Former global-warming alarmist and “Gaia Guru” Dr. James Lovelock is once again doing combat with his erstwhile comrades in the “green” movement, dishing out scorn for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which recently issued its latest dire global-warming predictions. In an interview with The Guardian on March 30 and another with the BBC on April 3, Lovelock, the geophysicist best known as the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis, said environmentalism has “become a religion” for many, and suggested that the IPCC has virtually copied his own exaggerated predictions from eight years ago — views that he has since repudiated.
The 94-year-old author, inventor, and former NASA scientist who is one of the most famous founders of the environmental movement also reiterated his support for natural gas “fracking” and his contempt for advocates of wind and solar energy, which he says will never provide sufficient energy for modern society. He also took swipes at the massive government funding of global-warming research, which has corrupted and politicized the science.
The IPCC’s report, Lovelock told BBC’s Jeremy Paxman, “is very similar to the statements I made in my book about 8 years ago, called The Revenge of Gaia. It’s almost as if they’ve copied it.” The following exchange then ensued:
Jeremy Paxman: Sure. But you then, after publishing these apocalyptic predictions, you then retracted them.
James Lovelock: Well, that’s my privilege. You see, I’m an independent scientist. I’m not funded by some government department or commercial body or anything like that. If I make a mistake, then I can go public with it. And you have to, because it is only by making mistakes that you can move ahead.
Lovelock caused serious heartburn for the globalist greens in 2012, when he launched some highly critical statements during the United Nations Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro, as The New American reported in our video here and our article here.
Professor Richard Tol, a prominent climate researcher from Sussex University and a coordinating lead author of an important chapter of the IPCC report, has also drawn negative attention to climate frenzy — in more ways than one. First of all, he has embarrassed the UN/IPCC by refusing to sign the report, which he says is an “alarmist” concoction of “scare stories.” However, perhaps even more damning than his original criticism of the report are his subsequent claims that climate-change mafia have retaliated against him with smears aimed at destroying his professional reputation and credibility.
The British-based Daily Mail has reported extensively on the story. On April 5, the paper reported:
Prof Tol, from Sussex University, is a highly respected climate economist and one of two “co-ordinating lead authors” of an important chapter in the 2,600-page report published last week by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
He has been widely criticised by green campaigners after he claimed that the much shorter “summary for policymakers” — hammered out in all-night sessions between scientists and government officials over a week-long meeting in Yokohama, Japan — was overly “alarmist.”
In his view, the summary focused on “scare stories” and suggestions the world faced “the four horsemen of the apocalypse.”
He said he did not want his name associated with it because he felt “uncomfortable” with the way the summary exaggerated the economic impact of global warming.
The Daily Mail further noted:
Richard Tol claims he is fighting a sustained attack on his reputation by a key figure from a leading institution that researches the impact of global warming.
Prof Tol said: “This has all the characteristics of a smear campaign. It’s all about taking away my credibility as an expert.”… The source of the alleged smear campaign is Bob Ward, director of policy at the London School of Economics’s Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change.
On April 2, the British-based Yorkshire Evening Post interviewed emeritus professor and former NASA scientist Les Woodcock, who called global-warming alarmism “rubbish.” Prof. Woodcock elaborated:
The term “climate change” is meaningless. The Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial, that is since the Earth was formed 1,000 million years ago. The theory of “man-made climate change” is an unsubstantiated hypothesis [about] our climate [which says it] has been adversely affected by the burning of fossil fuels in the last 100 years, causing the average temperature on the earth’s surface to increase very slightly but with disastrous environmental consequences.
The theory is that the CO2 emitted by burning fossil fuel is the “greenhouse gas” [that] causes “global warming” — in fact, water is a much more powerful greenhouse gas and there is 20 time more of it in our atmosphere (around one per cent of the atmosphere) whereas CO2 is only 0.04 per cent….
Carbon dioxide has been made out to be some kind of toxic gas but the truth is it’s the gas of life. We breath it out; plants breath it in. The green lobby has created a do-good industry and it becomes a way of life, like a religion. I understand why people defend it when they have spent so long believing in it, people do not like to admit they have been wrong.
“If you talk to real scientists who have no political interest, they will tell you there is nothing in global warming,” says Woodcock. “It’s an industry which creates vast amounts of money for some people.”
“Even the term ‘global warming’ does not mean anything unless you give it a time scale,” Prof. Woodcock notes. “The temperature of the earth has been going up and down for millions of years, if there are extremes, it’s nothing to do with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; it’s not permanent and it’s not caused by us. Global warming is nonsense.”
Propaganda Onslaught Aims at Paris 2015
The IPCC’s “Climate Change 2014” report, issued last week with the usual media fanfare, is the organization’s latest effort to stir hysteria over the supposed coming apocalypse caused by Anthropogenic (man-made) Global Warming (AGW). Three days after the report was issued, on April 3, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon proclaimed, “We are running out of time,” in an address to the Friends of Europe, a globalist organization in Brussels, Belgium. “All around the world, it is plain that climate change is happening. Human activities are the principal cause,” declared the UN’s top pol, citing the IPCC report. “Climate change has been at the top of priority list since the day I took office,” said Ban Ki-moon, but the IPCC report and his recent visit to Greenland have provided him with even more urgent impetus for action. “As our world warms,” he claimed, “Greenland’s ice will slip faster into the sea, contributing to a rise in sea levels that already threatens hundreds of millions of people living in low-lying nations and coastal cities.”
Secretary of State John Kerry, who has become the Obama administration’s chief AGW propagandist, hailed the IPCC report as proof that “the costs of inaction are catastrophic.” In a March 30 press statement prior to the IPCC report’s public release, Secretary Kerry issued a dire warning: “Read this report and you can’t deny the reality: Unless we act dramatically and quickly, science tells us our climate and our way of life are literally in jeopardy. Denial of the science is malpractice.”
“The clock is ticking,” claimed Kerry, utilizing the same time-is-running-out motif, a familiar urgency theme that has been the staple of AGW alarmism for the past couple of decades. “The more we delay, the greater the threat,” Kerry averred. “Let’s make our political system wake up and let’s make the world respond.”
The response that Kerry, Obama, and Ban Ki-moon are pushing for is a comprehensive, globally binding, regulatory regime that they hope to fasten on the entire planet at the UN’s 2015 Climate Conference in Paris, as a replacement to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. To that end, they are ramping up the dire climate forecasts, even as more and more scientists jump off of the global-warming bandwagon and leading alarmists admit there is no evidence of global warming over the past 17 years.
However, even many of the veteran AGW activists are acknowledging that their fellow alarmists have cried wolf too often, and that the new wave of fright peddling is failing. In an April 3 Bloomberg News column entitled, “Scare Tactics Fail Climate Scientists, and Everyone Else,” AGW advocate Clive Crook asks: “Why aren’t climate scientists winning the argument on climate policy? It sure isn’t for lack of effort.”
“I take seriously the harms that man-made climate change might cause,” says Crook. “Action does make sense: It’s a question of insuring against risk…. But this cause isn’t advanced by exaggerating what is known in order to scare people into action, nor by denouncing everybody who disagrees with such proposals as evil or idiotic.”
But Crook is out of step with his fellow alarmists — such as President Obama, John Kerry, Ban Ki-moon, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, James Hansen, and their media allies — who insist on demonizing all who oppose their global green regime.
Related articles:
UN Climate-change Report Uses Alarmist “Global Warming” Language
Climate Scientist: “Global Warming Nazis” Threaten Humanity
Study Claims That Melt of Arctic Ice Contributes to Global Warming
“Science Guy” Bill Nye Mixes Up North/South Poles in Climate Debate
U.S. Agencies Accused of Fudging Data to Show Global Warming
“Climate Science” in Shambles: Real Scientists Battle UN Agenda
Al Gore Forecasted “Ice-Free” Arctic by 2013; Ice Cover Expands 50% (12-18-13)
