Climategate: CRU looks to "big oil" for support

MattN (12:09:29) :
I believe I read one where they also met with Siemens.
Corporate toadies….
Of course it had nothing to do with this
http://www.energy.siemens.com/entry/energy/hq/en/?tab=energy-1213565-1213615-Renewables

Channel 4 news has revealed that the British Government had to justify running the infamous climate change advert about the little girl and the drowning puppy and bunny rabbit.
http://www.channel4.com/news/
See the advert here
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/government+forced+to+defend+climate+change+advert/3450237
Updated on 04 December 2009
By Cathy Newman
The government’s chief scientist has been forced to justify controversial claims in the government’s latest climate change advertisement, Channel 4 News has learnt.
The “storybook” TV campaign features a father reading his daughter a frightening bedtime story about global warming. This programme understands that Clearcast, the body responsible for vetting TV adverts, has questioned the scientific evidence used in the campaign.
Clearcast’s role is to check that adverts touching on issues of public controversy are impartial – in line with broadcasting rules. After learning that questions had been raised, the government’s top scientific advisers penned a furious retort to Clearcast.
The letter, seen by Channel 4 News, states: “We are concerned that the basic scientific inferences referred to in the latest…campaign are being brought into question by Clearcast. We are both surprised and disturbed that the premise of the television campaign is being questioned, given the incontrovertible nature of the science that underpins the campaign material.”
Download the letter from the government to Clearcast in full here:
http://www.channel4.com/news/media/2009/12/day04/climate_change_letter.doc
(The full text is at the bottom of this post.)
The government says it hasn’t broken the rules because the advert is based on fact. It was eventually cleared for broadcast, but is now being investigating by the advertising watchdog after triggering 785 complaints from members of the public.
The fresh dispute comes after a week of allegations that scientists are manipulating official data. Leaked emails have led to charges the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit has distorted the evidence on global warming.
The chief scientist John Beddington and the energy department’s main scientific adviser Robert Watson wrote the letter to Clearcast. It’s emerged that Professor Watson is director of strategic development at the UEA’s Climatic Research Unit.
A ‘mendacious’ advert
Lord Lawson, the Conservative former chancellor who has just launched a think tank devoted to challenging conventional wisdom about climate change, told Channel 4 News the advert was “mendacious”.
He said: “There are two things wrong with this ad. First, I am sure that if a commercial organisation had tried an ad which is as imaginative, as inventive as this one and as mendacious, it would not be permitted. The second thing is the focus of the ad is to scare young children and I think that’s positively immoral.”
But the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told the programme: “The problem is that the sceptics who want to cast doubt on this are the modern equivalent of the Flat Earth Society because the science is very clear about this. Climate change is real. It’s happening. It’s man-made.
“Frankly it’s irresponsible to suggest that it isn’t happening and it isn’t man-made and it’s trying to suggest that there is an easy way out of climate change. Well I’m afraid there isn’t an easy way out. We want to make it as financially possible as possible for people to make the transition but the truth is these are hard decisions that we have to make in order to make this transition. It’s necessary and the science is very clear.”
Climate change survey
Private research commissioned by the energy department – and seen by Channel 4 News – shows the scale of the challenge facing the government as it attempts to persuade people to combat the threat from global warming. Those surveyed didn’t see climate change “having a serious impact in the UK”. And they wanted the government to do more about the problem before they individually would do their bit.
Worryingly for the government, the research also found “a lack of understanding…of what climate change actually is, how it is caused, what the impact will be, what that might mean to human life and when the consequences might happen”.
Not only do ministers have to convince a sceptical public about the effects of global warming, but they also have to persuade people to pay for measures to fight it. The government estimates that by 2020 the average household energy bill will increase by £92 a year as energy companies pass on to consumers the cost of tackling climate change. On top of that, many householders will have to dig into their own pockets for energy saving devices around the home.
The government is to encourage householders to pay for loft lagging, cavity wall insulation and other green initiatives by applying for long-term loans from supermarkets, banks, local authorities and energy companies.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
What the letter said…
Letter from Governmental science advisors for Clearcast substantiation
Department of Energy & Climate Change
3 Whitehall Place,
London SW1A 2AW
http://www.decc.gov.uk
23 September 2009
To whom it may concern
RE: AMV-BBDO/Department of Energy Change’s climate literacy campaign (‘Storybook’)
We are concerned that the basic scientific inferences referred to in the latest DECC ACT ON CO2 public engagement campaign are being brought into question by Clearcast.
We are both surprised and disturbed that the premise of the television campaign is being questioned, given the incontrovertible nature of the science that underpins the campaign material, which is founded on basic physics, a vast body of peer-reviewed scientific literature, and an overwhelming consensus of climate science experts.
A remarkable and compelling degree of international scientific consensus exists on the relationship between rising CO2 levels, global temperature increase, sea level rise and changes to weather patterns. Indeed, there is now absolutely no doubt that some future change is inevitable.
In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the most authoritative source of information on the subject of climate change, issued its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Its conclusions and its summary texts were agreed by every nation on Earth. The IPCC AR4 was clear and unequivocal in asserting that global temperatures continue to rise and human greenhouse gas emissions are very likely the ultimate cause:
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level”
“Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th Century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.”
The AR4 also laid out the observed changes to weather patterns as a result of climate change, demonstrating the prevalence of more severe weather events:
“At continental, regional and ocean basin scales, numerous long-term changes in climate have been observed. These include changes in arctic temperatures and ice, widespread changes in precipitation amounts, ocean salinity, wind patterns and aspects of extreme weather including droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves, and the intensity of tropical cyclones”
The conclusions of the AR4 have been further strengthened by more recent scientific findings, as reported at the International Climate Science Congress that was held in Copenhagen in March this year. The report from this congress delivered six key messages from the scientific community to the world leaders, which highlighted the need for a successful global agreement on climate change at the Copenhagen talks this December.
There is also compelling support from other quarters for the scientific basis for climate change. In June this year, the National Science Academies of the G8 nations and Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa all signed a joint statement on climate change and the transformation of energy technologies for a low carbon future . It called on world leaders to undertake a range of actions, saying:
“… climate change is happening even faster than previously estimated; global CO2 emissions since 2000 have been higher than even the highest predictions, Arctic sea ice has been melting at rates much faster than predicted, and the rise in the sea level has become more rapid. Feedbacks in the climate system might lead to much more rapid climate changes. The need for urgent action to address climate change is now indisputable.”
The scientific basis is now accepted by world leaders, for example President Obama delivered a speech yesterday to the United Nations General Assembly saying, “No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change. Rising sea levels threaten every coastline. More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict in places where hunger and conflict already thrive. On shrinking islands, families are already being forced to flee their homes as climate refugees. The security and stability of each nation and all peoples – our prosperity, our health, our safety – are in jeopardy. And the time we have to reverse this tide is running out.”
The UK Government bases its response to the threat of dangerous climate change on the IPCC’s findings and these other robust assessments; and DECC’s campaign needs to provide simple messages based on this overwhelming scientific consensus. The purpose of the campaign is to raise public understanding of the causes of climate change and its effects. In particular, it aims to show that climate change is an issue which affects us all and which requires co-ordinated action, domestically and internationally.
We recognise and strongly support your role in ensuring TV advertising is accurate and substantiated. In this instance we are clear that the fundamental science underpinning DECC’s script is entirely consistent with these principles. It is imperative that we communicate clearly and authoritatively the strong, peer-reviewed evidence linking manmade CO2 emissions with climate change and its impact on the UK. In the context of the forthcoming critical talks in Copenhagen in December it is crucial that we help the public to understand the serious challenges facing the UK and the rest of the world due to climate change. Unless we are able to present the evidence in a valid and compelling way, we believe the campaign’s immediate objectives and arguably the Government’s overall objective to reduce CO2 emissions could be compromised.
Yours faithfully,
Professor John Beddington
Government Chief Scientific Adviser
Professor Bob Watson
Defra Chief Scientific Adviser and acting
DECC Chief Scientific Adviser

The AGW theory couldn´t be 100% proven, due to quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle, and quantum fluctuations, as well as, if true, it´s not, solved by socialism, i.e. Cap and Trade, with a total world price tag of $145 trillion.
Say No To Climategate!!!

I haven’t listened to the whole thing yet, but these guys would best be advised to keep their mouths shut:
http://climateprogress.org/2009/12/04/press-call-michael-mann-gavin-schmidt-and-michael-oppenheimer-climategat/

Oops, forgot to add this chestnut from Mann:
Michael Mann:“Decades of research [has been conducted.] There is a very robust consensus that humans are warming the planet and changing the Earth’s climate.”
“There are a handful of people and organizations who have tried to cloud the debate…. They have engaged in this 11th-hour smear campaign, where they have stolen personal emails from scientists, mined them for single words or phrases that can be taken out of context to twist their words, and I think this is rather telling…. Those advocating inaction don’t have the science on their side, so they turn to this last minute smear campaign.”

The horror of this situation is the idea that “Big Oil” began switching sides when they were informed there was enough profit in this “Brave, new, Green world” for everyone who helped to ram it down our throats. For so called “renewables” to compete, Fossil fuels need to “necessarily skyrocket”. And Big Oil would dislike this …..?

The ‘shill for big oil’ argument is absurd on the face of it.
If less oil is needed, the price tends to go up. There’s this magical thing called supply and demand. The oil companies would be better off if global warming were real and intense. We’ll still need plastics, lubricants, and yes, gasoline and jet fuel. There ain’t no electric jets.
On the other hand I’ve noted that rarely is the accuser familiar with economics or even capitalism, seeming to favour some sort of command economy mental model.

Big business and finance left the station long ago and put money down on AGW.
Goldman-Sachs into carbon credit trading schemes big time looking to be a regular Enron.
That big business is funding the people who question AGW is one of the Big Lies of the AGW proponents.
In truth, it is the other way around, Big business has been in bed with the AGW crowd for years.
Why?
Because they know they can “game” the system.

Shell has a big refinery in The Netherlands and reading the e-mails I found out that the Dutch are also involved in Climate Gate.
Shell is currently involved in a test for Carbon Capture and Storage under the city of Dordrecht.
This sounds very odd to me because one of the objectives is to find out if their CCS concept is safe. I always learned that any personal risks should be avoided in an experiment that has to proof the safety of a concept, so I wonder why they risk the lives of an entire city population of a town to proof safety?
I personally would not like to live in a town where they have a 200 Bar Liquid CO2
system to pump CO2 under the ground.
In one of the e-mails between Phil Jones and Michael Mann the KNMI was mentioned
and Van Engelen et al, a report about the Dutch winters from the year 800 to today.
The report concludes that the hottest winters happened in the past fifty years from the current and past century, in perfect support with the Mann’s Hockeystick Graph.
There is more interesting information in this e-mail here:
http://climate-gate.com/email.php?eid=178&keyword=KNMI
I also found an e-mail where the Dutch request for cooperation to get a 100 million Euro grand, see here: http://climate-gate.com/email.php?eid=293&keyword=Pavel
So if we make a fast calculation:
The last e-mail i about a 100.000.000 Euro grand, the Shell CCS project is about 680.000.000 Euro in grands and participations, totals 780 million Euro = over one billion dollar, a lot of money to keep the scam alive. And that’s only the Netherlands.

BP and it’s absorbed Amoco were very “green” for the last decade or so. If I were not a cynic by nature I might think them sincere*. Their HQ in Houston has a big solar array on one of its many garages. Incidentally, it is covered with snow today in the earliest snowfall in the history of weather records hereabouts (and still accumulating). Unsurprising that BP would fund the enemy – perhaps they thought that the greens might give them a break – or, again, they could be sincere.
The greens shamelessly bash big oil while taking their filthy lucre. Apparantly they don’t “stay bought”. No honor among shills on that side of the equation, eh?.
* But, really “beyond petroleum”? Give me a break!

I did a research on internet after I heard about a meeting in the White House, 4.th of August 1997 between Bill Clinton, Al Gore, government officials and 7 energy exectutives, one of them was Lord Browne of BP. I have reedited an essay that I put up on a blog in Norway some days ago.
About the Kyoto Protocol.
It was signed the 11th Desember 1997, and from Wikipedia, pr now it is signed 187 nations. The Protocol says that 37 developed nations have to reduce their discharge of anthropogenic gases by 5.2 % within 2012 compared to the levels in 1990.
But, it is possible to avoid this demand by Emission trading, from Wikipedia:
The Protocol provides for several “flexible mechanisms” which enable Annex I countries to meet their GHG emission targets by acquiring GHG emission reductions credits. The credits are acquired by an Annex I country financing projects that reduce emissions in non-Annex I countries or other Annex I countries, or by purchasing credits from Annex I countries with excess credits. The flexible mechanisms are emissions trading, the clean development mechanism (CDM) and joint implementation.
Bying and selling CO2-quota have grown into big business. From Wikipedia:
Since allowances and carbon credits are tradeable instruments with a transparent price, financial investors can buy them on the spot market for speculation purposes, or link them to futures contracts. A high volume of trading in this secondary market helps price discovery and liquidity, and in this way helps to keep down costs and set a clear price signal in CO2 which helps businesses to plan investments. This market has grown substantially, with banks, brokers, funds, arbitrageurs and private traders now participating in a market valued at about $60 billion in 2007.[14] Emissions Trading PLC, for example, was floated on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market in 2005 with the specific remit of investing in emissions instruments.
From Tim Carneys webside, http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sealed/gw/business.htm . At the end of 2008 the value of CO2-quota, cap and trade, will be ca $ 126 bn, the origin mainly from Europe.By 2020 the value vil increase to $ 3.1 tn. But he the volume of trading will be about $ 20 tn, according to Matt Taibi´s essay in Rolling Stone. The Obama administrations is planning to sell CO2-quota for the amount of $ 646 bn.
From other source I have learned that investment bank like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are positioning themselves for this market. The government in Norway now offer CO2-quotas to private person.
Question is, can cap and trade have any influence on emmisions and global temperature. Probable very little. The calculated effect of the Kyoto Protocol was to lower the global mean temperature below 0,06 oC at 2050.
The cost for every single person will be huge. In USA, for every family it will increase to about $ 4600 in 2035. In Norway we are paying 15 c pr liter of gasoline and oil in CO2-taxes. We have to pay for socalled green certificates, increased to $ 140 in 2020 to the utilities. From next year we have to pay a CO2-tax on our renewabel hydro electric power to EU. And the government is bying CO2-quotas for million of dollars, many of the scemes are obscure. The government tactic in Norway is to deversify the carbon taxes.
Then back to Tim Carneys webside, how late Kenneth Lay, CEO of ENRON, was one of the main arcitects of the Kyoto Protocol and cap and trade. The 4th of August 1997 it was a decisive meeting in The White House, 3 months before the signing of the Kyoto Protocol. Attendees were Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Ken Lay, Lord Browne of BP an 6 other energy executives. Kenneth Lay managed to convince the others that there should be a market approach to the reduction of anthropogenic gases. That was the reasen behind the artical 17 in the Kyoto Protocol, cap an trade.
There are to important things to notice in TC webside. First, before the meeting in The White House, the Oil Industri was negativ to anthropogenic global warming, AGW. But, they became convinced, they could benefit of the new of cap and trade. THEY CHANGED THEIR POSITION IN 1997! The NGO´has not told us. Some years ago there was a big row in UK when a hospital had to by CO2-quotas, and from where they had their origin.
The second point is that after 1997 the Big Oils started to support NGO´s financially. ENRON had knitted into new alliances and started to fund NGO´s like Greenpeece and World Wild Life Fund:
From TC: In addition, Enron began to cultivate new friends in the environmental community. From 1994 to 1996, the Enron Foundation gave nearly $1 million to the Nature Conservancy, whose Climate Change Project promoted global warming theories. Another $1.5 million was donated to other groups advocating international controls to curb global warming, including Greenpeace.
ENRON´s business plan was to parasite, profitt on the coal dependant industries:
From TC: In 1997, Enron set about to promote an international treaty to impose cuts in CO2 emissions while allowing emission rights trading. Such an agreement would produce a gigantic windfall for Enron because it would boost the usage of natural gas at the expense of coal and it would help Enron’s growing commodity trading business.
They created institusions that should marginalize AGW sceptics; Bjoern Lomberg became one of their victims:
From TC: As the push for a treaty gained more support around the world, Enron CEO Ken Lay and other business leaders wrote to President Bill Clinton on September 1, 1998, asking him to create a bipartisan blue ribbon commission that would essentially shut off the scientific debate on global warming and discredit those scientists who opposed the treaty and did not support the global warming theory.
ENRON studied AGW. The conclusion was not obvious, but they managed to attach the most prominent experts on the field:
From TC: Simultaneously, Enron commissioned an internal study of global warming science, only to find the results did not support the theory. In conclusion, the report noted, “The very real possibility is that the great climate alarm could be a false alarm. The anthropogenic warming could well be less than thought and favorably distributed.”A primary consultant for that study was NASA scientist James Hansen, the very same scientist who now castigates the Bush administration for its stance on Kyoto and who trashes scientists who dispute global warming as being in the hip pocket of big business. That certainly did not keep Mr. Hansen from cashing Enron’s check.

Google search results for “climategate” as of 4:35pm EST today:
Results 1 – 10 of about 13,800,000 for climategate. (0.10 seconds)
Earlier this morning, it was 30,000,000 — NOT 13,800,000.
Perhaps there is a valid reason for this, but it seems odd because I have been watching it steadily grow all week long.