EU Referendum

Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts

According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, arctic sea ice appears to have reached its annual minimum extent on 10 September.  The minimum ice extent was the third-lowest in the satellite record, after 2007 and 2008, the Center says, "and continues the trend of decreasing summer sea ice."

The big joke, of course, if you are into these things, is that arctic ice extent seems to run on a seventy year cycle, as well as being affected by short-term cycles which have more to do with wind patterns than they do temperature. Thus, a declining trend since the beginning of satellite data – which started in 1979 – is actually meaningless. Unless you know what happened in the previous cycle, you have no comparative base, and therefore you are just producing figures in isolation.


The very latest figure might tell us that the cycle is on the turn, and there is some slight evidence that we have passed the bottom end. We are, after all, just past the 70th anniversary of the surface raider Komet traversing the ice-bound northeast passage, on her way to the Pacific to sink Allied shipping.

As we recalled earlier, she left Germany on 3 July 1940 with a crew of 270, sailed up the Norwegian coast and then, with the assistance of the Soviets, navigated the northern route, crossing the Bering Straits into the Pacific Ocean in early September. She returned safely to Germany on 30 November 1941, after sinking seven ships, only in 1942 to be sunk by British motor torpedo boats near the Cap de la Hague, with no survivors.

If seventy years ago, we'd been spending the time monitoring arctic ice instead of indulging in an orgy of killing, we might all be better off. But, since we did not, we don't have the information – and guessing isn't good enough.

The Russians though, who live with the ice - and suffer from the vagaries of the climate far more than we ever have - have collected a huge amount of data and are convinced (warning mega PDF) that there are long-period fluctuations in climatic conditions, and have evidence to demonstrate the existence of an approximately 60-year repeating pattern in the circumpolar Arctic zone.

Needless to say though, that doesn't stop the little boys and girls in NSIDC knowing better and making stupid statements. Why should they listen to the people who know what they are talking about when they can make complete idiots of themselves unaided? But I guess they are no more stupid than the people who listen to them.

COMMENT THREAD

Just as the morons in the Scottish parliament are beginning to wake up to the fact that the spending bonanza is over and there is no more money in the kitty, a report released under the Freedom of Information Act has indicated that they are going to have to find at least £8billion to fund their ludicrous climate change act passed last year.

Under the new spending constraints, where hitherto the cerebrally challenged Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) have been convinced that money grows on trees, the report makes it clear that this funding requirement will "inevitably result" in cuts to all other portfolios.

Thus, at the most inconvenient time possible, reality gets its shoes on and goes for a stroll. Having decided on "the most ambitious attempt to cut emissions anywhere in the world", these buffoons have suddenly discovered that it costs money and, since they have not got a bottomless well of gold, they're going to have to cut back on schools, hospitals, welfare, etc., etc.

In a nation of five million or so that has allowed its collective brain to rot over the decades, as it has soaked up ever-more generous tax subsidies from south of the border, it is not easy to predict quite how the people of Scotland are going to react.

But when they discover that their precious services are being cut even more savagely than expected, just to pay for their rulers' climate change ambitions, it might just be possible that they (or some of them) become a tad angry. It is not quite the stuff of revolution, but it is getting us there.

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With Pachauri in "crow mode" in the Times of India, Booker starts the fight-back in today's Sunday Telegraph. Essentially, what he is saying is that the recently published Inter-Academy report into the IPCC "tiptoes around a mighty elephant in the room", even if it has provoked even some of the more committed believers in man-made global warming to demand the resignation of Pachauri.

The "elephant", of course, is that it is not just Pachauri who is corrupt but the whole of the edifice of the IPCC. This is not a proper scientific body we are dealing with here – any more than Pachauri is a proper climate scientist. It is an advocacy group, ready to stop at nothing in hijacking the prestige of science for its cause.

This, though, you would not have guessed from the Inter-Academy report which means that, even if Pachauri is forced to resign at a UN meeting in Korea next month - as seems possible - he will merely have been thrown off the sledge so that the all-important cause can survive.

Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the cause will survive. Like the EU, it has lost any intellectual or moral authority it ever had. It is only a matter of time, therefore, before the stench from its decomposing corpse, washed up on the beach, becomes so overpowering that even its supporters are forced to take note.

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The suspect, we are told, had previously served two weeks in jail after staging a protest against the channel's supposed lack of commitment to protecting the environment.

He entered the building in Silver Spring, Maryland at 1pm, waving a handgun and wearing explosives strapped to his body. Police decided to shoot the suspect after almost four hours when they believed the hostages' lives were in danger.

Why did they wait so long?

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When push comes to shove, it is totally unacceptable that an official report of the supposed status of the IPCC AR4 should produce work of a quality that would not be acceptable for a PhD thesis. Yet, as we see above, The Daily Telegraph (the egregious Louise Gray) is giving house room to an "Oxford academic" who argues that the poor little darlings who author the next report should not be burdened with "red tape" – when what he is actually complaining about is that they are being asked to stick to the rules that are imposed on PhD students.

It comes to something when Dr Myles Allen does not seem to know the difference between "bureaucracy" and academic rigour, although this is perhaps unsurprising given what is clearly evidence of a long-term decline in academic standards.

Interestingly, and perhaps spurred on by my piece, the Moonbat has come back into play, defending his hero Pachy. But for all his stridency, Moonbat has never even begun to address the issues. He simply relies on the joke report from KPMG to clear his hero.

What he therefore neglects is that Pachy is a man at the head of an international organisation, with offices (and bank accounts) all over the world. In the one instance that we were able to get to his accounts, those of TERI Europe, because they were under UK jurisdiction, we found that they had been falsified. Look at the "before" and now look at the "after" and you will see what I mean.

Given this behaviour from a man that is a proven liar, it would be rather foolhardy to assert on the basis of an extremely limited report, laced with caveats, that Pachauri is "innocent of financial misdealings". Not least, you would have to go through every bank account, in every country, carrying out a forensic audit, before you could be so bold as to make such a statement - if it was true.

But that is precisely what Moonbat does, which says all you need to know about him. He believes what he wants to believes. He then cherry-picks the "evidence" to support his case and ignores the rest. That is why you cannot engage with him and it is not worth arguing with him. He is yet more evidence of the inexorable decline in standards that is poisoning the well of public discourse.

And the worse of it all it that he is so far gone that he does not have the first inkling of quite how off the wall he has become - a pathetic figure worthy only of sympathy. But then, he is in good company - exactly what we would expect of his creed.

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Now we have The Financial Times adding its voice to the throng, noting that the time has come for Rajendra Pachauri to move on. But one wearies of the follow-through suggestions that the IPCC "needs stronger leadership to maintain credibility".

The FT thus thinks that a rejuvenated IPCC leadership could tackle the deficiencies in its review process. It says this should become more inclusive, welcoming alternative views where these are scientifically valid, and at the same time more exclusive, rejecting unsubstantiated claims of dramatic change.

But the paper is wholly wrong. The whole point of AR4 is that if you strip out all the unsubstantiated claims, there is no case for the Armageddon scenario that its authors wished to portray.

It was in the absence of such material that they cast around for material that would support their case, whatever the provenance. The senior authors and editors knew exactly what they were doing, people like Martin Parry who were instrumental in setting it up.

Having Pachauri in place to back them up was all part of the grand scheme, and changing the leadership will not change the basis of the project. Of course he should go, but it would be better if he was not replaced and the collective of nations walked away from the IPCC.

The whole thing was based on a lie - is based on a lie. And, whatever leverage Carter Fuck might have been able to exercise on The Sunday Telegraph, the High Court in Delhi branded Pachauri a liar. Nothing will change that - the man is a consummate, practiced, serial liar, and he is head of the IPCC.

The thing about so many of the warmists in this context is that they think I am as stupid as they are. For sure, I make the odd mistake, get confused about some things and get some details wrong. But my underlying research is sound.

Thus, I would be perfectly happy to stand up in court and defend myself ... many people know of my role in the MacDonalds case and I could repeat the whole charade. It would cost them millions and me just my time - I have nothing else to lose.

It matters not whether they rise to the challenge though - they lose either way. The main accusations against Pachauri stand, and I would be seriously foolish if I had not also salted away some additional material, to use at the appropriate time.

And eventually the truth will out. Then there will be some reckoning because this thing has gone too far and cost too much for people simply to walk away and forget that it ever happened.

COMMENT THREAD

In a new report, Friends of the Earth Europe is crying foul about the production of biofuels, claiming it is leading to a land grab in Africa.

In the best patronising style of the liberal neo-colonialists, it thinks the niggers should be using the land to grow subsistence crops instead of generating economic activity on the backs of gullible Europeans, which can then be taxed and used to foster independence from whitey and his NGOs (like Friends of the Earth).

As much to the point, the greenies and their supporters see better revenue earning opportunities in REDD, where they can turn the forests of Africa into carbon credits, freezing economic development and making the nigger totally dependent on whitey and his NGOs.

Thus, the report is far from what it seems. The very fact that it is produced by Friends of the Earth Europe – a publicly-funded body, heavily supported by the EU, tells you there is an agenda here.

But it also gets additional support from the EU Commission, the Sigrid Rausing Trust, the Isvara Foundation, a rather dubious German Catholic agency called MISEREOR and an advocacy group called GRAIN. The Netzwerk Africa-Deutschland and Markus Bier (a geographer from the University of Aachen) are also in there, plus Greenpeace.

This is an interesting if not untypical mix – the EU, Christian evangelicals, largely German greens and academia. These are the new colonists, spreading the word in the name of their religion of neo-environmentalism.

But it also shows up the stresses within the EU, where the German green faction is seeking to frustrate EU policy. As we get more of this, we will see the EU tearing itself apart with its own money (our money). The creed has nowhere to go but down.

COMMENT THREAD

Nature magazine has finally noticed the unusual coldness of the southern hemisphere. And, with absolute, dreary predictability, it's climate change as "Cold empties Bolivian rivers of fish" and "Antarctic cold snap kills millions of aquatic animals in the Amazon."

At first it was funny ... whether it was hot, cold, wet, dry, windy, calm, it was always climate change. How lucky for the warmists that, at a very early stage, they dumped "global warming" in favour of this catch-all.

Frankly, though, it is now just boring. These people have nothing new to say, offer nothing of any interest and know nothing that matters. Their narrow, one-dimensional world view would be comedic if it wasn't so damn boring – not least the vitriol they pour out to anyone who has the temerity to disagree with them.

That is what is going to destroy their little game ... not the science, but the sheer boredom of it all. Climate change is boring, boring boring. Get a life people!

But the fact of a cold southern hemisphere is a little concerning. It was like that last year, and we had a cold winter. We've has the heating on here three time this month already, once during the day, it's been so cold – in August damn it! The signs are, therefore, that we could be looking at another cold winter.

But hey! That's climate change! Except that your average Joe will be telling the warmists to put it in their pipes and smoke it – or something to that effect. And when the Cleggerons have finished messing with the energy supply and the lights go off, we'll have to burn warmists to keep ourselves warm.

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"Anthropologists from the National Automonous University of Mexico think that the body was placed in the cave in a funeral ceremony performed late in the Pleistocene epoch when the sea level was around 488 feet lower than it is today," says The Daily Mail.

So, somewhere between 12,000 and 2.5 million years ago, the sea level was 488 feet lower (exactly 488 feet?). If we apply warmist logic to that and extrapolate the trend, in another 12,000 to 2.5 million year, my house will be on its way to becoming a beachside property.

Do you realise what that means? Put it in your diaries. You're all gonna die!!! Not me of course, I'm above the water line.

COMMENT THREAD

The UN's CDM Executive Body is to review a request from a Chinese plant destroying HCF-23 to generate carbon credits. This follows on from its action in blocking four similar requests "in a bid to ensure that the plants do not deliberately boost their greenhouse gas emissions" – exactly the scam we discussed in December 2009 and again last June.

The Chinese plants are requesting millions of Certified Emissions Reduction Units (CERs) for destroying HCF-23, a potent greenhouse gas that is a by-product of manufacturing the refrigerant gas HCF-22. The credits are generated under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which "allows" industrialised countries to offset a part of their emissions by funding reductions in developing countries.

The whole thing, as we explained in our earlier pieces, is a gigantic multi-million dollar scam. Furthermore, it has been going on for years, ignored by the greenies over here and especially the media. And even now, the World Bank is seeking to defend the indefensible.

Its involvement here is interesting, accused by CDM watch of "defending its investments", illustrating precisely the conflict which occurs when financial institutions get mixed up with environmentalism. And it is the same World Bank which is so interested in REDD, that even The Observer is concerned about - but is otherwise being ignored.

Yet it is the pursuit of REDD which is driving the climate negotiations to the point where it is set to become the dominant feature of the negotiations at Cancun. We are thus likely to see not so much the abolition of one CDM scam but its replacement with another – the replacement of a million-dollar scam with a billion-dollar scam.

Actually, the reality is not millions and billions, but billions and trillions, as this headline makes clear, putting the current market at $2.7 billion. At least the Philipine Star is on the ball, which really does tell you so much, when it seems to be the only journal which is currently covering the issue.

COMMENT THREAD

The Daily Mail is amongst the many newspapers remarking about the sudden turn of bad weather. Remember those balmy days back in June?" it asks us, then telling us to cherish the memory. With the holiday season in full swing, what remains of the summer seems likely to be washed away.

Large parts of the country were braced for a deluge last night as forecasters issued a severe weather warning for heavy rain and flash flooding. As much as 3in of rain was predicted across southern England, East Anglia and the southern Midlands, falling on saturated ground and raising the likelihood of flash floods.

Of course, the warmists will be quivering with delight at the prospect, able once again to tell us that this "peculiar" weather is yet more evidence of global warming. But this is not so.

One of the delights of doing the current narrative on the Battle of Britain is that each day, 70 years ago, I have access to comprehensive weather reports. And, solidly from 19-23 August, there was a run of bad weather, with heavy rain, which virtually shut down the air war. The summer of 1940, contrary to myth was far from good. Only the Indian summer through September redeemed it.

Interestingly, we would know more about the weather in 1940 then the people at the time. Weather forecasts were state secrets and the media was prohibited from publishing them, or referring to the weather for the past ten days. It was felt that this would give too much information to the Luftwaffe.

However, when the Germans had invaded France and were sitting in Calais 21 miles from England, it was pointed out that it was a bit stupid prohibiting any mention of the weather there, as all the Germans had to do was look out of their windows.

A compromise was eventually reached, with the media allowed to mention the weather in the Channel but nowhere else. Historians not in the know may be puzzled at the inordinate interest taken by the population at the time in the weather conditions in the Channel.

But then, it was a question of it raining in the Channel – and nowhere else. The previous January, there had been record cold snap, and the censor had to give a special dispensation to allow the media even to mention that fact. The publication of photographs (such as this street scene in Liverpool in January 1940) was not permitted until after the war.

Nothing ever changes, it seems, except that now the media does not publish voluntarily, because the material does not suit the warmist agenda.

COMMENT THREAD

An interesting reflection on how the media only seems to be reporting weather in the northern hemisphere now. This might have something to do with the fact that it is winter south of the equator, and some very odd things are happening.

COMMENT THREAD

Let's see now ... I did the so-called "Carbon Reduction Commitment" (CRC) last February. Booker saved it up until April when the scheme kicked in.

But now, six months after I had first written about it, The Daily Telegraph warns: "Business facing a wave of green taxes". Thousands of British businesses, it tells us, will be liable for significant fines and charges under a new government "green tax" scheme. It is writing, for the first time, about the CRC.

Interestingly, Bob Jarrett, of the BHF-BSSA Group, "a trade body that represents thousands of independent shops," complains that ministers had not done enough to explain or justify the CRC. "We've only come across this in the last few weeks, and yet the deadline is at the end of next month. The Department for Energy has not given this nearly enough publicity," he says.

Of course, it would be a waste of time Jarrett complaining that the media hadn't done its job either (except Booker) ... or that people should be reading the blogs if they want the news. If he had tried, they simply would not have printed his comments. Newspapers do not go in for self-criticism.

But, to help out the trundling Daily Telegraph, we've come up with a brilliant headline for tomorrow's edition. Did you know Japan had surrendered? Its newsroom probably hasn't heard yet.

COMMENT THREAD

Recent landslides in China, triggered by prolonged rainfall, have - according to diverse reports killed at least 127 people. Furthermore, the death toll in the massive landslide in northwest China's Gansu province is expected to rise rapidly as over 2,000 people are missing.

"It's very hard to locate the people washed away by floods. It's hard to say what their chances of survival are," He Youxin, an officer of People's Armed Police Force, said. Rescuers had to use spades and bare hands because heavy machinery and excavators could not reach the site covered with sludge, some as thick as six feet.

On top of the Pakistani floods – which have, incidentally, also been affecting the Indian-held sectors Jammu and Kashmir – we have also seen extreme weather events in Korea, Korea Japan and elsewhere.

This, of course, is just weather, but still the warmists pursue their dire creed, on which Booker today passes comment. Interestingly, it was back in June that we got the most honest comment about extreme weather events in a certain locality, the candour matched only by the complete lack of interest in the Western media.

By the same token, we get plenty of coverage about the Russian heatwave, but got very little about the coldest winter in 130 years ... in Russia. Thus, the whole subject is wide open to cherry-picking, which distorts even accurate reports of isolated events. Without an appreciation of the whole picture, and a longer-term perspective, there is nothing that can be properly inferred from these events.

The real news, therefore, is not of climate, but of human tragedy and suffering. That we can do something about, and a fraction of the billions spent on "climate change" would go a long way to reducing the impact.

But as long as we are in the grip of the climate zealots, those being killed by the weather now are less important that the lucrative funding opportunities arising from predicting future disasters. How perverse it is that potential deaths in the future get more money than real deaths now – a sad reflection on human priorities.

COMMENT THREAD

Gradually, on the blogosphere, diverse sites are building up knowledge and expertise on important subjects, such as service periods and costs for bird mincers.

This site is an example - nothing big-time or dramatic ... more likes drips of water wearing away at a stone. But it is something that that cannot be ignored.

Speaking of which, John Rosenthal has done a superb analysis of the "EU Connection in Climate Research".

He has identified 26 projects on climate change funded out of Framework Programme 6, worth a whopping €165,580,451. In FP7, the "climate research" manna, he says, has flowed even more freely.

In just the first three years (2007–09) of the current Framework Programme, the European Commission has already funded 28 projects on climate change for a total EU contribution, according to provisional data, of some €116,271,772.

Actually though, Rosenthal, for all the depth and value of his work, might have missed a trick. As we have reported, the EU is allocating €1.9 billion from FP7 on climate change and related "sustainability" issues, a factoid which would hugely strengthen his arguments.

It also makes the money paid by Big Oil completely irrelevant, as Booker asserted. And through these diverse and several means, the message gets through. It can't be stopped, and the force is irresistable.

COMMENT THREAD

The Methodists – albeit in draft – according to this statement, headed: "Approaching God in the context of climate change", seem to believe:

The theological task is to reflect on modern scientific accounts of the threats presented by climate change in the context of affirming the triune God as creator and redeemer of the universe. The scientific analyses of climate change and the role of human carbon emissions are well-grounded. It is now intellectually and morally irresponsible to fail to acknowledge and address the urgent need for radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent intolerable damage to human populations and mass extinctions of many plant and animal species.

This is an interesting observation for a sect with its "intellectual" origins in Arminianism. This holds that humans are naturally unable to make any effort towards salvation and can achieve this only through God's grace. It also holds that salvation cannot be merited and no works of human effort can cause or contribute to salvation.

On that basis, it would seem that, unless God is a committed warmist, the Methodists are rather in trouble. As it is, She could just be having an Almighty joke at our expense.

COMMENT THREAD

So, floods sweeping Asia have killed more than 900 people, washing away thousands of homes and destroying infrastructure in some of the worst scenes in living memory. Heavy monsoon rains have exacted the heaviest toll in northwest Pakistan, with 800 confirmed dead and the regional capital Peshawar cut off. The deluge has also killed another 65 people in mountainous areas across the border in Afghanistan.

Floods devastating northeast China have killed at least 37 people and destroyed 25,000 homes, with the authorities racing to intercept vessels that broke their moorings and retrieve barrels full of explosive chemicals headed for a dam.

The worst floods in living memory have destroyed homes and swathes of farmland in northwest Pakistan and Pakistani Kashmir, with the main highway to China reportedly cut and the military deployed to help isolated communities.

The United Nations says almost a million people had been affected by the Pakistan flooding. Footage shot from helicopters shows people clinging to walls and rooftops as gushing waters rampaged through inundated villages. Others walked barefoot through the water to seek safety, carrying their belongings and with children on their shoulders.

"This is the worst ever flood in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in the country's history," provincial information minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain said. "The death toll in floods and rain-related incidents has risen up to 800 across the province," he said, with another 150 people missing.

Now then ... is climate change supposed to bring drought or floods to these regions? It is difficult to keep up with the latest predictions, whatever they may currently be.

COMMENT THREAD

Guest post by Christopher Booker



To the colourful Daily Telegraph blogger James Delingpole, it was winner of the coveted award for the "Biggest front page non-story in history of journalism". What he was referring to was a tale published a week ago under the by-line of The Times's enviromment correspondent Ben Webster which led the paper, covering virtually the entire front-page and with a whole further page inside, beneath the huge headline "Oil giant gives £1 million to fund climate sceptics."

Everything about this story was bizarre. Its essence, based on information which as Webster told us was had been supplied by Bob Ward, policy director of the Grantham Institute on Climate Change, was that Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, last year gave "almost £1 million" to four US think-tanks.

These hired lackeys had then shamefully gone on to describe the various official inquiries into the Climategate emails scandal as "whitewashes", apparently citing them as evidence that the dangers of global warming had been "grossly exaggerated".

The story concluded by suggesting that Exxon Mobil had clearly corrupted these four venal think tanks into giving "the oil company at least another year of freedom to reap the profits of its high-carbon strategy".

The most obvious puzzle was why this remarkably tenuous tale should have been put by The Times on its front page, presumably rating it as the most important news of the day. The evidence assembled by Mr Ward, who had apparently "been monitoring Exxon's links to sceptic groups," hardly seemed to stack up even in its own terms.

One think-tank had apparently received $50,000 last year, another had also received $50,000 - but how all this added up to "almost £1 million" in the past 12 months was far from clear. Furthermore, none of these think-tanks had really been anything but bit-players in the great ongoing row over Climategate.

As is familiar to anyone who has followed the details of that scandal and the various subsequent inquiries, it was hardly necessary for anyone to be given money by Exxon to describe their reports as no more than a blatantly perfunctory "cover up". Their sole purpose was clearly to shower the Climatic Research Unit and the various senior IPCC scientists involved in the incriminating emails with bucket-loads of rather murky whitewash.

Not one of the knowledgable sceptics who have torn those reports apart in detail, led by Steve McIntyre on Climate Audit, has ever received a cent of funding from "Big Oil". And what makes all this particularly laughable is that the penny-packets given to think-tanks which were almost wholly irrelevant to the debate are utterly dwarfed by the colossal sums poured into all the groups and organisations on the other side of the argument.

Even the big oil companies have long since been putting their real money into projects dedicated to showing how they are in favour of a "low carbon economy". In 2002 Exxon gave $100 million to Stanford University to fund research into energy sources needed to fight global warming. BP, which famously rebranded itself in 2004 as "Beyond Petroleum", gave $500 million to fund similar research.

In fact two things made The Times's grotesque overblowing of this story rather much more interesting than many Times readers might have guessed. The first was the fact that the origin of the story was Bob Ward, who has in recent years become familiar to followers of the climate debate as a tireless advocate in the media for warmist alarmism.

Looking raather like a night-club bouncer, though not so polite, Mr Ward seems to have set himself up as a professional attack dog for the cause, harrying anyone who dares publicly to promote scepticism by any means he can find.

He used to work in this capacity for the fanatically warmist Royal Society, in which role, in 2007, he organised a voluminous series of complaints to the regulatory body Ofcom, signed by "37 professors", against Channel 4's documentary The Global Warming Swindle. A year later, after wasting huge quantities of everyone's time, Ofcom failed to uphold any of Ward's complaints.

Since then Mr Ward (pictured top and right) has been employed in a similar capacity by the Grantham Institute on Climate Change at the LSE, where he acts as policy director alongside its chairman Lord Stern. Formerly Sir Nicholas Stern, this ex-Treasury official has, since his famous but much derided 700-page report in 2006, become one of the real high-priests of the warmist religion. And he has made a fortune from touring the world to advise mankind on how to reduce its "carbon footprint".

Since he joined the Grantham Institute, Mr Ward has not only written countless letters to the press and appeared frequently on TV, he has also launched a number of similarly time-wasting complaints to the Press Complaints Commission against articles by climate sceptics such as myself.

I have been the target of two such monster complaints in the past year, each wasting collectively hundreds of man-hours, and on each of which the PCC eventually found it impossible to rule in his favour. Mr Ward was also closely involved in the row which earlier this year much excited the warmist press over a misquotation from Sir John Houghton, one of the founding fathers of the IPCC and one of the doughtiest champions of Michael Mann's now wholly discredited "hockey stick".

Mr Ward's employer, the Grantham Institute, is backed by significantly big money. It was set up in two parts, one under Lord Stern at the LSE, the other run by another committed warmist Sir Brian Hoskins at Imperial College, funded with £24 million from Jeremy Grantham, an investment fund billionaire. Its chief purpose is to advise governments, firms and investment funds on how to promote and invest in ways to "fight climate change" - which is now of course one of the fastest-growing and most lucrative industries in the world.

Even more interesting in terms of its complex relations with the new worldwide climate industry is the vast business empire run by Rupert Murdoch and his son James, owners of the paper which last week published Ward's peculiar story.

If you mention to anyone in North America that the Murdoch empire might these days be moving towards rather active promotion of the warmist cause, they will only laugh, pointing out that, in the US, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal are two of the very few pillars of climate scepticism in America's media establishment.


But at the British end of the Murdoch empire, there have recently been signs that this is far from being the case. For the past two years, for instance, its television arm, Sky, has been teamed up with the world's richest environmental lobby group WWF (income £400 million a year), in a bid to "help combat climate change" by saving the CO2-rich Amazon rainforest.

Then a few weeks back there was that curious episode when the Murdoch Sunday Times published a grovelling correction of a story familiar to reader of this blog which soon made headlines round the world as "Amazongate".

This was the scandalous story, first dug out by the tireless researches of Richard North, of how the IPCC's latest 2007 report had included a shock-horror claim that 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest was under threat from climate change. This had no scientific basis whatever. The only source given for this claim was a WWF propaganda sheet, which in turn had drawn its key sentence from the website of a small Brazilian environmental advocacy group set up by Dr Daniel Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Center (in turn closely linked to the WWF).

Even though The Sunday Times's report on this aspect of the story back in January was entirely correct (as was recently confirmed by WWF) for some inexplicable reason The Sunday Times agreed, following a complaint to the Press Complaints Commission, to retract its original correct claim about the IPCC.

Rather more shadowy still, however, are the Murdoch family's links with Bill Clinton's Climate Change Initiative. The head of strategy and communications for this influential and lavishly funded body is James Murdoch's wife Kathryn.

The "Climate Initiative" is in turn part of the William J. Clinton Foundation, fast-becoming one of the richest foundations in the world. It is supported to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by the likes of Bill Gates of Microsoft. Thanks not least to its involvement with climate change, it likes to boast that it has recently been named as one of the world's "Top 10 Green NGOs".

Both Rupert Murdoch and his son are listed as among the Clinton Foundation's leading donors. Rupert, along with Barbra Streisand, was one of the three sponsors of a project to reduce the "carbon footprint" of 20 major cities.

And Mrs Murdoch's Climate Initiative, as can be seen from its website, is involved in co-ordinating and arranging finance for a whole string of "climate-related" projects, potentially worth billions of dollars, from building vast solar energy parks in countries such as India to developing schemes for "carbon capture and storage".

Another of the Climate Initiative's major projects is to find ways of turning the CO2 locked up in forests into "carbon credits", which can then be sold on the world market at a large profit. In this potentially lucrative enterprise it is teamed up with, among others, the Woods Hole Research Center. As was first revealed on this blog, this is the body which, along with WWF, is involved in a scheme to turn the vast Amazon rainforest into carbon credits, under the UN's REDD scheme (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).

Also backed by the World Bank, they hope to get finally approval for this sheme at the UN's Cancun climate conference later this year, According to a formula worked out by Woods Hole's Dr Nepstad, they reckon that turning the world's rainforests into carbon credits could generate in all some $60 billion, by selling the right to offset the CO2 contained in the forest's trees against that emitted by firms in the developed world.

The Murdoch newspapers may of course be perfectly entitled to champion a cause in which their proprietors so fervently believe. But when it comes to comparing the piddling sums in funding received by a handful of sceptical think-tanks to the oceans of cash poured into the other side of the climate debate, there is no contest.

How The Times's front-page headline might rather more relevantly have been re-worded was "Governments, foundations, multi-national corporations including the owners of this newspaper and Big Oil give hundreds of billions of pounds to promote worldwide climate bonanza." But doubtless The Times's editors would have ruled that this was too long for their front page.

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"Ever more risibly desperate become the efforts of the believers in global warming to hold the line for their religion, after the battering it was given last winter by all those scandals surrounding the UN's IPCC." So writes Booker in his column which, to some, may seem curiously flat when it comes to naming names.

The column is thus the first instalment for the day. We expect to publish a guest post here, from Booker, later today.

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Many times in this blog we have noted that the real news is the stuff not being published by the MSM. Now, on the "climate change" front, that has never been more true. The silence speaks volumes.

That particular silence is the one that attends the publication of the Booker column on 11 July, revealing to the world that the IPCC did after all have feet of clay in its claims on the Amazon, with the source of "Amazongate" finally traced to a Brazilian website.

When you get an "exclusive" like that – especially as the original Amazongate story was rather high profile – other newspapers and news agencies tend to pile in and lift the story. This time, though, with only very few exceptions, there has been silence.

One of those exceptions was Lawrence Solomon in The National Post, who saw in the revelations the first test of the IPCC in a new post-Climategate era of openness and accountability that many seemed to be talking about. This, however, was even then a forlorn hope. The retraction on 20 June by The Sunday Times of its Amazongate story had already been hailed as a major victory by the warmists, who were set on exploiting it.

Something of this can be seen from the WWF press release which had Keith Allott, head of climate change (there's glory for you) declaring that it " ... hopefully indicates that after a period of some hysteria, balance and consideration is being restored to the media's reporting of climate science."

In fact, there was more expectation than hope. Led by the WWF, the warmists embarked on a sharply focused campaign against many of the newspapers which had written about Amazongate, demanding that they followed The Sunday Times lead and retracted their own stories.

Under this pressure, not a few editors were beginning to wilt, especially as there were hints of further PCC references. Booker's story, therefore, could not have come at a worse time. Although no newspapers have yet followed suit, it was noted and, at the very least, stopped the rot. No other newspaper has retracted its story.

Quite how finely poised the pendulum is now can be seen by the continuing silence. At the beginning of this week, a major international newspaper was to have published a piece calling for the retraction of The Sunday Times retraction, but internal politics have kept it off the pages so far.

And, while The Guardian and others were quick to publish news of Simon Lewis's complaint to the PCC, which triggered the ST retraction, none of the papers which so prominently announced this development have announced the complaint to the PCC about the retraction, a complaint which has now been formally accepted and is being investigated.

Interestingly, the silence also comes at a time when not only has the IPCC case on the Amazon been trashed but also, on the eve of the publication of a new tranche of research papers which seriously undermine the doom-laden scenarios promulgated by the warmists.

Just one of those, in the coming edition of New Phytologist, puts loss of the forest at a mere six percent. This is a paper by Marina Hirota et al on "The climatic sensitivity of the forest, savanna and forest–savanna transition in tropical South America." With this, the re-evaluation of earlier papers and the emergence of some which have been little-cited, the warmists' case has never been weaker. This makes the silence even more deafening,

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