Polar Bears Doing Just Fine Shock

Polar bears
Reuters/Geoff York/World Wildlife Fund/Handout

Susan Crockford, arguably the world’s greatest polar bear expert, has some really bad news for environmentalists.

Their favorite ursine poster child of climate doom is doing great. Polar bear populations are stable, if not growing. That stuff you read in the liberal media about bears starving to death because thin summer sea ice is pure nonsense. The only evidence we have that polar bears are in any kind of trouble is the fake evidence of activists’ computer models.

Crockford’s full State of the Polar Bear Report 2017, produced for the Global Warming Policy Foundation, can be read here.

Here is a summary of its conclusions:

• Global polar bear numbers have been stable or risen slightly since 2005, despite the fact that summer sea ice since 2007 hit levels not expected until mid-century: the predicted 67% decline in polar bear numbers did not occur.

• Abundant prey and adequate sea ice in spring and early summer since 2007 appear to explain why global polar bear numbers have not declined, as might have been expected as a result of low summer sea ice levels.

• The greatest change in sea ice habitat since 1979 was experienced by Barents Sea polar bears and the least by those in Southern Hudson Bay, the most southerly region inhabited by bears.

• As far as is known, the record low extent of sea ice in March 2017 had no impact on polar bear health or survival.

• Some studies show bears are lighter in weight than they were in the 1980s, but none showed an increase in the number of individuals starving to death or too thin to reproduce.

• A just-released report of Southern Beaufort Sea bears having difficulty finding prey in 2014– 2016 suggests that the thick ice events that have impacted the region every ten years or so since the 1960s have continued despite reduced summer sea ice.

• Claims of widespread hybridization of polar bears with grizzlies were disproven by DNA studies.

• Overly pessimistic media responses to recent polar bear issues have made heartbreaking news out of scientifically insignificant events, suggesting an attempt is being made to restore the status of this failed global warming icon.

Or – short version – pretty much everything that Greenpeace, the WWF, the IPCC, the IUCN, the Guardian, CNN and the New York Times have ever told you about polar bears is a lie.

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This video tells the truth.

What particularly interests me about Crockford’s report are the extraordinary similarities it shows between global warming alarmism and polar bear alarmism.

In theory, there ought to be no connection whatsoever. Global warming studies, after all, involve scientific specialities like meteorology, climatology, atmospheric physics, palaeoclimatology. Polar bear studies, on the other hand, tend much more to lie in the realm of zoology.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

The Ugly Truth About that Dying Polar Bear

Polar Bear
Have you seen the footage of that dying polar bear yet?

It’s sad. Very sad. You can see why it has gone viral and been all over the media from the Mail (“soul-crushing footage”) to CBC to the Washington Post (“we stood there crying”).

It’s the kind of sad thing you want to share it with your friends so they can wallow in the same pool of helpless misery you’re wallowing in.

For example, that bit where the emaciated bear reaches with his sad paw into that rusting trash can in search of something, anything, to eat. As you watch, you want so desperately to help him….

The footage was filmed on Baffin Island in Canada. Surely, if you or I had been there, we could have found something edible to push that stricken bear’s way: maybe a visiting delegation of performance poets, abstract artists and avant-garde musicians who arrived by antique sailing ship on a Rockefeller-Foundation-funded arts project to “raise awareness” of melting icecaps; or a group of Greenpeace activists(aren’t bears attracted by strong smells?) on a No To Arctic Drilling protest; or one of the plethora of explorers on another of those deep and meaningful eco-expeditions, sponsored by one of those big reinsurance companies whose business model largely depends on scaring potential clients into thinking global warming is a serious problem.

OK, perhaps I shouldn’t be so flippant. Watching a once-mighty beast in its death throes is never a pretty sight.

I’ll tell you what’s a lot uglier, though: the way that polar bear’s death has been completely misrepresented for political ends by the usual suspects in the climate alarmism lobby.
And I’ll tell you what’s uglier even than that: all the old people – not bears but actual humans – who’ve died equally miserable deaths in fuel poverty brought about by precisely the kind of environmentalist propagandizing we’ve seen in the cynical, manipulative promotion of this video.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

‘Climate Change’ Is No More Credible than Magic Says Top Physicist

climate
AP/Pat Roque

The evidence for man-made climate change is so flimsy that you might just as well believe in magic, says one of the world’s top physicists.
Richard Lindzen, Alfred P Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Emeritus at Massachussetts Institute of Technology, has long expressed doubts about the “science” behind anthropogenic global warming theory. (h/t Paul Homewood)

Now, in probably his most comprehensive and devastating assault yet on the Climate Industrial Complex, Lindzen shreds every one of the fake-science arguments used by the environmentalists to justify their hugely expensive “global warming” scare story.

The 97% meme

This is a fabrication designed to make idiots feel like experts.

As Lindzen puts it:

The [’97 per cent of scientists believe in global warming’] claim is meant to satisfy the non-expert that he or she has no need to understand the science. Mere agreement with the 97% will indicate that one is a supporter of science and superior to anyone denying disaster. This actually satisfies a psychological need for many people.

But, he explains, it’s just a trick created by pretending that all the scientists who agree that humans make a contribution to global warming (ie almost everyone) also agree with the alarmist theory that global warming is catastrophic, unprecedented and within man’s control. Which simply isn’t the case.

The ‘warmest years on record’ meme

Alarmists have been shrieking a lot recently that most of the hottest years on record – 14 out of 15, according to the UN – have happened since 2000.

This is silly for a number of reasons, Lindzen explains.

First, warmth is not necessarily bad or worrying thing:

It begins with the ridiculous presumption that any warming whatsoever (and, for that matter, any increase in CO2) is bad, and proof of worse to come. We know that neither of these presumptions is true. People retire to the Sun Belt rather than to the arctic. CO2 is pumped into greenhouses to enhance plant growth.

Second, it doesn’t – as some idiots believe – mean that global warming hasn’t paused for the last twenty years.

Of course, if 1998 was the hottest year on record, all the subsequent years will also be among the hottest years on record. None of this contradicts the fact that the warming (ie, the increase of temperature) has ceased.

Third, the differences in temperature are so small as to be almost unmeasurable and are open to all manner of fraudulent adjustments by politically motivated climate gatekeepers.

The extreme weather meme

The idea that we are experiencing more “extreme weather” events because of “climate change” is plain dishonest.

Roger Pielke, Jr. actually wrote a book detailing the fact that there is no trend in virtually any extreme event (including tornados, hurricanes, droughts, floods, etc.) with some actually decreasing. Even the UN’s IPCC acknowledges that there is no basis for attributing such events to anthropogenic climate change.

In fact, its pure propaganda designed to scare the ignorant:

The claims of extreme weather transcend the usual use of misleading claims. They often amount to claims for the exact opposite of what is actually occurring. The object of the claims is simply to be as scary as possible, and if that requires claiming the opposite of the true situation, so be it.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Polar Bears Are a Pest – Time to End Their ‘Threatened’ Status

Earlier this week, as I’m sure you know, was International Polar Bear Day. Usually I celebrate by tossing a well-marinaded bear haunch onto the barbecue – note to novices: DO NOT eat the liver. It’s poisonous –  but I couldn’t this year because of pesky global cooling, so instead, I sat indoors by the fire and drank a toast to the world’s exploding polar bear population which has now reached record highs of 30,000.

30,000 polar bears is a lot. As someone else remarked (remind me where and I’ll link to it), when Al Gore was born the population was just 5,000. Even as recently as 2005 it was estimated at no more than 22,500.

When the population of something explodes six-fold in 70 years that’s a sign that it’s doing pretty well, right? In fact, frankly, at that point it ceases to be a species in any kind of danger and starts to look more like a pest.

So why do the greenies persist in treating it like it’s a rare and precious species on the verge of extinction due to man’s selfishness and greed (TM)?

This is the question asked and answered by the best short video you will ever see about the polar bear non-problem.

It has been made by Canadian polar bear expert Susan Crockford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation and it calls for the US Administration to reassess the polar bear’s (utterly bogus) classification as a “threatened” species.

As the film makes clear, the polar bear is not “threatened” and hasn’t been for many decades (not since hunting was mostly banned). When in May 2008 the US Fish and Wildlife Service listed it as “threatened” under the Endangered Species Act this was a political gesture not a scientific one.

The flimsy justification for the polar bear’s “threatened” status was the dramatic decline in summer sea ice which – so the fashionable theory ran – would render polar bears unable to feed because whenever they pursued seals they’d collapse through the thin ice.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Twelve Reasons Why the Paris Climate Talks Are a Total Waste

Here is why they might just as well not have bothered.

1. There has been no ‘global warming’ since 1997

monckton1

So, of all the children round the world currently being taught in schools about the perils of man-made global warming, not a single one has lived through a period in which the planet was actually warming.

2. The polar bears are doing just great.

As they have been for the last five decades, during which time their population has increased roughly five-fold. So why does the IUCN still classify them as “vulnerable”? Because the environmentalists needed a cute, fluffy white poster-child for their “the animals are dying and it’s all our fault” campaign, and the snail darter and the California delta smelt just didn’t cut it. So various tame conservation biologists came up with all sorts of nonsense about how polar bear populations were dwindling and how the melting of the ice floes would jeopardize their ability to feed themselves etc. How can you tell a conservation biologist is lying? When his lips move.

3. Antarctica is growing.

According to the greenies, this just wasn’t meant to happen. But it is. Even NASA admits this.

4. The Maldives aren’t sinking

Or, if they are, their government is responding in a very odd way. Just a few years back, they were staging photos of their Cabinet meeting underwater to symbolize how threatened they were by “climate change” – a problem that could only be cured, apparently, with the donation of large sums of guilt money from rich Western industrialized nations. But a few months ago they completed work on their 11th international airport. So that all the climate refugees caused by global warming can escape quickly, presumably.

5. Ocean acidification is a myth

If I were an eco-Nazi I would seriously think about killing myself at this point. Ocean acidification was supposed to be their Siegfried Line – the final line of defense if, as has grown increasingly obvious over the last few years, “anthropogenic global warming” theory proved to be a busted flush. But it turns out that ocean acidification is as big a myth as man-made climate change. a) it’s based on dubious, possibly even fraudulent, research and b) if anyone’s acidifying the ocean it’s those wretched bloody coral reefs

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Six Reasons Why ‘Climate Science’ Should Definitely Be on the School Curriculum

The head of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Gina McCarthy has said in an interview that she believes “climate science” ought to be included in the school curriculum.

“Very much so,” she says. “I think part of the challenge of explaining climate change is that it requires a level of science and a level of forward thinking and you’ve got to teach that to kids.

Some cynics may accuse the woman of talking gibberish.

In what way, exactly, does uglifying your school roof with a bunch of expensive and probably pointless solar panels comprise a “hands-on” experience which will “change the entire dynamic” of a child’s education?

And are we really sure that schools are suffering from a shortage of teaching on climate change? Isn’t the problem – from Britain to the US – exactly the opposite: that kids are being brainwashed by ignorant, politically motivated teachers into believing that there’s a serious, man-made “global warming” problem, when in fact there’s no evidence to support this increasingly discredited thesis?

Find out why at Breitbart London

Related posts:

  1. Green MP Caroline Lucas tries to keep science out of climate science
  2. ‘Post-normal science’ is perfect for climate demagogues — it isn’t science at all
  3. Jamie’s Nightmare School
  4. ‘BBC’s biased climate science reporting isn’t biased enough’ claims report

 

Polarbeargate?

Every holiday flight you take to Tuscany another one of these DIES!!!

Every holiday flight you take to Tuscany another one of these DIES!!!

This is too good a story not to repeat, not least for the headline it invites: (H/T Ed West; Julian Morris)

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — A federal wildlife biologist whose observation in 2004 of presumably drowned polar bears in the Arctic helped to galvanize the global warming movement has been placed on administrative leave and is being investigated for scientific misconduct, possibly over the veracity of that article.

Charles Monnett, an Anchorage-based scientist with the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement, or BOEMRE, was told July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending results of an investigation into “integrity issues.”

Something about this story is very odd. Surely, under the Obama administration any government official who was discovered to have been “emotionalising the issue” in order to raise public awareness of the terrible dangers of ManBearPig would be given a promotion, and a Congressional Medal of Honor at the very least? Can it really be possible that BOEMRE remains so principled and inviolate that it still insists its employees cleave to the truth?

It’s definitely one to watch, anyway. After all, the “drowning polar bear” story was instrumental in the US Interior Department’s controversial decision in 2008 to have Ursus maritimus declared a “threatened species.” (Despite evidence that polar bear populations have increased roughly five-fold in the last 50 years: not so much a threatened species, you might say; more like a plague or an infestation). It also prompted the silly scene in Al Gore’s fantasy movie An Inconvenient Truth where an animated polar bear is shown drowning because of “global warming.”

At Watts Up With That you’ll find an excellent World Climate Report essay reporting on the background to the “drowning polar bear” story.

But the part of the study that garnered the press attention so much so that it has become ingrained in global warming lore was that Monnett et al. reported the sighting of four polar bear carcasses floating in the sea several kilometers from shore, presumably having drowned. All four dead bears were spotted from the plane a few days after a strong storm had struck the area, with high winds and two meter high waves. Since polar bears are strong swimmers, the authors concluded that it was not just the swimming that caused the bears to drown, but that the swimming in association with high winds and waves, which made the exertion rate much greater, sapping the bears of their energy and leading to their deaths. The authors also suggested that the frequency and intensity of late summer and early fall storms should increase (as would the wave heights) because of global warming and thus the risk to swimming bears will increase along with the number of bears swimming (since there will be less ice) and subsequently more bears will drown. But they didn’t stop there—they suggested that the increased risk will not be borne by all bears equally, but that lone females and females with cubs will be most at risk—putting even more downward pressure of future polar bear populations. And thus a global warming poster child (or cub) is born.

But does all of this follow from the data? Again, we haven’t heard of any reports of polar bear drownings in Alaska in 2005, 2006, or 2007—all years with about the same, or even less late-summer sea ice off the north coast of Alaska than in 2004, the year of the documented drownings.

Lubos Motl, as is his splendid way, has some trenchant things to say on the subject.

One of the commenters at Watts Up With That thinks this story could turn out to be really juicy. His rationale is that no way would BOEMRE bring an action against an employee for something as innocent as having honest, peer-reviewed research twisted, misrepresented and exaggerated by the media. No, it would have to be way more serious than that.

The news is especially tragic for those of an eco-alarmist persuasion, coming as it does on the same day as new research from NASA (of all places: where’s Jimmy “death train” Hansen when he’s needed to put the correct spin on things?) blows yet another massive hole in CAGW theory.

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA’s Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

“The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show,” Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. “There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans.”

Anyhoo, weep not for the polar bear. The polar bears are doing just fine.

Related posts:

  1. Memo to Prince Charles: CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is plant food.
  2. Why Man-Made Global Warming is a load of cobblers; Pt 1
  3. Syed Hasnain, RK Pachauri and the mystery of the non-disappearing glaciers
  4. The Economist: not a serious journal

4 thoughts on “Polarbeargate?”

  1. Liam says:5th August 2011 at 12:55 amYou should leave these types of articles to real scientists. a quick search from google will reveal papers supporting increased pressures on polar bears.Climate change is real, deal with it.
  2. Gordon says:6th August 2011 at 8:30 amHow many gates has Delingpole invented? What about Delingpolegate? The denial world’s useful idiot who admits he hasn’t time to read the science but finds plenty to attack it.
  3. London Calling says:7th August 2011 at 4:43 pmAd Hominem, yawn…
  4. Gordon says:10th August 2011 at 11:34 amAd Hominem? yep, pot calling kettle…

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‘Mass suicide now the only option left’ say Cancun scientists | James Delingpole

November 30, 2010

As the latest round of UN-sponsored climate talks opened in Cancun today, ’scientists’ had a stark message on the threat posed by Man Made Global Warming. It is now so severe that only by exterminating ourselves like the vile parasite we are can we hope to leave a planet fit for habitation by generations as yet unborn, ’scientists’ say.

The radical measures being proposed by ‘scientists’ include:

1. Compulsory consumption of ground-up tiger’s whiskers.

2. Jonestown-style “eco parties” where kids can join in the fun by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid (or similar locally popular beverage: eg Irn Bru in Scotland; Badoit or San Pellegrino in Notting Hill, etc).

3. Natural death safaris in Africa, North America, Australia and even Antarctica where you can re-enter the ecosystem through the bowels of your killer predator of choice: Lion; Grizzly; Great White or Leopard Seal.

Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said today in a quote I’ve made up but which is only slightly less absurd than what he actually said:

“Since the hacked Climategate emails, we expert Climate Scientists have come in for a lot of stick from sceptics and deniers in the pay of Big Oil who claim that we’re just a bunch of misanthropic eco-fascists for whom freedom of choice is a concept more abhorrent than a baby polar bear pickled in shale oil. But nothing could be further from the truth. We believe that it should be entirely up to the people of the earth how they choose to kill themselves. If they don’t wish to follow any of the fun suggestions outlined in the Royal Society’s latest paper ‘So you’ve decided to die for Mother Gaia?’, we’re more than happy to send round a team of our experts to do the job for them.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for David Cameron said he believed an outbreak of mass extinction would be “Great for Britain. Great for jobs.” He pointed out that after the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, there had been some kind of similar economic revival as a result of there being more land, or people dying, or class barriers breaking down or some such, but that the exact details would have to wait for the forthcoming report on history teaching by Simon Schama, entitled: “Why death is the very least Britain deserves for the despicable colonial record which shames us all!”

Related posts:

  1. My holiday is being ruined by global cooling. But try telling that to the ‘scientists’
  2. ‘ManBearPig is real!’ declare top climate scientists. ‘And to prove it here’s a photo-shopped image we found on the internet of a polar bear on a melting ice floe.’
  3. Lying, cheating climate scientists caught lying, cheating again
  4. Lying climate scientists lie again – about death threats, this time

2 thoughts on “’Mass suicide now the only option left’ say Cancun scientists”

  1. Velocity says:30th November 2010 at 12:07 pmThe attendance for Cancun I understand is 40% DOWN on that previous farce of waffling windbags, Cop-out-hagen 15.

    And Obamaworlds ‘Cap & Trade’ – that’s short for ‘Capitalism Taxed’ – can only muster 43 votes even amongst the bleating ranks of lefties of his own crumbling dysfunctional party.

    When even the whinging, whining, habitual moaners of the world can’t be arsed to bowl up, or even vote, to ‘Save the World’ from frying, you know we’ve reached the UN IPCC’s infamous ‘tipping point’.

    AGW RIP

  2. ge0050 says:10th December 2010 at 5:04 pmHopefully the “scientists” will lead by example

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Pope Catholic; night follows day; IPCC found telling pack of lies about sea level rises | James Delingpole

May 27, 2010

IPCC lies, cheats, distorts again. Yes, all right, it is a bit of a “dog bites man” or “pizza found to contain mozzarella and tomato resting on dough base” kind of story. But on the day in which Britain’s new Prime Minister announced in the Queen’s speech that one of his government’s main goals is to “combat climate change”, it’s perhaps just as well to remind ourselves of the kind of junk science and misinformation that is inspiring his green policies. (Hat tip: Barry Woods)

This one comes from the great Canadian blogger Donna Laframboise, who has noticed that the most recent report (2007) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change liberally cited a scientific paper which wasn’t published until 29 months after the cut off date for submissions.

“Ah what’s 29 months between friends?” you might say. But as Laframbroise rightly observes it strips the process of its integrity.

If IPCC authors are to accurately describe the scientific literature, an agreed-upon cutoff date is required. If expert reviewers are to comment on the IPCC’s use of that literature, they must be afforded adequate opportunity to examine it.

More sinister still, though, is the way the IPCC report has twisted the paper – by one David G Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey – for its own ends. Here’s what Vaughan’s paper said about the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS).

Since most of WAIS is not showing change, it now seems unlikely that complete collapse of WAIS, with the threat of a 5-m rise in sea level, is imminent in the coming few centuries.

Note that phrase “it now seems unlikely”.

Now see how the IPCC interprets Vaughan’s paper:

If the Amundsen Sea sector were eventually deglaciated, it would add about 1.5 m to sea level, while the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) would account for about 5 m (Vaughan, 2007).

Yes, yes, IPCC no doubt it WOULD. But as the report you cite to prove it made pretty explicit: IT AIN’T GOING TO HAPPEN.

Still, as the IPCC has twigged by now, tell a lie often enough and it becomes part of the “consensus”.

That’ll be why Vaughan’s paper appears to have become almost as big a poster child for the Fourth IPCC report as Mann’s hockey stick was for the earlier ones. Just see how many times Vaughan is cited:

  • Working Group 1, Chapter 4 lists a D. Vaughan (UK) as a contributing author
  • WG1, Chapter 10 lists a D. Vaughan (UK) as a contributing author
  • WG2, Chapter 15 lists a David G. Vaughan (UK) as one of two coordinating lead authors
  • WG2’s Summary for Policymakers lists a David Vaughan as a drafting author
  • WG2’s Technical Summary lists a David Vaughan (UK) as a lead author

Maybe the IPCC were hoping that if they wrote his name in slightly different ways we wouldn’t notice. Bad luck IPCC. We did.

Oh and while we’re on the subject of things that could happen as a result of “Global Warming” but which aren’t going to, check out this story about Polar Bears. Apparently they’re all doomed – again – because a bunch of Canadian scientists have worked out that this is the sort of thing that might happen if you punch a few scary figures into a computer. (Hat tip: Mike Daly)

Dr Molnar, Professor Andrew Derocher and colleagues from the University of Alberta and York University, Toronto focused on the physiology, behaviour and ecology of polar bears, and how these might change as temperatures increase.

“We developed a model for the mating ecology of polar bears. The model estimates how many females in a population will be able to find a mate during the mating season, and thus get impregnated.”

Ah. So it’s not actually based on counting real polar bears or noting how in the last 10,000 years they’ve survived much more drastic changes in global climate than the ones we’ve experienced recently.

The latest US assessment of the conservation status of polar bears included the only two previous studies to assess the impact of climate change, but these extrapolated population trends, rather than directly modelling how the ecology of polar bears may alter.

The new study by Dr Molnar’s team offers a way to improve these predictions, and suggests the potential for even faster declines than those found by the US assessment.

“Canada has about two-thirds of the world’s polar bears, but their conservation assessment of polar bears didn’t take climate change seriously,” says Dr Molnar, a flaw noted by the IUCN/SSC Polar Bear Specialist Group last year.

“Our view is that the Canadian assessment should be redone, properly accounting for climate change effects.

“The status of polar bears is likely much more dire than suggested by the Canadian report,” he adds.

Yes! Yes! I trust this man. He clearly knows what he’s doing. Let’s give him another research grant – a really big one this time. With enough money, I’m sure he and his team will be able to model the entire polar population off the planet by 2013 at the latest.

And won’t that just teach all us sceptics a lesson we’ll never forget!!!!

Related posts:

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  2. IPCC Fourth Assessment Report is rubbish – says yet another expert
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Climategate: Greenpeace hoist by its own petard

Unfurling ginormous protest banners:

That’s what your Greenpeace activist enjoys more than almost anything in the world (save, perhaps, unseasoned tofu burgers; starring in those ecovideos they show ad nauseam on the screens by the main stage at Glastonbury; and, of course, the cathartic, masochistic thrill of being hosed down by Japanese whale fishermen). So how jolly amusing it is to see their favourite technique being used against them at Copenhagen by eco activists of a somewhat different hue.

The stunt was the work of Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) – a US organisation which campaigns for the environment: but in a realistic, pragmatic way rather than one guaranteed to bomb the global economy back to the agrarian age.

They report on their website:

CFACT unfurled the banners for two reasons, CFACT president David Rothbard explained. “Greenpeace ships, like the Rainbow Warrior and Arctic Sunrise, have become global symbols for radical environmentalism, and we wanted to call attention to the harm these groups are causing.  And second, it seemed appropriate to use one of Greenpeace’s favorite tactics to make this point.”

Greenpeace protesters frequently hang banners from factories and office buildings, paint slogans on smokestacks, and employ other publicity stunts. Some are relatively harmless, but others reflect a willingness to lie or even destroy property to make a point.

In 1995, Greenpeace launched a $2-million public relations campaign against Shell Oil, claiming the company was planning to dump tons of oil and toxic waste in the ocean by sinking its Brent Spar platform as an artificial reef. It was a full year before the group issued a written apology, admitting it knew all along that there had been no oil or chemical wastes on the platform.

Greenpeace has frequently destroyed bio-engineered crops, wiping out millions of dollars in research efforts designed to develop food plants that are more nutritious, withstand floods and droughts better, and resist insect infestations without the need for chemical pesticides. It has also waged an unrelenting campaign against insecticides and insect repellants that could prevent malaria, a vicious disease that infects 500 million people a year, kills over 1 million and leaves millions more with permanent brain damage.

“Greenpeace employs the same deceitful tactics in opposition to nuclear, hydroelectric and hydrocarbon energy, even though 1.5 billion people still do not have electricity – and thus don’t have lights for homes, hospitals and schools, or power to purify water and run offices, shops and factories,” Rucker says.

Rothbard acknowledged Greenpeace was launched for the best of reasons.  “But it radicalized its mission. The more power it acquired, the more it abused that power,” he said. “Some of Greenpeace’s original cadre has left, feeling they can no longer associate themselves with its current agenda.”

Yep: all good points, well made. But what’s at least as interesting about this stunt is what it has to say about the New Culture Wars being fought – and won – by the libertarian right.

Note – as Stephanie Gutmann did in an excellent post the other day – how quick the Minnesotans for Global Warming were to capitalise on Climategate. Barely had the scandal broken, when these witty, talented young men had rushed out a funny, professional, satirical song called Hide The Decline which became a massive hit on YouTube. Since then they’ve brought out a whole Christmas album’s worth of Climategate-related songs, my favourite being  The 12 Days Of Global Warming (”…five drowning polar bears….”).

These are the kind of hip, guerilla tactics which in the 1960s were the preserve of the radical left who were expertly capturing the hearts and minds of global youth while anyone to the right of Che Guevara was made to look like – and indeed usually was – a stuffed shirt.

But now that the Establishment is essentially a creature of the authoritarian, politically correct liberal left, the roles have reversed. The Gramscian long march on the institutions is over. Thanks to the internet those institutions count for naught.

Related posts:

  1. Greenpeace and the IPCC: time, surely, for a Climate Masada?
  2. Greenpeace goes postal
  3. Free the Greenpeace 30! (And spare us any more whingeing from Damon Albarn, Jude Law and that bloke out of the Clash)
  4. Greenpeace and The Guardian: yet again, sticking up for the bad guys