The Bali Trade Fair.

The week in Bali, attending the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, was a remarkable, and worrying, experience.

When I arrived, I presumed I was attending a regular conference, but soon realised that this huge convention was actually a major trade-fair. The doom-casting sessions from the Plenary Hall were simply the marketing arm supporting the commercial interests (both public and private) boosting their wares or demanding funds in the surrounding exhibition halls. Most were unabashed scams. For example the Tuvalu booth was seeking money from passers-by to prevent these Pacific Islands being inundated by rising seas. A potential donor would look in vain for any real evidence of this imminent inundation, because the seas around Tuvalu are not rising at all.

But guilt trippers cannot allow the facts get in the way of an honest scam.

I was part of a group of ten visiting skeptics, organized from New Zealand, but which included fellow rebels from Australia, the UK, India and the US. Our mission was to make the case for a more reasoned, balanced approach on the climate change issue and challenge the clarion call for a second Kyoto-style draconian treaty.

Reading the mainstream media, both here and overseas, it would be easy to believe that the only problem in negotiating such an agreement at Bali was the intransigence of the US, as personified by President Bush himself.

Don’t believe a word of it. The blockages were much deeper and more widespread than that.

Possibly because the New Zealanders in our team represented an agricultural economy, distant from the major and protected First World markets, many third world delegates, NGOs and journalists sought us out to share their concerns and perceptions.

For example, the European Parliament’s missionaries were determined Indonesia should stop felling their rainforests in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – just as New Zealand farmers are under pressure to stop our cattle belching methane. The trade-off was that the UN would pay generous compensation to Indonesea, funded by the carbon taxes and levies paid under Kyoto obligations.

The roads of Bali are lined with small factories and shops making and selling Balinese teak furniture. Consequently, such restraints on tree-felling would put many of these people out of work, and devastate the tight-knit communities built up around this craft industry. The compensation of course will flow to their government leaders. The cheques will be written in Geneva, and the Indonesian government will gratefully accept the money. But given the virtues of recycling, the cheques will probably be immediately recycled back to Geneva.

The “trickle-down” theory has much to commend it, but not when we expect the wealth to trickle down from the rulers to the ruled.

One of our team asked a local cab driver what he thought of George Bush. The cab driver replied "He is a good man, a gentleman, and a strong man – and we depend on him to protect us."

Many of the African delegates shared this position. They all fear that “food miles” and other "climate policies" will be used to set up new barriers to trade to Europe in particular. As Will Alexander from South Africa said “Africans want trade – not aid.”

The UN’s Attitude to Free Speech.

Delegates from Lithuania, Hungary and the Czech Republic all told us of their fears that, having just won their freedoms and liberties from the Soviet Empire, they may be about to lose them to another – a United Nations Global Order based on the fear of catastrophic climate change.

It would appear such fears of a new tyranny under the UN were well founded, if the UN’s attitude to free speech at Bali was anything to go by.

Right from the beginning, the UN officials made it clear we were not welcome. Lord Monckton of Brenchley (Former science advisor to the Thatcher Government), had applied to join our Bali Team as a journalist writing for Environment and Climate News. The UN officials denied him accreditation because they decided the magazine, (circulation 22,000) was not a “legitimate” publication.

The publishers cried “discrimination”. Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News ran with the story, so millions of Americans heard how the UN was attempting to silence dissenting views. Lord Monckton fortunately had other cards to play and eventually gained accreditation.

Forty members of the press turned up to our team’s first Press Conference to hear the other side of the global warming story. An official from the Secretariat's office promptly stormed into the meeting, broke up discussion, and ordered everyone out of the room. So much for free speech. The incident prompted Marc Morano of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, to make a press release which featured in the US Drudge Report. The UN’s retribution was swift. The room, which had been allocated to our Bali Team for one hour each day for two weeks, was reduced to only one slot, without any notification.

So we began distributing DVD copies of the BBC’s “Global Warming Swindle” in the media center, handing them out to anyone with a press badge. (see photo) The team crafted numerous fact sheets for distribution to delegates and NGOs.

Finally, Dr Joanne Nova of Australia put together a small demonstration right in front of the Conference center itself. (see photo) For some of us it was like being back in the 60s demos again – except we were the ones over 30.

We presented the proposal to mount the demonstration right next to a Green Peace demonstration and the UN reluctantly granted permission for our demo to take place on the second to last day of the conference.

The response from journalists and photographs was dramatic. At last someone was creating some real news.

Numerous reporters interviewed Dr Vincent Gray, a New Zealand IPCC reviewer challenging the climate science “consensus”, (see photo) while Lord Monckton conducted interview after interview with reporters clamoring to hear the point of view of an English peer. (see photo) The rest of us were also interviewed at length. Few reporters paid much attention to the Greens who seemed to have dropped out of sight. Any NZ press were conspicuous by their absence.

The commotion did not go unnoticed by U.N. officials. Within 10 minutes of the media's arrival, a representative from the Secretariat's office appeared on the scene doing her best to lighten the PR damage. Although clearly upset by the ruckus, the constraint of being filmed by the world media softened her demeanor, and she reluctantly allowed the event to proceed for no more than a further 10 minutes and moved us all about 25 yards back across the forecourt. The event eventually unwound after about a half an hour.

That evening we watched the Japanese news item in our hotel rooms, and it was heard or seen by others on larger networks including NPR and BBC World as well. Sadly, we did not make the screens at home.

Parting Shots

As a follow up to this event, the team set up two more press gatherings. Both became victims of the U.N. fear of open debate.

The first one featured Bryan Leyland and Lord Monckton who intended to explain some of the uncertainties in global warming science This might have well drawn a sizable crowd but for the fact that it wasn't mentioned in the official U.N. program. (see photo)

All the details were provided in time, and in proper format but never made the timetable.

The other event was to be a final wrap-up press conference to take place in the main conference center on the last day. The night before, we were advised the Press Conference had been reviewed by the Secretariat's office and denied. This final snub was also picked up in the U.S. on Fox News.

So whatever you may think of the prospects of UN world government do not look to UN officials to defend our basic human rights. All those who are so keen to hand over sovereign power to this organization should have been at Bali to witness their attitude to free speech at first hand. What genuinely surprised many of us was their remarkable efficiency in this field of action. This massive bureaucracy, which normally could not be relied on to blow up a paper bag, was remarkably flexible and innovative when squashing our dissenting voice.

The Last Panic?

The irony was that while the Bali conference was dedicated to promoting urgent global actions based on predictions of world wide catastrophe, the rationale behind this trade convention of power-seekers, tax gatherers, hot air traders, and subsidizers, was being undermined by the release of a series of new research findings which may be about to knock the props out from under the whole theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming.

Even some in the mainstream media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists and noting that the number of climate skeptics appears to be expanding rather than shrinking.

A US Senate Report indicates the extent of the shift, reporting that over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called “consensus” on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (the IPCC) criticized the alarmist claims made by the IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. (http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.SenateReport)

This new report details how teams of international scientists are dissenting from the UN IPCC’s view of climate science. Scientists from diverse nations such as Germany, Brazil, the Netherlands, Russia, New Zealand and France, banded together in 2007 to oppose what they call “climate alarmism”.

An open letter to the UN dated December 7, stated that attempts to control climate were “futile.” The NZ Climate Science Coalition was involved in the preparing this letter and seven New Zealanders are signatories. I never expected to see my signature share a document with the great Freeman Dyson – one of my heroes of science and mathematics.

This letter gained huge publicity around the world. The New Zealand news media totally ignored it. (Read it at http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=165020)

How the IPCC Got things Seriously Wrong.

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is an excellent mathematician and is lead author of a paper drafted during the conference and presented on our last day. This paper shows that right from the beginning the IPCC got one of their sums seriously wrong. Their error was rather like writing in a School C paper that 3 x 2 = 18 rather than 6. The result of this basic arithmetical error is to significantly overestimate the impact of carbon dioxide on global temperatures through all the consequent computer models.

The graph (CO₂ does not cause Dangerous Warming[1]) plots the change in air temperatures from ground level up to 14,000 metres. The temperatures on the blue line are actual measurements while the IPCC climate modellers' temperature projections are on the red line.

The surface temperatures are in agreement, as one would expect, but the models' projected warming is significantly and consistently higher than the actual temperatures as measured by Radiosonde etc.

These differences between measurement and the IPCC models are just what one would expect from Monckton's paper on the basic error relating to the assessment of the Stefan Boltzmann equation.

So we not only know the IPCC projections of atmospheric global warming are wrong; we are beginning to be able to explain why they are wrong. Which is what genuine skeptics are meant to do.

Our Bali Views in Summary

You will not have read anything about what we had to say in Bali but fortunately US news agencies picked it up and there is a nice summary, in which we are all quoted.

http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=174&Itemid=1

Anyhow, for laughing-out-loud entertainment, read Lord Monckton’s account of the “Fortnight of the Undead” here. (http://nzclimatescience.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=178&Itemid=1)

The Unsettling Issue of Financial Risk.

The Economist of December 19 features an essay “The Finger of Suspicion - an overview of the early stages of litigation triggered by the downside of the housing bubble.” It opens:

FINANCIAL firms have already been drenched by mortgage-related losses. Now a wave of litigation threatens to assail them. According to RiskMetrics, a consulting firm, between August and October federal securities class-action lawsuits were filed in America at an annualised pace of around 270 – more than double last year's total and well above the historical average. At this rate, claims could easily exceed those of the dotcom bust and the options-backdating scandal combined. Several firms are being sued for allegedly failing to disclose problems as they became apparent to managers.

Many of us are wondering whether those promoting and buying into “carbon trading” and subsidised products such as biofuels, and windfarms, and the whole Climate Change Industry, are aware of the possibility of litigation which could follow on any “new consensus” that accepts that carbon dioxide is not a driver of climate change. Anyone who has read no other skeptical material than what is summarised in this posting cannot claim to have been unaware that such a change in scientific and economic understanding might be just around the corner.

For many years I was in the venture capital business, in one form or another, and wrote many prospectuses, or Information Memoranda, and was well aware of the need to lay out the possible risks involved in any proposed investment opportunity seeking public money. This was particularly true in the well-regulated US IPO market.

And yet I routinely see new business opportunities, all totally dependent on the Anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas scenarios, but which are being promoted as though the scienctific and economic issues are really settled, even though both areas of knowledge are growing less settled by the day.

Here is Lord Monckton on Al Gore’s presentation at Bali:

[Gore} failed, yet again, to declare his financial interest before whipping up worldwide alarm with his trademark errors and exaggerations in Bali. He is a director of Lehman Brothers, a global finance house that wants to control the worldwide managed market in carbon-emissions trading. He founded his own “green” corporation, Generation Investment Management. He is a paid member of the Board of a renewable-energy company. In the UK, if he made a speech containing so many deliberate and unidirectional errors as he did in Bali, and if he failed to declare his financial interest, he would be committing a criminal offence. It is surely only a matter of time before a complaint is filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that, through the numerous, extreme and scientifically-unwarranted exaggerations which Gore has relentlessly continued to peddle, notwithstanding the warning in the UK judge’s verdict, he is in effect fraudulently promoting a false prospectus to potential investors.

Imagine if, by the end of this year, a new consensus emerges that solar activity is driving the climate and that we are entering a cooling phase (examine the figures since 1998 for evidence) and a host of Global Warming ventures go belly up, the Governments turn off all the subsidies, and all that “Traded Carbon” is suddenly worth zero.

Are those folk who have invested their money simply going to roll over and accept it? Or will the law-suits start flying far and wide?

I am not saying there is no place for new ventures in renewable or alternative energy and a host of new energy and transport related technologies. But it is surely prudent to properly assess the scientific and economic risks and, where possible, direct our energies and efforts into those which do not depend entirely on government subsidy and a climate of fear.

The New Year of 2008 is certainly a time for both buyers and sellers to beware of, and inform themselves of financial “Climate Risk”. The impact of a global warming bubble following so closely on the housing bubble – which has been driven by alarmist fears of urban growth – would surely be a disaster.

We might be rescued by a new tide of euphoria and relief that global catastrophe has been averted – but curiously, in today’s world of “terror journalism”, good news is only more bad news.

ENDS

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