Had it not been for this man, we would not last week have seen 150 heads of government joining 40,000 delegates in Paris for that mammoth climate conference: the 21st such get-together since, in 1992, he masterminded the Rio “Earth Summit”, the largest political gathering in history. Yet few people even know his name.
"During the Second World War, having emerged from humble origins in the Great Depression, Strong became convinced that the new United Nations should become a world government"
Some years back, when I was researching for a book called The Real Global Warming Disaster, charting how the late-20th-century panic over climate change came about, few things surprised me more than to discover the absolutely central role played in the whole story by a Canadian socialist multimillionaire, Maurice Strong.
During the Second World War, having emerged from humble origins in the Great Depression, Strong became convinced that the new United Nations should become a world government, dedicated to ensuring that the wealth enjoyed by the richer countries of the West should be spread out around the world’s underprivileged majority.
In the Sixties, having become very rich himself from Canada’s oil industry, Strong came to see that the key to his vision was “environmentalism”, the one cause the UN could harness to make itself a truly powerful world government.
A superb political operator, in 1972 he set up a UN “Environment Conference” in Stockholm, to declare that the Earth’s resources were the common inheritance of all mankind. They should no longer be exploited for the benefit of only a few countries, at the expense of poorer countries across the globe.
To pursue this, he became founding director of a new agency, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and in the Eighties he took up the cause of a tiny group of international meteorologists who had come to believe that the world faced catastrophic warming. In 1988, UNEP sponsored this little group into setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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| Con-artist & Socialist: Maurice Stone |
It is the UNFCCC which in effect has dictated the global climate change agenda ever since. Almost yearly it has staged huge conferences, notably those at Kyoto (1997), Copenhagen (2009) and the present one in Paris.
And all along it has been Strong’s ideology, enshrined at Rio in “Agenda 21”, which has continued to shape the entire process, centred on the principle that the richer developed countries must pay for a problem they created, to the financial benefit of all those “developing countries” that have been its main victims.
In 2005, Strong was caught having been illicitly paid $1 million from the UN’s Oil for Food programme, supposedly set up to allow Saddam Hussein to pay in oil to feed starving Iraqis. He retired to a flat in Beijing, where he had been close to China’s Communist leaders back to Mao. It was from there that he returned home to Canada to die,on November 27.
To this day, global climate policy is still shaped by Strong’s Agenda 21, as was highlighted last February when Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican Marxist now head of the UNFCCC and organiser of the Paris conference, urged that the West should give “$1 trillion a year” to the “developing” world.
But the wonderful irony is that the reason why Paris will fail, like Copenhagen before it, is that those “developing countries”, led by China and India – now the world’s first and third largest “CO2 emitters” – have not the slightest intention of curbing their emissions. It is for the West to do that, for creating “the problem”. Thus, just as he died, Strong’s dream is more than ever falling apart – thanks to those very countries his socialist vision was intended to help.
3 February 2015 - The Top UN Climate Change Official is optimistic that a new international treaty will be adopted at Paris Climate Change conference at the end of the year. However the official, Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of UNFCCC, warns that the fight against climate change is a process and that the necessary transformation of the world economy will not be decided at one conference or in one agreement.
"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.
"That will not happen overnight and it will not happen at a single conference on climate change, be it COP 15, 21, 40 - you choose the number. It just does not occur like that. It is a process, because of the depth of the transformation."
The so called 'Lima draft', which was adopted in December 2014 at the UN Climate Conference in Lima (Peru) will be subject of further negotiations by members states, starting in Geneva next week. Two rounds of negotiations are expected before the Climate Change Conference convenes in Paris in December.
The current draft is 39 pages including options, sub-options and brackets. The negotiators in Geneva have until 13 February to "manage and streamline" the draft. According to Ms Figueres, there are a lot of differences now in comparison to the run up to the Copenhagen Summit on Climate Change in 2009, during which a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol on limiting CO2 emissions was last attempted. She pointed out that with one year to go there already is a draft, whereas there was none until the start of the Copenhagen Summit.
Figueres, however, pointed out that the legal treaty is only one of four important parts of the process. In addition to the treaty, there are the current Climate Change actions from now and until 2020, the financing packages and the so-called Intended National Determined Contributions (INDCs).
These are the actions that countries intend to take under a global agreement from 2020 and have to be publicly outlined before the start of the conference. It is expected that all major economies will deliver their plans in time: the US, China, and the European Union have already shown their cards.
Ms Figueres went on to say that the sum total of the national contributions are not expected to be enough to limit the increase of world temperature to 2ºC. "That is not a discovery, that is not a breaking news item. We need to get to the maximum level of ambition of collective INDCs because what we are going to have to do all of the time is to close the gap between what science tells us where we have to be and where we actually are….But the point is will we be at the end destination? I would argue, yes."
Christiana Figueres was appointed as the new Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2010, and was reappointed for a second three year term in July 2013.
Although global temperatures have been pretty flat despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels since the big 1998 El Nino, no one that I know disputes that climate changes. Nor do they doubt that there has been very mild warming since the mid-19th century when our planet began thawing out of the last “Little Ice Age” (predating the Industrial Revolution).
And while most acknowledge that greenhouse warming may well be a contributing factor, it is also true that a great many very informed scientists believe that any human contributions to that influence are negligible, undetectable and thereby grossly exaggerated by alarmists, while far more important natural climate drivers (both for warming and cooling), are virtually ignored.
Particularly consequential among these are long-and short-term effects of ocean cycles along with changes in solar activity. The pervasive hype that we are experiencing a known human-caused climate crisis is based upon speculative theories, contrived data and totally unproven modeling predictions.
Much of this emanates from politically-corrupted processes and agenda-driven report conclusions rendered by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which is trumpeted in the media as authoritative gospel.
Fritz Vaherenholt, a socialist founder of Germany’s environmental movement who headed the renewable energy division of the country’s second largest utility company, was once a big IPCC believer. Recently, however, his new book titled The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen, charges the organization with gross incompetence and dishonesty… especially regarding fear-mongering exaggeration of human CO2 emission influences.
After serving as an IPCC reviewer for their report on renewable energy, he was stunned by the large number of errors and wondered if the other IPCC reports on climate change “were similarly sloppy.” This concern prompted Vahrenholt to dig into the IPCC’s 2007 climate report, and he was again horrified by what he found.
He concluded in an interview which appeared in the German news publication Bild that: “… IPCC decision-makers are fighting tooth and nail against accepting the roles of the oceans, sun, and soot.” Accordingly, IPCC models are completely out of whack. “The facts need to be discussed sensibly and scientifically, without first deciding on the results.”
Many would attribute the beginning of rampant U.S. global warming alarmism with star witness testimony delivered by James Hansen of NASA, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), at then-Senator Al Gore’s Committee on Science, Technology and Space during the particularly hot summer of 1988.
Then and now, Hansen’s catastrophic predictions (based upon highly theoretical and unproven general circulation climate models and subjective tweaking of incomplete and unreliable surface temperature data) continue to be a huge embarrassment to NASA.
Yet in January 15, 2009 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works-Minority Committee, his former boss John S. Theon, retired chief of NASA’s Climate Processes Research Program, took issue with the interference charge, stating: “Hansen was never muzzled, even though he violated official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen has embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claim of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.”
Theon also testified that: “My own belief concerning anthropogenic [man-made] climate change is that models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit”.
He observed: ”Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modeled in the observations, nor explain how they did it…this is contrary to the way science should be done.” He then went on to say “Thus, there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy”.
On April 10, forty-nine former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, admonishing the agency in general, and GISS under Hansen’s leadership in particular, for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change…while neglecting basic empirical evidence that calls that theory into question.
The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, is dismayed over the failure to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change, charging that NASA is relying too heavily upon complex models that have proven to be scientifically inadequate for climate predictions.
Their criticism is well founded, supported by scandalous exchanges among prominent researchers exposed in e-mail files retrieved from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia.
The communications reveal conspiracies to falsify and withhold information, to suppress contrary findings in scholarly publications, and to exaggerate the existence and threats of man-made global warming. Many of these individuals have had major influence over highly publicized summary report findings issued by the IPCC.
Another scientist warned, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.”
Still another admits: “…clearly, some tuning or very good luck [is] involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.” Still another modeler complained: “Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive -- there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC …”
All climate models, regardless how sophisticated, are hopelessly compromised when based upon poor global temperature records. Yet an e-mail posted by database programmer Ian “Harry” Harris reports: “[The] hopeless state of their [CRU] database. No uniform data integrity. It’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found…There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy [surface temperature recording] stations…and duplicates…Aarrggghh! There truly is no end in sight. This project is such a MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!”
Responsible science is expected to be uncontaminated by political policy agendas, however passionate those participants may be regarding personal ideological beliefs. That same reasoning should also apply to those who are empowered to sponsor and direct that science. All too often this has not been the case, as revealed in candid public admissions by influential government officials, international climate summit organizers and leading IPCC authors.
Dating back two decades ago to the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Climate Summit, which codified the U.N.’s central theme for the famous (or infamous) Kyoto Protocol, chairman Maurice Strong proposed a remedy to solve what was regarded to be a man-caused climate crisis. Addressing the audience, he suggested, “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse. Isn’t it our job to bring that about?”
Former Senator Timothy Wirth, then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, strongly endorsed using global warming to advance that cause: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Wirth now heads the U.N. Foundation which lobbies for hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help underdeveloped countries fight climate change.
Also speaking at the Rio conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick, who then headed the policy divisions of the U.S. State Department, agreed that the Kyoto Protocol should be approved whether it had anything to do with climate change or not: ” A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”
Christine Stewart, then Canadian Minister of the Environment, speaking before editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald in 1998, said, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
And as IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer admitted in November 2010, “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth...”
While climate is generally defined in at least three decade-long periods, consider that James Hansen’s 1988 testimony before then-Senator Al Gore’s carefully staged steamy spectacle that stirred up a frenzy about an alleged CO2-driven climate emergency occurred only slightly more than one decade after many scientists had predicted an opposite crisis.
One of them was the late Stanford University Professor Stephen Schneider who authored The Genesis Strategy, a 1976 book warning that global cooling risks posed a threat to humanity. Schneider later changed that view 180 degrees, serving as a lead author for important parts of three sequential IPCC reports.
Schneider candidly summed up what appears to be a prevalent IPCC view of scientific responsibility: “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, on the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change.
“To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
In other words, trust not what we tell you, but believe that we have your best interests in mind, because our intentions, if not our methods, are ethical. Accept what we tell you for that reason alone. If we have to exaggerate and alarm to get your attention, recognize that this is for a righteous cause.
Nobel Physics laureate Ivar Giaever has called global warming (aka. climate change) a “new religion”. When scientists emulate spiritual prophets, they overstep all ethical bounds. In doing so, they forfeit our confidence.
