Dr. Richard North of the EU Referendum sends word of this new revelation. North and Christopher Booker were the first to point out the money trail with Pachauri. Now the have followed the money on IPCC’s “Amazongate” all the way to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Here’s an excerpt from both.
Appearing in the Booker column is an account of how the “conservation” group WWF hopes to turn Amazonian trees into billions of dollars, all in the name of saving the planet. The background briefing on which Booker relied is posted below, detailing how the rainforests are to become a monstrous cash-making machine.
The Amazon – a “green gold-rush”
The WWF and other green campaign groups talking up the destruction of the Amazon rainforests are among those who stand to make billions of dollars from the scare. This “green gold-rush” involves taking control of huge tracts of rainforest supposedly to stop them being chopped down, and selling carbon credits gained from carbon dioxide emissions they claim will be “saved”.
Backed by a $30 million grant from the World Bank, the WWF has already partnered in a pilot scheme to manage 20 million acres in Brazil. If their plans get the go-ahead in Mexico at the end of the year, the forests will be worth over $60 billion in “carbon credits”, paid for by consumers in “rich” countries through their electricity bills and in increased prices for goods and services.
The prospect of a billion-dollar windfall explains the sharp reaction to the “Amazongate” scandal, in which the IPCC falsely claimed that up to 40 percent of the rainforest could be at risk from even a slight drop in rainfall.
Here, the IPCC was caught out again making unsubstantiated claims based on a WWF report. But unlike the “Glaciergate” affair where its claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was conceded to be an “error”, the IPCC stood firm on its Amazon claim, stating that the assertion was “correct”. What makes the difference is that there is no serious money locked into melting glaciers. Amazonian trees, however, are potentially worth billions.
In standing its ground, the IPCC was strongly supported by the WWF, and by Daniel Nepstad, a senior scientist from the US Woods Hole Research Centre. Relying on an assiduously fostered reputation as a leading expert on the effects of climate change in the Amazon rainforests, Nepstad – who works closely with the WWF – posted on the Centre’s website a personal statement endorsing “the correctness of the IPCC’s statement”. Bizarrely, his own research failed in any way to substantiate the claim.
==================================
Read the rest of this entry at the EU Referendum here
Also see the Booker column in the Telegraph
So where do I enter the ground floor of the vitrtual carbon cartel?
In Papua New Guina, they charged the land holders 500 dollars to be qualified to recieve credits. The land holder is unlikely to see any penny of this hoax.
Nearly 100% of the carbon funny money will remain with the handlers.
Economic WMD – > Carbon Credit Bomb. The scam continues. By the way, I can give you a real good deal on Tulip futures.
This is just organised crime. World Worshippers-of-the-great-god-onan Fund.
Cap and tradegate is also coming here in the US just as soon as healthgate is passed and then amnestygate and greengate and ….. Hello socialism. Oh, and gungate.
I still have not seen any penatlies for Mann, Hansen, Jones, Gore, ETAL. They are going to get away with all of this nonsense.
As always.. follow the money
penalties—- darn teachers.
Wow.
Of course I was way ahead of everybody in saving the rainforests. A few decades ago I was working in Lagos, Nigeria on a factory job and was approached by their minister of finance. He explained that Nigeria was poor because people there had trouble moving funds to overseas banks, and that to help connect his citizens with foreign bank account holders he was going to send out daily mass mailings to “EVERYONE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.” (Nigerians talk in all-caps, for some reason.) The letters would go out on converted supertankers, several hundreds thousand tons per day.
I explained that producing that much paper would strip all of Africa’s rainforests bare in just a few years, and suggested using a new invention called “e-mail.”
He was delighted, Nigerian’s were able to contact everyone in the entire world about transfering funds, and I saved trillions of acres of rainforest, for which I now receive about $200 billion in annual carbon credits, which I’m willing to share with anyone who wishes to invest with me by sending me their personal VISA, Mastercard, and bank account numbers.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it!
As I understand, a current large carbon sink is the “greening” of the oceans thru Phytoplankton. There must be a way to duplicate the Amazon scam with a mechanism for carbon offsets involving somehow getting credit for stewarding, and taking “ownership” for vast cubic miles of undisturbed ocean. Imagine the possibilities for getting rich from that.
Mr. Booker includes an off-putting photo to hearald an important topic.
The bought off media like CNN/BBC/ABC et al are deaf and blind to the gigantic fraud and cynical exploitation, the age old dance of money and power playing out before our eyes.
The truth is both wonderful and terrible to behold, its frightening to witness just how far and deep the corruption of our society goes and for so long covered up by a client media fed a diet of press releases and puff pieces.
We find ourselves in a sea of sharks it seems, an Alice in wonderland nightmare where bad is good and wrong becomes right and fantasy become reality.
The supposed good guys are the bad guys the the supposed villains are? In retropsect it was easy to see groups like the WWF go bad, turning to the dark side where power and money are the currency.
The scale and depth of the fraud makes enron look like a penny ante deal.
Blue Planet in Green Shackles!, Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic:
“Thank you for giving me the chance to address this distinguished audience and for asking me to speak on one of the issues I consider absolutely crucial.
I am convinced that the ideology of environmentalism, particularly its extreme variant, the global warming alarmism, and its widespread acceptance by politicians, journalists and all kinds of leftist intellectuals is the main threat to freedom and prosperity we are facing today”.
http://www.klaus.cz
BillyV (12:56:12) :
As I understand, a current large carbon sink is the “greening” of the oceans thru Phytoplankton. There must be a way to duplicate the Amazon scam with a mechanism for carbon offsets involving somehow getting credit for stewarding, and taking “ownership” for vast cubic miles of undisturbed ocean. Imagine the possibilities for getting rich from that.
—–
REPLY:
It’s been attempted, with rather hilarious results!! Please see:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/03/24/iron-dumping-experiment-is-a-bust-it-feeds-crustaceans-doesnt-trap-carbon/
They tried to fertilize the ocean with iron to stimulate the phytoplankton, BUT the little phtyoplankton got gobbled up by copepods!! LOL!!
At least two companies who planned to make a fortune on this ocean-fertilization scheme (Phytos and Climos) are bankrupt thanks to the hungry copepods and other problems with the scheme.
Next scam, please?
Its worse than I thought
The World Bank, the UN, The UN IPCC, GeenPeace, WWF, the EU, the Obama Administration, the Roman Catholic Church, Pension Funds investing in AL Gore’s
Green Empire, the BBC, The NYT, CNN, the Banks, Virgin, Shell, etc. etc they are all into this!
They all underwrite the Consensus stating that Global Warming is real and we need to shut down our carbon fueled economy!
How big a jail do we need imprison the perpetators of this criminal conspiracy against humanity?
Paul of Alvhem beat me to it:
It really is a blatently obvious case of ”follow the money”.
Remember the old saying:
”Power (money) corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
Also:
There are people stick up 7-11 stores to get (maybe) a couple 100 $ in cash.
What will eco-opportunists like WWF be willing to do for potentially getting a big piece of a $60 BILLION dollar pie ??…
Obvious answer:
ANYTHING they think they need to do to hit the jackpot.
RhudsonL (13:04:21) :
Mr. Booker includes an off-putting photo to hearald an important topic.
Huh? Where? His article only has one photo and that’s of a hilltop.
Now Richard North slipped in a “National Geographic special” in his article. Is that what you were referring to?
Off topic, but I strongly encourage everyone to call their congressmen to vote no on this healthcare “reform” bill. This is merely the first snowball and after the administration turns congress into malleable putty they’ll get the momentum to pass cap and trade.
I called and emailed my congressman (DeFazio) after I heard he’d changed his vote to a yes.
So, Woods Hole Research Center supported the WWF in this scheme. It is rather interesting to note that John Holdren, Obama’s Science Advisor, has had a long-time association with the WHRC:
http://www.whrc.org/about_us/whos_who/cv/jholdren.htm
Woods Hole Research Center: Woods Hole, Massachusetts:
•1992 – 1994: Visiting Scholar
•1994 – 2005: Distinguished Visiting Scientist
•1994 – 2005: Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees
•2004 – 2005: Director-Designate
•June 2005 – Present: Director
Errata in my earlier post = the companies with the “fertilize the ocean with iron” scam were Planktos and Climos, not Phytos as I claimed.
Planktos is bankrupt, but Climos is still hanging on…..for now.
Here’s another great article on the “iron fertilization to grow phytoplankton and fix carbon” experiment gone awry:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/03/090327-iron-seeding.html
@ thegoodlocust (13:48:05) :
Not so far off topic. The whole basis of the CO2/global warming argument is that it’s hazardous to human health and well being. Refer to the abundance of proclamations to that effect by EPA, et al.
On British TV we have regular SKY/WWF commercials asking the viewers to donate £3 a month to sponsor/asopt an acre of Amazon rainforest. So that’s also a constant drip feed of extra cash coming in from gullible well meaning people.
http://www.wwf.org.uk/adoption/skyrainforestrescue/
The world is getting stranger by the day.
WWF = Gang Green
“So, Woods Hole Research Center supported the WWF in this scheme. It is rather interesting to note that John Holdren, Obama’s Science Advisor, has had a long-time association with the WHRC:”
That’s the next project … WHRC seems to be a nexus of influence, playing a key role in the whole scam.
@Curiousgeorge
“.. By the way, I can give you a real good deal on Tulip futures…”
Got any black ones?
hmccard,
Woods Hole Research Centre should not be confused with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. They are not the same, or connected in any way.
I followed the link to the carbon sequestration project. (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/03/24/iron-dumping-experiment-is-a-bust-it-feeds-crustaceans-doesnt-trap-carbon/ )
The article said the experiment was a failure because the iron fertilization led to a large ecosystem bloom but not ocean life dying to deposit CO2 on the ocean floor. A long comment claims the article is misleading, and the experiment was a success on many levels.
The success of this experiment, and of other iron fertilization projects, is in demonstrating that oceans can yield vast quantities of food for fish and fish for people. As soon as property rights are secured, investment dollars will fund needed technology development. The CO2 sequestration angle has been an effort (or ploy) to attract funding.
How many tens of millions of dollars were invested in fish farms before the technology kinks were worked out and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of fish started making their way to customers worldwide?
WWF:
Wretched Whoring Fraud
They are not welcome
http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/images/TapaLibro.gif
WWF is an extremely evil organization. It has done this trick in lots of parts of the world, kicking poor people off the land. They are the equivalent of those who cleared the Scottish Highlands of inhabitants in the 18th and 19th centuries in favour of sheep. Some would say that their policies are tantamount to genocide. Never forget that the founder of WWF had a vast area designated as nature reserve in Tanzania so that he could go big game hunting.
See what sort of people have worked for WWF: eco-imperialist Robert Napier in UK, former CEO of WWF-UK, now has his hands in all the pies of social control:
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/eco-imperialism-every-environmentalists-dream/
This post also has the following to say about WWF:
“The WWF is one of the most strident of malthusian organizations, which, under the guise of conservation, has stolen vast areas of the globe from native inhabitants, and has policies of depopulation. Some have claimed its policies amount to genocide. Its public image about saving animals, right down to its panda logo, is a front and a decoy. Its first president, a former Nazi Stormtrooper and member of the SS, loved to go big game hunting in Africa. WWF transferred huge sums of money to bankroll a private army of mercenaries, who trained UNITA and Renamo guerillas in their nature reserves, carried out assassinations, and infiltrated and became deeply involved in the illegal ivory trade.”
The more people learn about meteorology and climate the less likely they are to even contemplate AGW as a serious proposition.. which means that AGW is finished as a concept long term anyway… The added diversions..politics this posting etc just confirm it less (AGW).
The WWF are in this scandal up to their armpits.
Robert Napier Chairman of the UK Met Office 2007:
“Long before I picked up this mantle, I was aware of the Met Office and the important work that it does. Like most people, I watch, listen to or read my local weather forecast each day; but I became particularly familiar with the Met Office through my work as Chief Executive of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Everyday weather events and the longer term implications of climate change have a considerable impact on the species and habitats around the world that WWF is seeking to protect and the Met Office helps inform the decisions that we have to make.”
(http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/publications/annualreport/ARA0607.pdf)
Thank goodness there a few people like Christopher Booker and Richard North who are prepared to stick their heads way above the parapet. We owe the likes of them and Anthony and Steve more than we can ever hope to repay.
And of course Woods Hole Research Center has nothing to do with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute except to try and crib a name that sounds authoritative. If I were to try that with Microsoft or something similar, I would be talking to their lawyers real fast.
A wry smile will eminate every time I see a sponsor/donate a rainforest WWF advert.
Why does the Government allow some Communist front organization like WWF to operate a Ponzi-like fraud scheme out in the open like that?
This is just organized crime, that’s all it is.
I thought everyone knew this. I guess I am mistaken. Advocacy groups or lobbies, of and for anything, are all the same. They are populated by sophists and demigods. Propaganda and enlightened self interest (money in my pocket, power in my hands) has always been with us and always will be. That said, if I stop smoking my pipe can I get someone to pay me? I wonder what that carbon credit would be worth?
dn
Also check out the REDD program with the UN and REDDforests – you will find the money trail and control mechanisms growing.
http://www.reddforests.com/
Also the head of REDD Forests is none other than a WWF ex employee.
http://www.reddforests.com/people.html
Shocking. I get lent money from a global bank whose bankers are also preparing for carbon credits exchanges, I buy up land, do nothing with the land, then earn billions from carbon credits. My initial investment was zero. My work was zero. Yet millions of people around the world have to work themselves to the bone to earn the money and pay higher bills to pay for my profits.
“Brian G Valentine (15:03:48) :
Why does the Government allow some Communist front organization like WWF to operate a Ponzi-like fraud scheme out in the open like that?”
Because forest credits are a “get out of jail free” card. By having a huge influx of cheap credits, the Western governments can talk big about climate change, while their industries – on which they rely for taxation and keeping up employment – can go round the back door and offset their carbon emissions very cheaply.
No doubt Madagascar is next on the WWF hit list because they have had the temerity to log some of their forests:
http://www.panda.org/wwf_news/?190809/WWF-calls-to-stop-illegal-logging-as-plundering-of-Madagascars-rainforests-continues
Perhaps the WWF can have the loggers declared as eco-terrorists and mobilise a green army to stamp out the logging… as long as no Lemurs are hurt in the process >.>
You can see now, how and why the WWF had such a big imput into the IPCC 4th report. It doesen’t take a genius to add 2 and 2 together, it’s just a case of working out which is the dominant partner in this scam. I hope that this information finds its way to senator Inhofe because i am sure he will be able to use it against the EPA.
What am i saying, they are too big for us and too well organised to be threatened, regrettably.
The WWF should have their right to use the polar bears as a logo withdrawn, and should be forced to use two upright fingers in all their promotional material. They truly are a disgusting group of subhumans.
Curiousgeorge (14:14:02) :
“Not so far off topic. The whole basis of the CO2/global warming argument is that it’s hazardous to human health and well being.”
Since when, other than lip service, does the green movement care about human well being?
“Money, money, money
Must be funny
In the rich man’s world
Money, money, money
Always sunny
In the rich man’s world
Aha-ahaaa
All the things I could do
If I had a little money
It’s a rich man’s world ”
ABBA
More first class investigation by the estimable Chris Booker.I am in awe of his persistence and courage.
How long must we wait for these scandals to be recognised by politicians and the MSM?
It is really like living in ‘Wonderland’.
Is a mature patch of rainforest a carbon sink?
If you wanted to ensure it swallowed plenty of carbon you’d have to regularly fell trees and use the timber for something else (letting it neither rot or combust to get the best ‘sink’ out of it).
Seems to me like WWF have wangled their way onto a massive patch of rainforest that isn’t capable of being managed in that way even if they wanted to. How can it be a credible carbon sink?
Brian G Valentine (15:03:48) :
Why does the Government allow some Communist front organization like WWF to operate a Ponzi-like fraud scheme out in the open like that?
This is just organized crime, that’s all it is.
—————
Reply:
Because, just like the Lottery, government makes a huge amount of money from it. Sadly, those getting dinged the hardest are those that can least afford it.
I say to the gallows…
Hold on a minute, I’ve been donating to WWF for years. It just struck me.
I have absolutely no idea what WWF is. I presume they would spend enough of their ‘income’ to appear respectable, that would always be necessary for a charity. Sort of blending into the background.
But who the hell are they? Who controls the organization?
I’m genuinely ignorant about this, they seem to have been part of the landscape for years.
This story is incredible. Literally. The total amount of money that has been proposed for REDD is about $30 billion for 2010-2012. This is half the amount that Booker thinks the WWF is going to get from 20 million acres of Brazilian rainforest plus an undisclosed area in Mexico. 20 million acres is a tiny fraction of the 1.4 billion acres of Amazonian forest – how could it possibly get all the REDD money.
Does this blog check the credibility of what it publishes? Or will it publish anything, no matter now absurd, that puports to find fault in the IPCC and others?
OT
Latest Livingston solar observations data are available (Dr. Svalgaard’s file).
Although general trend lines appear to be there, but since the contrast and magnetic field critical limits appear to be intact, whole process of the ‘sunspot dimming’ appear to be uncertain.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC20.htm
pesadilla (15:37:16) :
“The WWF should have their right to use the polar bears as a logo withdrawn, and should be forced to use two upright fingers in all their promotional material. They truly are a disgusting group of subhumans.”
It’s supposed to be a panda. There’s a parody of it (more fitting for what WWF are really like – promoting genocide) on my post:
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/eco-imperialism-every-environmentalists-dream/
So is there a methane credit scheme popping up somewhere? Because here’s the report to justify a tax on beef to fight global warming:
http://fixtheclimate.com/uploads/tx_templavoila/PP_Methane_Johansson_Hedenus_v.2.0.pdf
It looks like one of the founders of the WWF was into eugenics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Huxley
Their first president was a German:
Bernhard Leopold Friedrich Eberhard Julius Kurt Karl Gottfried Peter of Biesterfeld
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_of_Lippe-Biesterfeld
who was also a little bit of a member of a certain party who happened to rule, well, a sizeable chunk of Europe back then. But he was a charming young man! Oh and a member of the SS as well…
I intentionally use wikipedia as the source here because they’re leftist and pro-AGW so we know what bias we’ll find there. And when even them document these facts… welll… this surely gives some backing to the statement that they’re into chasing away poor peasants off their land.
“Brian G Valentine (15:03:48) :
Why does the Government allow some Communist front organization like WWF to operate a Ponzi-like fraud scheme out in the open like that? ”
There’s not much of a difference between communism and fascism, Mussolini started out as a socialist and both communism and fascists are into price fixing, but for precision you should better call the WWF fascist i think….
I don’t see any suggestion in this article or the linked EU referendum article regarding whether this is $60 billion per year, or $60 billion once. I assume the desire would of course be per year.
Given that blue-green algae produces more oxygen than the Amazon rain forest, I wonder what I could get for not scraping the glass on my various salt water tanks?
Also, no mention whatsoever that the Northern forests provide more oxygen than the rainforests, being more vast, even Disney got that right in Planet Earth. Wonder what those will be worth?
What complete nonsense. In the linked EU Referendum article, it’s difficult to overlook the pic of the baby suckling prominently from his tribesman mother, and the pic of the emaciated child clinging to his mother.
But…does that mean not cutting trees half a world away should be worth anything?
Sickening. Eco-policies condemning the under-developed in Africa to a continued culture of subsistence existence is disgusting.
Tying that with trees in South America is intellectually dishonest and also disgusting, and suggesting that this should somehow be tied to my cost of electricity is bizarre.
How much inevitability are we expected to tolerate?
The End is Coming!!!
@ thegoodlocust (15:42:13) : They care about their health and well-being, but that begs the question: Are they human? Or are they aliens from Planet Green? (today is Alien Abduction Day, btw ) 🙂
http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/dpps/news/dpgoh-alien-abduction-day-lands-again-fc-20100319_6648542
Gareth (16:00:24) :
Seems to me like WWF have wangled their way onto a massive patch of rainforest that isn’t capable of being managed in that way even if they wanted to. How can it be a credible carbon sink?
—
Don’t ask awkward questions. It’ll be managed by doing nothing, other than counting the cash rolling in, or mismanaged. It’s risk free forest at the moment as it’s not under threat. The forest that is threatened is being cut back and people are discovering remains of populations that lived there before. So it’s being restored to agricultural use as it was hundreds of years ago.
Is a mature patch of rainforest a carbon sink?
No, of course not, and the people running WWF cannot be stupid enough to think it is. This objection is frequently raised, and always ignored by the Carbon freaks, because it doesn’t fit the agenda.
The only way you can get carbon out of the atmosphere is through active farming. Grow something which you then remove from the system, rather than let rot back into it.
You grow wheat, say, and once you’ve taken the kernels you plough the stems back into the soil rather than collecting them as straw or burning them off.
Another way we could actively remove carbon is to stop recycling paper! Old paper doesn’t contaminate land-fill so there is no need to expensively recycle it if we want to remove carbon. We should be growing more trees for paper which we then sequester.
Since I think the whole CO2 thing is a beat-up I’m going to continue to recycle paper myself. But I don’t get why a Greenie would.
With billions of dollars at stake it is no wonder that the science is always settled. The U.S. government is intent on allowing this massive fraud to continue, one can only guess at the payoffs to many of these elected officials.
“Not A Carbon Cow (16:41:32) :
I don’t see any suggestion in this article or the linked EU referendum article regarding whether this is $60 billion per year, or $60 billion once. I assume the desire would of course be per year.”
It is in EURef … this is the valuation from the ARPA areas up until 2050 … on the basis of the UNFCCC notional valuation for a CER. WWF estimates the yield at $5-6 billion a year … one assumes that is in the expectation of the carbon price increasing – which it would do if the other part of the dream ticket materialised: cap and trade in the US. Without that, the carbon price would crash … not that it can get much lower than it is already.
Of course, if they rolled out REDD to cover Africa and Asia, then it would be worth tens of billions a year, again assuming cap and trade is in place.
Dennis Nikols (15:09:22) :
Semi-immortals with superhuman powers or demagogues? Aside from your slip of the ‘pen’ (and the pipe smoking) I’m in agreement with you. The extent of the power grab entailed in this scam is horrifying.
ScientistforTruth:
I was not aware of the Nazi-roots of WWF through its first president. I’m going to do some research on this one, but this contention is not really shocking given that the Nazis were more interested in environmental issues and nature conservancy than any other European government or nation in the Nazi era.
Richard North (17:04:29) :
“It is in EURef … this is the valuation from the ARPA areas up until 2050 … on the basis of the UNFCCC notional valuation for a CER.”
Thank you, I missed that.
This is why there is so much establishment resistance to admitting that the crusade to stop anthropogenic global warming was based on a hoax. It’s not about the science; it’s about the money.
In the Booker column:
The lure of ‘green’ pots of gold worth billions in ‘carbon credits’ is what sustains the AGW propaganda machine, with governments, NGOs, corporations, the financial world, and the media all hanging on to this balloon.
That is why once Obama has the so-called ‘Healthcare’ bill passed by the House, you will see a revival of the infamous ‘Cap and Trade’ bill in the Senate. The Obamba administration wants the money to fund its continued socialization of America, which cannot be accomplished just with higher taxes.
How do we shoot down that giant financial balloon? Uncovering the fraudulent science, and Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, and others have done, will certainly help, but it like shooting BBs. We need a cannon.
/Mr Lynn
It’s NOT the environment stupid!!
It’s the money/prestige/power/ego, or something, but it has gone past the environment, sadly.
Most, I’m sure, know that the “logical solution” to all our modern problems will be probably the “logical solution” humans have employed so often in the past 6 million years to resolve BIG “modern problems” of every era.
Frequently, “the solution” seemed to come as a surprise –though many ‘could feel it in their bones’ years beforehand. Often, “the solution” took much longer than anyone thought possible. Solutions can be that way sometimes.
Humans have a very simple solution to the BIG problems that they just can’t seem to resolve. If you know anything about ‘Human Nature’ you know I’m speaking true.
Sometimes, Mother Nature pre-empts Human Nature and the BIG problems are resolved without anyone needing to resort to the Final Solution.
When the cave gets crowded tempers flare and water becomes a problem.
So, in layman’s language:
1. A worthless plot of land in the middle of nowhere is acquired.
2. The owner, ‘green’ or otherwise, gets to sell a lot of something it does not produce.
3. Owner gets rich, buys more worthless land and then repeats process.
The obvious flaw, of course, is if no one wants to buy the intangible something which is neither produced, nor deliverable, nor wanted.
This has got to be one of the greatest marketing cons of all times.
Where were they when the Wild Mustangs, Americas symbol of freedom were rounded up? Too busy counting money I presume!
Who would have thought ranchland in semi-arid West Texas and the Amazon rainforest would have so much in common.
A rancher I know received a cold call (global warming pun!) from a Chicago carbon trader telling him how much he could make selling his carbon credits, with the trader making commissions, of course. The rancher laughed as he told the story, about the money that might be made out of thin air.
“Richard Telford (16:24:23) :
This story is incredible. Literally. The total amount of money that has been proposed for REDD is about $30 billion for 2010-2012. This is half the amount that Booker thinks the WWF is going to get from 20 million acres of Brazilian rainforest plus an undisclosed area in Mexico. 20 million acres is a tiny fraction of the 1.4 billion acres of Amazonian forest – how could it possibly get all the REDD money.”
60 billion divided by 20 million is 3000, that’s 3000$ per acre. Assuming a CER price of 10$ per ton CO2 that’s 300 tons CO2 equivalent per acre. Entirely realistic numbers i think, what makes you think that’s unrealistic? It’s quite a lot of wood. And if you can make people pay 10$ for such a carbon credit you’re set to make tons of money.
After they’ve sold the CERs they’ll chop it down for added profit i think… all you need to do is change one law…
Correction: “How do we shoot down that giant financial balloon? Uncovering the fraudulent science, and Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, and others have done, will certainly help, but it like shooting BBs. We need a cannon.”
Should be: “How do we shoot down that giant financial balloon? Uncovering the fraudulent science, as Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, and others have done, will certainly help, but it like shooting BBs. We need a cannon.” /Mr L
Mooloo (16:57:56) :
“Is a mature patch of rainforest a carbon sink?”
No.
One can create a carbon sink by growing vegetation with a greater weight of carbon than existed before. Like grassland into forest.
But the fate of all grass and all wood (except for coal-like burial processes) is eventual oxidation to produce GHG (mainly CO2), be it by burning, eating, biological decay, termites or whatever. Decay might take decades, but it is inexorable.
A VALID carbon sink requires the increased carbon mass per hectare to be maintained IN PERPETUITY. That is, forever. Otherwise the effect on GHG is just a temporary blip when management ceases and the vegetation returns to a natural state.
There should be no funds paid for land regeneration as up-front one-offs. There has to be a method where payment is kept linked to the weight of sequestered carbon. If the planted forest is harvested, the carbon is decreased and the proportionate money goes back to the donor.
It’s like Ross McKitrick’s proposal that GHG taxes are tied to actual climate changes.
Keep on repeating: Schemes that get money for planting trees have to maintain the carbon sequestration forever, or the money must be repaid.
The Woods Hole Research Center is a well funded advocacy group that steals legitimacy through its name.
The group has been central to the AGW scare, so anything they say or do, particularly as it relates to the Amazon, where they have been investing quite heavily is recent years, is suspect.
I keep getting donation solicitation from eco groups. At first it was the WWF. Now it is some other funded by a Kennedy. Yeah, that has no hidden agenda. (end sarcasm) The one I received today had on the front “Do you trust oil companies with the fate of polar bears?”
I’ve had enough. I’m sending the pre-paid envelope back saying this:
“Of course you probably already know that polar bear populations are either stable or increasing. But that fact won’t allow you to fleece people out of money. The truth isn’t scary. Of course you probably already know Arctic ice has increased drastically over the past two years. But that fact won’t allow you to fleece people out of money. And, oh by the way, the Antarctic had a record high in ice coverage in 2009. The very sad truth is that evil oil companies are saints compared to you. I’d trust an oil company over you any day of the week and twice on Sunday. I’d trust an oil company more than you because Big Oil has far FAR less money than Big Environment. You won’t get any money from me. Because I am your worst nightmare: someone who actually bothers to check data. Enjoy your dirty money, but you won’t get any from me. I rather spend my money to help the earth, not to fill your bank account so that you can continue to lie and cheat people out of money. Sometimes I wonder the environments sleep at night knowing how much they cheat people out of money. How can your conscience take it?
I hope you’ll do some research into climate change. But I doubt you will. The truth isn’t profitable. I am not rich, but I just made some crazy study and said humans are to blame. Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. I hope you enjoyed the warm weather with the longer growing seasons, because those days are coming to an end. And all the “homogenized” data, all the cherry-picked results, all the scare tactics, all the baseless accusations without proof, all the violations of the tenants of science, and all the strong-armed silencing of dissent so essential to science will not stop it. Climategate just accelerated the inevitable. I am not funded by an oil company.”
The Penultimate Solution
http://www.volcano.si.edu/reports/usgs/worldmap.cfm
We really don’t need to spend a bunch of money that we don’t have. We’re broke! Everybody but a politician know that.
Soooo… We already have the means at our disposal to solve this problem in short order. The link above shows the current location of active and sort’a active volcanoes.
The Americans, Russians, Chinese, British, French, North Koreans, and four or more who deny it, are itching to get rid of some old Nucs and reduce their inventory. Now, for the benefit of all mankind, in the name of humanity, they have the perfect ‘excuse’ to make a bunch of BIG BANGs and blow up some volcanoes.
What’s wrong with this solution? What are the obvious drawbacks? Well, it is very inexpensive. It is logical. It does get rid of some old nuc’s. Ah… I know, you’re going to say I’m crazy for suggesting something so dangerous.
It isn’t too dangerous, is it?
Richard North (14:22:41) :
“So, Woods Hole Research Center supported the WWF in this scheme. It is rather interesting to note that John Holdren, Obama’s Science Advisor, has had a long-time association with the WHRC:”
That’s the next project … WHRC seems to be a nexus of influence, playing a key role in the whole scam”
Richard
Also look at this link – http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf
Holdren, Schneider, Mead, Wellwood, and the WHRC are part of Mead’s 1975 conference in the US.
Now this is funny. Aldous Huxley (“Brave New World”) is the brother of Julian Huxley (Founder of the WWF).
“The first Director-General of UNESCO, evolutionist and humanist Julian Huxley, wrote of The crowded world in his Evolutionary Humanism (1964), calling for a World population policy. Huxley openly criticised Communist and Roman Catholic attitudes to birth control, population control and overpopulation.”
So i think what these two brothers had in common was they were very much concerned with the notion of freedom of the individual and the destruction of said freedom. Whoever said that it’s Napiers fault that the WWF became what it is now has a different understanding of crappiness as i.
Richard North
Following link describes Margaret Mead’s 1975 conferenfence and Woods Hole Research Centre figures prominently – Holdren, Schneider, etc.
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202007/GWHoaxBorn.pdf
Interesting tidbit. A person named Mike Rowe started a software company called Mike Rowe Soft. Microsoft sued him, and lost.
Cassandra King (13:05:14) : We find ourselves in a sea of sharks it seems, an Alice in wonderland nightmare where bad is good and wrong becomes right and fantasy become reality.
You flow a nice word, Cassandra… pity it is not fantasy, but cold reality you point up. Kinda “thanks”; but I wish it were not true.
My understanding is that trees, intake CO2 until maturity and then are carbon dixodie neutral, sequestering the CO2 built up during the growth phase.
Upon death CO2 is released, through decomposition.
Now wouldn’t these massive forests, be carbon neutral and wouldn’t reforestation of the deforested areas at least make more sense in this fantasy shell game of sequestration.
Take the giant Sequoias, as a comparison if you were to take charge of these forests, you are investing in a CO2 already sequestered for hundreds and hundreds of years long before the Industrial age of man.
What a rort.
Kind of like the Wild Rivers scheme in Australia, they declared the area environmentally protected thus denying the indigenous and any joint parties that may have wished to build any industries in these areas vetoed off their own land.
These were the same people screaming land rights for indigenous, and then refusing them freehold or 100 year leashold to build homes or small business.
It’s everywhere.
OT – Don’t have food or drink in mouth.
Mining apparently causes earthquakes. Here is a petition to phase out ALL mining even if there is doubt about the claim.
I can see it now, bamboo skyscrapers, rubber planes, hemp satellites and wooden surgical equipment. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. :o),/b>
http://environment.change.org/actions/view/phasing_out_all_mining_activities_for_energy_and_metals_-earthquake
This is double counting! If the Amazon is a carbon sink, it has been so for millenia, and so is part of the ‘natural’ CO2 cycle. In the fantasy world of AGW they could only validly have carbon credits for any ADDITIONAL CO2 sequestered.
If they cut down some trees, turned them to charcoal and used the charcoal on the local soil, then I would broadly be in agreement. The charcoal improves the soil and any NEW trees growing in the cleared area would be valid for carbon credits.
Other than than that, it is, as suggested elsewhere, just a fraud and a scam. Also it would mean that almost all of the land, seas and oceans of the world would arguably qualify for carbon credits!
Darn tag typo1 meant to!
Daniel Napstad works for William Brown at Woods Hole.
William Brown is former Science Advisor to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt during the Clinton Administration.
Bruce Babbit a.k.a chairman World Wildlife Foundation.
…and President of Raintree Ventures.
…and promo speaker for http://www.carbontradeex.com
Anything Daniel Napstad says is bought and paid for. Its one big circle of money.
@ Geoff Sherrington (17:24:09) : But the fate of all grass and all wood (except for coal-like burial processes) is eventual oxidation to produce GHG (mainly CO2), be it by burning, eating, biological decay, termites or whatever. Decay might take decades, but it is inexorable.
I’m sure most everyone already knows this, but just to clarify, the above pertains to every other form of life on the planet also. Including people. People and other mammals contain about 18.5% carbon by mass. Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen.
Which is why the carbon scheme/agenda to put some kind of phony value on it drives me absolutely screaming up the wall nuts. And the entire foolishness of trying to control minute proportions ( according to some morons idea of perfection ) that are mixed in with this or that allotrope or compound, etc. is the height of absurdity. It’s even more absurd than dictating what the “perfectly” proportioned woman ought to be!
Unless they’re getting big grant money to contemplate it, and come up with the desired results.
Chuckles (14:30:49) : Woods Hole Research Centre should not be confused with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. They are not the same, or connected in any way.
Well worth noting, Chuckles. I had been so confused until I read your alert. Confused and dissapointed as the Oceanographic Institution has always had my admiration. Now that admiration, and respect, can continue.
Ron de Hahn,
Thanks for the link to the Vláclav Klaus speech. You can reach it directly through this link: http://www.klaus.cz/clanky/2538
Cheers,
John
I’ve always wondered about the net effect of trees to sequester CO2. Consider the driving factors behind the Urban Heat Island. They include (but are not limited to):
o buildings breaking up the local wind patterns
trees break up the wind….
o buildings presenting a vertical plane at right angles to a low hanging sun and so absorbing more shortwave in the winter than if they weren’t there
trees present a vertical plane…
o buildings breaking the snow cover that would otherwise reflect shortwave back to space
trees break the snow cover….
o concentration of activity in cities produces water vapour from exhaust and so on and water vapour is a GHG
trees suck water out of the earth and breath it into the air….
Just sayin… unintended consequences… right thing to do might be to cut them alll down. Could store them in those mines to help plug them up and stop the earthquackes.
Big mistake on RealClimate website :
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/saleska-responds-green-is-green/
Saleska is computing 10.8/33, but this has no meaning.
In Samanta’s paper, AreaGreen+AreaBrown+AreaUnchanged=AreaValid, so doing this fraction has no meaning !
Green area is 10.8% for the entire forest, not just for the valid area ! By doing the fraction, Saleska assumes the 10.8% is just for the valid area, so if you want to get it for the entire forest you do 10.8/33…. but this is incorret, as 10.8% is already for the entire forest !
WWF? I thought they were an environmental activist organization but after reading these two pieces, it sounds like it’s more of a financial powerhouse than anything else. More like big business than a charitible activity. Sounds like they ought to be falling under the watchful eyes of the SEC. Once upon a time that might have been a matter of grave concern for the wheeler-dealers, but since Madoff, I doubt they have even the foggiest idea of where to start, or if they can even start at all.
Way back in the day, someone started a company called Itsy Bitsy Machines. IBM sued and they backed down.
I had a couple of ideas for innovative company names myself back then:
Widgetal Equipment Corp.
Hack ‘n Hope Heuristics
But who, among our politicians, cares about these revelations other than US Senator James Inhofe?
Re, Marlene Anderson (20:29:05),
Taking your question further, why are democrats so hell bent on enriching other countries at the expense of the US?
World Wildlife Fund WWF’s Board of Trustees 2009
The President of the trust
His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf King of Sweden
Confidence Council Vice Chairman
Rolf Wirtén
Organizations of elected representatives
Torleif Ingelög, ArtDatabanken
Ake Berg, Center for Biological Diversity
Sven Stenson, Djurskyddet
Gunnel Hedman, Ecotourism Society
Marie Wallenberg, Sweden Friluftsfrämjandet
Bengt Ek, Association of Forest
Ake Barklund, Royal Forestry o Lantbruksakademien
Per Hedenqvist, Royal Academy of Sciences
Bengt Persson, Lantbrukarnas Association
Jan-Olov Westerberg, Museum of Natural History
Maria Agren, Environmental Protection Agency
Sven Goethe, National Heritage Board
Karin Mattson, Riksidrottsförbundet
Kenneth Gunnar, Red Cross
Hakan Wirt, National Board of Forestry
Anna Amrén, SMHI
Margaret Edqvist, Swedish Botanical Society
Torsten Mörner, Swedish Hunters Association
Anders Akerlund, Swedish Church
Mikael Karlsson, Swedish Society for Nature Conservation
Mary Graner, Swedish Scout Council
Yvonne Arentoft, Swedish Tourist
Lars Lindell, Swedish Ornithological Society
Joakim Ollén, Sweden’s Sportfishing and fishing management Federal
Personal elected representatives
Crown Princess Victoria
Ingemar Ahlén
Rutger Barnekow
Knut Bengtsson
Lena Björk
Hans Christofferson
Kjell Engstrom
Peter Hanneberg
Margaretha Ihse
Bo Kjellén
Mattias Klum
Lars Kristoferson
Jan Larsen
Lars Gunnar Larsson
Carina Lundberg
Bertil Nordenstam
Maria Norrfalk
Carl Piper
Mildred von Platen
Lisa Sennerby-Forsse
Lena Sommestad
Bjorn Sprängare
Bengt Telland
Jens Wahlestedt
Marcus Wallenberg
Barbro Westerholm
Rolf Wirtén
Honorary Members
Lennart Ahlgren
Bengt Mark Heller
Alf G Johnels
Ingemar Öhrn
World Wildlife Fund WWF Board 2009
Bjorn Hagglund – Chairman
Marie Berglund
Deborah Corn Country
Urban Emanuelsson
Marie Klingspor
Odd Lindahl
Christer Malm
Ulrika Rasmuson
January Twetman
Christian Wegenius
World Wildlife Fund WWF’s management team
Lasse Gustavsson
General Secretary
Peter Westman
Environmental Protection Manager
Pamilla Andreasson
Finance Manager
Maria Bergstedt
HR Manager
Marianne Eriksson
Communications
Madeleine Hedenius
Collection Manager
Staffan Söderberg
Director of business partnerships
Contact
To contact staff at the World Wildlife Fund by e-mail, write the address of the following form:
• firstname.lastname @ wwf.se
Re: The leader is (Mar 20 21:29),
I see. The vikings out for a WCF, World Casino Foundation. The bank always wins.
Interesting that it is Sweden, behind this, that is playing these stakes. Maybe they want to finance their exemplary social system that way?
20 03 2010
The leader is (21:29:59) :
World Wildlife Fund WWF’s Board of Trustees 2009
Pamilla Andreasson
Finance Manager
Ok, tell me I’m supposed to take this list seriously?
Just following the money leads you to the reason why nonsensical science is so passionately defended.
Preserving rain forests, reducing phosphorous and nitrogen in waters, and using less foreign oil are all worthy goals that should be encouraged.
Cap and trade or carbon taxes are based on the theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide gas have caused the warming observed over the last thirty or so years.
The AGW warmists have monkeyed with the temperature record to demonstrate that global temperatures now are a little over one degree Fahrenheit warmer than they were a century ago, and further claim that these temperatures are unprecedented in the history of the world since the last ice age, and maybe even before that.
Of course, the people who lived in Greenland a thousand years ago at temperatures warmer than those in Greenland today might disagree, but they didn’t write peer reviewed papers and lacked modern thermometers. They did pay taxes to the King of Norway for the grapes that they grew where grapes won’t grow today, but the warmists claim that it was just a local warm spell that lasted only a few hundred years in Greenland and the rest of the world was cold all over. Most adults no longer believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, but a few PHDs with computer models can apparently fool lots of folks.
Same goes with melting ice at the North Pole. Anyone with a history book can read of the dreams of sailors to find a northwest passage. There are logs from sailors showing that ice has melted before, and there are pictures in National Geographic of submarines that surfaced in water near the North Pole, but those same PHDs have convinced millions of people that the history books (and photos) must have been mistaken because their computer models and statistics say so.
The NSIDC graphs show that the North Pole sea ice extent is only slightly below normal right now, and the South Pole has actually been above normal for years. See:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/daily.html
When the ice was shrinking, it was frequently the subject of news articles and heartbreaking photos of drowning polar bears. Now that the north pole ice has recovered from lows and is nearly normal, sea ice will no longer be news because it doesn’t support cap and trade or carbon tax agendas.
As more researchers use sequoia tree rings at the University of Arizona, and Norwegian clam shell temperature history analysis replace the phony temperature historical proxies created by Drs. Mann, Jones, and Hansen, the foundations of the warmists will crumble like so much sand, and their peer reviewed papers (mostly reviewed by each other) will be relegated to the dustbins where eugenics, the ether, and the flat earth folks live.
If it wasn’t for the fact that the AGW folks have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate a huge money grab that will far exceed the amounts stolen by Bernie Maddox, no one would really care. Follow the grant money, and follow the insiders who will be creating carbon credits by ‘reducing the rate of deforestation’ to discover why this is happening. Nonsense scientific results based on data and procedures that they will not release to independent researchers are easily explained by anyone who has been around a while; there is a lot of money already made and to be made by the folks who are perpetrating the nonsense.
These same folks regularly accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being in the pay of the oil or coal or other moneyed interests. This has been their single most effective propaganda move and they continue to be astonished at how well it works. Notice that after fifteen years of these accusations, you don’t know the name of even one climate skeptic who has ever collected any money. Notice that the folks making the accusations have been collecting millions, and stand to collect billions from cap and trade, and yet they are the ones accusing someone else of being influenced by money. You can fool all of the people some of the time, but eventually you will be caught.
Jimbo (18:16:20) :
Mining and earthquakes ???????? Just looked at the link – and they want to focus on solar and windpower for energy – which requires copper wire etc to, er, deliver the electricity to the consumer.
Or by windpower do they mean what we Dutch used – Windmills to power grain grinding machines to produce flours etc.
I can’t laugh or cry – my eyes just glaze over……I wonder if these are the village idiots Lord Rees averred to in his interview http://www.smh.com.au/world/science/creation-and-destruction-20100319-qm5h.html
Benjamin
“Big mistake on RealClimate website”
What Saleska computes is not wrong but the Samanta’s paper conclusion is right:
“We found no big differences in the greenness level of these forests between drought and non-drought years, which suggests that these forests may be more tolerant of droughts than we previously thought,” said Arindam Samanta, the study’s lead author from Boston.
Just look at the rain deficit”s and the green, brown and unchanged area’s.
That the forest shows “some” reaction if the rain deficit is 84% should be no suprise but that”s not a slight reduction as the IPCC claims that “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation (Rowell and Moore, 2000).”
An astounding tale of deception and greed.
The leader is (21:29:59) :
World Wildlife Fund WWF’s Board of Trustees 2009
The President of the trust
His Majesty Carl XVI Gustaf King of Sweden
This is the Swedish branch. The international and other national branches have separate governance.
The leader is (21:29:59) :
You’ve got that completely wrong. That is the Swedish WWF, not the world organization.
AGW-Skeptic99 (22:59:57) :
No grapes have ever been grown on Greenland. What was grown there during the MWP was barley, and it was only marginally possible according to contemporary sources. Still that implies a considerably warmer climate than today.
Incidentally there is some archaeological evidence that grapes were actually grown in Norway during the Viking Period, which would also imply a significantly warmer climate.
So now it’s rain instead of loggers and farmers.
Better get those carbon credits out there!
But here’s another idea… If the loggers and farmers are allowed to cut trees down, there would be less competition in the environment for water. Cut down the towering old ones. The rest will thank you for it!
Not that the rainforest hasn’t had droughts in the past. I don’t know for certain, but perhaps in those drier times, a big fire would clear enough trees so that the rest could survive. Or maybe the dry, unfit trees, whatever their age, just drop dead. I don’t know, but I do not imagine that nature has little work to do in the rainforest when it comes to balancing things out.
So no matter what we do or don’t, there will always be that. So why bother cutting man’s actions out of the cycle? Heck, if anything, we help alleviate the conditions for forest fires and the greater ravages of drought within the natural cycle. At the same time, people profit. Everything benefits!
DirkH (17:21:32) :
The scheme you envisage bares no resemblence to the REDD schemes being planned.
Consider this:
REDD aims to make a difference. It wouldn’t make much difference if it spent $60 billion to conserve just 20 million acres. REDD won’t pay the value of carbon being stored in the forests, instead it will pay a relatively small amount of money to make it more profitable to retain the forest than convert it to alternative uses.
If REDD would pay $60 billion for a 20 million acres, every speculator would now be buying land in Amazonia. They would be mad not to.
This seems appropriate here: click
A very inventive way to double your money. Lock in the capital yet have 60 Billion to spend on what ever salary raises and bonuses for the scheme.
No wonder big busines is loving this. The consumer will be paying for this in the end as new environmental taxes.
I should be wearing an iron plated diaper.
Louis Hissink (17:59:42) :
“Holdren, Schneider, Mead, Wellwood (sic!), and the WHRC are part of Mead’s 1975 conference in the US.”
Thanks … Holdren, Schneider and Woodwell – the unholy trinity! These people are under the radar. They don’t have the profile of the likes of Al Gore or Mike Mann, but they are the intellectual powerhouse – the Praetorian Guard, if you like – of warmism. These people are the real power behind the movement, and need to be outed.
Richard Telford (02:55:42) :
DirkH (17:21:32) :
The scheme you envisage bares no resemblence to the REDD schemes being planned.
Consider this:
REDD aims to make a difference. It wouldn’t make much difference if it spent $60 billion to conserve just 20 million acres. REDD won’t pay the value of carbon being stored in the forests, instead it will pay a relatively small amount of money to make it more profitable to retain the forest than convert it to alternative uses.
If REDD would pay $60 billion for a 20 million acres, every speculator would now be buying land in Amazonia. They would be mad not to.
=======================
Richard,
Your last paragraph is about right and the article on the EUReferendum web site suggests that certain invited (so to speak) big players may be doing just that by proxy and without the adverse publicity a direct attempt at purchase may attract.
So, since you write like you know something of the REDD project (and those associated with it I assume?) in some detail you have a perfect opportunity and platform here to pick the piece apart detail by detail. Why not go for it so that any discrepancies of understanding can be brought into the open and settled along the way?
Thisis important. Despite what some in authority seem to believe you cannot get blood of taxation out of a public reduced to stone. The response to the financial crisis seems to have been to increase taxation and prices led by big government and big banking closely followed by big energy, all riding on the green bandwagon. Once they have soaked up a nation’s and perhaps a culture’s ‘free cash’ spending power where will they turn next?
Who, exactly, benefits from any form of carbon trading (other than those trading) and what do they get for their cash? Give me something that is ‘guaranteed’, not some form of legalised ponzi scheme added to all of Big Government’s other similar schemes.
So there you are – make your case in support of REDD, et al, and explain the benefits in sound economic terms on which you would be prepared, if asked, to stake your future earnings, pension and living standards as a pledge to be forfeit, in total, if you are wrong. That’s the challenge. I’ll tick the notify box and await your answer. Convince me.
Is it worth pointing out that a rain forest is not a carbon sink so you cannot sell carbon credits by simply keeping it as it is? A rain forest is carbon dioxide neutral. The carbon dioxide taken in by the trees comes from rotting vegetation and the animals that live in the forest. It is a true ecosystem. If it were a carbon sink it would be expanding sideways or upwards which it is not doing.
Anyhoo, I have a couple of trees in my garden. If I promise not to cut them down can I sell the carbon credits for them. If not why not?
AGW is not going away. The UK government taxes vehicles on how much carbon dioxide they produce. If the gov admits that AGW is wrong their justification for taxation vanishes. Ergo, it will not happen. Concentrate on exposing WWF.
Henry chance (12:27:25) + Cassandra King (13:05:14) + Roger Carr (18:12:55)
Transparency International (search enron)
http://www.transparency.org/global_priorities/international_conventions/conventions_instruments/uncac
The hyperlink on TI ‘Website for updated information’ takes one to the UN site. ‘Signature/ratification status’ hyperlink lists parties and here can be viewed also (end of page) ‘Declarations and Reservations’.
The UN Convention Against Corruption (2004) Foreward [paragraph 1 & 2] is clearly written. http://www.unodc.org/documents/treaties/UNCAC/Publications/Convention/08-50026_E.pdf
“WWF is an extremely evil organization”
Totally agree.
The cruelty exhibited by the environmentalist movement knows no bounds. the global warming hoax in the West is cruel enough and financially crippling, but what about poor defenseless people in countries like Papua New Guinea who are being raped by the lies imposed on these people.
Environmetalism is all about cruelty and ego. I have yet to find a single environmentalist that gives a damn about the individual.
The WWF is the new Reich.
Here is an example of a WWF (or other related field such as carbon trading) paid activist pretending to be an innocent commenter on a news article:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6924113.ece
This is the comment:
“Hilary Ryder wrote:
Why doesn’t the Western world simply buy the rainforest they wish to preserve? I’ve no idea how much it sells for per hectare, but I’m damn sure you could buy a hell of a lot for $30 bn.Having bought it that would be the end of it, and the rainforest could simply be left as it is.
November 22, 2009 5:50 PM GMT”
amazongate is a myth:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/saleska-responds-green-is-green/
This is my first post. Mssrs. Booker, Watts, North et al should win the next nobel prize for really actually doing something so far reaching to save our planet. For 2-years I’ve followed their wonderful trail of detective work, exposing the scams and fundamentally flawed theory that the world is warming up. But no-one up there ever seems to listen – and my wife’s packet of Walkers cheese & onion crisps still says on the back that it produced 80 grammes of CO2. Why??????. Stood in our kitchen, I’m now drinking more beer and eating more bread to see if I can heat up our conservatory from the extra CO2 produced by yeast fermentation. Next Sunday we’re trying Marmite, kettle descaler, a container of decomposing peelings for the compost, Alka Seltzer, decaffeinated coffee and 7 x opened bottle of lemonade whilst eating ten tins of baked beans the night before – just to see if the massive amount of CO2 we produce will mean we can now safely turn the household heating down and the enormous carbon footprint will make the ice in our fridge/freezer ‘retreat’. But judging by the results so far, it’ll still be cold and the level of water in the kitchen sink will not rise to unprecedented levels after all. Still, perhaps DEFRA will give us a grant for our research and we’ll be headhunted by the non-profit making Carbon Trust.
Can’t wait. Keep up the good work Christopher.
Couldn’t leave a comment at the Telegraph site as it is currently closed, but this story strongly reminded me of the Golgafrincham’s in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. You know, the second raters from their own planet who are tricked into leaving on the B Ark to be crashed onto a new, unpopulated planet.
They adopt the leaf as their currency, following which they all becoming very rich but encounter something of an inflation problem…voodoo economics. The irony of course is that the planet turns out to be Earth and therefore the implication is that we are their descendants.
I’m shill-shocked!
Wilson Flood (05:06:15) :
REDD is a mechanism to reduce carbon emissions from tropical deforestation, not to enhance carbon sinks. So it wouldn’t matter if tropical rainforest were not a carbon sink. And actually it is probably is a sink, see Simon Lewis’ recent paper in Nature.
GP (04:53:45) :
That’s a challange that will take more than a few minutes to type out. I was at the Klimaforum in Copenhagen in December (not the main event in the Bella Centre). Presentation on REDD at klimaforum were mainly from a left wing prospective and were almost uniformly hostile.
davidmhoffer (16:37:06) :
So is there a methane credit scheme popping up somewhere? Because here’s the report to justify a tax on beef to fight global warming:
http://fixtheclimate.com/uploads/tx_templavoila/PP_Methane_Johansson_
——-
REPLY: You betcha!! Under the “Clean Development Mechanism” of the Kyoto Protocol, methane mitigation projects in developing nations were initiated to generate Certified Emission Reduction (CER) credits.
As a scientist with expertise in this area, I worked on manure treatment schemes in Brazil, Mexico, and the Philippines.
What can be cool about it is, by capturing the errant methane produced on these farms, they can generate all the electricity they need to run very remote feedlot operations. Our piggeries in the Philippines did this, it is amazing.
I’m an alternative energy guy who enjoys this work, and I’m sorry that the climate change bozos diluted the focus. One of my industrial clients (Fortune 100 company, you’ve eaten their products) treats their french-fry effluent in my methane digester, so we provide most of their boiler fuel by treating the organic pollution in the wastewater.
There IS some good stuff mixed in with the bad, life is never black & white. I support preservation of tropical forests for biodiversity sake; however, intelligent harvesting of wood can be done. WWF are as much alarmists as anyone.
Richard North (03:46:43)
“Thanks … Holdren, Schneider and Woodwell – the unholy trinity! These people are under the radar.”
George Woodwell was a founder of WHRC. He is currently a senior scientist and director emeritus at WHRCC:
http://www.whrc.org/about_us/whos_who/CV/gwoodwell.htm
George M. Woodwell
Professional Experience
•June 2005: Director Emeritus, Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center
•1985 – 2005: President and Director, Woods Hole Research Center
•1975 – 1985: Deputy Director, Assistant Director for Education, Distinguished Scientist, Marine Biological laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Founder and Director, Ecosystems Center (MBL)
•1969 – 1975: Lecturer, Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Science
•1961 – 1975: Assistant Ecologist, Senior Ecologist, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Biology Department
•1957 – 1961: Assistant Professor of Botany, Associate Professor of Botany, University of Maine, Orono
Woodwell was also a founding trustee and continues to serve on the board of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is a former chairman of the board of trustees and currently a member of the National Council of the World Wildlife Fund, a founding trustee of the World Resources Institute, a founder and currently an honorary member of the board of trustees of the Environmental Defense Fund, and former president of the Ecological Society of America.
It appears to me that Woodwell played a key role in creating the WWF/WHRC linkage. I also suspect that he was also instrumental in bringing John Holdren to WHRC.
ScientistForTruth (14:52:16) :
WWF is an extremely evil organization.
This is strident, AGW-type exaggeration. WWF is now a rather big corporate conservation organization trying to do many things for the “common good.” Some of these are entirely wrongheaded and misguided. But evil? The founding Chairman Sir Peter Scott, was neither a Nazi or a big game hunter. In fact he was an accomplished naturalist, author, painter and sailor.
WWF needs to reign in their “science” with objective peer review of studies published in their name. They spearhead the REDD concept (Reduced Emissions and Deforest) of rainforest conservation for political and financial reasons. They need the carbon trading scheme to finance payments to developing governments for forest protection. What is particularly wrongheaded in this approach is the demise of these trading instruments would collapse the payment structure. This has in fact happened recently with carbon offsets selling for .10 cents a ton instead of the $12.50 WWF projects.
Deforestation is a real and serious problem in rainforest nations. How to balance development that lifts indigenous people out of poverty and preservation of the land and forests is a major challenge. What WWF must do is find a financing mechanism that will encourage regular, fixed sponsorship/stewarding of forest preserves – NOT based on carbon trading.
Claims of WWF “genocide” are unfounded and way overreaching considering that a tract of rainforest legally removed from development, (a protected area) – effectively preserves the forest for people living in it. Should those people decide to clear, farm, develop that land (not usually practical) i.e. “use” the land, some accommodation must be made.
These are the real problems of conservation, pollution, land use, etc. that need funding and wisdom. WWF’s wholesale enlistment in the climate change game has deflected their resources into the CO2 house of cards. When that house collapses, the good efforts of many conservationists will suffer badly. Another example of how the hysterical AGW campaign has damaged reasoned environmentalism.
The $60B in carbon “credits” as an evaluation of protected Amazon forests is only practical if there is a market for CO2. As the market is based solely on unproven science and exaggeration – there is no market. When will the AGW gurus admit their errors and help honest conservationists succeed?
The WWF was set up as the funding arm of the IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) who were involved with the start of the whole global warming scare under Maurice Strong at the United Nations. In 1996 President Clinton issued Executive Order 12986, which stated, in part: “I hereby extend to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources [IUCN] the privileges and immunities that provide or pertain to immunity from suit”
See: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_History.htm for details on all this.
socold (06:44:45) :
amazongate is a myth:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/03/saleska-responds-green-is-green/
That’s it? A drive-by posting where they quickly drop an Un-RealClimate link and flee?
Has the reputation of this site grown so fearsome that CAGW believers will no longer dare to stop and chat for a bit?
I blame this site’s high BS-to-knowledge conversion rate. WUWT is making too much sense way too fast, it’s scaring these believers away!
This is just a grab for the green cash, in all senses of the phrase.. This does nothing to ‘take’ carbon out of the cycle, it just sticks a big ‘carbon for sale’ sign on a piece of natural rain forest – it actually puts more back into it…
The whole carbon market will not function as advertised if one is able to put pieces of the natural system into the market for no additional effort or improvement in carbon storage ability – the inescapable rules of supply and demand will come into play & the price will drop through the floor – making carbon trading totally ineffective. But of course a lot of people will make a lot of money on the way to the floor.
My parents used to own 75 acres of forest. The only time they profited from the trees was when they signed a contract with a lumber company allowing them to thin the forest. Now persons and organizations owning forests will be able to profit simply by letting the trees stand. What a scam.
The acquisition of forests by persons and organizations with the intent of making a profit from carbon trading is going to come back and bite them. Cash strapped governments, looking for new sources of revenue and realizing the new increased value of standing trees will simply reappraise the value of forest land upward by a hundred-fold or more. As the appraisal goes, so goes the real estate taxes. If the forest is currently tax exempt, that can always be changed with the stroke of a pen. Governments know how to follow the money too.
Bones (10:39:07) :
ScientistForTruth (14:52:16) :
‘WWF is an extremely evil organization.’
“The founding Chairman Sir Peter Scott, was neither a Nazi or a big game hunter. In fact he was an accomplished naturalist, author, painter and sailor.”
You know exactly who I meant, so don’t be disingenuous. I never mentioned the founding ‘Chairman’. I’m talking about WWF’s ‘Founder-President’, Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, who was most certainly a Nazi and a big game hunter: he was one of the founders of the WWF and its first president, from 1962-1976 in fact. He is known (officially by WWF) as WWF’s Founder-President. Check it out on WWF’s own website, which says ” WWF is deeply saddened following the announcement of the death of its Founder-President…Prince Bernhard was a driving force behind the creation of WWF in 1961, and served as the organisation’s first International President from 1961 to 1976.”
http://www.wwf.org.uk/article_search_results.cfm?uNewsID=752
Now if you check up on him, you will find he was a Nazi and big game hunter. You knew that all the time, of course: you just thought you could do a bit of whitewashing on WWF, I suppose, by dropping in a non-sequitur..
Thinking about it – the Japanese should be able to claim carbon credits.
They are well known for importing hardwoods from the Amazon and elsewhere. They use this wood in buildings and so sequester CO2 AND it means that the cleared forest can be used for crops to sequester MORE CO2.
They should be applauded for their efforts to reduce CO2!
This could be a good model for the WWF. If they chop down the forest but only sell the wood if used for construction, the cleared land can be used for cash crops or for biofuel production. An ideal solution to counter AGW as it actually removes more CO2 from the atmosphere than their current plans.
So we are putting carbon credits on the Amazon Rain forest.
Funny thing is the Amazon climate has absolutely no effect on climate to the northern hemisphere. So were is the net gain for companies to buy carbon credits in the northern hemisphere when it will not effect the climate where the carbon trading is produced?
Anticlimactic (18:00:05) :
Thinking about it – the Japanese should be able to claim carbon credits.
They are well known for importing hardwoods from the Amazon and elsewhere. They use this wood in buildings and so sequester CO2 AND it means that the cleared forest can be used for crops to sequester MORE CO2.
They should be applauded for their efforts to reduce CO2!
===============================
It goes back a few years now but I seem to recall that one of the criticisms of the Japanese use of hardwood timber (which was a driving force for de-forestation at that time) was that they used the hardwood in the construction process rather than just in the construction. This wasted slow growing hardwood when faster growing softwood would have been fine since it was just trashed and burned once the building work was complete. Moving on with the development of the CO2 concern meme, if they still operate the same way it would seem that a large proportion of the timber (and therefore carbon) would not be sequestered at all.
However that probably would not stop claims for carbon credits.
I have a couple of trees and a bush or two I could protect. Wonder if someone will pay me to do it? Thinking about it I got a bin full of moss and thatch out of the grass today. That must be worth something surely if it gets buried?
Richard Telford (09:43:40) :
Wilson Flood (05:06:15) :
REDD is a mechanism to reduce carbon emissions from tropical deforestation, not to enhance carbon sinks. So it wouldn’t matter if tropical rainforest were not a carbon sink. And actually it is probably is a sink, see Simon Lewis’ recent paper in Nature.
GP (04:53:45) :
That’s a challange that will take more than a few minutes to type out. I was at the Klimaforum in Copenhagen in December (not the main event in the Bella Centre). Presentation on REDD at klimaforum were mainly from a left wing prospective and were almost uniformly hostile.
=================
Richard,
I think your point in the response to Wilson Flood is exactly one of the points that Dr. North was making. REDD, for good or otherwise, is meant to be deployed for the purpose of reducing deforestation. North makes the point that the way the funds seem to be deployed by the World Bank/WWF/et al appear to be avoiding that objective by seeking to ‘protect’ areas that are not currently the subject of any real risk and are unlikely to be at risk for some decades or indeed maybe never.
However, as a ‘source’ for an excuse to generate a very nice recurring revenue scheme (with virtually no costs or resource management liability and overhead) fully supported by BIG everything and primarily grounded on general taxation topped up by usage taxes in some way, any old bit of land that no one ever visits would do just fine.
In a way it is rather pleasing that some of the (presumably smaller) ‘concerned’ organisations have some inkling that things are not quite as clean as they might be. One wonders if this is mainly because they are not (yet?) in the rolling stock carrying the gravy. Perhaps they have spotted the ‘globalisation’ endemic in the policy and are still of the opinion that such a development is not such a good thing.
The thing that occurs to me is that foot soldiers in such organisations will always be left complaining that things are not right (they have their uses when doing so) whlst the more capable members will be recruited and subsumed into the larger players. After all most ‘leaders’ could not resist taking on more leadership.
I hope you can take on the challenge of a response about REDD. I’m sure that most here would welcome the opportunity to assess more than one angle of something that appears to be set to affect most of the world’s population one way or another – especially if the concept spreads globally.
This is not new, the WWF has a long record of trying to advance money making schemes in the UN. For instance, they tried to get the UN to declare all seamounts in international waters to be the sovereign territory of the WWF (basically making the WWF a government) and allowing it to collect taxes from fishing vessels fishing within 200 miles of each seamount (the Exclusive Economic Zone), and tolls from any cargo vessels travelling through their EEZ, taxes which the WWF would split with the UN, giving the UN sources of funding independent of donations from member countries.
Money is what the whole global warming thing is all about. The UN, ever since Reagan held US’s subscription money in order to force reform (repeated in 1994 under Gingrich’s congress and the Contract with America) at the UN, has sough ways to raise money to do what they want to do independently of the US.
When it is independent of US funds, and has sources of revenue independent of any nation, then the UN is in a position to militarily force its decisions on the US.
this is sadly to be expected – case of if there is money to be made someone will figure out how.
I am pleased to see it being exposed for what it is.
I have BLOGGED about it today:
Hailed as “the big new idea to save the planet from runaway climate change”, this set up a global fund to save vast areas of rainforest from the deforestation which accounts for nearly a fifth of all man-made CO2 emissions.
http://just-me-in-t.blogspot.com/2010/03/measure-your-gullibility.html
Mike Lorrey (22:25:43)
WUWT 4/3/2003 Ad Hoc Group wants to run ad attacks
“Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to
organize researchers and use their donations to challenge
critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times”
However a non-profit group may not be needed :
Partnerships for Sustainable Development:
Partnerships database
http://webapps01.un.org/dsd/partnerships/public/search.do?dispatch=displayAdvanced
Search ‘Climate Institute’ for eg for the list of partnership projects.
This may also facilitate employment of the WWF volunteers globally for many years.
Climate Institute: Schneider on Board of Directors: Pachuri on Board of Advisors
I am not clear whether these are ‘microfinance’ or ‘capacity building’ projects, additional to the governance training projects funded by development Aid $. UN programs to alleviate poverty and attain Millenium Development Goals?
There are arguments for and against the preservation of trees. In the local farming context on the east coast of Australia, here ids a rather substantial contribution from one who knows the subject. A lot of material is in common with the Amazon, but one has to weight the pros and cons according to criteria devised over long periods of observation – not from knee jerk rections in a blip on the historical record.
From my friend Viv Forbes, who, like me, was in big mining (he was high up in finance) before going farming.
http://carbon-sense.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/grass-trees-climate-food.pdf
Joe (18:07:28) :
So were is the net gain for companies to buy carbon credits in the northern hemisphere when it will not effect the climate where the carbon trading is produced?
The only gain is to Uncle Al’s net worth.
Carbon trading isn’t about reducing the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere, it’s about wealth redistribution — from our pockets to theirs, with no change to anything else, and nothing to show for it except the transfer of funds.
Mike Lorrey (22:25:43) :
Can you document any of the your first paragraph?
If they were sincere, they would refuse to sell any carbon credits based on the rain forest. Sadly, the big environmentalist groups have become that which they once might have protested: money-grubbing organizations that say the right words, but whose real goal is only growing their little bureaucratic empires.
From the times:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7069946.ece
An unkind person might point to the similarities with colonisation, except in this case the WWF would be doing the morally suspect stuff that western governments could not countenance from private corporations (tax free). I am not sure the natives would see the difference between being shot by the WWF for using their own resources, or the east india company shooting them for using their resources. The WWF is unlikely, however, to leave them any infrastructure.
I don’t see a lot of western interest in making sure the wrong people don’t get shot. There was not a single reference to human rights in the article. Will WWF start logging, as many people point out here a forest is only sinking carbon if somebody is logging it. Will they then prevent the forest from being logged by irresponsible loggers (i.e. those without a WWF accreditation)? They are surely walking into very dangerous territory here, especially with such close links to the UN.
pesadilla (15:37:16) :
You can see now, how and why the WWF had such a big imput into the IPCC 4th report. It doesen’t take a genius to add 2 and 2 together, it’s just a case of working out which is the dominant partner in this scam. I hope that this information finds its way to senator Inhofe because i am sure he will be able to use it against the EPA.
REPLY:
I think Senator Inhofe has someone busy reading WUWT. Many of the ideas I have seen here make it straight over to his web site. His staff would be crazy not to let Anthony and his crew here do their work for them…. The ideas are even subject to very rigorous “peer review”
Jimbo (18:16:20) :
…….
“As for Metals substitute, there is already tons of research out there on using hemp, rubber, bamboo,and host of other tree-based alternatives to minimize or eliminate the usage of metals/minerals.”
I can see it now, bamboo skyscrapers, rubber planes, hemp satellites and wooden surgical equipment. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Actually I think obsidian is sometimes used for scalpels
“Obsidian is still used today for its precision. It is carefully carved into the blade of a scalpel used in some cardiac surgeries. The uniqueness of this natural glass results in a cleaner cut that causes less tissue damage. The end result is less scar tissue and a faster healing process. “
http://www.beadage.net/glossary/index.php?term=obsidian
Perhaps we should use it for constructing our modern guillotines.