Vladimir Putin; Climate and Political Realist?

Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

The Daily Caller headline said, Russia’s Putin Says Global Warming Is ‘A Fraud.” What Putin is doing and saying is nothing new. He always knew that the IPCC climate was wrong he simply changed his political position as the situation dictated. Soviet and latterly Russian climatologists are far better than most in the west. I know Chinese climatologists are their equals because I worked with both.

Experience

I worked with several Soviet climatologists during the Cold War. It began when I wrote a chapter in a book titled Climate Since AD 1500. The editor had chapter authors review other chapters. One that I was assigned titled “Documentary evidence from the USSR” by E. P. Borisenkov reported on the value of the Russian Chronicles. I became very familiar with the work of Mikhail Budyko, who essentially changed the approach from synoptic climatology to energy budget climatology.   His work was influential to current climate science. Ironically, the editor was Phil Jones, who gave me my only mention in the leaked emails. In May 2008, he wrote,

“PPS Our web server has found this piece of garbage – so wrong it is unbelievable that Tim Ball wrote a decent paper in Climate Since AD 1500.”

Michael Mann commented,

p.s. As for Tim Ball, he is so completely discredited (with having lost that lawsuit involving him lying about his academic credentials) that nobody but those truly in denial would even bother reading his tripe. see e.g.

http://www.desmogblog.com/node/1272

I do find it an amusing curiosity that he actually has a chapter in Bradley and Jones.

Probably best kept a secret!

The problem is I didn’t lose a lawsuit and the paper that published the false academic credentials, The Calgary Herald, published a correction and apology. Consider the source of Mann’s information. Besides, we now know who published the real garbage?

Different Approaches and Conflicts

During the Cold War, most Soviet science publications were not available until a significant change occurred when Jewish scientists who escaped from the Soviet Union set up translation services in Israel. In approximately 1990 a divergence in climate science emerged between Eastern block countries and the West. The Soviets believed climate was cyclical, the sum of a multitude of cycles. The challenge was to identify them and how they interacted. Cyclical climate events pervaded Russian thinking particularly since the publication of Nikolai Kondratieff’s 1926 article titled “Long Waves in Economic Life.” The concept of climate cycles has flourished in economics and stock market prognostications ever since. Michael Zahorchak’s book “Climate: The Key to Understanding Business Cycles” is a good example. The western view revolved around Chaos Theory that weather was unpredictable beyond a couple of days because of randomness; Lorenz and the butterfly. This created an ongoing contradiction for AGW proponents. If you can’t forecast accurately for a few days, how can you be so certain about 50 and 100-year forecasts?

The fascinating thing about the east-west scientific, intellectual and philosophical difference is that it was interpreted as political and ideological. It wasn’t, and Putin’s position is a manifestation of the difference. What is fascinating is his recognition that the IPCC and Kyoto was a political agenda to suppress development, except that he believes it is only applied to developing countries. In fact, it was designed to promote equal and limited development by weakening developed nations and minimally improving developing nations. All this comes after the developed nations paid for their sins and the money went to the developing nations who suffered. It takes a communist to recognize an attempt at one-world government. Putin is not opposed to this as long as Russia is in control.

Another illustration of the Russian position occurred when Lord May used science societies to promote the IPCC global warming agenda. He began with the UK Royal Society and used their prestigious status to persuade other national societies to manipulate public perception with public statements. Most societies conformed, an issue that is still a contention for many, as Professor Emeritus Hal Lewis’s resignation from the American Physical Society illustrated. One group, the Russian Academy, resisted the propaganda move under the leadership of climatologist Professor Yuri Izrael. At a United Kingdom Met Office (UKMO) conference at Exeter University titled “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change,” Professor Izrael and Andrei Illarionov paid the price for their actions. As Benny Peiser reported,

After two days of relentless barrage of doom and gloom predictions at the Met Office conference on “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” I decided that enough is enough. The unmitigated exposure to prophecies of imminent ice ages, looming hell fire, mass starvation, mega-droughts, global epidemics and mass extinction is an experience I would not recommend to anyone with a thin-skinned disposition (although the news media couldn’t get enough of it). But such was the spectacle of pending disaster that anyone who dared – or was allowed – to question whether the sky is really about to fall on us (and there were at least half a dozen of moderate anti-alarmists present), was branded a “usual suspect”, a slur hurled against Andrei Illarionov (Putin’s economic adviser) by the IPCC’s Martin Parry.

Peiser reported that after Professor Izrael presented his paper

The Russian scientist was immediately and disrespectfully admonished by the chair and former IPCC chief Sir John Houghton for being far too optimistic. Such a moderate proposal was ridiculous since it was “incompatible with IPCC policy”. Clearly, the Met Office meeting was setting the tone for the next IPCC report.

It was deeply upsetting to witness the ill-mannered and discourteous way in which both Professor Izrael and Dr Illarionov were mocked during the debates by many delegates and IPCC officials.

This is the same UKMO that get weather and climate forecasts wrong so often they lost their contract to the fellow public agency the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Putin’s Climate Representative

Putin was always opposed to Kyoto and the so-called science behind it. He sent his economic advisor Andrey Illarionov on a world tour explaining what was wrong with the science. A copy of his Washington 2004 PowerPoint presentation is available here. After the tour Putin’s political situation changed.

The Kyoto Protocol needed ratification by enough countries that produced 55% of the CO2. When the US refused to participate, Russia was the only country left at the time producing enough CO2 to keep Kyoto going. Illarionov finished his world tour returned to Russia and a month later Putin announced he was going to ratify Kyoto. Illarionov resigned. Some argued that Putin gained more by selling emission credits. Putin explained the realities of his action. His goal was to double Russia’s gross domestic product, and he believed this was more achievable through membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO).

The fact was that several nations, mostly European, effectively blackmailed Putin by telling him they would not support his application for Russia’s membership in the WTO. Illarionov explained what went on before he left the stage. Putin considered that membership more valuable than the Kyoto deal at the time. Here is that view artfully suggested by a Polish commentator.

Another popular hypothesis links ratification with EU support for Russia’s WTO accession. Although high-ranking officials such as Foreign Affairs Minister Igor Ivanov and Energy Minister Igor Iusofov denied this allegation, President Putin himself hinted at it, when saying: “The EU has met us halfway in talks over the WTO and that cannot but affect positively our position on the Kyoto Protocol.” It is not clear, however, whether Russia’s delay was part of a strategy to bargain with the EU, or whether the Kremlin “just” took advantage of its special position to come closer to WTO membership—which was one of the main aims of Putin’s presidency.

Now it is to Putin’s economic advantage to oppose the Kyoto replacement the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Will Putin Contribute To The Green Climate Fund?

At the Conference of the Parties (COP)16, they introduced the Green Climate Fund with the World Bank as the interim trustee. In September 2015, the European Union and South Korea committed to making the GCF a major part of the Paris COP.

SONGDO, 17 September 2015 – Meeting on the occasion of their Eighth Bilateral Summit, the heads of the Republic of Korea and the European Union stressed the need to tackle climate change and confirmed their resolve to play their part in concluding a successful universal climate agreement in Paris later this year.

The three leaders affirmed their ambition to “make the Green Climate Fund fully operational and the main operating entity of the financial mechanism” under the UNFCCC for the Post-2020 climate regime.

Despite this, many are not paying.

Friends of the Earth International today demanded that developed nations provide the Green Climate Fund with the resources they pledged to it in 2014, warning that the contributions made so far are alarmingly low.

Thousands will go to Paris with over half of them Non-Government Organization (NGO) people. They will push an agenda that Putin knows is completely unnecessary. As the French mathematical society, SocietedeCalculMathematiqueSA wrote in a recent paper that Putin will know about titled, “The battle against global warming: an absurd, costly and pointless crusade.”

There is not a single fact, figure or observation that leads us to conclude that the world‘s climate is in any way ̳disturbed‘. It is variable, as it has always been, but rather less so now than during certain periods or geological eras. Modern methods are far from being able to accurately measure the planet‘s global temperature even today, so measurements made 50 or 100 years ago are even less reliable.

Concentrations of CO2 vary, as they always have done; the figures that are being released are biased and dishonest. Rising sea levels are a normal phenomenon linked to upthrust buoyancy; they are nothing to do with so-called global warming. As for extreme weather events – they are no more frequent now than they have been in the past.

It is built on the false science created by the IPCC to support the political objective of Agenda 21. German Physicist and meteorologist Klaus-Eckart Plus explained why too many scientists don’t understand. They never read what the IPCC said.

“Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data—first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it.” ”Scientifically it is sheer absurdity to think we can get a nice climate by turning a CO₂ adjustment knob.”

Russian scientists know what the IPCC said. Because of them Putin knows that the climate science of the IPCC is wrong. He knows it because Soviet and now Russian climatologists practice open science, which is ironic in a political system that is supposed to be controlling. He also knows the IPCC is designed to use climate for political goals because he does it better than most. As the say, it takes a thief to catch a thief. How much money will Putin contribute to the Green Climate Fund?