Osama Bin Laden has picked up on the cause of climate change as a
way to attack the United States, according to a new videotape
released through Al Jazeera. On the surface, his timing may
appear to be particularly unfortunate as the science underpinning
alarmist claims about man-made global warming has been exposed as
fraudulent and misleading.
However, the “climategate” scandal involving emails from the
University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU) in Great
Britain that has unfolded in tandem with the exposure of
fallacious statements in the United Nations Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports has gone largely
unreported. Moreover, it is evident from his remarks that Bin
Laden is more concerned with regulatory control than he is with
scientific integrity. (There’s a lot of that going around.)
The
New York Times and other outlets picked up on this point in
its coverage of the Al Qaeda leader’s remarks in the following
paragraphs:
“In the message broadcast on Friday, Mr. bin Laden veered
away from his traditional vows to inflict death and destruction
on the United States, and instead discussed climate change,
globalization and monetary policy in a message that he said was
directed to `the whole world.’”
“He called for a worldwide boycott of American goods and the
dollar. He faulted the United States for failing to sign the
Kyoto Protocol, which sought to curb global warming by
restricting greenhouse gas emissions.”
Bottom line here is that environmentalism, right from beginning,
has always been about constraining and restricting America’s
economic and military activity. It has provided the U.N., and
more recently the E.U., with ability to attack American
independence and sovereignty on the sly.
“Even Bin Laden recognizes the inherent propaganda and potential
destructiveness to the U.S. of the entire global warming
movement,” Climate Depot’s Marc Morano observed. “Soon, only a
few fringe political figures — like Bin Laden — will still
spout the nonsense climate claims that were once accepted as
mainstream.”
Media organs that have reported uncritically on the more extreme
claims of the environmental movement now have a special
obligation to deprive Bin Laden and others of scoring propaganda
points.
Here are a few key facts from the Science and Environmental Policy Project
(SEPP) to help get them started.
· In mid-August,
after repeated requests for such data under the Freedom of
Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of
East Anglia (CRU), one of the three international agencies that
calculate global temperatures, announced that it discarded the
raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures. The CRU
action renders independent review and verification of the
temperature trends published by the CRU impossible - a clear
violation of principles of science and the Freedom of Information
Act
· In October, at
the 2009 annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, Dr.
Don Easterbrook presented graphs demonstrating how tree ring data
from Russia showing a cooling after 1961 were truncated and
artfully disguised in IPCC publications. The artful deceit, so
exposed, indicates that the IPCC Assessment Report 4 (AR4)
contains deceptions rendering the entire document scientifically
questionable.
· In November,
emails from the CRU were leaked to the public. These emails
reveal efforts to suppress independent studies that are contrary
to IPCC conclusions of human caused global warming. Thus, the
IPCC scientific review process has a systematic bias of an
unknowable magnitude in favor of human induced warming.
· In
mid-December, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA)
reported that the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British
Meteorological Office (Met Office) had probably tampered with
Russian climate data and that the Russian meteorological station
data do not support human caused global warming. The Met Office
collaborates with the CRU in reporting global temperatures. The
reported global surface temperature trends are unreliable and
probably have a strong warming bias of an unknown magnitude.
· In January, Joe
D’Aleo and E. Michael Smith reported that the National Climatic
Data Center (NOAA-NCDC) and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-GISS)
dropped many meteorological stations from their data bases in
recent years. The dropped stations, many of which continue to
make appropriate reports, are generally in colder climates. [For
a detailed report see item #1 below.] The actions by NOAA -NCDC
and NASA-GISS make their reported temperature trends unreliable
and likely to have a strong warming bias of an unknown magnitude.
[NOAA-NCDC and NASA-GISS are the two other organizations that
report global surface temperatures.]
