Last week, the sequel to 2009’s Climategate scandal was introduced to the global Internet audience, and preliminary reviews show it to be potentially more explosive than the original. Gems include iconic Hockey Stick scientist Michael Mann advancing a “cause” and admitting “we certainly don’t know the GLOBAL mean temperature anomaly very well,” and University of East Anglia scientist Phil Jones advising colleagues involved in the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “to delete all emails at the end of the process,” so to avoid being subject to any Freedom of Information Act requests.
And the Solyndra-splattered Department of Energy doesn’t come off too well either, with Jones warning:
Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I’ve discussed this with the main funder (U.S. Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data.
Meanwhile the ties between environmental pressure groups and the development of the IPCC as the (fraudulent) standard-bearer for climate science were further revealed. As NLPC reported recently, a holiday campaign by Coca-Cola that sends millions of dollars to World Wildlife Fund to purportedly fund polar bear preservation efforts instead finances WWF’s activism to fight global warming. While WWF has asserted – as part of its polar bear protection drive – that the authoritative IPCC “has confirmed that human-induced climate change is a reality,” the group has failed to reveal that many of its own activist scientists were contributors to IPCC reports.
Now Climategate 2.0, as it’s being called, has revealed approximately 5,000 emails among climate change advocacy scientists. The messages and some documents were released on a Russian server (just like the first time), and revealed message number 3,655 was an email from WWF European Climate and Energy Policy chief Stephan Singer to several colleagues and researchers, seeking to capitalize with publicity on a 2003 heat wave and its effects. The full text of the message follows (typos and email language have been cleaned up):
Dear all,
I think we all have seen [if not commented on] the devastating heat wave presently in Europe – gives us a feeling on truly global warming.
WWF has assured some money – a few thousand EUROS, which is not much to be honest, but at least a start – to ask an economist with climate policy understanding to assess in a short but fleshy paper [max 10 pages] the economic costs of these weather extremes in Europe. This can be put in context with the mitigation costs of ambitious climate policies which are often quoted as a barrier to clean technologies unfortunately. I think we as an NGO working on climate policy need such a document pretty soon for the public and for informed decision makers in order to get a) a debate started and b) in order to get into the media the context between climate extremes/disasters/costs and finally the link between weather extremes and energy – just the solutions parts what still is not communicated at all.
In short, can you advise us on a competent author who is readily available [can be one of you, of course], to bring together the conventionally accessible costs of reduced transport loads on rivers, in railway networks, forest fires, disruption of water supply and irrigation, closure of hydro power and even nuclear in some locations, health costs, agricultural failures [if accessible] etc., etc., etc…resulting from the heat wave?
Of course, I could not send this e-mail to all competent scientists, so feel free to share please and come back to me – at best ASAP.
So WWF’s Singer went fishing for a researcher to create a document that would pretend to calculate the harmful economic effects from the heat wave. No need to make the obvious tie-in to global warming, as WWF could do that just fine all by itself. This is what has passed for climate change research over the last 20-plus years, and it is what passes for part of WWF’s polar bear preservation initiative, since the organization believes all human-created, fossil-fueled greenhouse gases – from anywhere on the planet – harms their habitat.
It doesn’t stop there. Author Donna Laframboise, whose book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert was released last month, has documented dozens of ties between WWF and the supposedly objective UN IPCC. Among her findings are the fact that of the IPCC’s 40 members of its core writing team for its influential 2007 4th Assessment Report (AR4), two (including IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri) had close ties to Greenpeace and nine were linked to WWF. She also noted that of the 11 chapters produced by AR4’s Working Group 1 – which oversaw the report’s climate change research “from a hard science perspective” – more than half included contributions from authors connected to WWF.
Laframboise also identified particularly troubling circumstances surrounding Chapter 11.
“Its authors relied on 10 papers that not only hadn’t been published yet, they hadn’t even been accepted for publication by an academic journal prior to the IPCC’s own cutoff dates,” she explained. “Later, rather implausibly, all 10 were published together, between the covers of a single issue of Climatic Change.”
Laframboise further addressed the issue in her book, writing, “The fact that necessary information hadn’t yet been published posed no impediment. They simply wrote the IPCC chapter they desired and arranged for the necessary papers to be published after the fact.”
Laframboise also reported that by 2008 WWF had recruited 130 scientists, mostly from the IPCC, for its Climate Witness Scientific Advisory Panel. The specially chosen group was offered the possibility of: “further involvement in a number of other WWF activities;” “attendance at conferences, forums or workshops and interaction with the media;” and “future collaboration between WWF and research institutions.” The purpose for the participation of these so-called objective scientists was to help WWF “build a movement of individuals…who want to be active in addressing this threat.”
And what was the “work” these scientists were to do for WWF? To “evaluate testimonials the WWF collects from ordinary people who believe that they themselves have detected human-caused climate change,” Laframboise explained. In other words, elevate anecdotal observations from a “glorified public opinion poll” about things like sea level rise and snowfall, and legitimize them into scientific “findings” for WWF to report.
The implications were this: Nearly two-thirds of AR4’s chapters were produced by groups that had at least one individual involved with the activist, movement-minded WWF – so much for IPCC neutrality. Fifteen of those chapters, or approximately one-third, were led by scientists associated with WWF. Laframboise has written much more about WWF’s involvement with IPCC scientists, which can be accessed at her blog, No Frakking Consensus.
That’s the “consensus” science that the world’s governments and the mainstream media wants everyone to believe points to a future catastrophic climate change. And for cola drinkers, this is the polar bear preservation that your Coke purchases pay for.
Paul Chesser is an associate fellow for the National Legal and Policy Center.