Inconvenient questions will not be tolerated in Durban or other climate crisis conferences

By Kelvin Kemm

British Viscount Christopher Monckton of Brenchley parachuted with me into Durban, South Africa, to challenge UN climate crisis claims, attracting numerous journalists and onlookers. A 20-foot banner across our press conference table gave the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow further opportunities to present realistic perspectives on the science and economics of climate change.

CFACT played by the rules, obtained the necessary permits beforehand, and ensured that its message was heard throughout the seventeenth annual climate conference (COP-17). Greenpeace, on the other hand, got no permits before staging an Occupy Durban protest in the hallway outside the plenary session – and got kicked out of the conference.

Shortly thereafter, however, Lord Monckton and another CFACT representative were summarily (though temporarily) ejected from the Durban conference, for preposterous reasons that dramatize how thin-skinned and arrogant the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has become.

As a South African and delegate at the COP-17 conference, I witnessed more amazing and absurd exhibitions than one would find at a Believe It Or Not circus sideshow. Along with thousands of government delegates, scientists and journalists, we witnessed music and dance groups, Women for Climate Justice, the Alliance for Climate Protection, APEs (Artists Protect the Earth) and others pleading for “planetary salvation.”

It took a truly nimble mind, and abiding sense of humor, to appreciate their often competing messages. One large official poster proclaimed “More climate change means less water,” while the one next to it said “More climate change means more floods.”

A socialist group sloganeered “One planet living is the new aspiration.” I could only conclude that they were neo-Malthusians worried sick about speculative climate chaos and resource depletion – and promoting a roll-back of energy use and living standards, so that people can share “more equitably” in sustained poverty and misery, enforced by UN edicts.

Yet another group insisted that the world should “Stop talking and start planting.” However, this group and countless others oppose profits and private enterprises. They apparently haven’t yet realized that large paper and timber companies plant the most trees and create the largest new-growth forests, which breathe in the most carbon dioxide and breathe out the most oxygen.

These and similar organizations also demanded that profit-making companies give more money to environmentalist NGOs – which might temporarily make the companies less reprehensible and more eco-friendly. Of course, if the activists succeed in further obstructing the companies, they will plant fewer trees, remove less CO2, create fewer jobs and have less money to give to NGOs.

This parallel universe aspect of the Durban extravaganza was troublesome enough. Another aspect of the conference was much more sinister and worrisome. Which brings us back to Lord Monckton, a renowned debater and expert in IPCC and climate science, economics and politics.

One day he and I were meandering through the halls, as advisors to CFACT and its official delegation to the conference. We were accompanied by CFACT project organiser Josh Nadal, who was using his video camera to film anything he liked, to make a video of “what we did at COP-17.”

As we rounded a corner, we saw someone we didn’t know being interviewed for the in-house television information system that transmitted programs throughout the official venue. We were astounded by how biased and inaccurate his comments were. When atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rose, temperature also rose, he insisted – very simple. Of course, that is simply not true.

His interview over, he stepped off the dais and headed our way. I asked him whether he would agree that global temperatures had actually gone down during the early 1970s, even as CO2 levels continued to rise. He refused to acknowledge this universally accepted fact. I then mentioned the Medieval Warm Period of a thousand years ago. In response, he asserted that the MWP was merely a localized event of no consequence. Also simply not true.

At that point Monckton asked him to acknowledge that the science was nowhere nearly as clear cut as he had proclaimed. The official refused to do so, asserted “I have work to do,” and walked off.

Josh had been filming the entire exchange, but now an aide put a hand over the camera lens. When I remarked that just walking off was bad manners, the aide said “You are not worth debating.” I replied, “All he had to do was answer two simple questions.” I was amazed when the aide responded, “He is the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organisation. He does not have to answer your questions.” The aide then walked off just as rudely as his boss had.

These unelected technocrats and bureaucrats want to decide the science and ordain the energy and economic policies that will determine our future livelihoods and living standards. And yet they are of the opinion that they can talk scientific nonsense and ignore anyone’s inconvenient questions. We had not known that he was Michel Jarraud, Secretary General of the WMO. But that is irrelevant. We were polite, and he should have been, as well. But it gets worse.

Two hours later, Lord Monckton and Josh were informed that they had violated ad hoc rules and were banned from further participation in the conference: Josh for filming without permission, Monckton for “unprofessional” conduct. Somehow I was spared. The next day, following negotiations between CFACT and UN officials, the two were reinstated.

A couple of days later, a TV interviewer asked IPCC Vice Chair Jean-Pascal van Ypersele whether there was now enough information to decide the next steps COP-17 should take. van Ypersele answered, “The body of knowledge was there already in the first [IPCC] report twenty years ago and was actually good enough to start the action which inspired the convention on climate change.”

The interviewer then asked if the science was well enough understood. “Not only is there enough science” the Vice Chair replied, “but that science has been there, available and explained by the IPCC, already from the first report.”

In other words, in the view of the IPCC, climate change science was settled even before the term “climate change” was coined – and all “research” and “findings,” reports and conferences since then have been window dressing – inconsequential. Even new evidence about cosmic ray effects on cloud cover, and thus on the amount of the sun’s heat reaching the earth, is irrelevant in the view of the IPCC and other UN agencies, and thus may be intentionally ignored.

The imperious attitudes and intolerance of dissenting opinions displayed by these officials further underscores the wholly unscientific and politicized nature of the IPCC process. Even in the face of Climategate 2009 and 2010, The Delinquent Teenager, Marc Morano’s A-Z Climate Reality Check and other revelations, the UN and IPCC fully intend to impose their views and agendas.

At this point, in the view of the IPCC, the only thing left is for first world countries to pay up and shut up – and poor countries to develop in the way and to the extent allowed by the United Nations.

Dr. Kelvin Kemm holds a PhD in nuclear physics, is currently CEO of Stratek and lives in Pretoria, South Africa. He also serves as a scientific advisor to the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)

 

WesternFront America

Climate fraud proves insanity of extending Kyoto, renewable subsidies and economic mayhem

 In a repeat of Copenhagen, on the eve of the Durban climate change gabfest, someone released another horde of emails from alarmist climate researchers, including Dr. Michael Mann, whose infamous “hockey stick” was headlined in the 2001 IPCC report to justify the Kyoto agreement and demands that nations slash fossil fuel use and economic growth.

 Meanwhile, back on Dr. Mann’s campus, Pennsylvania State University was confronting the sordid Jerry Sandusky affair. Sports Illustrated summarized the Augean Stables task in an article titled “Missteps at every turn: Efforts to clean up Penn State reveal how deep the institutional problems lie.”

 As SI noted, a key judge in the case, Pennsylvania’s governor, Penn State’s new athletic director and even the attorney appointed to head up a “full and complete” internal investigation all have deep and longstanding ties to the university and/or its big-money football team. Noting these and other “blatant conflicts of interest,” the magazine quoted new PSU president Rodney Erickson as saying, “Penn State is committed to transparency to the fullest extent possible” [emphasis added] – in view of relevant financial, personal and other considerations, and special exemptions that Penn State enjoys from disclosure laws.

 SI ended the article by asking, “Is Penn State cleaning house? Or simply rearranging the furniture?”

 The same question applies to Dr. Mann. In the wake of Climategate 2009, Penn State hurriedly exonerated him and his department of any wrongdoing, as did NOAA and the National Science Foundation. The blatant whitewashes reflect the desperation of organizations intent on preserving their money train and perpetuating the Hollywood façade of manmade catastrophic climate change.

 All three organizations are at the forefront of fraudulent climate alarmism and its agenda of “radically transforming” the energy and economic foundations of modern nations. As IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri has said, climate change is “just a part of” the effort “to bring about major structural changes” in “unsustainable” economic growth, development and lifestyles.

 The agenda involves slashing carbon dioxide levels to 80% below 1990 levels. That would carry the United States back to emission levels last seen during the American Civil War – devastating the economy.

 Together these institutions receive billions of dollars in annual government grants that foster one line of thinking on “global climate disruption” – another term concocted to spin weather and climate events as unprecedented disasters resulting from hydrocarbon energy use. Delegates from all three institutions get to attend annual climate confabs at exotic 5-star resorts, to promote “the cause” of ending mankind’s “addiction” to fossil fuels and establishing “global governance” under UN auspices.

 For all these institutions, full-blown independent investigations – with adverse witnesses, cross-examination, and access to data and records denied to previous investigators – could result in lost income, prestige, and power over public policy decisions. Honest, replicable, truly peer-reviewed, robustly debated science into the causes, effects and extent of climate change would do likewise.

 For Penn State, global warming represents a significant cash cow. As meteorologist Art Horn has noted, the university received a whopping $470,000,000 in federal grants and contracts between 2010 and 2011. Neither Mann nor Penn State is saying how much went to climate research. But since the US government spent over $106 billion on climate research money between 2003 and 2010, PSU undoubtedly received a hefty portion for promoting the official alarmist viewpoint.

 No wonder they refused to turn over raw data and computer codes to other scientists, IPCC reviewers and even investigators – claiming these were private property, even though taxpayers paid for them and the results generated are being used to justify endless energy, job and economy-killing public policies.

 At the tip of the policy iceberg are EPA’s (postponed) CO2 “endangerment” regulations, its boiler and refinery rules, its reams of restrictions on coal-fired power plants, the agency’s opposition to hydraulic shale fracturing and the Keystone XL pipeline, and its new automobile mileage rules, which will raise the cost of cars, reduce crash-worthiness and result in thousands of additional deaths in accidents. Mann’s deceptive models and hockey sticks are also being used to justify a $100-billion-a-year “climate change reparation and mitigation” fund for poor nations, to be financed directly by FRCs (formerly rich countries) or via “climate taxes” imposed on international air travel and imported and exported products.

 Also benefitting from the corrupt Climate Armageddon research machine are crony capitalists and climate profiteers too numerous to count: the renewable energy and carbon trading firms that depend on climate scares to maintain renewable energy, “green job,” carbon trading, and similar mandates and schemes.

 As Competitive Enterprise Institute analyst Bill Frezza has observed, the US Department of Energy invested $529 million in taxpayer-subsidized loan guarantees to build North America’s largest lithium ion automotive battery plant … to supply a Finnish electric car manufacturer backed by Al Gore’s venture capital fund … to ship 40 (!) cars to the USA to date … so that they can be purchased by “environment-motivated” millionaires like Leonardo DeCaprio, who receive $7,500 tax credits for buying the cars.

 Add in billions for wind turbines and solar panels … billions to persuade the poorest nations on Planet Earth to endure “sustainable” lifestyles, rather than modernize through reliable, affordable and, yes, hydrocarbon energy … and billions for IPCC and other UN bureaucrats, who insist that drought and flood, cold and heat, storm and sea level events are no longer due to natural forces, but to mankind’s use of fossil fuels – and we’re talking serious money.

 Global warming alarmism could ultimately cause the global economy trillions of dollars.

 Meanwhile, what about average workers and families? They get none of these perks, sinecures, subsidies and handouts. Instead, they get to pay taxes to support the bureaucrats, pseudo scientists and activists. They get to pay soaring energy bills that subsidize wind, solar and climate schemes, while driving families into fuel poverty. They get to lose their jobs, as companies faced with skyrocketing energy bills lay people off, close their doors or ship jobs off to overseas factories that have cheap energy and cheap labor, because China, India, et cetera do not and will not operate under Kyoto-style restrictions.

 What about families in destitute African countries, where 90% of the people still don’t have electricity – because radical environmentalists, IPCC and World Bank operatives, and Obama Administration bureaucrats collude to delay or prevent the construction of coal and even gas-fired power plants?

 It’s remotely possible that we face a genuine manmade climate crisis. It’s highly likely that mankind will continue to confront natural climate changes that compel adaptation through ingenuity and technology.

 However, Climategate 1 and 2, The Delinquent Teenager and other exposés make it clear that the climate crisis cabal deliberately altered data, misrepresented and withheld crucial information, squelched inquiry and debate, and presented a one-sided narrative, so as to protect their revenues and reputations, and drive an anti-hydrocarbon agenda. Until truly convincing evidence is presented, vetted and fully debated – that fossil fuels are causing catastrophic warming and climate disruption – Kyoto and its proposed successors should be terminated, and the frenzied rush to kill fossil fuels and embrace renewables should be ended.

 Penn State needs to conduct a real investigation, by honest independent analysts who have no ties to the university or the climate crisis consortium. Its trustees took bold, decisive action on the Sandusky scandal. They need to do the same thing with Professor Mann, his department and colleagues.

 Far too much is at stake – for the university, United States and world at large – to permit Penn State (or the IPCC and White House) to merely rearrange the furniture.

 Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.

 Related articles

• Open letter to Dr. Erickson, President of Penn State University (wattsupwiththat.com)

 

WesternFront America

When you murder someone the case is never closed. The same holds when you murder the truth. No matter how long it takes, truth is defended despite all the calumnies heaped on those who stand firm against the lies and the propaganda intended to persuade those who have been deceived.

Ultimately, truth is its own defense. There never was a shred of truth in the claim that humans were causing the Earth’s climate to heat up by using so-called “fossil fuels” and engaging in manufacturing and other activities. There was no dramatic “global warming” in the 1980s until the present.

The Earth’s climate has warmed very slightly since the end of the Little Ice Age, dated to around 1850. Five hundred years of extremely cold weather had gripped the northern hemisphere starting around 1300. The much heralded “climate change” is, unlike the weather, measured in terms of centuries, not days, weeks or years. It is used by politicians that do not know what they are talking about. It is also used by charlatans, but I repeat myself.

Under the direction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a massive fraud was engineered. The object was to turn carbon dioxide (CO2), a common though minor atmospheric gas, into a commodity that could be traded in exchanges around the world that would issue “carbon credits” to utilities, industrial facilities, and others who would be required to pay for permission to produce energy and products. It was an audacious scheme.

It began with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, otherwise known as the Kyoto Protocol. It set binding targets for the reduction of CO2 by 37 industrialized nations and the European community and was adopted on December 11, 1997 and entered into force on February 16, 2005. The U.S. never signed the Protocols. They were rejected by a unanimous vote in the Senate.

It was a complete lie without any basis in science. C02 plays no role in climate change and reducing whatever amount industry and other human activities might produce would be meaningless.

Surely the people behind the scheme knew this. The IPCC charged a small clique of climate scientists to come up with “proof” that global warming was happening. In England they were located at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and, in America, they were led by Dr. Michael Mann working first at the University of Virginia and later at Penn State University.

Dr. Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” Graph

Mann’s research, assisted by co-authors Bradley and Hughes, was published in 1998. “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations” became famous for a graph dubbed the “hockey stick”. Its sudden upward curve, intended to demonstrate a dramatic increase was based on tree ring reconstruction of climate over a thousand years.

To say it attracted attention is an understatement. It and other studies produced by the IPCC clique became the cornerstone of the “global warming” hoax. The problem for Dr. Mann was that Steve McIntyre, a Canadian mathematician in Toronto, along with Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph concluded it was bogus science and published a paper in 2004 criticizing it.

In science, when a theory or hypothesis is put forward, the data supporting it is as well. Years went by before McIntyre could get access to it. The tree ring data had been provided by Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit. Neither Dr. Mann, nor Briffa made it available, but McIntyre was able to secure it from another source. When he plotted all the tree ring data, not just the parts cherry-picked by Mann, the “hockey stick” disappeared.

In November 2009, thousands of leaked emails between Dr. Mann and other “warmists”—scientists responsible for the global warming hoax, revealed nothing less than a massive fraud.

Flash forward to a freedom of information (FOI) request by Chris Horner on behalf of American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center. Despite stonewalling for years, Dr. Mann’s former employer, the University of Virginia complied in May 2011, agreeing to release Dr. Mann’s computer files containing the data he had kept hidden for more than a decade.

Serendipitously, a similar FOI issued to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has revealed the level of financial gain received by another key player in the global warming hoax, Dr. James Hansen, a longtime NASA employee and the man credited with generating the hoax with testimony before a congressional committee in 1988. He has been the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies since 1981.

It turns out that in 2010 alone he received “between 236,000 and $1,232.500 in outside income”! When you add in all the awards and speech fees Dr. Hansen has received over the years it is a tidy sum while he exploited his taxpayer-funded position. The agency had resisted disclosing this information for years, but as a federal employee Dr. Hansen waives privacy interests as a condition of employment.

A former government employee, Vice President Al Gore, became the face and voice of the hoax, earning millions in the process.

What has the global warming cost Americans? Joanne Nova of the Science and Public Policy Institute has estimated that the U.S. government spent more than $32.5 billion on climate studies between 1989 and 2009, nor does that include about $79 billion more spent for related climate change technology research, foreign aid, and tax breaks for “green energy” (solar and wind).

For deception on that scale, one might think they will be punished at some point, but it will likely be years more before those responsible for the global warming fraud will stand before the bar of justice, if ever.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

 

WesternFront America

I have been predicting the death of the global warming theory since late in the last decade when it became obvious that the Earth had entered into a cooling cycle. By 2009 the leak of thousands of emails between the “scientists” whose computer models the claims were based upon revealed they were in a state of panic regarding this obvious phenomenon.

Employed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Global Warming (IPCC), those “scientists” have since been protected by the universities who benefited greatly from the huge grants of public funding they received. The issue of whether such men should be prosecuted for deceiving the entire world remains to be decided.

The lead player, Dr. James Hansen, still on the payroll of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is the man who told Congress in 1988 that global warming threatened mankind and the Earth. He has since switched to lying about coal and oil, two of the fossil fuels on which the economies of all nations depend, claiming they are deadly pollutants that must be abandoned in favor of “clean energy”, wind and solar.

Former Vice President Al Gore, the most public face of “global warming”, has become a public joke. Recall, however, that he received a Nobel Prize and an Oscar in additions to the millions earned from the sale of “carbon credits” to offset “greenhouse gases.” Some exchanges devoted to these credits have closed their doors. The proposed Cap-and-Trade legislation based on them lingers in Congress.

One need not be a climate scientist or meteorologist to conclude that humans have nothing to do with the climate or the weather. Watching huge hurricanes wreak havoc, along with other weather-related events should be enough for anyone to conclude that humans do not “cause” such things.

Occam’s Razor is the ancient principle that the simplest explanation is the most likely the correct one, but billions in public funding, taxpayer’s dollars, have been diverted to the “research” that corrupt scientists have used to justify the global warming fraud.

MIT Professor, Dr. Richard Lindzen, an internationally recognized authority on atmospheric science, said, “Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age.”

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to those courageous scientists that stood their ground against the global warming fraud. Recently the Heartland Institute, in concert with the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and the Science and Environmental Policy Project, published “Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report.” It is 430 pages co-authored by Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Robert M. Carter, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, all of whom have been among the scientists repeatedly slandered as “global warming deniers” and “skeptics” for their efforts to educate the public.

The report, in careful documented, scientific language identifies the way the warmist’s computer models over-estimated the amount of warming, ignored the fact that increased carbon dioxide benefits plant growth, that there is less melting in the Arctic, Antarctic and on mountain tops than claimed, and that there is no sign of acceleration of sea-level rise in recent decades.

A recent Rasmussen survey indicates that upwards of 60% of Americans have concluded that humans have nothing to do with “global warming” or any other aspect of the climate. This is extraordinary when one considers how the mainstream media, the curriculums in the nation’s schools, and the unceasing efforts of major environmental organizations have tried to impose the global warming claims on the public.

In a similar fashion, “The Other Climate Theory” by Anne Jolis, an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, describes how a project of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has put what may well be the final nail in the global warming coffin. The work of physicists using particle beam technology, CERN confirmed that the Sun’s cosmic rays enhanced cloud formation. The IPCC’s 2007 report had peremptorily dismissed this possibility, but then the IPCC’s reports have been the basis for the global warming fraud, asserting a “consensus” among scientists that never existed.

Thus the scientific method of describing a phenomenon, formulating a hypothesis to explain it, and performing tests to confirm or reject a hypothesis, has once again demonstrated that “global warming” is just so much hot air.

This is not stopped the Environmental Protection Agency from doing everything in its power to destroy the energy sector of the nation based in part on the global warming fraud.

Universities across America have entire departments and units devoted to keeping the global warming fraud alive. The mainstream press is heavily invested in it. Schools continue to frighten children with its claims. All this and other efforts will fail because science—real science—does not support it.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

 

WesternFront America

New research from one of the world’s most prestigious scientific organizations indicates that cosmic rays and the sun — not manmade carbon emissions — are the major factors influencing global climate.

“The science is now all-but-settled on global warming, convincing new evidence demonstrates, but Al Gore, the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) and other global warming doomsayers won’t be celebrating,” writes Lawrence Solomon, executive director of Energy Probe, in Canada’s Financial Post.

“The new findings point to cosmic rays and the sun — not human activities — as the dominant controller of climate on Earth.”

The findings, published in the journal Nature, come from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, one of the world’s largest centers for scientific research involving 60 countries and 8,000 scientists at more than 600 universities and national laboratories, according to Solomon.

CERN — the organization that invented the World Wide Web — built a stainless steel chamber that precisely re-created the Earth’s atmosphere.

“In this chamber, 63 CERN scientists from 17 European and American institutes have done what global warming doomsayers said could never be done — demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that in Earth’s atmosphere can grow and seed clouds.” And the cloudier it is, the cooler it will be, Solomon notes.

“Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere (the stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more it shields Earth from incoming cosmic rays from space), the sun determines the temperature on Earth.”

So when the sun’s magnetic field is strongest, fewer cosmic rays impact the Earth, which in turn leads to decreased cloud formation and warmer temperatures.

The link between cosmic rays and global warming was first proposed by two Danish scientists in 1996, and was immediately denounced by the IPCC.

But CERN scientist Jasper Kirkby, a British experimental physicist, accepted the Danes’ theory. He told the scientific press in 1998 that it “will probably be able to account for somewhere between half and the whole of the increase in the Earth’s temperature that we have seen in the last century.”

It took Kirkby nearly 10 years to convince the CERN bureaucracy to proceed with his plan to create the chamber that replicates the Earth’s atmosphere and has produced the recent results.

But CERN “remains too afraid of offending its government masters to admit its success,” observes Solomon, author of “The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud.”

CERN told Kirkby and his team to downplay the results by stating “that cosmic radiation is only one of many parameters.”

Solomon concludes: “CERN, and the Danes, have in all likelihood found the path to the Holy Grail of climate science. But the religion of climate science won’t yet permit a celebration of the find.”

 

WesternFront America

The most surprising thing about the current heat wave affecting much of the United States is that no global warming charlatan is claiming that it is the result of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Since the late 1980s, Americans were assailed with the global warming hoax until, in November 2009, the release of emails between the trolls ginning up false “climate models” were exposed.

These days the term “climate change” is used as a substitute for “global warming”, but fewer of us are fooled by this. Al Gore is planning a last-ditch effort in September to revive the hoax, but that will fail.

Even those in the mainstream media are too embarrassed to report the absurd notion that CO2, a trace gas in the Earth’s atmosphere (0.0380%) vital to all vegetation on the planet has anything to do with climate cycles. A new cooling cycle that kicked in around 1998 is the predictable result of less solar activity.

This is not to say it’s not hot. Heat waves are as common to summer months as blizzards are to winter ones. For those who possess the memory of fungus, there was a heat wave that engulfed the East Coast from July 4 through 9th in 2010. Weather records reflect that heat waves are a natural event, often following or preceding record setting cold waves.

While Al Gore and the last holdouts of the global warming hoax continue to tell us that CO2 emissions (the use of fossil fuels for energy to produce electricity, drive anywhere, and manufacture anything) will destroy the world, the world’s most sophisticated particle study laboratory, CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, will soon announce a finding that will blow the CO2 nonsense to bits.

Dennis T. Avery of the Hudson Institute, reports CERN has demonstrated “that more cosmic rays do, indeed, create more clouds in the earth’s atmosphere.” Cosmic rays are subatomic particles from outer space. More clouds means that less of the sun’s warmth reaches the Earth’s surface.

This completely overturns the torrent of lies that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been churning out for decades. The IPCC’s scientists went into full panic mood as a new cooling cycle asserted itself in 1998.

As Avery points out, the IPCC scientists had deliberately ignored “the Medieval Warming (950-1200 AD), the Roman Warming (200 BC-600BC) or the big Holocene Warmings centered on 6,000 and 8,000 BC.” There was also a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850 to account for as well.

While the global warming crowd has been telling everyone that they must stop burning coal, using oil or natural gas, and “reduce our carbon footprint”, a recent volcanic eruption in Iceland, in just four days, negated every government-mandated effort to control or reduce CO2 emissions worldwide for the past five years! When Mt. Pinatubo erupted in 1991, it put so much smoke and other gases in the atmosphere that it cooled the Earth’s temperatures for a few years until they dissipated.

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is frantically issuing new rules and regulations to reduce the CO2 emissions from utilities and manufacturing facilities before the public realizes that its actual goal is to kill the U.S. economy by increasing the cost of electricity and everything else. It is insanely trying to shut down the mining of coal, while other elements of the Obama regime are trying to stop any drilling for oil.

Unable to scare everyone with the global warming hoax, new horrors are being invented, from ocean acidification to the claim that the atmosphere is being overloaded with nitrogen. Relax, there’s four times more nitrogen in the atmosphere than oxygen and it’s no big deal.

The Greens think you’re stupid

Americans need to be aware that major environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth are desperate to maintain the fictions required to deprive the U.S. of the energy it needs to function.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg just gave $50 million to the Sierra Club to support its “Beyond Coal” campaign. Bloomberg actually thinks it’s a good thing the Sierra Club has managed to stop 150 coal-burning plants from being built. Meanwhile, during the current heat wave, providers of electricity are worrying whether they can continue to meet the increased demand for it. Coal provides 50% of all the electricity we use in America.

How stupid or evil do you have to be to stop building the plants that provide electricity at a time when the population and the demand for it is rising? Must America become a third world nation with rolling blackouts and brownouts?

Friends of the Earth are in a panic that Republicans might actually get the U.S. government to cut back on the insane spending that has put the nation on the edge of sovereign default. Lately they’re claiming that Majority Leader, Eric Candor (R-VA) “is threatening to sink the American economy and undermine environmental protections so that his wealthy friends, including big oil corporations, can keep sitting on their cushions.”

That’s the same Big Oil that hasn’t been able to build a single new refinery in the U.S. since the 1970s. That’s the same Big Oil that has seen ten oil rigs leave the Gulf of Mexico since the May 2010 Obama “moratorium” for drilling sites in Egypt, Congo, French Guiana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Brazil. They took a lot of jobs and revenue with them,

If you wanted to destroy America, all you have to do is make it impossible to access several century’s worth of its own huge reserves of coal and the billions of barrels of oil inland and offshore that would, indeed, make America more energy independent.

The next time anyone speaks about “sustainability”, they are talking about turning out the lights and emptying the highways of America. The next time anyone talks about “the environment”, they mean the same thing.

So, remember, it’s just a heat wave. It will end just like all the others and, in a few months, we will all be talking about the blizzards.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

 

WesternFront America

Have you noticed that you rarely hear “global warming” mentioned on radio or television and the term rarely occurs any more in the print media?

One reason is that it has been replaced with “climate change” and the other reason is that the only people talking about climate change seem to be leaders of governments like the United States or Australia.

To borrow a line from Shakespeare, I come to bury global warming, not to praise it.

An early and unrelenting skeptic from the days it first debuted in the late 1980s, I rather instinctively knew that the only warming occurring was the same natural warming that always follows a cooling cycle; in this case the warming that began in 1850 after the Little Ice Age that began around 1300.

It never made sense to me that “industry” should be blamed for pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere when the amount of CO2 was a minuscule 0.038 percent with far greater amounts of hydrogen and oxygen that protect the Earth from becoming the galactic equivalent of a toasted marshmallow.

Then, too, like oxygen, all life on Planet Earth is dependent on CO2, a gas that the Environmental Protection Agency is actually calling a “pollutant.” That is so absurd that I was confident people would laugh the whole “theory” out the door when it was first proposed. But that was over two decades ago.

The end didn’t begin until November 2009 and the release of thousands of “Climategate” emails between the meteorologists supplying the bogus data that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) used to generate the greatest hoax of the modern era.

Not since the discovery of the “Piltdown Man” had so many scientists allowed themselves to be taken in by a complete fabrication; one based entirely on falsified computer model data. Worse still, many climbed on board the global warming bandwagon to reap some of the billions in grant money involved.

The fact that “global warming” was generated by the United Nations should have been the red flag that something was not just wrong about it, but that it hid an agenda aimed at Western industrialized nations.

I think global warming gained credibility as much from the support of the leaders of Western nations as from the great difficulty skeptical scientists encountered in gaining any traction against it. To this day President Obama still prattles on about the need for solar and wind power to replace fossil fuels in order to avoid “climate change” from their use.

The current Prime Minister of Australia is busy trying to impose a carbon tax on that nation. The British have dug themselves a deep hole by embracing windmills instead of coal mines. Billions have been wasted by Spain and Germany on alternative energy sources.

The anti-energy agenda will have devastating affects on life in the West. Electricity consumers in the United Kingdom were recently told by the CEO of the country’s grid operation that, by 2020, they will have to get used to having no electricity for periods during the day and night. This will put the U.K. on par with North Korea. And the U.S. is not far behind if it does not quickly reverse current energy policies.

In the U.S., the leading voice for “global warming” became the former Vice President Al Gore who, following his defeat for the presidency ,set about becoming a multimillionaire with all manner of “global warming” projects and enterprises. He would eventually win an Oscar for his documentary and a Nobel Peace Prize that was shared by the IPCC. Today, however, Al Gore is a joke.

The legacy of “global warming” has been the decades-long attack on U.S. energy sources until today our vast resources of coal and oil remain in the ground instead of being available as the price of oil increases due to troubles in the Middle East and the cost of electricity increases due to laws mandating that utilities must buy from wind and solar electricity producers who would be out of business by next week without those government mandates.

The public acceptance of the “global warming” hoax has waned even as the mainstream media has tried to hide the truth. The rise of the Internet has seen to that and other more pressing, real challenges are shoveling dirt onto its grave. 9/11 refocused public attention on a real threat. The 2008 financial crisis still holds the nation in its grip.

And a President whose first two years have generated massive resistance now only occasionally references “climate change.”

The global warming corpse is not quite dead, but dead enough for now. The question is what new fraud will the United Nations and environmental organizations perpetrate? The “acidification” of the world’s oceans? “Species extinction” or “Invasive species”? Be assured, the UN mafia is at work on something.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

 

WesternFront America

The UN seeks to redistribute wealth, while CFACT works to reduce “energy poverty”

By Duggan Flanakin

As conference delegates shivered in Cancun during its coldest weather in 100 years, power-hungry elitists labored behind the scenes to implement the real goal of this “global warming” summit, this sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-16), this clever political con job.

That the Cancun summit was never a climate conference at all has become increasingly obvious. Even before it began, IPCC Working Group III co-chair Ottmar Edenhofer said, COP-16 is actually “one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War…. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” In fact, it has “almost nothing to do with the environmental policy.” Its real purpose “is redistributing the world’s wealth and natural resources.”

A few days later, IPCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres told conference attendees, “The world is looking for new answers to the political, economic and social challenges which all countries face.” That the “new answers” focused primarily on how much more money and technology developed nations “owe” poor countries further affirmed the proceedings’ true nature.

As Viscount Christopher Monckton has accurately noted, the entire UN IPCC process is a “monstrous transfer of power from once-proud, once-sovereign, once-democratic nations” … to the corrupt, unelected Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The grand design – built on the model of the European Union – is to give the Secretariat power to compel once-independent nations to compile and submit vast quantities of information to the UN, pay ever-increasing taxes to unelected internationalists, and do the bureaucrats’ bidding on a host of issues. They are especially keen to compel the replacement of affordable, reliable hydrocarbon energy with “eco-friendly,” “sustainable” wind, solar and biofuel power.

Claims that “the science is settled” and there is “scientific consensus” on manmade climate disasters have already been demolished. The ClimateGate emails, revelations that numerous “peer-reviewed” IPCC “studies” were actually environmentalist press releases and student papers, and admissions by alarmists themselves took care of that. “There has been no statistically significant warming” since 1995, Dr. Phil Jones of East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit admitted to the BBC in February 2010.

“No kidding,” his fellow Brits would tell him now, amid one of the UK’s coldest winters in a century.

In fact, there is not now and never has been a “consensus” on manmade global warming. A new report by Marc Morano, of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and ClimateDepot.com, lists more than 1,000 scientists who have openly challenged the IPCC and claims that humans, hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide are causing a climate crisis. One of them, Swedish climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring, accused the alarmist community of relying on inadequate computer models to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming, to generate funding, gain attention and influence public policy.

“If this is what ‘science’ has become,” he added, “I as a scientist am ashamed.”

However, these cold realities have done little to chasten the alarmists or temper their tone. Far too much money, power and prestige are at stake. Confronted in Cancun with Dr. Jones’ admission, a startled IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri pointed to the discredited Fourth Assessment Report (of which Edenhofer was a lead author) as his sole source for “scientific” information – and refused even to say whether he agreed that warming had stopped 15 years ago.

During the widely covered CFACT press conference in Cancun, climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer addressed some of the reasons so many scientists dissent from IPCC orthodoxy. Many of the scary scenarios and predictions of imminent crisis, he explained, are based on computerized climate models that assume carbon dioxide drives climate change, but are deficient or erroneous in reflecting major climate mechanisms. For example, clouds cause negative feedback (cooling effects), and not just the positive feedbacks (heat trapping effects and warming) assumed by nearly all climate models.

Dr. Spencer also challenged a recent paper that continues to insist that clouds only trap heat and warm the planet. This paper defies science and common sense, he noted, and is “one more reason the public is increasingly distrustful of the scientific community, when it comes to research having enormous policy implications” for energy use, jobs, economic growth, and human health and welfare.

In short, debunking alarmist climate science is relatively easy. The much harder job has always been to expose the true intentions of the UN climate cabal. CFACT and others did this in Cancun, by demanding an end to “energy poverty,” condemning phony “climate change” obstacles to affordable energy, and insisting that poor countries be encouraged and helped to achieve the health, prosperity and modern living standards that only hydrocarbons can ensure and sustain.

When billionaires Ted Turner and Richard Branson tried to discuss ways to profit from global warming hype, “renewable” energy and CO2 emissions trading, a team of CFACT college students exposed their hypocrisy and anti-people climate profiteering. Wind, solar and biofuel companies are “producing products people don’t want and can’t afford,” the students pointed out. Even more immorally, they are conspiring to keep poor families impoverished and afflicted by malaria, lung infections, dysentery and other diseases of poverty.

Meanwhile, champions of “climate ethics” and “environmental justice” in dozens of rich countries are all too happy to provide what Lord Monckton called “bailout bucks for bedwetting big businesses,” to ensure their continued cooperation with the wealth redistribution scheme. He also slammed the notion of giving kleptocratic governments $100 billion a year – which will do little except perhaps keep poor families from starving. If they are to achieve their hopes and dreams, they need abundant, reliable, affordable energy: ie, fossil fuels.

Climate alarmists say poor families will be devastated by global warming, unless we slash carbon dioxide emissions. No. The world’s poor are being devastated right now by climate alarmism. US Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) and others who say poor countries must live “sustainably” and rely on “renewable” energy are rich, callous hypocrites, Canadian policy analyst Redmond Weissenberger said. They would never live that way themselves, but they want Earth’s poorest people to forego “the energy, wealth, health, clean water, safety and longer lives we enjoy, thanks to fossil fuels.”

A CFACT-organized bus tour drove this fact home. Delegates and journalists visited a village whose residents work at lavish Cancun hotels, but whose own houses are built of cardboard, plywood, rope and sticks – and lack electricity, running water, sanitation, trash pickup or even a functional public school.

“It is wrong to erect obstacles to progress for communities like this,” CFACT President David Rothbard told tour participants. “And yet, global warming campaigners are in Cancun, proposing treaty provisions that would permanently trap these families in energy poverty, while doing nothing to stabilize the Earth’s constantly and naturally changing climate.”

“The UN has always been about the politics of [climate science],” Morano told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto. “They produce the best science that politics can manufacture, and their goal has always been global governance. They openly admit it and are using climate scares to achieve it.”

Decent people everywhere must help ensure this does not happen. The battle will continue through COP-17 in Durban, South Africa and COP-18 in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, during the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit that launched this power grab. We hope you will join us on the ramparts.

_______________

Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)

 

WesternFront America

Alarmists gather in last-ditch attempt to keep the climate change gravy train running.

It’s become a predictable annual rite. Several weeks prior to each global warming gabfest, breathless news stories, editorials, op-eds and pontifications begin hitting the airwaves and print pages, reaching a crescendo as the conference opens. So it was with Copenhagen; so it is with Cancun.

Actually, it may be worse this year. ClimateGate, bogus IPCC “studies” about disappearing Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforests, the global economic recession, the Copenhagen disaster, soaring EU and UK energy prices, Spain’s collapsing green energy industry, and eroding public belief in manmade Climate Armageddon have ushered in growing unease within the alarmist camp.

Now unease has turned into desperation. US midterm elections all but ensure a wholesale congressional reexamination of climate science and renewable energy claims … and budgets. The Chicago Climate Exchange has gone belly-up, as carbon prices plunged from $7 a ton to 5 cents. China, India and other emerging markets continue to build hydrocarbon energy facilities, offering promises of “reduced carbon intensity” (slowly improved energy efficiency), but no binding CO2 reduction targets. In response …

Michael Mann whined to Fortune magazine that he and climate science are under attack, and he is getting rude emails. Al Gore again wailed that planetary demise is nigh (but was forced to admit he voted for ethanol solely to bolster his chances in the 2000 Iowa primaries). Bjorn Lomborg energetically promoted shifting countless billions of former global warming prevention dollars to reducing wind and solar energy costs – to ward off dangerous global warming that he insists is happening, despite stable global temperatures since 1995, in the face of steadily rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.

The Economist offered articles on “how to live with climate change.” We should make renewables so cheap that burning coal and oil “will seem perverse,” it suggested. We should even evaluate geo-engineering schemes “to cool, rather than warm,” our planet. (Meanwhile, Wales and Northern Ireland recorded the coldest November night since recordkeeping began – and one-third of households in Wales and Scotland are living in “fuel poverty,” because of soaring energy prices.)

The AP howled that methane leaking from Siberian ice (as it has since Ice Ages) is a signal – not that vast natural gas riches lie beneath – but that the release has reached “a perilous rate” and is “a climate time bomb, waiting to explode.” Not to be outdone, a “respected” and “influential” British academic (so says London’s Telegraph) dropped this absurd bombshell:

The only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years. To achieve this, politicians should consider a rationing system similar to the one introduced during Britain’s last “time of crisis,” during the 1930s and 1940s.

So a climate “crisis” generated by computer models and ClimateGate/IPCC data manipulation is now equivalent to the Great Depression and World War II. And rich nations are somehow supposed to fork over $100 billion annually in “climate change reparations” and “mitigation and adaptation” funds, on top of other aid, after they have shackled their economies and become “formerly developed countries.”

We are witnessing the global warming, green energy, “environmental justice” and wealth redistribution equivalent of kamikaze air attacks. Desperate times do indeed require desperate measures. The assumption and assertion that humans are causing a climate catastrophe must be perpetuated at all costs.

Make no mistake. Cancun and its predecessors are not about saving the planet or protecting poor nations from the “ravages of dangerous manmade global warming.” This battle is, and always has been, about two things: money and power. Who gets how much money from whom? Who gets to control energy systems, economic growth, and people’s opportunities, living standards and futures?

It all comes down to a past and impending unprecedented redistribution of wealth – from taxpayers and consumers (rich, middle class and poor alike) in developed nations to:

* Political leaders and bureaucrats in poor nations that were enticed to sign the Kyoto and other agreements, by promises that they would receive billions, year after year; and

* Scientists, activists, bureaucrats, carbon traders and corporations responsible for the “consensus” and “settled science” about catastrophic climate change and cheap, eco-friendly renewable energy. Their careers, reputations, institutions and cash flows are heavily dependent on keeping citizens alarmed by climate hobgoblins, and hence clamorous to be led to safety. Far worse, they are proposing that the world spend trillions combating global warming, and completely upending hydrocarbon-based economies, in favor of costly, unproven, unreliable, land-intensive “renewable” energy.

These climate cash recipients are terrified that governments, especially the incoming American Congress, will derail their global warming and renewable energy money train. That, of course, is exactly what should happen – for we are talking about serious money that could be put to far better uses.

ExxonMobil was long pilloried by climate alarmists for allegedly giving $23 million over a ten-year period to organizations that challenged claims of an imminent manmade warming crisis. The Exxon grants supposedly bought “climate denial pseudo-science.” Spare me.

These Exxon grants are chicken feed, compared to the estimated $80 billion that the US government alone gave to the climate crisis community. To that must be added countless billions from the EU, UN, corporations, foundations and other sources. The Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, for instance, alone received $110 million during the last decade from Canadian taxpayers, to promote global warming crisis messages in schools and universities.

If $23 million buys a lot of denial, imagine how much crisis “science” and “education” these countless billions have bought – and why these institutions want to “circle the wagons” to prevent any independent investigation into their research, peer-review, report-writing, education and advocacy practices.

Therefore, before we spend or transfer one more dollar, three absolutely critical steps must be taken.

First, we need to have open, robust and, if needs be, cantankerous hearings and debates – in Congress and elsewhere, with witnesses under oath. Do we really face a manmade climate crisis? Or are we just dealing with the same forces, the same changes, the same impacts (good and bad) that Earth, the wild kingdom and mankind have had to confront and adapt to countless times over the eons? What actual evidence do you have, and how was it gathered and peer-reviewed? Not computer models, assumptions, assertions, scary headline-grabbing press releases, imaginary consensus, et cetera. Real evidence.

Second, Congress and the states must bring in government officials, again under oath and subpoena, and find out which agencies gave how much money to whom, how it was used – and what quality control, transparency and accountability rules applied, who enforced them, and how.

Third, we need to stop this runaway climate crisis funding and regulatory juggernaut, until we have satisfactory answers to these questions. That means freeze the funding conduits; halt or defund the EPA “endangerment” rules; and open America’s onshore and offshore public lands to oil, gas, coal, uranium and rare earth metals exploration and development, under reasonable environmental guidelines, to ensure that we have the reliable, affordable energy we need.

Only then will we again have government of the people, by the people and for the people.

Paul Driessen

 

WesternFront America

On November 14, 1957, leaders of the American and other Mafia organizations gathered at the home of Joseph “Joe the Barber” Barbara in Apalachin, New York; approximately one hundred Mafiosi from around the United States, Canada, and Italy attended.

Up to then, J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had refused to acknowledge that the Mafia even existed, but a succession of prime time television appearances before Congressional committees by members of the Mafia made it abundantly clear that crime in America was, indeed, organized and led by some very colorful and ruthless descendents of the Sicilian Mafia.

It is time for the U.S. government to acknowledge that a climate mafia has existed since the gathering in Kyoto, Japan, to establish the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The December 11, 1997 treaty was, upon ratification, to go into force on February 16, 2005. Its expressed purpose was to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for the purpose of avoiding “global warming”, but its real purpose was to create an entirely bogus system of emissions trading to be known as “the carbon market.”

On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate, responsible for the ratification of international treaties, unanimously passed (95-0) a resolution rejecting the Kyoto Treaty on the grounds that it “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States.”

As this is written, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is striving to secure authorization to regulate GHG emissions despite massive evidence that they pose no threat to the environment and despite the fact that this authority would, as in 1997, cripple and likely destroy an already ailing economy.

There was no “global warming” then or now. Carbon dioxide (CO2) was deemed the chief cause of “global warming” when, in fact, it plays little or no role in climate change. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a criminal enterprise set up as a mechanism to facilitate the sale of bogus “carbon credits” and to transfer billions from industrialized, developed nations to those that have failed to keep pace. This latter scheme is little more than extortion.

In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC for their efforts to further this fraud. This demonstrates just how vast the effort to impose it had become. In the U.S., “Cap-and-Trade” legislation, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, sponsored by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-CA) was passed in the House and sent to the Senate. Political pundits say it is unlikely to come up for a vote.

In November 2009, the leak of thousands of emails between the scientists leading two university-based climate research centers responsible for the data published by the IPCC demonstrated they had deliberately rigged the data to assert a “global warming” that did not exist then or now. It was quickly dubbed “Climategate.”

The Climategate revelations doomed last year’s conference in Copenhagen that was intended to further the “global warming” fraud. It was attended by President Obama who said, “Today we’ve made (a) meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen. For the first time in history all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.”

There is no threat of climate change beyond those natural climate events such as hurricanes and blizzards over which humankind has no control.

Abandoning the term “global warming” and substituting “climate change” does not change the fact that there has been NO dramatic increase in the Earth’s overall temperature and ignores the fact that, since 1998, the Earth has entered a predictable and natural cooling cycle.

The President was lying then and continues to lie today about “climate change.”

Billions worldwide have been wasted on the needless reduction of GHGs. Billions here in the U.S. have been diverted to two of the most unpredictable and least effective means of energy production, wind and solar power.

Billions have been wasted on the U.S. mandate that ethanol be mixed with the gasoline Americans purchase, despite the fact that ethanol releases more CO2 into the environment than gasoline without it. Due to expire on December 31^st, it would save an estimated six billion dollars. Even Al Gore has disowned ethanol.

The IPCC meeting in Cancun begins on November 29 and will generate a lot of hot air for two weeks.

The Earth doesn’t need less carbon dioxide; vital to all crops, forests and vegetation. It needs more. The world doesn’t need less energy production. It needs more; vital to the economies of developed and developing nations.

The future of six billion people on planet Earth depends on the failure of the Cancun conference.

Alan Caruba blogs daily at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. An author, business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about “scare campaigns” designed to influence public opinion and policy.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

 

WesternFront America