Global Warming's
Worriers and Zeroes
Twenty-five Phonies Who Are Fighting to Advance Planetwide Stupidity
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The new edition of Rolling Stone magazine spotlights global warming, including an article entitled, "Warriors and Heroes: Twenty-five Leaders Who Are Fighting To Stave Off Planetwide Catastophe"... or should that be "Worriers and Zeroes: Twenty-five Phonies Who Are Fighting to Advance Planetwide Stupidty"? JunkScience.com let's you be the judge. Names are liniked to their Rolling Stone profiles.
The Dropout: Billy Parish - A college dropout who, with the support of the likes of the Earth Island Institute, Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network, plays the Pied Piper for naive-to-dopey college students who apparently don’t know that climate changes naturally. Parish's message to college kids with too much time on their hands seems to be "Forget science and economics. Embrace eco-ignorance!"
The Avenger: Al Gore – What can be said that hasn’t already been said about the bizarre and twisted Ozone Al? He called for phasing out the internal combustion engine and compared climate change to the 1930s Nazi threat in his book Earth in the Balance. Even the climate gods mock him. He gave a global warming speech in New York City in January 2004 on the coldest day in 50 years. His global warming speech before the National Association of Insurance Commissioners scheduled for early September was wiped out by Hurricane Katrina.
The Paul Revere: Dr. James Hansen – Although he sounded the global warming alarm in Congress first in 1988, he has yet to be correct and has admitted that climate models don’t work.
The Messenger: Dr. Robert Watson – As chairman of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) propagated in 2001 the myth that only 1 or 2 percent of scientists did not believe humans were responsible for global warming. Ata minimum, Watson overlooked these 17,000 scientists.
The Elder Statesman: Raul Estrada Oyuela – Oyuela is credited with last minute diplomatic activity that made the Kyoto Protocol happen, a treaty which even if fully implemented might reduce average global temperature by 0.07 degrees Centigrade at a cost of around $7 trillion. Oh yeah, Oyuela’s native Argentina doesn’t have to cut greenhouse gas emissions under Kyoto.
The Power Player: Paul Anderson – As CEO of electric utility Duke Energy, Anderson recently announced support for a “carbon tax” – essentially a progressive sales tax that’s meant to discourage consumption of consumer products produced through the use of, that’s right, energy from oil, gas and coal. If you’ve ever seen the movie Napolean Dynamite, the expression “hid-ee-ot” comes to mind.
The Hawk: Jim Woolsey – Woolsey is a co-founder of something called the Energy Future Coalition (EFC), which wants to exploit national security concerns to promote the anti-energy, big government strategy. The Left-ist EFC (funded by the Ted Turner Foundation and the Tides Foundation among others) has duped a number of otherwise political conservatives into a classic Leninist strategy, whereby the useful idiots and the capitalists will sell the rope used to to hang themselves. According to CEI’s Myron Ebell, the EFC’s policies “are a combination of stuff that has failed stupendously and repeatedly in the past, naïve assumptions about energy use, conservation, and efficiency, climate alarmism, a total lack of understanding of economics and the way industry works, and lots of those off the shelf magic technologies that are ready to go right now and will of course save money, too. Plug-in hybrids! Methanol from coal! Ethanol! Higher CAFE standards! Not surprisingly, they think the energy policies of the 1970s were actually successful.”
The Emissary: Sheila Watt-Cloutier – Watt-Cloutier chairs an organization that believes U.S. greenhouse gas emissions violate the human rights of the Inuit. Unless the Rolling Stone editor omitted a sentence or two from her bio, it’s not exactly clear to me how the appearance of robins and barn owls in the Arctic violate anyone’s human rights.
The Prime Minister: Tony Blair – Blair recently acknowledged in an opinion piece in The Observer (Oct. 30) that the Kyoto Protocol won’t work. “We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions radically but Kyoto doesn't even stabilise them… We have to understand as well that, even if the US did sign up to Kyoto, it wouldn't affect the huge growth in energy consumption we will see in India and China.,” he wrote. Skeptics of climate alarmism said that in 1997 when the Kyoto Protocol was signed. Welcome to the real world Prime Minister!
The Road Warrior: Hiroshi Okuda – Rolling Stone must have missed Friend of the Earth’s full-page ad in the New York Times (Oct. 29) asking, “Is Toyota A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing,” and featuring a Wolf in sheep’s clothing standing next to the Toyota CEO – Okuda is the chairman of Toyota. It seems not all the Greens are too pleased with Toyota’s environmental policies and, much to Okuda’s surprise, pulled a Green Pearl Harbor. We can only wonder if the Greens called out “Toyota-Toyota-Toyota” as they submitted the ad to the Times.
The Ice Hunter: Dr. Lonnie Thompson – Rolling Stone says Thompson’s photographs “provide disturbing views of the world's melting glaciers -- including the ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro, which is expected to disappear entirely by 2015.” But Fred Singer says,“the Kilimanjaro ice cap is not a thermometer. It may well be melting, but this is simply a delayed consequence of a natural climate warming during the early part of the 20th century. Moreover, it will continue to melt as long as the climate doesn't return to the temperatures of the Little Ice Age of past centuries… Surface measurements of East Africa show no warming trend Weather satellites show a pronounced cooling trend of the atmosphere there. No one has questioned these data.”
The Hardballer: Dr. Ralph Cicerone – Cicerone is an atmospheric chemist, not a climate scientist and his testimony in Congress last summer proves it. As described by Fred Singer, “Ralph Cicerone, incoming president of the National Academy of Sciences, repeated the usual litany by reciting selectively from the June 2001 [National Academy of Sciences report]. While paying lip service to uncertainties, he managed leave the impression of a substantial 20th-century human-caused warming ignoring the cooling between 1940 and 1975 that has always created problems for advocates of anthropogenic global warming. Cicerone is not a climate scientist but an atmospheric chemist. [His seminal paper some 30 years ago pointed to the possible destruction of stratospheric ozone by chlorine. In my opinion, he should have shared the Nobel Prize awarded to Rowland and Molina; but his work has little to do with global warming.]” Check out Pat Michaels recent take on Cicerone.
The Litigator: John Adams – Adam’s Natural Resources Defense Council likely served as the model for the eco-terrorist National Environmental Resource Fund (NERF) in Michael Crichton’s recent global warming thriller, “State of Fear.” Like Al Gore, Adams thinks we need to phase-out fossil fuels. But the NRDC and all its lawyers probably can’t produce enough hot air to keep us warm in the winter.
The Producer: Laurie David – Another “Hollywood genius” to weigh-in on global warming, David helped organize the “Stop Global Warming Virtual March” on Washington. Laurie did her part to avert global warming by demanding that the tony southern California private school her kids attend ban cars from idling while in the pick-up lane -- a policy she wants all schools to adopt. I wonder what parents will have to say about no heat and no air conditioning while waiting to get their kids from school in cold and hot months? Rolling Stone reported, “She is producing an HBO report on global warming called Too Hot Not to Handle that she promises will be ‘the least wonky documentary anybody has ever seen on this issue.’” No doubt.
The Lawmakers: John McCain and Joe Lieberman – “McLieberman,” as their proposed legislation is known inside the Washington, D.C. Beltway, would impose Kyoto-like limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The Senate rejected it in 2003 and against in 2005 (by a wider margin than in 2003). Get the hint, fellas?
The Tide Turner: Dr. Robert Corell – Rolling Stone wrote, “Few scientists know as much about how global warming is changing the world as Robert Corell. As chair of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, Corell oversaw a five-year study by 300 scientists from fifteen countries who studied the effects of climate change in the Arctic. The conclusion: Greenhouse gases are causing the planet to heat up faster than anyone realizes... The detailed findings – laid out in a peer-reviewed, 1,200-page report published on October 21st – provide the most advanced evidence yet of global warming's stark reality.
If Corell knows anything about Arctic climate, he sure didn’t show it in his report. Check out my “Polar Bear Scare on Thin Ice” column and this follow-up, “What Arctic Warming?”
The Up-and-Comer: Zhao Hang – Who’s Rolling Stone trying to kid with this Chinese version of Al Gore? The Chinese didn’t sign Kyoto – they didn’t even pretend to sign the treaty like the Ruskies finally did late last year. The Chinese want their economy to keep expanding. China will cut its greenhouse gas emissions right after it grants Taiwan its independence.
The Prophet: Jim Ball – The Left can’t make enough fun of evangelical Christians – unless of course evangelical leaders can deliver their flocks to the cause of environmental extremism. The naïve Rev. Ball told Rolling Stone, “Millions of poor people could die in this century because of global warming, and millions of others are at risk of hunger and malnutrition.” This man is in dire need of a revelation to the fact that environmental extremism is killing millions every year, right now!
The Governator: Arnold Schwarzenegger – Global warming is another Schwarzeneggar political miscalculation. He thinks the Left will love him if he loves their agenda. Ah-nold hasn’t yet figured out that, while the Left is more than happy to feature him in Rolling Stone as a “climate warrior,” it will work to defeat his three ballot initiatives on Tuesday, Nov. 8 and his re-election bid in 2006.
The Visionary: Amory Lovins – Even the alternative energy crowd says, "Beware of Amory Lovins bearing factoids.”
The Go-Between: Jonathan Lash – Lash’s World Resources Institute is a Washington, D.C. think-tank that consistently supports higher taxes and more government controls to reduce the private use of natural resources, says the Capital Research Center. Lash is happy to be a “go-between” so long as corporations pay greenmail in the form of contributions to WRI.
Professor Hydrogen: Dr. Bragi Arnason – Hydrogen may be a nice idea but the bottom line is that efficient hydrogen fuel cells remain a pipedream. Hydrogen fuel cells (HFCs)are not sources of energy, they merely carry energy. It takes more energy to produce HFCs than we can get out of them. Rolling Stone quotes Arnason as saying his country's future will look much like its past: “When the Vikings settled in Iceland, they used only renewable energy like wind, sun and wood.” And back-to-the-future is where the eco-extremists want to take all of us – except we won’t be able to use the wood.
The Pied Piper: Greg Nickels – Frustrated because the U.S. didn’t sign on to the junk science-fueled global economic suicide capsule known as the Kyoto Protocol, Seattle Mayor Nickels told Rolling Stone, “If we invest in efficient technologies, that can have huge implications for climate change.” But serious scientists, including global warming worrier Tom Wigley of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, do not believe that even the most stringent treaty on greenhouse gas emissions would produce any significant effect on global climate. So why would we believe this high school dropout-cum-local politician?
The Profiteer: Jeff Immelt – One of GE CEO Immelt’s “brilliant” ideas is to cover 7 percent of Arizona with GE-made solar panels at a cost of $16 trillion (based on current GE prices for the panels, excluding land acquisition, installation and maintenance costs). My personal theory is that Immelt is pretending to be climate-friendly so that the EPA and the environmentalists cut GE some slack on the company’s several hundred million dollar Hudson River PCB problem.
