Al Gore Getting Rich By Spreading Global Warming Hysteria

It is not possible to separate politics, money and power from the issue of global warming. The following article puts a few of these factors into perspective.
Peter

from: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/10/03/al-gore-getting-rich-spreading-global-warming-hysteria-media-s-help

Al Gore Getting Rich Spreading Global Warming Hysteria With Media’s Help

By Noel Sheppard October 3, 2007 - 11:06 ET
Americans willing to look at the manmade global warming debate with any degree of impartiality and honesty are well aware that those spreading the hysteria have made a lot of money doing so, and stand to gain much more if governments mandate carbon dioxide emissions reductions.

In fact, just two months ago, ABC News.com estimated soon-to-be-Nobel Laureate Al Gore's net worth at $100 million, which isn't bad considering that he was supposedly worth about $1 million when he watched George W. Bush get sworn in as president in January 2001.
Talk about your get-rich-quick schemes, how'd you like to increase your net worth 10,000 percent in less than seven years?

Fortunately for the world's foremost warm-monger - a term I'd love to see become part of the parlance concerning what, in the long run, will likely be viewed as the greatest con ever perpetrated on the American people - his current wealth represents a mere pittance of what it will be if governments around the world are scared into all of his preposterous recommendations.

With that in mind, Deborah Corey Barnes published a marvelous piece at Human Events Wednesday that would be rather sobering for folks on both sides of the aisle if only a global warming obsessed media would be willing to share the information with the citizenry (emphasis added throughout):

Al Gore's campaign against global warming is shifting into high gear. Reporters and commentators follow his every move and bombard the public with notice of his activities and opinions. But while the mainstream media promote his ideas about the state of planet Earth, they are mostly silent about the dramatic impact his economic proposals would have on America. And journalists routinely ignore evidence that he may personally benefit from his programs. Would the romance fizzle if Gore's followers realized how much their man stands to gain?

Of course it would, Deborah. That's why media have largely been mute on this matter.
With that as pretext, Barnes addressed Gore's cap-and-trade carbon scheme, and how he is well-positioned to benefit if governments across the globe implement it:
Al Gore is chairman and founder of a private equity firm called Generation Investment Management (GIM). According to Gore, the London-based firm invests money from institutions and wealthy investors in companies that are going green. "Generation Investment Management, purchases -- but isn't a provider of -- carbon dioxide offsets," said spokesman Richard Campbell in a March 7 report by CNSNews.

GIM appears to have considerable influence over the major carbon-credit trading firms that currently exist: the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX) in the U.S. and the Carbon Neutral Company (CNC) in Great Britain. CCX is the only firm in the U.S. that claims to trade carbon credits.[...]Clearly, GIM is poised to cash in on carbon trading. The membership of CCX is currently voluntary. But if the day ever comes when federal government regulations require greenhouse-gas emitters -- and that's almost everyone -- to participate in cap-and-trade, then those who have created a market for the exchange of carbon credits are in a position to control the outcomes. And that moves Al Gore front and center. As a politician, Gore is all for transparency. But as GIM chairman, Gore has not been forthcoming, according to Forbes magazine. Little is known about his firm's finances, where it gets funding and what projects it supports.

After addressing how intimately tied to the investment firm Goldman Sachs Gore and his GIM associates are, Barnes presented further nefarious connections that make Ken Lay's Enron network in the '90s look almost amateurish:
We do know that Goldman Sachs has commissioned the World Resources Institute (affiliated with CCX), Resources for the Future, and the Woods Hole Research Center to research policy options for U.S. regulation of greenhouse gases. In 2006, Goldman Sachs provided research grants in this area totaling $2.3 million. The firm also has committed $1 billion to carbon-assets projects, a fancy term for projects that generate energy from sources other than oil and gas. In October 2006, Morgan Stanley committed to invest $3 billion in carbon-assets projects. Citigroup entered the emissions-trading market in May, and Bank of America got in on the action in June.

Some environmentalist groups disparage Gore and his investment banker friends. They say the Gore group caters to others who share their financial interest in the carbon-exchange concept. The bulletin of the World Rainforest Movement says that members of a United Nations-sponsored group called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stand to gain by approving Gore's carbon-trading enterprise. The IPCC has devised what it says is a scientific measure of the impact of greenhouse gases on global warming. In fact, the critics charge, the IPCC sanctions a mechanism that mainly promotes the sham concept of carbon exchange.

The global non-profit organization Winrock International is an example of one IPCC panel member that seeks out groups and individuals with an interest in carbon trading. Arkansas-based Winrock provides worldwide "carbon-advisory services." Winrock has received government grants from the EPA, USAID and the Departments of Labor, State and Commerce, as well as from the Nature Conservancy (whose chairman used to be Henry Paulson). Winrock argues that cap-and-trade carbon trading is the best way to prevent a climate change crisis. But consider this: When a non-profit group takes money from oil companies and advocates drilling for oil as a solution to energy shortages, it is certain to be attacked as a tool of Big Oil. So far, the groups linked to Al Gore have avoided similar scrutiny.

Why is that? Why does everything Gore is involved in avoid government and media scrutiny?
While you ponder, there's more:
In June 2006, the World Bank announced that it, too, had joined CCX, saying that it intended to offset its greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing emission credits through CCX. The bank says its credits would contribute to restoring 4,600 hectares of degraded pastureland in Costa Rica. Somehow, CCX has figured out that this is an amount equivalent to 22,000 metric tons of emission that the bank calculates are created by its activities.

A World Bank blog called the Private Sector Development Blog regularly features items touting Al Gore and the concept of carbon credits. Its articles typically announce corporate "green" initiatives in which carbon credits are said to cancel out "bad" CO2 emissions released by a company's activities.In fact, the World Bank now operates a Carbon Finance Unit that conducts research on how to develop and trade carbon credits. The bank works with Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark and Spain to set up carbon-credit funds in each country to purchase emission credits from firms for use in developing countries. In addition, it runs the Carbon Fund for Europe helping countries meet their Kyoto Protocol requirements. These funds are traded on the ECX (half of which is owned by CCX, itself a creature of Al Gore's firm, Generation Investment Management). Can we connect the dots?[...] So it seems banks and investment houses are going green, eager to enter an emerging emissions market. Meanwhile, environmentalists are discovering new ways to get rich while believing they are saving polar bears and rainforests.

Add it all up, Al Gore really is perpetrating a scheme that could end up being much more costly to Americans than anything Ken Lay did. As if that's not bad enough, our media are totally complicit rather than doing their jobs exposing the scam.
I don't know about you, but suddenly I need another shower.

—Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters.

NASA Changes Historic Climate Data

The fact that NASA recently changed it's Historical Climate Data is not trivial. It is going to have far reaching impact. This will begin with the questioning of the UN's findings on global warming and climate change as reported by the IPCC. It will affect everything relating to global warming. Read the following please.
Peter

from: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2007/08/13/how-important-nasa-s-change-historical-climate-data-last-week

How Important Was NASA’s Change to Historical Climate Data Last Week?
By Noel Sheppard August 13, 2007 - 10:43 ET
Last week's revelation by Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre of a serious mistake and subsequent changes made by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in the temperature history of America has created quite a debate in the new media.

While conservative bloggers were quick to point out the hypocrisy regarding the lack of an official announcement from GISS chief James Hansen as well as the possible significance to the entire global warming debate, alarmists such as RealClimate and TNR's The Plank viewed McIntyre's discovery and GISS's alterations less than earth shattering.
With that in mind, McIntyre published a response at Anthony Watts' "Watts Up With That?" Saturday (Climate Audit is undergoing a server change) with his take on the issue (emphasis added throughout):
The Hansen error is far from trivial at the level of individual [weather] stations. Grand Canyon was one of the stations previously discussed at climateaudit.org in connection with Tucson urban heat island. In this case, the Hansen error was about 0.5 deg C. Some discrepancies are 1 deg C or higher.

[A]s you can see from the distribution, the impact on the majority of stations is substantially higher than 0.15 deg. For users of information regarding individual stations, the changes may be highly relevant.

GISS recognized that the error had a significant impact on individual stations and took rapid steps to revise their station data (and indeed the form of their revision seems far from ideal indicating the haste of their revision.) GISS failed to provide any explicit notice or warning on their station data webpage that the data had been changed, or an explicit notice to users who had downloaded data or graphs in the past that there had been significant changes to many U.S. series. This obligation existed regardless of any impact on world totals.

Readers should certainly be aware that this was what I specifically took issue with - the lack of disclosure that this had occurred:
GISS has emphasized recently that the U.S. constitutes only 2% of global land surface, arguing that the impact of the error is negligible on the global averagel [sic]. While this may be so for users of the GISS global average, U.S. HCN stations constitute about 50% of active (with values in 2004 or later) stations in the GISS network (as shown below). The sharp downward step in station counts after March 2006 in the right panel shows the last month in which USHCN data is presently included in the GISS system. The Hansen error affects all the USHCN stations and, to the extent that users of the GISS system are interested in individual stations, the number of affected stations is far from insignificant, regardless of the impact on global averages.

McIntyre then pointed out the hypocrisy in the lack of official reporting of these changes:
In my opinion, it would have been more appropriate for Gavin Schmidt of GISS (who was copied on the GISS correspondence to me) to ensure that a statement like this was on the caption to the U.S. temperature history on the GISS webpage, rather than after the fact at realclimate.
Obviously much of the blogosphere delight in the leader board changes is a reaction to many fevered press releases and news stories about year x being the "warmest year". For example, on Jan 7, 2007, NOAA announced that The 2006 average annual temperature for the contiguous U.S. was the warmest on record.

This press release was widely covered as you can determine by googling "warmest year 2006 united states". Now NOAA and NASA are different organizations and NOAA, not NASA, made the above press release, but members of the public can surely be forgiven for not making fine distinctions between different alphabet soups. I think that NASA might reasonably have foreseen that the change in rankings would catch the interest of the public and, had they made a proper report on their webpage, they might have forestalled much subsequent criticism.

In addition, while Schmidt describes the changes atop the leader board as "very minor re-arrangements", many followers of the climate debate are aware of intense battles over 0.1 or 0.2 degree (consider the satellite battles.) Readers might perform a little thought experiment: suppose that Spencer and Christy had published a temperature history in which they claimed that 1934 was the warmest U.S. year on record and then it turned out that they had been a computer programming error opposite to the one that Hansen made, that Wentz and Mears discovered there was an error of 0.15 deg C in the Spencer and Christy results and, after fiixing this error, it turned out that 2006 was the warmest year on record. Would realclimate simply describe this as a "very minor re-arrangement"?

Not a chance. In fact, this would have been announced with great enthusiasm, and likely would have been the lead report on all of the evening news programs, as well as making front page headlines the following day:
So while the Hansen error did not have a material impact on world temperatures, it did have a very substantial impact on U.S. station data and a "significant" impact on the U.S. average. Both of these surely "matter" and both deserved formal notice from Hansen and GISS.

Yet, something that has been lost in the fight over this issue is that as a result of identifying this Y2K error by Hansen et al, McIntyre has grown more concerned about the veracity of other data being collated and disseminated by GISS, as well as the lack of transparency concerning adjustments to raw data to compensate for the heat island effect:

In the course of reviewing quality problems at various surface sites, among other things, I compared these different versions of station data, including a comparison of the Tucson weather station shown above to the Grand Canyon weather station, which is presumably less affected by urban problems. This comparison demonstrated a very odd pattern discussed here. The adjustments show that the trend in the problematic Tucson site was reduced in the course of the adjustments, but they also showed that the Grand Canyon data was also adjusted, so that, instead of the 1930s being warmer than the present as in the raw data, the 2000s were warmer than the 1930s, with a sharp increase in the 2000s.

Now some portion of the post-2000 jump in adjusted Grand Canyon values shown here is due to Hansen's Y2K error, but it only accounts for a 0.5 deg C jump after 2000 and does not explain why Grand Canyon values should have been adjusted so much. In this case, the adjustments are primarily at the USHCN stage. The USHCN station history adjustments appear particularly troublesome to me, not just here but at other sites (e.g. Orland CA). They end up making material changes to sites identified as "good" sites and my impression is that the USHCN adjustment procedures may be adjusting some of the very "best" sites (in terms of appearance and reported history) to better fit histories from sites that are clearly non-compliant with WMO standards (e.g. Marysville, Tucson). There are some real and interesting statistical issues with the USHCN station history adjustment procedure and it is ridiculous that the source code for these adjustments (and the subsequent GISS adjustments - see bottom panel) is not available/ [sic]

Adding it up, and data from seemingly good weather stations is being adjusted up for reasons that McIntyre can't explain, and Hansen and company refuse to provide the procedure and the source code such that folks like McIntyre - and policymakers - can review the methodology.
Why is all this a big secret, and why should any American citizen or politician just blindly accept data from an agency that refuses to make transparent what the station history adjustment procedure is?

If one views the above assessment as a type of limited software audit (limited by lack of access to source code and operating manuals), one can say firmly that the GISS software had not only failed to pick up and correct fictitious steps of up to 1 deg C, but that GISS actually introduced this error in the course of their programming.

According to any reasonable audit standards, one would conclude that the GISS software had failed this particular test. While GISS can (and has) patched the particular error that I reported to them, their patching hardly proves the merit of the GISS (and USHCN) adjustment procedures. These need to be carefully examined. This was a crying need prior to the identification of the Hansen error and would have been a crying need even without the Hansen error.

One practical effect of the error is that it surely becomes much harder for GISS to continue the obstruction of detailed examination of their source code and methodologies after the embarrassment of this particular incident. GISS itself has no policy against placing source code online and, indeed, a huge amount of code for their climate model is online. So it's hard to understand their present stubbornness.

Finally, McIntyre addressed how the Y2K changes might impact global data (ROW):
In the U.S., despite the criticisms being rendered at surfacestations.org, there are many rural stations that have been in existence over a relatively long period of time; while one may cavil at how NOAA and/or GISS have carried out adjustments, they have collected metadata for many stations and made a concerted effort to adjust for such metadata.

On the other hand, many of the stations in China, Indonesia, Brazil and elsewhere are in urban areas (such as Shanghai or Beijing). In some of the major indexes (CRU,NOAA), there appears to be no attempt whatever to adjust for urbanization. GISS does report an effort to adjust for urbanization in some cases, but their ability to do so depends on the existence of nearby rural stations, which are not always available. Thus, ithere [sic] is a real concern that the need for urban adjustment is most severe in the very areas where adjustments are either not made or not accurately made.

In its consideration of possible urbanization and/or microsite effects, IPCC has taken the position that urban effects are negligible, relying on a very few studies (Jones et al 1990, Peterson et al 2003, Parker 2005, 2006), each of which has been discussed at length at this site. In my opinion, none of these studies can be relied on for concluding that urbanization impacts have been avoided in the ROW sites contributing to the overall history.

Moreover, Keenan's report last week cast grave doubt about the veracity of Jones et al's 1990 paper on urban effects being negligible.
In sum, though this Y2K error and subsequent changes to America's climate history is not necessarily a smoking gun, the lack of reporting, and consistent refusal on the part of Hansen and Schmidt to share methodologies and source codes surrounding statistical formulae remains a grave concern, as does how much all this impacts the global numbers.

Of course, I'm sure when Hansen and Schmidt get around to seeing how this does indeed relate to world temperatures, they'll be quick in alerting the media.
Alas, unless the changes to global data are deemed miniscule, that could be irrelevant, for with the exception of Fox News, it appears that not one major American press organization felt the revelation of GISS's Y2K error, and how it related to U.S. climate history, was at all newsworthy.
Imagine that.
—Noel Sheppard is an economist, business owner, and Associate Editor of NewsBusters