December 6, 2009
Carbon credits bring Lakshmi Mittal £1bn bonanzaJonathan Leake and Bojan Pancevski

LAKSHMI MITTAL, Britain’s richest man, stands to benefit from a £1 billion windfall from a European scheme to curb global warming. His company ArcelorMittal, the steel business where he is chairman and chief executive, will make the gain on “carbon credits” given to it under the European emissions trading scheme (ETS).

The scheme grants companies permits to emit CO2 up to a specified “cap”. Beyond this they must buy extra permits. An investigation has revealed that ArcelorMittal has been given far more carbon permits than it needs. It has the largest allocation of any organisation in Europe.

The investigation has also shown that ArcelorMittal and Eurofer, which represents European steel makers at European level, have lobbied intensively in Brussels. This has included threatening to move plants out of Europe at a cost of 90,000 jobs, and asking European commissioners to meet Mittal.

ArcelorMittal is now free to sell its surplus permits on the market or to hoard them for future use. The latter would allow it to avoid cutting greenhouse gas emissions for years, effectively undermining the point of the scheme.

Either way, the company will have gained assets worth around £1 billion by 2012. The eventual value could be much greater. Each carbon permit is currently worth about £12.70 but the European Union has said it wants to drive this price above £30.

The disclosure comes on the eve of the Copenhagen climate conference, whose main aim is to extend schemes such as the ETS into a global system for trading carbon.

Details emerged from an analysis of the community independent transaction log, the EU system for logging the carbon permits issued to factories and power stations covered by the scheme in Europe.

Anna Pearson, an expert on the ETS who carried out the analysis, said: “Between 2008 and 2012 ArcelorMittal stands to gain assets worth £1 billion at today’s prices for scant effort. For them, the ETS has been turned into a system for generating free subsidies.”

ArcelorMittal, which is based in Luxembourg and has more than 80 steel plants around Europe, has confirmed Pearson’s figures. The ETS covers 10,000 industrial installations, responsible for 40% of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“Following intense lobbying and claims that the scheme would harm business, the cap on emissions was set too high and too many permits were issued,” said Pearson, who performed her analysis for Sandbag, which campaigns to improve carbon trading.

ArcelorMittal was given the right to emit 90m tonnes of CO2 each year from its plants in the EU from 2008 to 2012. However, the company emitted just 68m tonnes last year. That was partly due to the recession, but Pearson believes its allocation of 90m was already too generous. This year ArcelorMittal’s emissions are predicted to plummet to 43m tonnes.

A spokesman for the company said: “The extra surplus arose when actual steel production fell way below forecasts because of the unexpected global economic crisis. As the world returns to growth, we expect to use them up.”

However, Pearson estimates that by 2012 the company will have accumulated surplus permits for 80m tonnes of CO2 — equivalent to the pollution generated annually by the whole of Denmark.

Details of ArcelorMittal’s lobbying emerged from freedom of information requests made by Corporate Observatory Europe to the European commission. They include two letters from Mittal himself, in December 2006 and April 2007, requesting meetings with Günter Verheugen, the commissioner for enterprise and industry, and Stavros Dimas, the environment commissioner.

In another, in January 2008, ArcelorMittal threatened to relocate if made to pay for carbon certificates.

The business is 43% owned by Mittal, who tops The Sunday Times Rich List with a fortune of £10.8 billion. He lives in a Kensington mansion bought for £70m in 2003.

The revelations support the criticisms of carbon trading by Professor Jim Hansen, director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who supports the alternative idea of a direct tax on carbon. He said: “The corporates see emissions trading as a huge opportunity to boost profits.”

Pearson said she had written to Mittal on behalf of Sandbag asking if ArcelorMittal would “retire” the carbon permits — meaning they could not be used by anyone else.

“If the company were to rip these up it would be a great act of philanthropy and set an excellent example,” she said.

An ArcelorMittal spokesman said: “ArcelorMittal’s surplus carbon credits are an asset which will only grow in importance,” he said.

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/industrials/article6945991.ece

UGANDA: “Mount Elgon Eviction Has Reduced Us to Beggars”*
By Wambi Michael

MOUNT ELGON, Uganda, Nov 13 (IPS) – “We have been reduced to begging from relatives and to migrate to urban areas where life is not safe. We were living in the mountain for more than 200 years. Transferring us means burying us, completely. We want to stay in our area and develop.”

These are the words of Mejje Christopher, a former parish chief who now lives as a squatter in Kisitu, almost 30 km from Kapchorwa district in eastern Uganda. He finds it hard to cope with life in the lowlands after his people, the Benet, were evicted from land apparently earmarked for reforestation in the Mount Elgon National Park.

Controversy has surrounded the reforestation project in the park which is jointly run by the Netherlands-based FACE Foundation and the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) and was started with a view to generating carbon credits. FACE Foundation has denied that the eviction of the Benet is connected to its project with the UWA.

There are over 1,000 evicted Benet living in a temporary settlement at Kisitu. Christopher laments that, “where we are now, even the maize takes a long time to mature. The majority of the people are illiterate, especially the women. To cope with new farming methods is not easy.

“Children are forced to weed gardens in other parts of Kapchorwa to earn a living. Sometimes, women risk going into the park at night to get firewood and bamboo,” he reveals. “Even the cows that we used to graze in the mountains are not allowed there. Some have died. We did not have hospitals but we managed to survive because of the cool weather.”

Christopher is adamant that the Benet can contribute to conservation. “We can do it. After all, we the indigenous people have indigenous knowledge which, when integrated with the modern knowledge, can conserve the mountain, we are sure.”

Moses Kiptala, the treasurer of the Benet Lobby Group, is critical of the kinds of trees being planted. “They talk about conserving the mountain and the water catchment areas but we know that in this mountain there are trees that grow better while conserving water catchment areas. Some of the trees they are planting here have traditionally not grown here.”

According to him, the eviction “is seriously affecting us because there is no food and people are not allowed to get firewood, bamboo and medicines to treat ailments. The schools were destroyed. The people have been declared landless; they cannot go back to their original land.

“When we were evicted last year, some of us decided to go and live in bushes and caves and others went to live with relatives. The situation is not good. We were not allowed to flee with our belongings. Our houses and crops were razed. We survived with help from non-governmental organisations but they have since stopped the assistance.”

Parents complain that their children cannot go to school. They improvised a temporary tin-roof structure. It has no benches and can only accommodate lower primary pupils. Those children in upper primary school have to relocate or drop out.

Mary Yeko, a mother of seven, tells IPS her children can no longer go to school because they have to walk a long distance to the district headquarters. Speaking through an interpreter, Yeko indicates that she and her husband cannot afford the good schools in the area because they are not government-owned.

She and her children are getting frequent attacks of malaria and other diseases that they did not suffer from before. “When you go up where we were (in Mount Elgon), the air is fresh, we had water, we had medicinal plants which can treat many diseases that cannot be treated by the muzungu (white person).

“Now, we cannot go to get the medicine up there because the rangers will not allow us to pass over the park boundary,” she complains.

According to Uganda’s state minister for tourism, Serapio Rukundo, there have been some instances of what he calls “maladministration” but, overall, communities are benefitting from the tree planting because the Uganda Wildlife Authority carries out conservation projects that involves the remuneration of some community members.

A UWA warden in the Mount Elgon Park, Richard Matanda, insists that the tree planting has benefited communities. “People got jobs, uniforms and gumboots. The idea is that most of the labour should come from the areas next to the boundaries of the park.”

According to him, communities evicted from the park were due to get a percentage of money made from the tree planting.

But Timothy Byakola, an activist with Uganda’s Climate and Development Initiatives, retorts that there is a lot of hostility between the communities and Uganda Wildlife Authority park rangers. “The jobs they promise people don’t pay enough. We have talked to some of the people who said they are almost giving free labour.

“People complain that that the project has taken away the little that local communities had. For example, women can’t get firewood for cooking.”

Byakola believes “no carbon credits” have been sold from the Mount Elgon project because people destroy the trees before they mature in protest to having been evicted. “Because of hostility, people sneak over park boundaries in the night and uproot the newly planted saplings,” he argues.

Between Jan and Jul 2009, three national forestry staff members — Richard Kalemera, Alfred Ezati and Emmanuel Assiimwe – were allegedly murdered by people who had been evicted from forest reserves. In another case, a man, a pregnant woman and their three–year-old son were burn to ash in Buikwe Central Uganda.

A driver working for the National Forestry Authority, Ambrose Tibarimu, was attacked by a mob with machetes who set ablaze his and other vehicles. (END/2009)

http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49253

My Position on Global Warming and Climate Change
If I can be classified it would be as a left-leaning environmentalist, with a history of environmental concerns dating back to my pre-teen years in the 1960s. I was one of the founders of the Alberta Greens political party in 1990 based on support for a federal Green candidate in 1988, and was the party’s president until 2004 and then CFO until a right-wing takeover in late 2008.

I have organized my position on global warming/climate change as a self-interview because my concerns have arisen as I have been asked more questions about this and some of my green friends exhibit shock at my position.

Q1. Is Global Warming Happening?
It is impossible to know if global warming is happening without waiting for hundreds or thousands of years to see if short term trends go up or down. Of course we can’t wait that long, so the question is whether catastrophic global warming is imminent. That also is impossible to know. If the changes are small they are also manageable.
It is also impossible to define a global temperature. Even small biases in measurements made in a small number of points over the globe (such as heat island effects due to measurements near growing cities) can create false temperature increases. When extrapolated and fed into a mathematical model that accelerates them, dire predictions can appear on computer screens around the world.

Q2. Why are you speaking up now?
I feel forced to speak now as environmentalists are trying to enforce adherence to the climate change theory even as more and more evidence comes out against it. For a long time I didn’t speak because I’m not a climate scientist but I gradually realized that all the people telling me this were not climate scientists either and, in fact, I am probably far better educated and experienced to comment than most of them.
Q3. Don’t the data show an unambiguous trend?
I recently looked at arctic and antarctic ice area data. The arctic data does show a trend towards lower amounts of ice since records began in 1979 but antarctica shows, if anything, the opposite trend. Longer term records only show the decline in arctic sea ice since about 1979. It is quite likely that this is due to data from 1979 on not being comparable. Furthermore, 30 years is not even a drop in the geological bucket. To state that this is a firm trend, when it is only found in the north, and records for the last couple of hundred years are not available, is not warranted.
A panel, including James Hansen, wrote in 2000 that global warming was real despite there only being evidence that the surface was warming, not the troposphere (indicating that the atmosphere was not actually warming). They defended this by saying, “The disparity between surface and upper air trends in no way invalidates the conclusion that surface temperature has been rising” (but that’s not the question. Is the atmosphere warming?), noting that despite their best efforts, “a substantial disparity remains” (between surface and tropospheric temperatures), admitted that other factors were highly significant (including volcanoes), blamed human activities for global cooling (including ozone-depleting substances) and finally “cautions that temperature trends based on data for such short periods of record, with arbitrary start and end points, are not necessarily indicative of the long-term behavior of the climate system”.

Clearly there is data in both directions. But the climate of the planet varies with every day, every season, with influence from many human activities, amounts of volcanic activity and from variations in the output of the sun. Climate is incredibly complex, with many feedback loops that are poorly understood. It is impossible to draw conclusions based on a few year’s data especially when the data is being interpreted by scientist who have a priori decided what the trend is.

Furthermore, ‘ClimateGate’ is just the most recent evidence that data is being manipulated to make the picture cleaner and more biased towards global warming being real – “Manufacturing Certainty”.

Q4. Don’t You Believe Any Warming is Happening?
That’s not the question. Only if the warming that is happening is intolerable should we take these dramatic actions. If mild warming to the planet is occurring, any disruptions will occur over many years and can be easily mitigated. After all, dramatic changes in the earth have occurred relatively frequently due to perfectly natural events like tsunamis, landslides, volcanic eruptions, raising and lowering of land and sea levels, floods, earthquakes and so on.
The actions being proposed by climate change proponents are dramatic, have significant side effects, probably won’t have the desired effect, but can only be justified if the changes in climate are so dramatic that the very future of humans is threatened.

The right question is, “Don’t You Believe that Catastrophic Global Warming is Imminent?” No, I don’t.

Q5. Aren’t Hurricane Katrina and the Burmese Typhoon Proof that Global Warming is Happening?
Yes, but not of climate change. These tragedies have something in common with a third, the Indonesian Tsunami. The problem is that tsunami’s are not connected to climate change, but to geological phenomena (movements of tectonic plates). The common denominator in the increased devastation is coastal forest destruction. Allowing coastal forests to regrow will provide a buffer of protection to people all over the world from these destructive ocean events. It is entirely speculative that reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will have any benefits. Given the randomness with which these events occur it is not clear how you could ever determine whether changes to the composition of the atmosphere were helping to reduce the frequency or destructiveness of severe weather events.
Q6. Aren’t Some Proposals of Climate Campaigners Justified?
Yes. Some actions (such as reducing use of fossil fuels) can be justified for other reasons. I am concerned about actions that can only be justified by prophesies of climate doom. These actions are clearly counter-productive if we are not facing climate doom as they take considerable energy and will produce their own side effects. We should focus on actions that can be justified as solutions to known problems which means that we can ignore climate change and go back to real environmentalism.
If you should only undertake actions that have a justification other than climate change then you can factor climate change out of the equation. Furthermore, climate change action requires global agreement, which simply will not happen. At Copenhagen we see true climate change fanatic James Hansen arguing against an agreement because it won’t be extreme enough.

Q7. If Some Actions Are Justified Isn’t Climate Change Campaigning Good?
No. The focus on climate change has resulted in orders of magnitude more talk than action. Climate change action is only perceived as useful if actions are universal. However, action against other environmental damage is beneficial on a small scale. Public transit would be a benefit to the world if only Canada invested. An end to mountain-top removal coal-mining would be a benefit to the world if only the USA did it. More bike paths would be beneficial if only Holland built them. Reforestation would be a great thing even if only in Nepal and Burma. Reduction of coal-burning would be a benefit to the world if only China did it.
Traditional environmental activism is “Think Globally. Act Locally”. Climate Change is “Think Globally. Act Globally”. Even if global action on CO2 was warranted, it will never happen because it is impossible to get such sweeping global agreements, it just leads to treaties with nice words that can be safely ignored.

Q8. Isn’t Talking Good?
All climate change campaigners appear to do is talk. I am confident that no substantive improvements to the environment will ever occur because of global warming actions. But that is not a problem for some people – money will be made through massive increases in research funds, speculations on the carbon market and installation of equipment of speculative value, such as systems to pump CO2 into the ground.
What the planet really needs is action justified by traditional environmental principles – reduction of exposure to toxic chemicals being one of the primary goals. And CO2 is not a toxic chemical. Other goals should be the elimination of unsustainable killings of animals (especially fish), reduction in extraction of raw materials (including fossil fuels) and a halt to habitat destruction, especially of forests and ocean environments. Many of these things will, as a by-product, reduce the production of CO2.

Q9. Aren’t Carbon Taxes and Trading Good?
Climate Change is based on a neo-liberal philosophy. I define this as a fundamental belief that government is bad and that the free market is good, but a grudging acceptance that government influence is sometimes necessary, but only through a free market mechanism. Carbon taxes will not influence the behaviour of the well-off (look at how much more they spend on cars than they need to). And if the funds are merely redistributed they won’t pay for things like public transit, bike paths or energy conservation projects. And redistribution of carbon taxes and carbon cap-and-trade are invitations to fraud, which will make many neo-liberals very rich, and make the planet poorer.
Q10. Aren’t Carbon Credits Good?
We are now realizing that carbon credits are likely to result in the eviction of poor people in the third world to make space for trees to assuage the conscience of rich people in the first world. If even this much happens. There are many avenues for fraud in the carbon credit market leading to an incentive to produce paperwork indicating that carbon is being sequestered when it really isn’t. Only the perception counts. People may claim credits for things that already exist, claim double credits in different places, or simply claim credits for things that don’t exist.
Another example of corruption is the excess credits mysteriously given to steelmaker ArcelorMittal and Eurofer in Europe after extensive lobbying of the European Commission, including threats to move jobs out of Europe. This will result in windfall profits to these companies for not producing a harmless gas that they would never have produced anyway.

Q11. What’s Wrong with Climate Reparations?
Sending huge amounts of western money to third world countries is a truly horrible idea. This will do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions, and will almost certainly not produce the mitigation projects that it is presumably intended for. Most countries are ruled by corrupt elites (high level corruption is rife in countries as diverse as America, Nigeria and China), and most of this money will disappear into their pockets, or in megaprojects such as large hydro-electric generation dams that will not improve the life of ordinary people, and may end up displacing them.
A more fundamental problem that neo-liberals don’t understand is that money does not actually solve all problems. If the west continues to operate mines and oil production without adequate safeguards for workers, the environment and people in the vicinity; if hydro projects continue to displace people living sustainable lives; if plantations continue to gobble up land and produce crops for export not for local consumption; if chemical production continues to poison workers, rivers, air, groundwater and our food – what does it matter if buckets of cash are shoveled into capital cities where little will leak out?

What is needed is local government action to eliminate bad practices and a reforming of global ties to put principles of fair trade (which value the environment, workers and people in both trading nations) above the principles of free trade (which value only free movement of capital and goods). If an industrial practice is not in the overall interests of a nation it should be banned – not taxed or traded.

Q12. Can’t we Trust Scientists?
There is a lot of evidence that the activity often called science, and the scientists who practice this activity (as opposed to those few who have a monk-like dedication to the scientific method), are not trustworthy. Peer review is a bankrupt process, for example. It is lousy at detecting fraud but very good at suppressing innovative thought. Financial conflicts of interest are frequent and rarely disclosed. Scientists often fall into the trap of focusing on their next grant rather than what important questions need to be asked (including questioning their own assumptions and biases). The prejudices of the system are amplified in this way. Those who conform are rewarded with grants which inform the granters that this is a subject of great interest.
The proof of this is that there have been many scientific errors that have survived for decades – Piltdown Man, Radical Mastectomy, (opposition to) continental drift, irradiation of the thymus, the germ theories of scurvy, pellagra and SMON. We, like all generations before us, falsely believe that all false beliefs lie in the past.

The ClimateGate scandal illustrated this problem well. Without access to data scientists cannot fully evaluate the work of others. Phil Jones, the head of the CRU, at the center of this scandal, said, “Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?” That is exactly why the data should be released. If it can pass scrutiny from a skeptical, critical, cynical scientist then our confidence in the data and interpretations drawn from it will be much higher. It is a waste of time to give data to a scientist whose intention is to prove that previous interpretations are correct.

Q13. Do you agree that no credible scientists questions global warming?
This is one of the most absurd aspects of the global warming debate. This can only be put forward by people who have no understanding of science or even simple logic.
It is not even possible to define the term “scientist”, let alone, “credible scientist”. If those who believe in climate change are put in charge of defining “credible” then they will define it as people who agree with them. This is how dictators come to believe that they are democrats – because all critics are silenced.

There are credible scientists who oppose the global warming/climate change theory just as there are credible scientists who opposed the HIV=AIDS=Death theory, educated and accomplished scientists who oppose some or all vaccination, those who oppose water fluoridation as well as many other sacred cows of modern science. All of them get the same treatment – they are marginalized by preventing them from publishing, denying them grants and ridiculing them as “not credible”, “cranks”, “conspiracy theorists”, “isolated”, “paranoid”, “delusional” or even “dangerous”.

Q14. What’s Wrong with Computerized Mathematical Models?
A lot. They tend to reflect the prejudices of the designer. They can be tweaked until they produce the ‘right answer’. But what is the right answer except what the designer expects – their prejudices?
How can a climate model be validated except by monitoring its predictions over many years?

A good example of the problems has occurred in South Africa where mathematical models have accused AIDS “denialists” of hundreds of thousands of deaths. In this case it has been possible to consult actual statistics (ignored by the modelers in favor of statistics fabricated by WHO in Geneva) that show that the South African population is steadily growing, with no signs of any unusual rate of deaths let alone a population decline. Yet, due to prejudices in favour of the HIV=AIDS=Death dogma the fraudulent mathematical model is widely cited despite its obvious flaws, presumably because it is what the establishment wants to think. People who say that AIDS drugs are toxic and ineffective must be silenced so anything that does the job is acceptable – even lies.

We now know that climate change scientists are guilty of the same desire – to silence their critics by denying them the ability to publish, by demonizing them in the press – by using the infrastructure of science to punish them. Mathematical models are infinitely malleable and are important tools in this endeavour. Whether they are accurate is something we won’t know for many years.

Q15. Is Global Warming a Scientific Theory?
No, because it is not a testable or falsifiable hypothesis.
It’s a bit like asking whether there are a series of 100 ‘1′ digits in the full expansion of pi. You produce consecutive digits for an arbitrary amount of time and don’t find such a string but it doesn’t tell you whether you haven’t yet looked far enough or there is no such string. It’s worse with Global Warming because there is no identifiable mathematical signal that says, “Yes, it is happening”. 10 years of warming (even if you accept that there is such a thing as a single global temperature) could be followed by 20 years of cooling. You simply cannot know.

The flipside of this is that there is no way to refute the theory. 10 years of global cooling does not prove that global warming is not happening, it could just be that other temporary factors are overwhelming the human signal.

If there were no side effects from reacting to global warming this wouldn’t matter, but there are.

Another test for a scientific theory is whether it has predictive value. Global Warming theorists make a lot of prediction but we are expected to accept them and act on them long before we can know whether the predictions are true. Scientific theories make predictions that can be tested and shown to be reasonably accurate before the theory is accepted.

Q16. Isn’t Climate Change a Simple Explanation for a Complex Phenomenon?
Yes, suspiciously simple. But even the full Global Warming theory that predicts that greenhouse gases alone will bring catastrophic change to the earth’s climate is too complex for most proponents. It has become solely a CO2 theory, with other global warming gases (including that notorious pollutant water vapor, as well as cow farts, i.e. methane) being virtually ignored.
Global warming is also in the process of edging out other (real) problems. The process is simple, the author of an article says that a particular problem is caused by a combination of global warming and another well known problem (such as deforestation) or natural phenomenon. They then continue to talk as if global warming was the only problem, successfully having evicted yet another long known environmental problem from attention.

Q17. Isn’t Global Warming Denial A Right Wing Conspiracy?
Two problems here. First of all the phrase “denial” is deliberately chosen to evoke those who deny that the Nazi extermination campaign of Jews, Gypsies, Homosexuals, Socialists and other “undesirables” occurred. It has also been invoked to dismiss people who claim that HIV is not the cause of AIDS (“AIDS Denialists”).
It is more honest to talk about Climate Change Skeptics.
A lot of these people are right-wing, sometimes exceedingly far to the right. I can’t comment on whether there is a conspiracy (legally a conspiracy can involve as few as two people) but it is clear that at least some skeptics are motivated by their philosophical position. Many right-wing climate change skeptics are indeed anti-environmentalists.

But the fact that I despise the politics of some of these people doesn’t make them wrong on this issue. It clearly should not change my position on a scientific issue.

Q18. Is this a Secret Plot to Create a Global Government?
If it was a secret plot I would, by definition, not know about it. I shudder to think that the people who can’t run America, can’t run Russia, can’t run China and can’t run any other country in the world, would think they could run the world. But, maybe they are megalomaniacs. If so, we don’t have a lot to worry about because even the most powerful country in the world, that spends more on the military than all other countries combined, cannot subdue either Iraq or Afghanistan. The chance of a bureaucracy trained in words, not deeds (like the UN), could ruthlessly rule the planet is infinitesimally small.
Q19. Is CO2 a Pollutant?
The claim that CO2 is a pollutant, recently supported by the EPA, is one of the most damaging aspects of the climate change theory. CO2 is essential for life and the only way it could be associated with ill health is if there is so much that it displaces the other gases, such as oxygen, that are essential for life. By that definition everything is a pollutant.
Traditional pollutants cause cancer, birth defects, mental disorders up to and including paralysis, metabolic disturbances, immune deficiences, skin disorders and so on. CO2 does none of those things.

To call CO2 a pollutant is to completely pervert the meaning of the term “pollutant” and eliminates the true horror that true pollutants represent to human and other life forms.

Q20. How can Action to Reduce CO2 Emissions not be Good?
Burying CO2 securely in the ground (perhaps by reacting it) costs energy. Therefore, to produce the same amount of energy more coal will need to be burned (about thirty percent by this MIT estimate). This would increase the amount of arsenic, mercury, chromium, cadmium and acid rain and only reduce the amount of CO2.
Far more scary are plans to pump particulates into the atmosphere, plans that are being taken seriously. A logical extension of this is that countries that pump huge amounts of particulates in the atmosphere already, such as China, should get credit for the cooling impact of their activities.

Nuclear energy is also being promoted by some advocates of global warming fear, including green guru James Lovelock. This has two well-recognized problems, the risk of a catastrophic accident, like Chernobyl, and the lack of any method to dispose of the reactors (not just the nuclear fuel) after the reactor needs to be taken out of service.

Q21. Won’t Environmentalism Benefit?
This singular focus on climate change risks destroying the environmental movement. It removes the focus from local issues if they are not related to CO2 which reduces the activist base. If climate change is discredited then the organizations associated with it are discredited. Personally I have stopped funding environmental organizations who have climate change as their main focus. This now includes most environmental organizations that I used to donate substantial amounts of money to regularly. When the climate change theory collapses so will many environmental organizations. People may stop taking the warnings of environmentalists seriously even when they are well-grounded in real environmental issues.
I have felt my doubts silenced by self-censorship for some time now. The proponents of global warming are so self-assured that it appeared to me that all environmentalists shared this viewpoint except me. But as I started to raise hesitant doubts I was surprised that my concerns were actually shared by many other environmentalists who also felt silenced. I am afraid that this could lead to a big split in the movement as more people come out against this theory realizing that it is irresponsible to stay silent.

Q22. But it has encouraged young people to get engaged
Yes, but they are being encouraged to be engaged with a simplistic, “explains everything”, theory. They are being encouraged to demonstrate for virtual remedies, such as carbon trading. They should be demonstrating against real environmental crimes, and demanding real changes like decreasing energy consumption, reforming transportation systems and cracking down on toxic emissions.
What would have happened if the demonstrators in Copenhagen had broken into the Bella Center? What could they have done? Produced a piece of paper to be ignored and misinterpreted by governments worldwide?

Q23. What is your scientific background?
I have an HBSc (four year degree) in Botany and Mathematics with a thesis involving complex mathematics and computer programming published in the international journal Taxon in 1981. This led to a career in computer programming and then telecommunications. I am accepted as an expert in telecommunications without a single for-credit course in that subject because I, and colleagues, literally wrote the book on some aspects of cellular communications in the 1990s, developing standards that are still in wide use today.
My interests in science include a philosophical interest in the limits of scientific knowledge. When studying biology in university for five years I specialized in Taxonomy, the endeavour of trying to organize organisms according to evolutionary relationships. I realized that, in this field, the more precise the statement about relationships the less likely it is to be true and, at a certain point, the truth will never be known because you cannot go back in time and see what the situation was, say, one million years ago. I also realized that the fundamental unit of this science, the species, cannot be defined in a universal way, but only relative to the type of organism being studied (and even then there are many exceptions). Many taxonomists don’t want to face this reality. This gave me a good understanding of this problem in other fields, where you have to live with generous helpings of uncertainty, making certain predictions futile.

My interest in ecology is long-standing, even before winning a science fair prize in 1973 (at the age of 17) for a study of microclimatic changes between forest and nearby cleared power line areas.

Climate science has a different problem than taxonomy or evolutionary biology. It is somewhat easier to go back in time to get data (from ice cores, etc.), but it is no more possible to go forwards in time. Again, the more forceful the statement, the less likely it is to be true, the longer the time period, the more the uncertainty. Evolutionary biologists are usually smart enough to avoid making predictions about the future of organisms that exist today but many climate scientists seem unable to resist the urge.

I work on a regular basis with engineers in a field where firm predictions can sometimes be made. Systems can be arranged so that, in some cases, under the same circumstances, exactly the same event can be repeated any number of times. Although, to be fair, this is surprisingly often not the case, even for fully digital communications systems like the internet. The predictive ability of some complex systems leads some engineers and other similar professionals to misunderstand biological systems that are not amenable to predictions produced from reductionist mathematical models.

I have also extensively studied supposedly infectious diseases, particularly AIDS, reading literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers on this subject (and a similar number of other documents), and in 2008 was appointed to lead the main group of scientists who question the HIV=AIDS hypothesis (Rethinking AIDS) – the first leader who was not a professional (i.e. paid) scientist or academic.

My interest in HIV/AIDS has led me to the hypothesis that many so-called infectious diseases actually have environmental causes. It has also led me to understand the dangerous seductiveness of a theory that claims to explain too much and that is so flexible it can bring completely different diseases that arise in completely different circumstances under its wing. Similar to climate change, proponents of the HIV=AIDS=Death dogma often claim that there are no credible scientists who oppose them, defining “credible” to mean someone who supports the establishment theory. Trafficking in circular logic is the main crime these scientists (who ignore the scientific method) share.

If you notice any errors on this page please contact me at David[dot]Crowe[at]cnp[dash]wireless[dot]com.

http://davidcrowe.ca/GlobalWarming.html

Hackers leak emails from University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, stoking climate debate

Associated Press

Saturday, November 21st 2009, 5:11 PM

Computer hackers have broken into a server at a well-respected climate change research center in Britain and posted hundreds of private e-mails and documents online — stoking debate over whether some scientists have overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The University of East Anglia, in eastern England, said in a statement Saturday that the hackers had entered the server and stolen data at its Climatic Research Unit, a leading global research center on climate change. The university said police are investigating the theft of the information, but could not confirm if all the materials posted online are genuine.

More than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists is included in about 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents posted on Web sites following the security breach last week.

Some climate change skeptics and bloggers claim the information shows scientists have overstated the case for global warming, and allege the documents contain proof that some researchers have attempted to manipulate data.

The furor over the leaked data comes weeks before the U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen, when 192 nations will seek to reach a binding treaty to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases worldwide. Many officials — including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon — regard the prospects of a pact being sealed at the meeting as bleak.

In one leaked e-mail, the research center’s director, Phil Jones, writes to colleagues about graphs showing climate statistics over the last millennium. He alludes to a technique used by a fellow scientist to “hide the decline” in recent global temperatures. Some evidence appears to show a halt in a rise of global temperatures from about 1960, but is contradicted by other evidence which appears to show a rise in temperatures is continuing.

Jones wrote that, in compiling new data, he had “just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline,” according to a leaked e-mail, which the author confirmed was genuine.

One of the colleague referred to by Jones — Michael Mann, a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University — did not immediately respond to requests for comment via telephone and e-mail.

The use of the word “trick” by Jones has been seized on by skeptics — who say his e-mail offers proof of collusion between scientists to distort evidence to support their assertion that human activity is influencing climate change.

“Words fail me,” Stephen McIntyre — a blogger whose climateaudit.org Web site challenges popular thinking on climate change — wrote on the site following the leak of the messages.

However, Jones denied manipulating evidence and insisted his comment had been taken out of context. “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially, as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward,” he said in a statement Saturday.

Jones did not indicate who “Keith” was in his e-mail.

Two other American scientists named in leaked e-mails — Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and Kevin Trenberth, of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Colorado — did not immediately return requests for comment.

The University of East Anglica said that information published on the Internet had been selected deliberately to undermine “the strong consensus that human activity is affecting the world’s climate in ways that are potentially dangerous.”

“The selective publication of some stolen e-mails and other papers taken out of context is mischievous and cannot be considered a genuine attempt to engage with this issue in a responsible way,” the university said in a statement.

Pity The Fools That Believe in Man-Caused Global Warming

What a snow job some corrupt scientists, the arrogant elite, radical environmentalists, the United Nations and their co-conspirators in the United States, have perpetrated on the people of this planet in order to convince a gullible public into believing in the Alice-in-Wonderland fairy tale of man-caused global warming!  In the process they have sullied true science and corrupted the scientific method, maybe beyond repair.  Their specious arguments stretch credulity and are what we call MAI science, or Made-As-Instructed.  In other words, you manipulate the data to arrive at the desired outcome.  What has transpired in this debate is nothing less than the trashing of all of the science greats since Copernicus, Galileo and Newton.

But to see anything clearly, you must have a sufficiently broad perspective, accompanied by hard data, repeatable long-term observations and verifiable facts.  If you are standing and looking at the ground, your perspective and your field of view are quite limited.  If however, you are standing on the top of a mountain, your perspective broadens exponentially.  And thus it is with the subject of global warming. Without a broader view, it is almost impossible to know whom or what to believe.  So, a short history of the Earth is in order.  The history we present here is reasonably accurate, based on the collected scientific data over the last 500 years, with not much argument within the honorable scientific community.

Human civilization is but a bare 5,000 years old.   If you took the entire life of Planet Earth, some 4.5 billion years and divided that life span into a 24-hour clock, our puny 5,000 years represents the last tenth of a second, of the last second of the 86,400 seconds that occur in one 24-hour period.  If you took the age of enlightenment, commonly known as the Renaissance (14th to the 17th Centuries) when true science was born, it represents less than the last 100th of a second of the last second in our 24-hour clock.  During the last 5,000 years the Earth has been relatively quiet, with a few burps in climate variables, but it hasn’t always been that way.

The Earth has endured the effect of massive sunspots, reversing poles, shifting magnetic fields, drifting continents, asteroid and comet collisions and ice ages, in its 4.5 billion-year history.  It has experienced the wondrous 165 million-year dinosaur experiment.  Approximately six hundred million years ago, the “Cambrian explosion” occurred, when life almost magically erupted, emerged and evolved at a pace never before seen.  Some scientists have contributed this explosion of life to a sudden increase in atmospheric oxygen.

Over its lifetime the Earth spun, tilted, heaved, shifted its orbit, drastically changed, expelled poison gases, ash and molten lava, grew hot and then cold.  Continents, floating on an underground sea of molten magma, drifted first toward each other (Pangea) and then away.  Polar ice caps and glaciers melted and sea levels rose and then lowered.  New evidence has come to light that the entire Earth was one big ball of ice at one time in its long and violent history.

A little more recently, about 12,000 years ago, one-third of the Earth’s surface was covered in a layer of ice more than one mile thick.  During that ice age, which lasted longer than civilized man has lived on Earth, there were no animals, plants or insects that could survive in this harsh, frozen environment.  But life on Earth still survived in other places less-hostile.  The ultimate thaw and the rushing torrent carved deep gouges and massive channels in the Earth’s surface.  It created riverbeds and dry falls and lakes and inland seas and other features in the Earth’s crust, not there before.  Now that was global warming on a grand scale and humans hadn’t even come out of their caves yet.

Whole forests grew and then died out.  Mountains rose out of the bowels of the Earth, pushed up by continents in collision and then flattened back into the crust.  Rivers changed direction.  Monster lakes were formed.  Giant meteors struck the Earth at galactic speeds, carving massive holes in the crust and sending continent-size clouds of sunlight-dimming dust into the atmosphere.  The atmosphere became opaque and cut off the life-giving sunlight, rendering lifeless enormous parts of the planet.  Millions of species of plants and animals evolved, survived, reproduced and then died out, to be replaced by entirely different species of plants and animals.   Had the dinosaurs not gone extinct, it has been posited that mammals would have never evolved in their current form, including humans.

However, major changes seldom occurred in cataclysmic events.  They almost always took place agonizingly slowly, over eons of time, through the tedious, grinding, random, chaotic, disorganized process of natural evolution and natural selection.  The variables were almost infinite and still are.

And today, those same agonizingly slow processes are at work.  We (humans) are an integral part of those processes but we will have little or no effect on any final outcome.  Those who tell you so are lying.  We will but only tickle the grander elements such as the sun, the moon and the Earth itself, none of which is predictable, much less measurable to the degree necessary for accurate predictions over long periods of time.  Our only avenue for survival is to get out of the way, if we can.  The whole idea that man-generated CO2 is causing run-away global warming, when atomospheric CO2 represents a small fraction of so-called greenhouse gases and man’s contribution to atmospheric CO2 is a miniscule fraction of naturally occuring CO2, would be laughable, if it wasn’t that evil men were exploiting it for evil purposes.
“I pity da’ fool.”
A few spewing volcanoes or an episode of sunspots can totally invalidate any computer models.  Just look at weather predictions.  Any prediction is good for about two hours and that is why the environmentalists’ models were predicting an ice age 20 years ago and now they are predicting global warming.  Any credible scientist will tell you that the greater the number of variables in a non-linear dynamic system (such as the weather) render long-range predictions virtually meaningless the moment they are spit out of the computer.  What has been done in the name of man-caused global warming, is an insult to true science.  It is fueled by dirty, agenda-driven money, a corrupt ideology and the lust for global power.

The universe, our solar system and even our Earth are violent, dangerous places to humans and other life forms and always have been.  Just ask the dinosaurs.  So far, we have just been lucky.  A close-by (in galactic terms) supernova in the spiral arm of the Milky Way, in which our solar system resides, could flood the sun and planets with massive amounts of deadly radiation and render Earth lifeless and barren in a virtual geologic instant.  If the sun changed its energy output by a significant fraction, all life on Earth as we know it, could cease.  An errant asteroid or comet could cross the Earth’s orbit and the resulting collision could dramatically change the pattern of life, or terminate it altogether.

Environmentalists cry “wolf” on very little data and way-too-short time periods to come up with so-called accurate predictions, as they have with man-caused global warming. Unfortunately, environmentalism has become a cult of mindless followers with a distorted vision of how humans and the Earth should relate to each other.  Earth gets the highest priorities — over people — in spite of true science.  In reality, humans are but a part of the evolutionary and natural processes of Earth and those processes, not environmentalists or governments, will determine whether we, as an intelligent species, will survive or die out. This is why their man-caused, global-warming theory is an unmitigated farce and this is why that any very expensive attempts to control man-generated CO2 is an unprecedented fraud, with dire consequences for the global economy.

We must always be vigilant against the never-ending threat of governments and special-interest groups peddling crises with propaganda, hype, distortions and lies, because behind each crisis is a hidden agenda and in the end their hidden agenda has more to do with control of the masses and the transfer of wealth.  They only use pseudo science as a means to an evil end.  Shall it ever be thus.

© Copyright November 24, 2009 – All Rights Reserved

~ The Author ~
Ron Ewart is the President of The National Association of Rural Landowners and may reached for comment via email at r.ewart@comcast.net.

http://www.federalobserver.com/2009/11/24/pity-the-fools-that-believe-in-man-caused-global-warming/

December 24, 2009
Anthropogenic Global Warming is a Farce
By Alexander Cockburn

The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost.

Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr. Phil Jones. The CRU was founded in 1971 with funding from sources including Shell and British Petroleum. It became one of the climate-modeling grant mills supplying tainted data from which the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concocted its reports.

Deceitful manipulation of data, concealment or straightforward destruction of inconvenient evidence, vindictive conspiracies to silence critics, are par for the course in all scientific debate. But in displaying all these characteristics, the CRU e-mails graphically undermine the claim of the Warmers that they command the moral as well as scientific high ground. It has been a standard ploy of the Warmers to revile the skeptics as whores of the energy industry, swaddled in munificent grants and with large personal stakes in discrediting AGW. Actually, the precise opposite is true. Billions in funding and research grants sluice into the big climate-modeling enterprises and a vast archipelago of research departments and “institutes of climate change” across academia. It’s where the money is. Skepticism, particularly for a young climatologist or atmospheric physicist, can be a career breaker.

Many of the landmines in the CRU e-mails tend to buttress longstanding charges by skeptics (yours truly included) that statistical chicanery by professor Michael Mann and others occluded the highly inconvenient Medieval Warm Period, running from 800 to 1300 AD, with temperatures in excess of the highest we saw in the 20th century, a historical fact that makes nonsense of the thesis that global warming could be attributed to the auto-industrial civilization of the 20th century. Here’s Keith Briffa, of the CRU, letting his hair down in an e-mail Sept. 22, 1999: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

Now, in the fall of 1999, the IPCC was squaring up to its all-important “Summary for Policymakers” – essentially a press release, one that eventually featured the notorious graph flatlining into nonexistence the Medieval Warm Period and displaying a terrifying, supposedly unprecedented surge in 20th-century temperatures.

Briffa’s reconstruction of temperature changes, one showing a mid- to late-20th-century decline, was regarded by Mann, in a Sept. 22, 1999, e-mail to the CRU, as a “problem and a potential distraction/detraction.” So Mann, a lead author on this chapter of the IPCC report, simply deleted the embarrassing post-1960 portion of Briffa’s reconstruction. The CRU’s Jones happily applauded Mann’s deceptions in an e-mail in which he crowed over “Mike’s Nature trick.”

Other landmines include e-mails from Kevin Trenberth, the head of the Climate Analysis Section of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. On Oct. 14, he wrote to the CRU’s Tom Wigley: “How come you do not agree with a statement that says we are no where close to knowing where energy is going or whether clouds are changing to make the planet brighter. We are not close to balancing the energy budget. The fact that we can not account for what is happening in the climate system makes any consideration of geo-engineering quite hopeless as we will never be able to tell if it is successful or not! It is a travesty!”

Only a few weeks before Copenhagen, here is a scientist in the inner AGW circle disclosing that “we are no where close to knowing” how the supposedly proven AGW warming model might actually work, and that therefore geoengineering – such as carbon mitigation – is “hopeless.”

This admission edges close to acknowledgment of a huge core problem: that “greenhouse” theory violates the second law of thermodynamics, which says that a cooler body cannot warm a hotter body without compensation. Greenhouse gases in the cold upper atmosphere cannot possibly transfer heat to the warmer earth, and in fact radiate their absorbed heat into outer space. (Readers interested in the science can read Gerhard Gerlich and Ralf Tscheuschner’s “Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics,” updated in January 2009.)

Recent data from many monitors including the CRU, available on climate4you.com, show that the average temperature of the atmosphere and the oceans near the surface of the earth has decreased significantly across the past eight years or so. CO2 is a benign gas essential to life, occurring in past eras at five times present levels. Changes in atmospheric CO2 do not correlate with human emissions of CO2, the latter being entirely trivial in the global balance.

The battles in Nicaea in 325 were faith based, with no relation to science or reason. So were the premises of the Copenhagen summit, that the planet faces catastrophic warming caused by manmade CO2 buildup, and that human intervention – geoengineering – could avert the coming disaster. Properly speaking, it’s a farce. In terms of distraction from cleaning up the pollutants that are actually killing people, it’s a terrible tragedy.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/12/24/anthropogenic_global_warming_is_a_farce.html

December 22, 2009
Other Consequences of Climategate
By Ed Timperlake

The consequences of “Climategate” are lost opportunity costs that should have been directed at real global pollution problems. The hothouse atmosphere at East Anglia from cooking the books on a huge fraud has significant consequences that will play out over time. “Global Warming” shamans have sent the world on the fool’s errand of looking for man-made carbon footprints while very real environmental problems have fallen by the wayside.

On a micro-level, some involved in this scientific fraud will have their reputations destroyed. Along the way, nasty invectives will be leveled, which will make for fun reading. I specifically found it interesting to read Nobel Laureate Al Gore lie to defend the liars. His statement was a total fabrication when he said scientific e-mails were ten years old. The latest one was sent just months ago.

One can just imagine the sense of loss felt by environmental activists who were planning on making billions protecting the world from greenhouse gases. The real threat is not pollution as defined by the simple act of breathing and emitting CO2, but the pollution of industrial waste pumped into the atmosphere at specific locations and also dumped into streams, rivers, and oceans. It is a proven scientific fact that chemical toxins directly impact groundwater.

While the East Anglia con artists were looking skyward, the real problem was symbolically right under their feet.

One of my most beloved possessions is a personal letter from President Bush ‘41 thanking me for my role as an Assistant Secretary, Department of Veterans Affairs, in making “progress toward settling the complex questions about the environmental hazards of warfare.” The questions the VA had been dealing with on my watch were about Agent Orange and “Gulf War Illness.” Both are very real and very deadly.

Of the 2,709,918 Vietnam veterans that served in Southeast Asia, around 800,000 are still alive. Almost 59,000 were killed in action, and around another 100,000 were severely disabled. Claims have been made about Vietnam vets having higher suicide rates, more substance abuse problems, and higher incidences of homelessness. Regardless, the number of soldiers from the war alive today is evidence that Vietnam vets paid a high price for their service. Many soldiers were killed by Agent Orange — not climate change from a carbon footprint.

The National Academy of Science and the VA link exposure to Agent Orange to such horrible diseases as Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia, and prostate cancer. Another real tragedy is that the sons and daughters of Vietnam vets have a higher incidence of spina bifda. That determination was the first time the US has linked adult exposure to toxic chemicals to birth defects. A lot of Vietnam veterans were killed before their time by Agent Orange — not climate change and a carbon footprint. Also, the world should not forget that Vietnamese families are also paying a high price for ongoing exposure to Agent Orange in their groundwater.

For our next generation of veterans, one cause of the growing problem of “Gulf War Illness” is exposure to Iraq chemical munitions inside bunkers that were blown up in Desert Storm. Even today, some residual chemical munitions (yes, WMDs) have been found. However, on an ever-bigger “environmental hazards of warfare” front, there is really grim news.

Serving in the DoD, I was responsible in 2003 for visiting the Iraq Port of Umm Qasr. Before my visit, I hosted at the Pentagon a senior representative of the U.N. Development Program (UNDP). The man, a highly educated French engineer, warned me about the cancer-causing, toxic nature of the Persian Gulf.

His well-made point was that because of evaporation, for twenty-three hours of each day, water flows into the gulf — and only for one hour a day does it flush itself. Essentially, the gulf is a man-made devil’s brew of every nasty chemical in the world, from chemical munitions used in the Iran-Iraq war (and also by Saddam against his own people) to rocket motors and warheads and bunker oil in sunken ships to simple raw open sewers. Gulf water can kill you.

When I visited Umm Qasr, the locals quipped, “Turn on the water and see what we are having for dinner.” It was that disgusting.

The costs of war in that part of the world, according to my UNDP visitor, are now horrendous, including extremely high cancer rates for children. He even claimed that if they can afford it, poor fisherman burn their catch rather than feed it to their families.

We should immediately stop trying to blame mankind for the complex ebb and flow of the earth’s climate since creation. There are real life-and-death issues that are specifically geographically located. With investigation and intelligent mitigation efforts, a concentrated scientific focus could make a profoundly positive impact on humanity.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/other_consequences_of_climateg.html

By Chris Flood

Published: December 21 2009 11:40 | Last updated: December 21 2009 11:40

Carbon prices dropped sharply on Monday in response to disappointment at the outcome of the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, which ended with an agreement that fell well short of its goals for significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

“This (accord) is a very disappointing outcome,” said Trevor Sikorski, director at Barclays Capital: “I see nothing here that should drive investment in the carbon commodity and low carbon technology.”

Mr Sikorski warned that the outcome of the Copenhagen conference was “bearish for the market and bearish for the world.”

European Union allowances for December 2010 delivery, the benchmark contract for pricing European carbon emissions, dropped 8.7 per cent to €12.40 a tonne in early trading before recovering slightly to trade 5.7 per cent lower at €12.80 a tonne.

One dealer described the market as like “a falling knife” but said that a rise in European gas prices had helped to support the carbon market.

UN-backed certified emissions reductions for December 2010 delivery fell 6.6 per cent to €11.05 a tonne, their lowest level since June 23.

Dr Emmanuel Fages of Societe Generale/Orboe said: ”Copenhagen illustrated the failure of the UN process in dealing with climate change but drop in carbon prices is due purely to sentiment and fundamentals will reasset themselves. The pre-2012 supply and demand outlook has not changed and post 2012, the market is still pricing in a 20 per cent cut in emissions.”

The European Union said the accord (which is weaker than a legally binding treaty) was not ambitious enough to persuade it to raise its target for cutting carbon from a 20 per ent reduction to a 30 per cent cut by 2020.

Dr Fages said EUA carbon prices could drop to as low as 10 euros a tonne in the first quarter of 2010 as market participants, who have been oversupplied with quotas, would know for certain how much carbon had been emitted in 2009.

“Copenhagen showed that we cannot reply on the UN and the whole process of dealing with climate change has to be much more bottom up than top down,” said Dr Fages.

Eugen Weinberg, head of commodity research at Comerzbank said: ”Everybody is disappointed by the outcome of the Copenhagen meeting but it was an important step to have direct talks betweeen the largest polluters and we have to wait to see what individual countries will opt to do under the non-binding goals that will be published at the end of January.”

Mr Weinberg said the importance of the US Climate bill currently being debated in the US Senate “could not be understated” as passing the legislation would allow for the development of linkages between US and European carbon markets and would support EUA prices as a target for a 30 per cent cut by 2020 could be revived.

”But if the bill fails, it could be a real disappointment for the market and it would be difficult to see positive catalysts going forward,” warned Mr Weinberg.

Mark C. Lewis, analyst at Deutsche Bank, said the Copenhagen Accord would cast uncertainty over the future of post-2012 carbon offset trading schemes under the Kyoto Protocol called the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

“The development of new CDM projects is likely to slow over the course of next year, and perhaps significantly so,” said Mr Lewis.

Meg Brown analyst at Citigroup said the settlement at Copenhagen would perpetuate uncertainty about the outlook for the carbon market post 2012.

“International offset markets were hoping for detail on how CDM would be expanded, perhaps including sector-specific benchmarks and an expansion of the market’s size,” said Ms Brown: “Heavy industry must wait longer for clarification of emission liabilities and international abatement mechanisms.”

“The lack of a political framework is seen as bearish because a lot of hedge funds and financial institutions had pinned their hopes on quite a significant and important alternative to other commodities markets,” said Jean-François Cauvet at Paris-based carbon market broker COER2.

Crude oil prices moved higher on Monday, supported by colder weather in the US and Europe.

Nymex January West Texas Intermediate rose 15 cents to $73.51 a barrel. The January contract expires at the close on Monday and February West Texas Intermediate, which becomes the benchmark from Tuesday, traded 50 cents higher at $74.91 a barrel.

Opec is meeting in Angola this week but the oil producers’ group is not thought likely to call for any changes in its current production quotas.

“We expect prices could ease somewhat after the Opec announcement as participants will be reminded that Opec will not be doing anything to tighten supplies anytime soon,” said Edward Meir, an analyst with MF Global.

ICE February Brent added 65 cents at $74.40 a barrel.

US natural gas prices also moved higher, with Nymex January Henry Hub up 12 cents, or 2.1 per cent, at $5.902 per million British thermal units.

Fri Dec 11, 7:06 PM

Fraud within Europe’s carbon credit trading system has cost taxpayers more than $7 billion in the last 18 months, European police said Friday.

Officials at Europol, the body in charge of co-ordinating police forces inside the European Union, say fraudulent activity on the EU’s Emission Trading System was first suspected in late 2008 when police noticed the volume of trades in certain countries would mysteriously spike.

“It is estimated that in some countries, up to 90 per cent of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities,” Europol said.

Since late 2008, the total value of fraudulent activity is believed to be in excess of five billion euros ($7.7 billion Cdn) from bogus trades in European unit allowances, or EUAs, the credits that companies in some countries buy to offset their greenhouse gas output.

In the EU and other jurisdictions, caps are put on the total amount of carbon dioxide that is allowed to be emitted. Companies that pollute more than their fair share must then buy carbon credits from companies that don’t pollute, to keep the total output below the prescribed cap.

Market volume on the EU’s carbon trading system peaked in May 2009, with several hundred million EUAs traded in France and Denmark alone, Europol said.

At the time, one EUA was worth about 12.5 euros, or about $19.30.

In the scam, criminals set up a carbon trading account on a recognized European market. They would then buy credits tax-free on exchanges in countries outside Europe. Those credits are then transferred into the European account, and the fraudsters collect tax on that transaction, but the monies are never paid to any European tax agencies.

The bogus trading account is then shut down before tax authorities can collect.

To prevent further losses, governments in France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and most recently Spain have all changed their taxation rules on the transactions. Trading activity from the aforementioned countries has declined by as much as 90 per cent as a result, Europol said.

Police agencies throughout Europe are currently collaborating to uncover specific fraudulent trades, and there are reasons to believe that fraudsters might soon migrate toward the gas and electricity branches of the energy sector, Europol said.

The EU carbon trading market is estimated to be worth nearly $140 billion a year, and 12,000 emitters have purchased more than two billion EUAs thus far. The Emission Trading System is one of six recognized European carbon trading markets.

http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/cbc/091211/business/business_eu_carbon_credit_trading_fraud

So what’s cooking: is it the planet, or just the evidence?
Mark Aveyard

Last Updated: December 20. 2009 8:19PM UAE / December 20. 2009 4:19PM GMT What we have just witnessed in Copenhagen was a rare spectacle in global affairs: a massive exercise in political groupthink reaching its pinnacle precisely as the rational foundation for it began to unravel in a very public way.

Even as records confirmed the authenticity of the controversial “Climategate” e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain, true believers at the UN conference were still in denial (the first stage of grief), acting as if CRU were some minor outpost in the climate research landscape. In fact, it is a world leader in global-warming research.

Stretching back over ten years, e-mail records show a culture of corruption at CRU in which researchers fabricated trends in climate data, concealed modifications to their computer models from public scrutiny, attempted to evade Freedom of Information requests and tried to isolate sceptical colleagues in the scientific community.

Among those at the UN who bothered to address the Climategate bombshell, the response generally took the following form: the scandal doesn’t matter much because thousands of scientists have signed letters supporting the theory of man-made global warming. That’s like portraying presidential elections in Iran as models of democratic behaviour; when the outcome is predetermined by those in power, counting ballots is merely an artful conceit.

I would like to trust the signed declarations of scientists supporting the global warming “consensus”. But in my experience, when it comes to political causes, professors are not the Socratic gadflies of academic lore. Scepticism isn’t a habit of academics today any more than candour is a habit of politicians.

You don’t win many elections by divulging everything you believe, and you don’t get promoted in academia by telling your senior professors what you really think of their politics. As a result, on some campuses, being openly sceptical about global warming means that you risk being labeled a “denier” – and we all know to which ghastly event in European history that term usually applies.

I am not strongly committed to any position on global warming, except the position that science ultimately must serve truth above politics. I am more sceptical about the man-made component of the theory than the question of warming by itself. The public form of this debate carries little scientific content. I have met dozens, maybe hundreds, of global-warming alarmists, inside and outside academia, and not more than a handful had any grasp of the basics of climate science. Typically, the more passionate they are, the less informed they appear (a rule with too few exceptions in politics not to be useful). In these discussions, the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age might as well be mythical eras in a lost epic by JRR Tolkien.

In defence of Copenhagen’s mission, Scientific American and other publications predicted that CRU’s sins would have no effect on the scientific “consensus”, pointing to research at other climate laboratories. But this evades the central question: if trusting CRU was a mistake, why should we trust the researchers at, say, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies ?

The long-term damage of Climategate, though, doesn’t concern the public standing of any particular laboratory. The general damage to scientific credibility is a graver issue. The scandal has undermined trust in scientists and science itself. Any open society that funds research and uses it to guide political decisions must protect the public’s trust in science.

Few of us have the time or the ability to scrutinise the raw data of any research programme. We trust that researchers will behave ethically, allowing nature, not their preconceptions, to guide their conclusions. But money and politics can ruin a lot of good things. You don’t get millions of dollars in government grants by claiming that the sky isn’t really falling. Apocalypse is good for business at universities. And you don’t get interviews with the BBC and 60 Minutes by saying “I don’t know” to all the big questions, even if you really don’t know and no one else does either.

Those who lose sleep over carbon emissions need to face the CRU scandal head-on. It is emboldening researchers who have been holding their tongues about climate change despite deep reservations. What we will see in the next few months is the exposure of a “consensus” that isn’t entirely consensual. Members of the American Physical Society (APS)are openly questioning its stance on global warming. The committee charged with crafting the group’s position is headed by Robert Socolow, described by one APS member as someone “whose entire research funding stream, well over a million dollars a year, depends on continued alarm over global warming”.

This month 141 climate-science researchers signed a letter to the UN questioning the presuppositions behind Copenhagen, especially the primary evidence behind the alarmist position, the computer modelling of climate trends: “Projections of possible future scenarios from unproven computer models of climate are not acceptable substitutes for real world data obtained through unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation.”

If the issue is settled in the minds of climate scientists, who are these people? And why did the UK’s Meteorological Office (a frequent collaborator with East Anglia) announce that it would be reviewing 160 years of temperature data in the wake of the scandal?

Climate is always changing. The earth is always getting warmer or colder, and sometimes these changes are rapid. Are we now in a warming trend that justifies a radical restructuring of the global economy, including a surrender of personal and corporate liberties to politicians and bureaucrats? Are human beings the primary source of global warming?

If you’ve already made up your mind, you can find scientists and evidence on both sides to support your view. For those of us who think either scenario is possible, knowing whom to trust just got harder.

Mark Aveyard is assistant professor of international studies at the American University of Sharjah

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