Who's behind the RICO push?

Shub Niggurath has been taking a look at a report by the Climate Accountability Institute, a small California non-profit, with links to the renewable energy industry, and which features Michael Mann among its advisers. The Institute seems to have been coordinating efforts to bring racketeering charges against climate dissenters in the USA.

The report in question describes a 2012 conference at which the strategy was agreed and Shub's report makes for fascinating reading. The list of those who took part is interesting. Some were entirely expected - Naomi Oreskes and James Hoggan for example - but it was slightly more surprising to see Myles Allen there.

Enforcing the dogma

Over the weekend, news emerged that the decision by French weatherman Philippe Verdier to come out as a sceptic has resulted in swift retribution.

The Head of Weather France 2, away from the antenna to its challenges to the consequences of global warming, aired Saturday night, a video claiming he was fired by the public channel.

Last year, Roy Spencer was widely criticised for referring to global warming Nazis. But as the list of those who have lost their jobs for questioning the orthodoxy grows, you have to ask yourself, was Spencer wrong?

In related news another weatherman has announced that he is not a sceptic any longer.

Greg Fishel was once a Limbaugh-loving climate skeptic. Now he’s fighting global warming.

You can see why that might be an attractive option.

Just what is DFiD spending money on?

On a whim, I downloaded the monthly expenditure details from the Department for International Development for August 2015, the most recent figures available.

Of interest are payments to:

• ClientEarth £246,171 Aid programme
• Climate Policy Initiative £32,500 Project delivery
• WWF £371,860 Aid programme, Asia, Caribbean and Overseas Territories
• World Resources Institute £867,847 Aid programme grants,Policy division
• Solar Aid £239,875
• Environmental Investigation Agency £69,416 Aid programme grants, policy division

I don't know about you but you could get the impression that a great deal of what DFiD reports as overseas aid spending is actually bungs to environmentalists.

Update on Oct 29, 2015 by Bishop Hill

WWF seem to have been getting as much as £3-4m per year in the past. The figure above suggests that this has not changed much. Given what we know about WWF removing people from their homes to make way for wildlife (1, 2), you have to say that this is a pretty odd definition of "development".

Making poverty permanent

The World Bank thinks we can end poverty by making energy more expensive.

When the Tyndall Centre loved big oil

Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre, wondered a couple of days ago whether oil-company funding was "worse than tobacco funding".

Report concludes top UK uny's receive major Oil funding&influence https://t.co/6XYamaxoBE @OfficialUoM Worse/better than tobacco funding?

— Kevin Anderson (@KevinClimate) October 24, 2015

How different to the founders of the Tyndall Centre, who were extremely keen on oil companies, discussing a strategic partnership with Shell that would include the provision of funding, placements of students with the company.

What happened in the intervening years I wonder, to change the minds of the Tyndall Centre people so far?

Wake me up when it's over

The news on Twitter this morning is that a small group of greens have tied themselves to machinery at the Banks Mining opencast site in Matt Ridley's back garden.

Yawn.

Update on Oct 26, 2015 by Bishop Hill

It's over. Nine arrests.

See you in the morning.

Remember when Nature was a science journal?

Climate change: Climate justice more vital than democracy

Title of new paper published in Nature

I can still remember the days when Nature magazine was about science.

Update on Oct 15, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Great minds...

Orac takes on @NatureNews for their propagation of quackery. Remeber when @Nature used to be a science magazine http://t.co/Vaq642LcCb

— David Colquhoun (@david_colquhoun) October 15, 2015

He gets all his best stuff from me. ;-)

Anti-everything Joss the boss

Utility week is reporting that Joss Garman is going to move from the woolly-left IPPR to become head of policy for Lisa Nandy, the shadow energy and climate minister. Garman has come a long way since he organised mass-trespass and criminal damage at airports.

His stance on energy should provide everyone with plenty of entertainment. He is anti-nuclear, anti-coal and anti-gas, for example, leading one to wonder if Labour's policy on energy security is going to involve a great deal of finger-crossing.

He also has an eyebrow raising attitude to factual accuracy. Take for example this piece, about alleged risks of "explosions" under houses located near unconventional gas wells:

Cuadrilla pursues its foe

Shale gas pioneers Cuadrilla have complained to the Charities Commission and the Advertising Standards Authority about the behaviour of Friends of the Earth, whose campaign of lies and disinformation about unconventional gas has been a favourite topic at BH.

The boss of fracking firm Cuadrilla is calling on the Charity Commission to put a stop to the “wilfully misleading” and “scaremongering” claims in fundraising material pumped out by FoE.

The Advertising Standards Authority is also being asked to block the claims.

My money would be on a wholesale rejection of the complaints, no matter how valid they might be. Blind adherence to the green faith is so ingrained in most of our institutions that I don't look to them for the truth or for justice.

Guenier on Sands

Those following the recent developments on the "law and climate" front will be interested in the article at Paul Matthews' site from Robin Guenier.

The perils of delegation

As a follow up to the last posting, consider this excerpt from the Guardian article by Client Earth director James Thornton (pictured above on a long-haul holiday):

The most obvious liabilities for companies and their directors relate to physical loss or damage. The residents of Tuvalu in the Pacific and Kivalina in Alaska, whose homes are disappearing beneath rising waters, have both threatened challenges against polluters.

Follow the Tuvalu link to its source and you find a national Geographic Article entitled:

Will Pacific Island Nations Disappear as Seas Rise? Maybe Not

and which contains this:

Some islands grew by as much as 14 acres (5.6 hectares) in a single decade, and Tuvalu's main atoll, Funafuti—33 islands distributed around the rim of a large lagoon—has gained 75 acres (32 hectares) of land during the past 115 years.

I wonder if Mr Thornton wrote the article himself?

Zac paying greens to sue city bigwigs

A group called Client Earth is threatening to sue big UK businesses for not doing as greens tell them on the climate change front.

The Companies Act 2006 codifies directors’ duties in law for the first time. They must “promote the success of the company”, first by considering “the likely consequences of any decision in the long term”. Failing to plan for climate change is incompatible with this and other duties and leaves directors open to legal challenge.

The case for climate litigation against reckless directors grows ever stronger. Increased regulation, changing market dynamics and heightened risk to physical assets means maintaining the status quo is no longer an option for those keen to protect their finances and reputation.

We at ClientEarth are closely monitoring the activities of FTSE 250 companies. We will pursue those directors who fail to protect their investors from the challenge that climate change presents. Those intent on following a business-as-usual model, be warned: the “usual” has changed.

Even Guardian readers seem unimpressed.

So who is behind Client Earth? A list of their funders is quite interesting, including the City of London Corporation Charity and...wait for it...the personal charity of Zac and Ben Goldsmith. Yes that's right folks, the aspirant mayor of London is paying greens to sue the companies that bring the wealth to the city.

It's an interesting tactic.

Wildlife thriving in Chernobyl

Updated on Oct 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Oct 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Pic Arctic Woof under CC licence https://www.flickr.com/photos/arcticwoof/7105477111To some extent, concerns over global warming have arisen as a direct result of environmentalists' scaremongering over nuclear energy. How much lower would carbon dioxide emissions have been if the world had gone nuclear in the 1960s?

That environmentalists were scaremongering is confirmed by a new paper in Current Biology, which reports long-term survey data from the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Despite numerous earlier studies reporting that radiation levels in the 1600 square miles zone are above dangerous levels, nobody seems to have passed the news on to the wildlife:

Click to read more ...

A bloody truth or a big bloody truth

George Monbiot is sounding off about the guys at the Breakthrough Institute today - it seems they are insufficiently green for the great man's liking and so they are to receive a tongue lashing.

2/3: One of #ecomodernism's authors has been spreading a great blood libel against the green movement. http://t.co/nwdrg7qO58 @mark_lynas

— GeorgeMonbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) September 30, 2015

Click to read more ...

Wadhams fails

Peter Wadhams is something of a favourite at BH, his researches into the paranormal, his physics-free sea-ice predictions and his concerns about assassination having provided readers with much entertainment over the years. The last of these claims led to an official complaint to the Press Regulator, but it seems that Prof Wadhams' complaint has been no more successful than his doom-laden predictions about the Arctic (£).

A Cambridge professor who claimed that assassins may have murdered three British scientists investigating the impact of global warming has had a complaint against The Times dismissed by the press regulator.

Prof Wadhams is an advisor to Pope Francis.