senior appointed officials made at least 181 changes to a strategic plan on climate change to play down the scientific consensus on global warming. They made a further 113 alterations to minimise the human role in climate change, and inserted possible benefits of climate change. "These changes must be made," a note in Mr Cooney's handwriting says. "The language is mandatory."

Some of the statements deleted on Mr Cooney's instruction were non-controversial, such as: "Climate change has global consequences for human health and the environment." He also deleted references to models indicating that temperatures have been rising for 1000 years. However, he chose to highlight a study funded by his former employer, the American Petroleum Institute.

Under heated questioning, Mr Cooney admitted the changes were all intended to cast doubt on the impact of global warming. He denied they were directly co-ordinated with the White House but said he had regular conversations with a senior White House aide. "We got notes from them."

Notes? Notes from them? How Orwellian. Shouldn't the notes be going in the other direction? Shouldn't science be informing the politicians, not the politicians informing the science? Hansen went on to accuse the government of propaganda.

Control from the White House became the norm, Dr Hansen told the committee. "Scientific press releases were going to the White House for editing," he said. "It's very unfortunate that we developed this politicisation of science. The public relations office should be staffed by expert appointees - otherwise they become offices of propaganda."

For Hansen's full transcript, go to Climate Change Action. It's compelling reading. Here is James E. Hansen's homepage.

Global Warning Climate Change Energy

Cheney's money talks of an inconvenient truth

Dick Cheney is a scary guy to boldly express dissent to — no matter who your are.

If you are swarthy and have a beard, you run the risk of being rendered by the bloke's private army. Even if you are a CIA agent, you're not safe . A newly discovered hazard of the job — like you need more problems in that role — is that you risk being outed on his instruction for something you didn't do.

Like Valerie Plame was.

So if you were his investment funds manager you would pretty much tell him what he wants to hear, right?

Not, it seems, if your name is Jeremy Grantham, who is basically Cheney's money - talking - and the topic is global warming. :::[AOL News]

Step forward, Jeremy Grantham -- Cheney's own investment manager. "What were we thinking?' Grantham demands in a four-page assault on U.S. energy policy mailed last week to all his clients, including the vice president.

Titled "While America Slept, 1982-2006: A Rant on Oil Dependency, Global Warming, and a Love of Feel-Good Data," Grantham's philippic^* adds up to an extraordinary critique of U.S. energy policy over the past two decades.

What Cheney makes of it can only be imagined.

"Successive U.S. administrations have taken little interest in either oil substitution or climate change," he writes, "and the current one has even seemed to have a vested interest in the idea that the science of climate change is uncertain."

Yet "there is now nearly universal scientific agreement that fossil fuel use is causing a rise in global temperatures," he writes. "The U.S. is the only country in which environmental data is steadily attacked in a well-funded campaign of disinformation (funded mainly by one large oil company)."

That's Exxon Mobil.

As for Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Richard Lindzen, who appears everywhere to question global warming, Grantham mocks him as "the solitary plausible academic [the skeptics] can dig up, out of hundreds working in the field."

And for those nonscientists who are still undecided about the issue, Grantham reminds them of an old logical principle known as Pascal's Paradox. It may be better known as the "what if we're wrong?" argument. If we act to stop global warming and we're wrong, well, we could waste some money. If we don't act, and we're wrong ... you get the picture.

As for the alleged economic costs of going "green," Grantham says that industrialized countries with better fuel efficiency have, on average, enjoyed faster economic growth over the past 50 years than the U.S.

Grantham says that other industrialized countries have far better energy productivity than the U.S. The GDP produced per unit of energy in Italy is 50% higher. Fifty percent. Japan: 60%.

And China "already has auto fuel efficiency standards well ahead of the U.S.!" he adds. You've probably heard about China's slow economic growth.

Grantham adds that past U.S. steps in this area, like sulfur dioxide caps adopted by the late President Gerald Ford, have done far more and cost far less than predicted. "Ingenuity sprung out of the woodwork when it was correctly motivated," he writes.

There is also a political and economic cost to our oil dependency, Grantham notes. Yet America could have eliminated its oil dependency on the Middle East years ago with just a "reasonable set of increased efficiencies." All it would take is 10% fewer vehicles, each driving 10% fewer miles and getting 50% more miles per gallon. Under that "sensible but still only moderately aggressive policy," he writes, "not one single barrel would have been needed from the Middle East." Not one.

I repeat: This is not some rainbow coalition. This is not even Al Gore. Grantham is the chairman of Boston-based fund management company Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo. He is British-born but has lived here since the early 1960s.

I love this bit: "What Cheney makes of it can only be imagined." Apoplexy anyone?

==

^*Global Warming Word Watch: Phi·lip·pic

n.

1. Any of the orations of Demosthenes against Philip of Macedon in the fourth century b.c.

2. Any of the orations of Cicero against Antony in 44 b.c.

3. philippic A verbal denunciation characterized by harsh, often insulting language; a tirade.

==

Other unflattering things I've said about Cheney

==

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Regime change in the US and Australia (a winning coalition needed)

With the first ominous sniff of federal elections hanging in the Australian air like a distant bushfire, and with the US presidential elections due in less than half a term, the question has to be asked.

How do we get carbon dioxide emissions regime friendly governments into power into these two countries, the only non-signators of the Kyoto Protocol?

Well, let's knock over the easier case first; the US. Unless the Democrats completely bugger-up their majority control of the senate and the house, it's hard to see them not winning. But, the burning issue of Iraq risks sucking all the oxygen from other issues, like global warming. So it it would be useful brand the issue of Iraq with its opportunity cost that arises from not combating global warming earlier (and for less in the long-term). Or developing energy independence, self-relience and sustainability. The issues are linked, and those links should be drawn out for voters to consider.

I calculated the opportunity cost using the rule suggested by World Bank economist Sir Nicholas Stern in his recent recent report: That the total cost of combating is 1% of global gross domestic product per year. I worked out the yearly average of the cost of Iraq from www.costofwar.com and US GDP from the CIA Factbook.

It turns out that the cost of fighting in Iraq is 1.4 times the cost of what Stern says is needed if the US were to effectively fight global warming, if I am right.

$35.5 billion is a lot of spare cash. Keep in mind the opportunity cost of not combating global warming is calculated at 20 times the cost of combating it by 2050.

The other high ground to stake a claim on is as the party that believes in science. The failures of Bush's 'faith-based' initiatives in not finding the WMD they 'believed' they had, for example, or the Supreme (court) Failure of Intelligent Design to viraly replicate itself in the science class-rooms alongside The Theory of Evolution makes science more reassuring whether one has a faith or not. Even if religious there still is something unsettling about Bush saying that God told him to go into Iraq.

The censoring of top NASA climate scientists like Hanson is well documented, as is the relationship of the Republican Party to the oil industry and its dirty disinformation program.

You don't need to be Rove (Karl) to make hay with all that sunshine, being as saturated with co2 as it is. The way to do this is make the case that climate science is what will lead us out of the global warming desert. And the renewable energies will be our chariots.

And Australian opposition parties should do the same.

1. Claiming the high-ground in science-informed climate recovery.
The only way we are going to combat global warming is by comprehensively understanding the entire body of interrelated science. Voters need to know this. While the Howard government is busy placing our scientific institutions at the service of commerce they must be exposed. Science is not advanced by forcing scientists into predicting what discoveries they will make when they apply for grants based on potential comercial merit.

2. Turning Iraq into an isssue of oil independence.
America is an important ally and trading parter, so we need to stay in synch with their
politics. Our opposition politicians should hear the US voters verdict
at the recent US mid-term elections as keenly as any American
conterpart. We import all our oil. If we grow our own biodiesel we cut down on climate distorting emissions, and don't have to join in on every loser mission in the middle-east.

Finally, we should accept any help from outside interested parties. Like US Democrats who might want to test market this political strategy in Australia. We are a test market for everything else. And like the rest of the world that is attempting to pull its weight under the Kyoto Potocol. From their point of view - hey, the US and us are free-loaders on the global economy. It's in the interest of Germany, France, Italy and the rest of continental Europe to get a Kyoto Protocol friendly government up in Australia, and especially up in the US.

Some say that that is what the British were up to with the politics behind the Stern Report. :::[From Economist's View]

Stop the free ride, by Philippe Sands, Commentary, The Guardian: The Stern report concludes that reducing the adverse impacts of climate change is highly desirable and feasible. ... One of the main barriers to ... change is the failure to stigmatise the industrialised states that have decided not to join the Kyoto Protocol ... Australia and the US. Putting it another way, these two states derive economic advantages by not joining Kyoto: their producers do not have to pay the short-term costs of implementing emissions reductions. The companies and their producers are free-riders, benefiting from the environmental actions of others without meeting some of the immediate costs.

It is time to start the ball rolling against this unfair subsidy. It is time to start thinking about using economic instruments to encourage Australia and the US to sign up to Kyoto. That means trade measures: levying climate duties - and perhaps even import restrictions or outright bans - on products from these two countries...

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