Greenpeace and the IPCC: time, surely, for a Climate Masada?
By James Delingpole Environment Last updated: June 18th, 2011
blogs.telegraph.co.uk
For once my sympathy is all with the whalers...
And how are you feeling today, all you Greenies, after your most embarrassing week (well, one of the most embarrassing: the competition, it must be said, has been pretty stiff these last 18 months) since Climategate?
Just in case your only information sources are RealClimate or Guardian Environment let me explain, briefly, what has been happening out here on Planet Reality. In a nutshell, you’ve been caught with your trousers down yet again, viz:
An official IPCC report bigging up renewable energy as the power source of the future turns out to have been lead-authored by an activist from Greenpeace and based not on solid science but a wish-fulfilment fantasy scenario devised by, you guessed it, Greenpeace.
Here’s how the press release of the IPCC’s Summary For Policymakers reported its findings:
Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows.
This was uncritically reported by its amen corner in the MSM, led of course by the BBC’s Richard Black and the Guardian. But others more diligent smelt a rat – among them the mighty Steve McIntyre whose magisterially contemptuous blogpost on the subject has been keeping climate sceptics such as Bishop Hill, WUWT, Rex Murphy, Ronald Bailey and Mark Lynas busy all week.
Mark Lynas? Not the same eco activist Mark Lynas who once threw a custard pie in Bjorn Lomborg’s face and was responsible for advising the Maldives cabinet to pose for that nauseatingly disingenuous publicity shot where they’re all under water (because, like, the Maldives are being drowned due to global warming: except, of course they’re not)? Yep, that one. But on this occasion, at least, even as committed an eco zealot as he has been forced to concede that IPCC has done its reputation as the “gold standard” (copyright: B Obama) of international climate science few favours:
The IPCC must urgently review its policies for hiring lead authors – and I would have thought that not only should biased ‘grey literature’ be rejected, but campaigners from NGOs should not be allowed to join the lead author group and thereby review their own work. There is even a commercial conflict of interest here given that the renewables industry stands to be the main beneficiary of any change in government policies based on the IPCC report’s conclusions. Had it been an oil industry intervention which led the IPCC to a particular conclusion, Greenpeace et al would have course have been screaming blue murder.
Additionally, the Greenpeace/renewables industry report is so flawed that it should not have been considered by the IPCC at all. Whilst the journal-published version looks like proper science, the propaganda version on the Greenpeace website has all the hallmarks of a piece of work which started with some conclusions and then set about justifying them. There is a whole section dedicated to ‘dirty, dangerous nuclear power’, and the scenario includes a complete phase-out of new nuclear globally, with no stations built after 2008.
It is a good point well made. Putting a guy from Greenpeace in charge of writing the supposedly neutral, scientifically-based report on which governments are going to base their energy policy is like putting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in charge of a report entitled Whither Israel? It is, in fact, yet another scandal of Climategate proportions. But you’d be amazed how many people there are out there who still don’t quite see the broader significance of this.
Here, for example, is the characteristically wet response from the Economist’s Babbage:
THE release of the full text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Special Report on Renewable Energy this week has led to a new set of questions about the panel’s attitudes, probity and reliability: is it simply a sounding board for green activists? The answer is no—but that doesn’t mean it’s without serious problems.
Er, no, actually, Babbage. The answer is “yes.” Since its very foundation, the IPCC has been a sounding board for green activists. That is indeed its purpose. It has no remit to investigate whether or not climate change is significantly man-made and whether this constitutes a threat serious enough to handicap the global economy with massive tax and regulation because it takes all those as givens: as far as the IPCC’s concerned, the debate is over and the time to act is now. (Which, funnily enough, is exactly what green activists think). This was the point of McKitrick and McIntyre’s brilliant demolition of the Hockey Stick; the point of Climategate; the point of Amazongate, Glaciergate, Africagate et al; the point of Donna Laframboise’s superb research showing how much “grey literature” (ie activist propaganda with no solid scientific basis) from activist groups like WWF and Greenpeace has informed the IPCC’s supposedly state-of-the-art assessment reports.
The Man Made Global Warming industry is a crock, a scam on an epic scale, fed by the world’s biggest outbreak of mass hysteria, stoked by politicians dying for an excuse to impose more tax and regulation on us while being seen to “care” about an issue of pressing urgency, fuelled by the shrill lies and tear-jerking propaganda of activists possessed of no understanding of the real world other than a chippy instinctive hatred of capitalism, given a veneer of scientific respectability by post-normal scientists who believe their job is to behave like politicians rather than dispassionate seekers-after-truth, cheered on by rent-seeking businesses, financed by the EU, the UN and the charitable foundations of the guilt-ridden rich, and promoted at every turn by schoolteachers, college lecturers, organic muesli packets, Walkers crisps, the BBC, CNBC, Al Gore, the Prince Of Wales, David Suzuki, the British Antarctic Survey, Barack Obama, David Cameron and Knut – the late, dyslexic-challenging, baby polar bear, formerly of Berlin Zoo.
And you really don’t need to be a contrarian or an out-there conspiracy theorist or a hard-core libertarian or a rampant free-market capitalist or a dyed in the wool conservative to think this way any more. This is reality. This is how it is. This is where all the overwhelming evidence points. So what kind of a bizarro, warped, intellectually challenged, cognitively dissonant, eco-fascistic nutcase would you have to be to think otherwise?
Look, I’m sorry to be blunt all you Greenies (you know how normally polite and respectful I am to you and your cause) but don’t you think the charade has gone on long enough? Do you not think, maybe, that given that the IPCC is the basis of all your so-called “science” on climate change, and given that the IPCC has been proven dozens of times now to have been hijacked by activists with about as much of a handle on objective reality as Syd Barrett locked in a cupboard during a particularly bad acid trip, it mightn’t be time finally to do the decent thing?
Either come over to the side of reality, truth and climate scepticism (as your Lynas has sort of done) and admit you’re wrong. Or gather together in your last redoubt with your Hansens and your Gores and your Porritts and all the other die hards and do the only other honorable thing: show the courage of your convictions by staging a Climate Masada. |
