Climate Change Consensus?

[Mitch Cronin]

You're still getting it wrong Malcolm, but you're closer to truth than Fido.

Your, "some parts of Canada", should be, some Canadians.

[Canus Chinookus]

There's three types of people in this world: those that can count, and those that can't.

my browser, google chrome, shows 17 pages... oh well.

[Moon The Loon]

my browser, google chrome, shows 17 pages... oh well.

Ahhh. OK, I'll change it to a computer joke:

There's 10 kinds of people that understand binary: those that do, and those that don't.

[Canus Chinookus]

[Canus Chinookus]

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/f...c-meltdown.aspx

[Moon The Loon]

Great article, CC.

Funny though...given the background of the 2035 prediction, doesn't it seem strange they left out the Big One?

http://www.2012warning.com/

and

http://www.endoftime2012.com/

I LOVE this quote from the second link:

"End of the world 21.12.2012 is an effect of the same cause that drives all your technology. Moreover, it is the effect of the same cause that lends all forms of reality their existence - the past, the present and the future. It is the effect of the same cause that creates the density of matter out of the vibrations of energy! It is the underlying essence of the world holding it all together through the electromagnetic and gravitational bonds. To doubt that the winter sun 2012 will spell anything else but the death of the present order of things is commensurate with doubting one's own existence. You know what kinds of forces are unleashed during the sequential quantum changes of an orbiting electron. Multiply it by a factor of double light speed as per Einstein's E=mC� formulations and you will have a good idea of what 21.12.2012 is all about. However, the force as any other particular form of reality is impersonal and which personal shade will such an outburst of energy attain is a matter of choice. The apocalypse for the unjust one is the flower of life for the just one."

[chockalicious]

Why Fido, because the likes of these guys are snivvling about lost profit: "Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, Jeff Rubin, former chief economist for CIBC World Markets, Frank Stronach, chairman of Magna/[Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, Jeff Rubin, former chief economist for CIBC World Markets, Frank Stronach, chairman of Magna"?

"A recent study by a University of Ottawa professor and others estimates that 42 per cent of the job loss in Canadian manufacturing over the last few years resulting from the rise in the dollar can be attributed to our rise in oil exports, and identifies the computer and electronics, textile, transportation, machinery, paper and plastics sectors as those most affected. "

Another recent study by a highskule dropout and others estimates that 100% of the job loss in Canadian manufacturing over the last few years, that has not been a result of bankruptcies, can be directly attributed to employers seeking more profit. Free Trade, Privatization, Global Economy, Shareholder Value, Investment Return, Cost/Profit Analysis, Average Annual Return, Return on Equity, etc... In the language of the triple C Conservative there is no Humanity.

Seems to me a high Canadian buck is a damn fine thing for the average Canadian shmuck.

And Fido.... if you don't like Canada, please turn south, and start going... write back when you like what you see.

Hi Mitch

Couple things here. Can you post the link or attribute the source of the artice you posted. I don't want to attack the messenger but I would like to know who published the report. If it is a "Jim Stanford, economist for the CAW" type I know reflexively to dismiss it immediately.

Those jobs may be lost due to a higher dollar but what is the alternative? Cripple one section of the country to artificially keep lthe dollar low so that exporters can compete? Should there not be some onus on them to get more efficient?

The Oilsands drive manufacturing jobs as well as bring revenue to all parts of the country. I think it is short focussed to blame all of the manufacturing sector's ills on one region/industry.

As for the western seperatism sentiment, yes it is out there. I feel that a Canadian resource should benefit all Canadians, not just those in that province. Surely you can understand though that when the leaders of two provinces come out and slam the industry of a third that there might be hard feelings?

Not to throw too many different arguements out there but is PQ sharing the considerable wealth generated by it's northern hydro projects?

This disparity and the perception of it is what drives a lot of comments like the one Fido makes. I don't neccessarily agree, but I sure understand it.

[Moon The Loon]

Chock, all your points are at least theoretically addressed by equalization payments. Some years ago, the Supreme Court decided that any wealth gained by a province could stay with the province. As seen last year where Ontario, for the first time since 1867, was deemed a "have not" province status, it actually received (if only a pittance) some equalization payments. As has Quebec for many, many years.

Equalization payments have always been a sore point with the "haves". But ideally, it allows the poorest of provinces to share in the riches of those that have it. Short of becoming 13 little duchy's (izzat a word?), we're probably still better off as a whole than being swallowed by our neighbours to the south and becoming the 51st star!

[Mitch Cronin]

Hi Choc, sorry, I should have said, I was responding to this from Fido:

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/article/751...k-the-tar-sands 

More good arguments for the separation of Alberta from Canada.

Sask and BC do you want to join in?

Those slams you speak of were necessarily rather narrowly focused. Their presence, and therefore their soapbox was provided for by that so called, "open federalism" Harper created, which is supposed to be so unifying. What business do provincial leaders have at a national conference? Their interests are within their own confines, but the issues are not. Harper's government brags that this new policy is part of what "has strengthened national unity and neutralized the tired old debate between separatists and centralists that has been holding Canada back for more than forty years."

I don't think so.

Any Premier's provincially focused rant shouldn't be seen as any indication of what Canadians are thinking.

[chockalicious]

MTL and Mitch

Theoretically at least it does work and I am all for equalization payments and quite aware of their history and how they work. I think our resources should benefit all Canadians.

Those attacks on the Oildsands nmay not have been representative of what the general populace was thinking but out here it can be seen as another indicator of eastern mendacity towards industry in the west.

I know it is an old point and at some point people have to move on but the NEP was aimed at a very specific Alberta industry. I don't see federal programs aimed at the hydro-electric industry.

I have no desire to see the province where I now make my home seperate from Canada. I can however understand the reasons that people put forward on why we should (even if I don't agree with them)

[Guest woxof]

No wonder they wanted an agreement at Copenhagen so bad. They knew this was coming out soon.

Aren't you glad the main players read Woxof's posts on this thread prior to the conference?

First Climategate, now Glaciergate

"Hot on the heels of Climategate -- the leaking of thousands of emails and computer files that show many of the world's leading climate scientists fudging the results of their global warming research and contriving to keep skeptics from being published in academic journals -- comes what could be called Glaciergate.

Prominent among the claims of impending environmental disaster in the UN's fourth report on climate change, published in 2007, was the prediction that all of the 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayas could melt away by 2035. That's just 25 years away. Now the Times of London has discovered that this claim was not based on scientific enquiry, but rather on speculation. And old speculation at that.

In 1999 the magazine The New Scientist interviewed an Indian climatologist named Syed Hasnain. He told reporter Fred Pearce that it was his "speculation" that the Himalayan glaciers would "vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming." Dr. Hasnain cautioned that the data on which his speculation was based had neither been published nor peer reviewed, Mr. Pearce noted his in his article.

The Hasnain interview, according to the Times on Sunday, remained largely dormant until 2005 when the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) cited it in a report it prepared as a lobbying and fundraising tool. The WWF report was not peer-reviewed either (nor need it have been since it was produced by a special interest group to advance its cause). Nonetheless, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- the UN's official climate research branch -- picked up on the WWF's untested claim and, apparently without doing any further checking of its own, stated in its 2007 report that "glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world and ... the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high," above 90%.

This is the report that helped secure the IPCC its Nobel Prize. It is the report that stated categorically that man-made emissions were the main cause of global warming and climate change. Interestingly, it is also the report over which the Climategate scientists sent one another emails urging the destruction of any communication they had about data given to the IPCC, so freedom of information requests could not force them to turn over files showing how they may have manipulated the outcomes of their research.

Also, interestingly, Dr. Hasnain, the scientist whose initial speculation wound up being cited as unequivocal scientific fact by the IPCC, is now head of the glacier research team at an Indian environmental think-tank run by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC.

Indian government scientists helping to assemble the IPCC's 2007 report warned the Himalayan glacier claim was shaky. They told the UN their own research showed comparatively little glacial retreat. But the IPCC ignored them. Zealots never want to be confused by the facts.

The IPCC's previous report, issued in 2001, displayed a hockey-stick graph in five separate locations. It was the centrepiece of the findings.

The graph, developed by then-University of Virginia researcher Michael Mann, purported to show a millennium of relatively stable global-average temperatures followed by a sharp upward spike in the 20th century. The IPCC insisted this proved industrialization was dangerously altering the climate.

But two Canadian researchers, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, showed the graph was meaningless. Prof. Mann had manipulated over 80% of his data sets to ensure the climate numbers produced a hockey stick with ominous 20th-century temperature gains. Nearly any series of numbers plugged into Prof. Mann's formula produced the same graph.

That's two IPCC reports in a row that have featured later-discredited "proofs" of manmade global warming.

Add to that the fact that many of the emails released in Climategate reveal discussions by leading IPCC scientists about how to exclude dissidents and skeptics from the body's report-writing processes and you begin to get a glimpse of how contrived and one-sided the UN's climate investigations have been.

You also get to see how the "settled" science behind climate change alarmism was arrived at -- not by scientific consensus, but rather by manipulation, misrepresentation and strong-arming."

http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/story....?id=2461494&p=1

[E-HANDLE]

Scientists using selective temperature data, skeptics say

Richard Foot, Canwest News Service

Published: Wednesday, January 20, 2010

James R. Drummond/Dalhousie University/Handout A weather research laboratory located on Ellesmere Island at Eureka, Nunavut.

Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers.

Two months after "climategate" cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming.

Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.

http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2465231

The article doesn't mention it, but the nonsense that "the decade from 2000 til 2009 will be the warmest on record" owes it's basis in the temperature records of previous decades. What they don't tell us is that the baseline temperature was created with all 6000 weather stations. Before they excluded the cold stations, like Mould Bay, Coppermine, Nanasivik, etc. Pretty clever, eh?

p.s. I've been to Eureka several times. It could use some warming up.

[Check Pilot]

After following this thread for a long time now, and spending a very long time in my new retirement days looking at probably thousands of hours of data and also hundreds of opinions, I'm convinced that the there are two truths with the situation:

1. At Copenhagen, poor countries made an attempt to get our greenies to convince our governments (read i.e. you and I with Cap and Trade) to tax us to the maximum we could take without being outraged.

But it didn't work.

2. The Global warming scenario scandal is starting to come apart like a melting paper jigsaw puzzle that was floating away and dissolving in the few flooded basements that Winnipeg had in 1997.

The Global warming theory now stinks about as much as the IPCC report at Flopenhagen, and to add to it the Himalaya glacier melting fiasco..

All I can say, which isn't too often here but, never mind the idiots (left wing, CBC oriented, hidden agenda, biased media, which are desperate for any kind of attention) to have a look for our own ability to discern the truth for ourselves.

A hundred years from now I kinda think all our children (I'll be dead by then and you probably will be too) will be all OK. Maybe a bit warmer in the North, but that's all OK too. People will adapt and go on. It's been like that for 10,000 years now hasn't it? Or more maybe? Alarmists in our midst say no? Well that's not the case. It is OK in my opinion.

Too bad for the alarmists.

I empathize with their beliefs. I empathize with anyone else that's as wrong as well. The wrong kind of upbringing in an insulated universe like a cloistered university atmosphere that absolutely stiffens one's ability to absurdly twist a mindset out of their own freedom of expression towards a desire to please a peer reviewed article is just nuts.

As far as I'm concerned. Just my opinion.

Maybe they're just wrong. All I know is that right now they want to make me pay a lot more in taxes. Well, right now I'm not gonna do that without a big fight.

A hundred years from now -- most of us will likely all be dead and gone. Our contribution to society will be over.

But I predict our grandchildren or even our children won't be texting or sexting each other on little hand held devices any more, will they?

Well they won't. It'll be kinda like telegraph cables running along the railroad tracks some of us knew and lived with, won't it?

The world will be a lot different from a human point of view in a hundred years. Will it be warmer by then? Won't it? Well maybe. I hope so. The kids will have text'd and sex'd it out of existence by then. They'll be doing something that you or I can't even imagine by then. I don't or won't care by then. I sure hope Edmonton becomes a paradise for visitors in January.

That's up to them.

Best wishes for the future of our human race.

[Guest woxof]

Because of the importance of this article posted by E-Handle, I have decided to post the full story on here. As you can see, there is more and more explosive revalations happening to this theory. Remeber how earlier in the thread, the alarmists were saying how the vast majority of scientists believed in this. It looks like that argument is not used anymore. This is becoming the largest scientific scandal of all time.

Scientists using selective temperature data, skeptics say

"Call it the mystery of the missing thermometers.

Two months after "climategate" cast doubt on some of the science behind global warming, new questions are being raised about the reliability of a key temperature database, used by the United Nations and climate change scientists as proof of recent planetary warming.

Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.

In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

Worse, only one station -- at Eureka on Ellesmere Island -- is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.

The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada.

Yet as American researchers Joseph D'Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses "just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees."

Both the authors, and the institute, are well-known in climate-change circles for their skepticism about the threat of global warming.

Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have "cherry picked" the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea -- which has a warming effect on winter weather.

Over the past two decades, they say, "the percentage of [Canadian] stations in the lower elevations tripled and those at higher elevations, above 300 feet, were reduced in half."

Using the agency's own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA's Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.

Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S. and China.

They say NOAA collects no temperature data at all from Bolivia -- a high-altitude, landlocked country -- but instead "interpolates" or assigns temperature values for that country based on data from "nearby" temperature stations located at lower elevations in Peru, or in the Amazon basin.

The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record.

"NOAA . . . systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler," the authors say. "The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs."

The NOAA database forms the basis of the influential climate modelling work, and the dire, periodic warnings on climate change, issued by James Hanson, the director of the GISS in New York.

Neither agency responded to a request for comment Wednesday from Canwest News Service. However Hanson did issue a public statement on the matter earlier this week.

"NASA has not been involved in any manipulation of climate data used in the annual GISS global temperature analysis," he said. "The agency is confident of the quality of this data and stands by previous scientifically-based conclusions regarding global temperatures."

In addition to the allegations against NOAA and GISS, climate scientists are also dealing with the embarrassment this week of the false glacier-melt warning contained in the 2007 report of the UN Panel on Climate Change. That report said Himalayan glaciers are likely to disappear within three decades if current rates of melting continue.

This week, however, the panel admitted there is no scientific evidence to support such a claim.

The revelations come only two months after the "climategate" scandal, in which the leak or theft of thousands of e-mails -- private discussions between scientists in the U.S. and Britain -- showed that a group of influential climatologists tried for years to manipulate global warming data, rig the scientific peer-review process and keep their methods secret from other, contrary-minded researchers."

[Fido]

.... I sure hope Edmonton becomes a paradise for visitors in January.

Loved your post and agree with everything you stated..... well, I know texting but this sexting bit has me wondering.

[Steam Driven]

From the letters page of the National Post... Tongue firmly in cheek I'm guessing...

Don't believe the raw data, it's toasty in Edmonton

National Post

Larry Wong, Canwest News Service

Re: Cold Comfort: Mercury Rises To -20 C In Edmonton, Dec. 15.

Those who believe it may be cold in Edmonton will be cheered to know that the recently published temperatures consist of only raw temperature data. The Climate Research Unit (CRU) in East Anglia, U.K., has used its complex and peer-reviewed computer adjustment for that raw data to determine the real temperatures for inclusion in future IPCC reports on global warming.

It must be noted that the CRU-adjusted temperatures for Edmonton continue to show this to be one of the warmest weeks in Edmonton's history and exactly matches the catastrophic and accelerating warming prediction of the proven IPCC computer model.

The Edmonton weather office will replace the raw temperature data in its records with the CRU-corrected data as soon as possible to support future CRU climate research, however, the CRU asks that anyone who may have taken notes or have a memory of the raw temperature data of recent days to erase or otherwise forget it in order to avoid any possible future embarrassment the raw temperature data may cause. It further states that the science remains fully settled and there is no need to invite any silly debate with climate warming deniers who do not understand the CRU's complex scientific methods.

Dwight Christensen, Ottawa.

[Guest woxof]

Thanks E-Handle and Steam Driven. Here is an opinion piece about Suzuki....because....."he is not going to tell me what to do". And it is less and less likely that he ever will.

David Suzuki's hot air

"David Suzuki wants politicians thrown in jail if they don't act as quickly as he believes they should to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

David Suzuki wants politicians thrown in jail if they don't act as quickly as he believes they should to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

During a speech in Montreal he said: "We can no longer tolerate what's going on in Ottawa and Edmonton."

What's going on is Alberta's government is trying to bring in emission reductions without simultaneously destroying Alberta's oil and gas industry, which, in turn, is fuelling Canada's robust economy, not to mention the plane that flew Suzuki to Montreal to give his speech at McGill University this week.

For a guy who hates oil and gas so much, he sure uses a lot of it. His carbon footprint is so big it's likely rivalling Al Gore's, which is surely an inconvenient truth for these men who like to preach to others but don't walk their own talk.

Remember how Suzuki and six staff travelled across the country to foster awareness about global warming on a "rock-star style bus" big enough to comfortably seat 54 people, when a van would have sufficed? In other words, when faced with choosing the environment over his own comfort, Suzuki chose the latter, as his less-than-perfectly-insulated enormous glass home in Vancouver would attest.

Anyway, this is exactly what Suzuki told his rapturous crowd of 600 doomsday believers: "What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there's a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they're doing is a criminal act." Suzuki was first quoted in the McGill Daily on Monday and his comments were subsequently picked up by the National Post, at which point the story went nuclear (a form of energy Suzuki also opposes, rightly in my view).

Suzuki's spokespeople are now saying Canadians are not to take the renowned broadcaster at his word, even though he said virtually the exact same thing at the University of Toronto during a speech in January. Should practised public speakers delivering a prepared speech on more than one occasion not be taken literally? It's absurd of Suzuki to now claim he didn't mean what he said. Repeatedly. In a prepared speech. On the record. For publication. Speaking of travelling to Toronto and Montreal, have Suzuki and his ilk never heard of video conferencing?

"You have lived your entire lives in a completely unsustainable period," Suzuki told the crowd. "You all think growth and (climate) change is normal. It's not."

Are we supposed to take him at his word on that? I hope not, because if there's one constant about climate, it's change.

"It's an intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years," added Suzuki, during his speech in the heated university.

Notice how he didn't say 25 or 30 years ago. Know why? Because 25 years ago, this prophet of perdition was predicting that Earth was doomed to plunge into another ice age! Cooling was a catastrophe and now warming is a catastrophe. He should make up his mind.

Apparently, scientists back then, including Suzuki, were desperately frightened that Earth could cool by another degree or two, food production would be slashed and people would starve.

Well, just when Suzuki was melting down about global cooling, the sun went into a new cycle in the late 1970s and Earth started to warm again. You'd think he'd be thrilled.

After all, Earth has only warmed 0.8 C since the end of the Little Ice Age, which started in the 13th century and ended around 1860.

As for climate change being abnormal, consider this. There was a time in England when vineyards were common and temperatures much warmer than today.

After the Little Ice Age, Earth warmed up with no help from carbon dioxide and did so until about 1940, and then the temperatures started to fall until the late '70s when Suzuki et al. started predicting another ice age. Incidentally, those almost four decades of cooling occurred post-Second World War, when man-made CO2 was spiking exponentially. What's more, according to ice core data, when CO2 levels were 16 times higher than they are today, Earth was covered in ice.

Such scientific facts must infuriate Suzuki. He apparently refuses to debate real climate scientists about this. Perhaps he believes they should be in jail, too, just like that great scientist Galileo once was when he refuted the church's orthodoxy that the sun revolved around Earth. But real science can't be jailed for long, even if politicians can."

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/s...d0-1e9735f8dfae

[mrlupin]

13 August 09

Leaked Memo: Oil Lobby Launches Fake "Grassroots" Campaign

Tags: American Petroleum Institute, astroturfing, climate legislation, General, Greenpeace, Kevin Grandia, national association of manufacturers, U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Waxman-Markey

UPDATE: people are beginning the send me on-the-ground info about the American Petroleum Institute events. Check the list at the end of this article to see if you live in a "target region" and to track updates.

An internal memo obtained by Greenpeace USA details polluters’ plans to launch a nationwide Astroturf campaign, staging fake "grassroots" events to attack climate legislation during the final weeks of recess before the Senate returns to debate the issue in September.

The email memo (download a PDF copy), which appears to come from the desk of American Petroleum Institute President Jack Gerard, asks API’s member companies to recruit employees, retirees, vendors and contractors to attend “Energy Citizen” rallies in key Congressional districts nationwide. API is focusing on 21 states that have “a significant industry presence” or “assets on the ground.”

Taking a page from the playbook of Astroturf campaigners currently crashing health care town hall events across the country, API hopes to similarly sully productive communications between Congressmembers and their actual constituents. Gerard states that API is ready to bus in company members and provide logistical support, and reveals that API has retained “a highly experienced events management company that has produced successful rallies for presidential campaigns, corporations and interest groups.”

Gerard’s email states that API is partnering on the rally campaign with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, confirming that the groups are staging a coordinated effort to attack climate legislation regardless that several prominent members of these groups have stated support for strong Congressional action to combat climate change.

Greenpeace sent a letter to Gerard yesterday asking him to verify the authenticity of the email, and pointing out that the plan “runs contrary to several prominent API members’ public support for climate action, namely Shell, BP America, ConocoPhillips, General Electric and Siemens.”

The API memo closes with a ‘for your eyes only’ plea: “Please treat this information as sensitive and ask those in your company to do so as well… we don’t want critics to know our game plan.”

To which Greenpeace responded to Gerard in yesterday’s letter, “Game plan known.”

Here is a list of the “tentative venues” where API plans to hold “Energy Citizen” rallies. If you live in one of the named cities, please email any news or tips you hear about the rallies to us at desmogblog@gmail.com.

[mrlupin]

The Climate Killers

Meet the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming

Link to article

The Profiteer

Warren Buffett

CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

Despite being a key adviser to Obama during the financial crisis, America's best-known investor has been blasting the president's push to curb global warming — using the same lying points promoted by far-right Republicans. The climate bill passed by the House, Buffett insists, is a "huge tax — and there's no sense calling it anything else." What's more, he says, the measure would mean "very poor people are going to pay a lot more money for their electricity." Never mind that the climate bill, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, would actually save Americans with the lowest incomes about $40 a year.

But Buffett, whose investments have the power to move entire markets, is doing far more than bad-mouthing climate legislation — he's literally banking on its failure. In recent months, the Oracle of Omaha has invested billions in carbon-polluting industries, seeking to cash in as the world burns. His conglomerate, Berkshire Hathaway, has added 1.28 million shares of America's biggest climate polluter, ExxonMobil, to its balance sheet. And in November, Berkshire placed a huge wager on the future of coal pollution, purchasing the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad for $26 billion — the largest acquisition of Buffett's storied career. BNSF is the nation's top hauler of coal, shipping some 300 million tons a year. That's enough to light up 10 percent of the nation's homes — many of which are powered by another Berkshire subsidiary, MidAmerican Energy. Although Berkshire is the largest U.S. firm not to disclose its carbon pollution — and second globally only to the Bank of China — its utilities have the worst emissions intensity in America, belching more than 65 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in 2008 alone.

As a savvy investor, Buffett would only buy a coal-shipping railroad if he felt certain that Congress will fail to crack down on climate pollution. "Whatever hurts coal also hurts the railroad business," observes Peter Gray, a corporate climate attorney at the international law firm of McKenna Long & Aldridge. "Mr. Buffett must believe that efforts to adopt cap-and-trade legislation will fail."

That's a strange position for the billionaire to take, given that he's promised to donate more than 80 percent of his fortune to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. "As someone who is giving so much money to international development, Buffett ought to know better," says Joe Romm, who served as an assistant energy secretary under Bill Clinton. "He ought to have spent a great deal of time considering the greatest threats to developing countries — which would have quickly educated him about climate change."

[mrlupin]

The Disinformer

Rupert Murdoch

CEO, News Corporation

In 2007, when the world's most powerful media baron announced his newfound conviction that global warming "poses clear, catastrophic threats," it seemed as though the truth about climate change might finally get the attention it deserves. Murdoch promised that not only would News Corp. itself become carbon-neutral by 2010, but that his media outlets would explain the urgent need for a cap on carbon emissions. Climate change, he pledged, would be addressed as a sober reality across the News Corp. empire, whether as a plot element on 24 or in a story on Fox News. "I don't think there's any question of my conviction on this issue," Murdoch declared. "I've come to feel it very strongly."

Since then, however, Murdoch and his media operations have become the nation's leading source of disinformation about climate change. In October, Fox Business ran an extended segment on "The Carbon Myth," inviting a hack scientist to "make the case" that more carbon pollution is actually "good for the environment." The Wall Street Journal has continued to lie not only about the reality of global warming but about Obama's efforts to prevent it, denouncing climate legislation as "likely to be the biggest tax in American history." The New York Post insisted that the Copenhagen climate negotiations were little more than a meet-up for "shamsters, scam artists and assorted 'global warming' opportunists" who planned to "transfer a trillion bucks from the economies of the world's developed nations to Third World kleptocrats — with God-only-knows how much cash sticking to the fingers of well-connected U.N. bureaucrats." And on Fox News, right-wing attack dog Sean Hannity misinformed his viewers that 2009 — the fifth-hottest year in the past 130 — was "one of the coldest years on record." Hannity then summed up the deranged denial that permeates Murdoch's media empire: "I don't believe climate change is real," he said. "I think this is global-warming hysteria and alarmism."

[mrlupin]

The Fake Protestor

Jack Gerard

President, American Petroleum

As head of the American Petroleum Institute, Gerard serves as the frontman for the nation's oil and gas industry, including energy giants like Exxon, Shell, BP and Halliburton. Although API now claims to back the move to a "carbon-constrained economy," Gerard has been working behind the scenes to scuttle climate legislation. According to an internal memo leaked in August, Gerard directed API's nearly 400 member companies to mobilize their employees to attend "Energy Citizen" rallies in 20 states to protest a cap on carbon pollution. To ensure the success of the fake grass-roots protests, Gerard bragged that he had also enlisted a bevy of polluting allies — including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. "Please treat this information as sensitive," Gerard cautioned in the memo. "We don't want critics to know our game plan."

This is not the first time that API has been at the center of a secretive campaign to derail carbon controls. In the late 1990s, the institute conspired with Exxon and a cadre of right-wing think tanks to create the "Global Climate Science Communications Action Plan" — an $8 million effort to fund climate research that hypes the "weaknesses in scientific understanding" of global warming. "Victory will be achieved," the plan explained, when "those promoting the Kyoto treaty on the basis of extant science appear to be out of touch with reality."

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Burning Man

Rex Tillerson

CEO, ExxonMobil

Tillerson, who oversees the world's biggest oil company, concedes that "greenhouse-gas emissions are one of the factors affecting climate change." But that doesn't mean that America's largest carbon polluter plans to stop killing the climate. Exxon is responsible for 397 million tons of CO2 emissions annually — more than twice those of the nation's dirtiest electric utility — accounting for 6.5 percent of America's climate-warming pollution. As part of its campaign to defeat climate legislation, which Tillerson claims will "cap economic growth," Exxon spent $29 million on lobbying in 2008 — second only to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And despite vowing to stop its funding of climate denial, it continues to foot the bill for bogus research by right-wing outfits like the Heritage Foundation, which asserts that "growing scientific evidence casts doubt on whether global warming constitutes such a threat."

In a disingenuous attempt to appear serious about the threat of climate change, Tillerson has recently begun to advocate a tax on carbon pollution — a measure he knows has absolutely no chance of passing. "It's strategic," says Emilie Mazzacurati, North American research chief for the energy analyst Point Carbon. "You're never going to pass a tax on carbon in this country; politically, it's completely impossible." Such duplicity is par for the course: In 2007, spending $100 million on ads, Exxon boasted about its investments in renewable energy — even though such deals totaled only $10 million that year.

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The Dirty Democrat

Sen. Mary Landrieu

Democrat, Louisiana

Landrieu — who boasts of being "the most fervent pro-drilling Democrat in the Senate" — has assured oil interests that she'll be "putting the brakes" on current efforts to cap carbon pollution. Even though her home state will be savaged by climate change, Katrina-style, Landrieu routinely sides with her energy funders. In 2008, after providing the pivotal vote to preserve $12 billion in tax breaks for Big Oil, she received $272,000 from oil and gas interests — third among Democrats. Joined by other Democrats from key energy states — including Jim Webb of Virginia, Max Baucus of Montana, Evan Bayh of Indiana and Robert Byrd of West Virginia — Landrieu tried to kill climate legislation in the Senate by requiring that it be passed by a 60-vote supermajority. "Landrieu acts more to protect Big Oil than the future for the people of Louisiana," says Tony Massaro of the League of Conservation Voters, which added Landrieu to its "Dirty Dozen" roster of pro-pollution politicians.

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The Drudge of Denial

Marc Morano

Founder, Climate Depot

Morano, who worked for Sen. James "Global Warming is a Hoax" Inhofe, left Congress last year to set up shop as the Matt Drudge of climate denial. Today he runs Climate Depot, a website whose sponsor is funded by oil heir Richard Mellon Scaife. A private version of a congressional blog that Morano ran for Inhofe, the site serves as a clearinghouse for climate kooks. "He's a central cell of the climate-denial machine," says Kert Davies, research director for Greenpeace. "He's been very effective in delaying action on this crisis."

Morano says climate scientists are in the "fear-promoting business" and accuses them of waging a "war on modern civilization." But it's Morano who trafficks in wild claims, routinely distorting the work of climate scholars and charging that "proponents of man-made global warming have been funded to the tune of $50 billion." A former producer for Rush Limbaugh, Morano gained fame as one of the first to trumpet Swift-boat lies about John Kerry's military record. Andrew Watson, a British climate professor who recently debated Morano on the BBC, said it best in a whispered aside at the end of the show: "What an **bleep**."

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God's Denier

Sen. James Inhofe

Republican, Oklahoma

As the former chairman and ranking Republican of the Senate environment committee, Inhofe is one of the GOP's loudest and most influential voices on climate change. The senator from Oklahoma calls global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," insists that carbon dioxide is not "a real pollutant," and doesn't worry about rising sea levels, because, if all else fails, "God's still up there."

Far from being marginalized, Inhofe continues to hold remarkable sway: In November, he organized fellow GOP members to boycott the environment committee's debate on climate legislation. He also marshaled the ranking GOP members of all six committees with jurisdiction over climate change to write Sen. Barbara Boxer, warning her that proceeding without Republicans would "severely damage" prospects for the bill's passage. The move helped cloud the bill's future, diminishing America's bargaining position at the Copenhagen climate negotiations. "We won, you lost," Inhofe gloated to Boxer during a committee hearing. "Get a life."

In December, the senator also vowed that a resurgent GOP would block the EPA from curbing carbon pollution: "After the 2010 election," he said, "I guarantee we'll have the votes to do it."