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NZCPR Weekly
This week's NZCPR Weekly examines how global warming mania has been able to establish such a stronghold in New Zealand,
the NZCPR Guest Commentary by Lord Christopher Monckton questions pronouncements by the global warming guru Al Gore, and
the poll asks whether NZ's emissions trading scheme should be put on hold - permanently!
Warmest regards, Muriel Dr Muriel Newman
The Cold Winds of 2008
2008 was the coldest year this century. This is not an aberration as the global warming industry would have us believe.
The world has been on a cooling trend since 1998 and there is now growing scientific evidence that governments around
the world should plan for colder not warmer temperatures.[1] Yet, as is typical of emotion filled movements, it is hard
to imagine cold hard facts getting in the way of the vested interests' headlong rush towards costly and useless global
warming taxation schemes - even here in New Zealand.
New Zealanders are pragmatic people. It probably comes with the territory - being at the bottom of the world means that
we have to rely on our own ingenuity and common sense to overcome the challenges we face.
That is why it is so disturbing that the "global warmers" have been able to establish such a stronghold in New Zealand,
convincing so many New Zealanders that the world is under threat from a gas that is essential for life on earth. So
powerful is their grip that the new government appears determined to cement in climate change policies that will cost
the country dearly in wasted time, energy and money, while having virtually no effect on the climate.
It is fair to say that when fears of global warming first surfaced, most people were confused. In New Zealand carbon
dioxide is not regarded as a dangerous gas - nor as a pollutant - but as a minor component of the atmosphere that plays
a major role in life on earth. Carbon dioxide is the gas used by green plants during the process of photosynthesis when
the sun's energy is trapped and converted into a food source. Calling carbon dioxide a pollutant is not only factually
wrong, it is dangerously misguided!
We also know that since the earth was formed some four and a half million years ago, the climate has been continually
changing from warm cycles, when the temperature has been many degrees hotter than it is at present - with carbon dioxide
levels far higher than they are today - to cooling cycles, when the earth has plunged into ice ages.
In light of this, when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first announced that there
was an unprecedented build up of man-made carbon dioxide and that it was going to cause catastrophic global warming, it
sounded completely unbelievable, and was casually dismissed as fanciful. Then the former US Vice President Al Gore,
Chairman of Generation Investment Management - a major commercial beneficiary of global warming scaremongering - began
his global campaign to promote the threat of catastrophic climate change. His major prop was his movie "An Inconvenient
Truth", in which he demonised man-made greenhouse gases - especially carbon dioxide - through his infamous "hockey
stick" graph which shows the earth heating up to calamitous proportions, with melting snow, ice and glaciers causing sea
level rises that would flood cities and countries, causing general mayhem and massive loss of life.
The movie created global alarm, exacerbated by claims that there were 4,000 IPCC scientists and expert reviewers who
backed up the findings on which Al Gore's movie was based. The movie even won an Oscar for best documentary (despite it
being more fiction than fact and more a drama than documentary), and IPCC contributors a Nobel Prize.
With such unstoppable momentum, politicians eagerly jumped on the global warming bandwagon wanting to be seen to be
helping to save the planet. And in response to the inevitable questioning and criticism by the growing numbers of people
who understood that such climate change alarmism was fundamentally flawed, the catch-cry became "the science is settled'
and, there is an overwhelming "consensus" of scientists who agree with the hypothesis of human-caused global warming -
in other words, "4,000 IPCC scientists can't be wrong"!
The end result has been the implementation of a raft of climate change agreements and policies that are designed to
heavily tax and ration hydrocarbon energy. The Kyoto Protocol, which requires massive reductions of greenhouse gas
emissions under threat of costly penalties, is the prime upshot. Complying with the ambitious carbon dioxide target
reductions has given rise to a raft of climate change mitigation proposals such as emissions trading schemes, carbon
taxes, renewable energy projects, and so on.
The problem is that while massively increasing the cost of goods and services - and reducing economic growth at the very
time when increasing growth and jobs should be global priorities - these schemes will have virtually no effect on
climate, because it is not man-made greenhouse gases that are driving climate change. In fact, if man-made greenhouse
gases were driving climate change, given that their concentrations have increased steadily over the last ten years, the
global temperatures should have continued to rise. Instead, for ten years now the climate has been cooling, driven by
numerous other factors including the lack of sunspot activity on the sun, which hardly gets even a mention in the IPCC
reports.
Complicit in what is increasingly being called an international scam, are the various branches of the media which
sensationalise the ordinary in the interest of "news", ignoring their vows of fact over fiction. As a result they have
failed to adequately report on the mounting scientific evidence that man-made greenhouse gases have a negligible effect
on the climate.
Similarly, some of those in the business sector are prepared to turn a convenient blind eye to the hoax. At the
forefront of the global warming merry-go-round is Al Gore and others who have invested heavily in green businesses and
are fighting tooth and nail to keep the sceptical science community at bay in order to ensure their green empires
continue to grow at the expense of a gullible public.
However, many businesses and industries that will be badly effected by the introduction of emissions trading schemes and
the like, have remained silent, loathe to speak out too forcefully in case they are labelled as irresponsible corporate
citizens by mad environmentalists who have the power to create damaging adverse publicity.
So where does all of this leave New Zealand?
The definitive change in government last November raised hopes that the new administration will take a more pragmatic -
and honest - approach to this issue. With the global financial crisis seriously threatening our whole economy, the last
thing New Zealand needs is for the government to allow green ideology to over-rule reason and damage our economy even
further - especially when much of what has been passed as facts in this matter is instead fiction.
According to John McLean, a Melbourne based climate data analyst, the 4,000 scientists that the IPCC claim support their
hypothesis that humans are having a significant influence on climate, is overly exaggerated - when duplicates are
removed as well as those who support the creation of the reports, not the findings, the number falls to only about
60![2]
Meanwhile, with over 31,072 scientists from the US alone having signed a petition utterly rejecting claims that human
induced greenhouse gases are causing global warming, the claims of a "consensus" on this matter are totally wrong.[3]
It is the same story with claims that the "science is settled" - one of the most distinguished scientists in the US,
Emeritus Professor S. Fred Singer, spearheaded the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change,
Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate, which provides an independent examination of the evidence on climate
change that is available in peer reviewed literature. The report concludes that the human activities are not influencing
the global climate in a perceptible way, that global climate change is unstoppable, and that we should not even try to
influence it! (Please note that this report is available as an exclusive NZCPR electronic book - for details click here >>>)
In December last year, at the UN climate conference in Poland, Al Gore made a keynote address in which he called carbon
dioxide "global warming pollution" and repeated many of the claims made in his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", which, in
2007, a British High Court Judge had found to be factually incorrect.
This week's guest commentary is a critique of Al Gore's speech by Lord Christopher Monckton, a business consultant and
policy advisor, in which he exposes these errors:
In October 2007 a High Court judge in the UK ruled that Al Gore's fanciful film, An Inconvenient Truth, depicted "an
Armageddon scenario that . is not based on any scientific view". Yet Gore deliberately persists in repeating the errors
listed by the judge in that case. There are now serious discussions afoot to lodge complaints against Gore to the
federal financial and legal authorities, in that he fraudulently talks up the imagined "climate crisis" in the hope that
he and his "green" investment corporation can profit by the baseless alarm that his falsehoods generate. If that was his
hope, it was vain. In the current financial crisis (which, unlike the climate "crisis", is real), so-called "green"
investments have fallen in value nearly twice as far as all other investments. Certainly, it is a serious matter that
Gore continues to attempt to profit at the expense of the gullible by peddling falsehoods specifically identified as
erroneous by a High Court Judge, who, unlike most of Gore's audience, had been compelled to hear both sides of the case
and had decided that Gore's side was in at least nine material respects erroneous. To read the article, click the
sidebar link>>>
With governments around the world putting their climate change plans on hold, as concerns shift from the environment to
the economy, New Zealanders should be able to expect that our new government will follow suit. In fact, there is a
strong expectation that the Select Committee review announced as part of the coalition agreement between National and
ACT will properly investigate the scientific basis of man-made climate change. With that in mind, if you have a view on
whether you agree with the 31,000 US scientists who believe that there is no scientific evidence for global warming, why
not put in a submission? You have until February 13 to do so - see the sidebar for details.
In a democracy, politicians are forced to listen to public opinion. If you feel strongly about this issue, then put in a
simple submission in which you give the new government some guidance on whether they should be re-introducing an
emissions trading scheme or whether they should be putting it permanently and irreversibly on hold!
NZCPR POLL This week's poll asks: Do you believe the government should go ahead and introduce a modified emissions
trading scheme? To vote click here>>> (Readers comments will be posted here >>> daily) (You can check out your comments from previous weeks here >>>)
FOOTNOTES: All articles can be found on the NZCPR RESEARCH PAGE - click here >>> 1.Prof Bob Carter, Cold hard facts debunk global warming alarmism 2.John McLean, The IPCC Can't Count 3.Dr
Arthur B. Robinson, Global Warming Petition Project
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at www.nzcpr.com , established in 2005 by former MP Dr Muriel Newman.
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NZCPR Commentary
YET ANOTHER "MOMENT OF FATEFUL DECISION" Lord Christopher Monckton
Gore and his unthinking followers have, however, made a fundamental error of political judgment: they have assumed that,
precisely because climate science is so complex, they can get away with fabricating and then exaggerating the imagined
"threat" of "global warming", because ordinary people will be unable to understand the science, and because young people
can be relied upon to favor projects that are Left-leaning and that exploit their idealism... To read click here>>>
ENDS