People are starting to doubt climate catastrophilia, i.e., the whole “anthropogenic global warming” (AGW) or man-made global warming scenario. For one thing, we have been in a decade long cooling trend. Wyoming has record snowpack, and the parts of it that have already melted have caused record flooding downstream. This suggests that there might be a problem with the theory. You would think the science on AGW would account for this, wouldn’t you?
It doesn’t. And this should come as no surprise, as we now find out a lead-author on an Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC) report was also a Greenpeace employee. Worse, he reviewed his own work.
IPCC is the UN’s body for collecting data on climate change. Governments around the world rely on it for solid scientific data, including the Obama administration and the Gillard government in Australia.
Greenpeace is a € 200 million a year political animal. They are busily lobbying governments (on tax deductible donations) for subsidies for technologies they happen to like — a $243 billion industry. Having the IPCC announce that “Close to 80 percent of the world’s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows” won’t hurt the prospects for government subsidies for renewables, not a bit.
Guess what: that 80% figure is the one that the IPCC lead author, Sven Teske, grabbed and reviewed from his own Greenpeace paper. It’s also in another piece, published jointly by Greenpeace and the European Renewable Energy Council, an industry trade group. Mr. Teske is the lead author, project lead. And contact. Finally, to complete the circle, the report has a preface by Dr. R. K. Pachauri. Dr. Pachauri just happens to be Chairman of the IPCC.
With this, on top of the hockey stick scandal and Climategate, it’s no surprise that North American geologists held a climate skeptic conference.
The political fallout is worldwide. In Australia, Julia “no carbon tax under the government I lead” Gillard’s government is desperate to enact its carbon tax, in spite of poll ratings in the 30 percentiles. The Canadians have refused to sign on to any successor to Koyoto. Cap and Trade is dead in the U.S. Even media coverage of climate change has “plummeted” to levels prior to the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
It’s too early yet to crow victory. The beast’s back may be broken, but it will continue to thrash for a while.
