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Arthur Max | AP

Carbon taxes, add-ons to international air fares and a levy on cross-border money movements are among ways being considered by a panel of the world’s leading economists to raise a staggering $100 billion a year to fight climate change.

British economist Nicholas Stern told international climate negotiators Thursday that government regulation and public money also will be needed to create incentives for private investment in industries that emit fewer greenhouse gases.

In short, a new industrial revolution is needed to move the world away from fossil fuels to low carbon growth, he said.

“It will be extremely exciting, dynamic and productive,” said Stern, one of 18 experts in public finance on an advisory panel appointed by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

A climate summit held in Copenhagen in December was determined to mobilize $100 billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries adapt to climate change and reduce emissions of carbon dioxide trapping the sun’s heat. But the 120 world leaders who met in the Danish capital offered no ideas on how to raise that sum — $1 trillion every decade — prompting Ban to appoint his high-level advisory group.

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John Vidal |guardian.co.uk

A document accidentally left on a European hotel computer and passed to the Guardian reveals the US government’s increasingly controversial strategy in the global UN climate talks.

Titled Strategic communications objectives and dated 11 March 2010, it outlines the key messages that the Obama administration wants to convey to its critics and to the world media in the run-up to the vital UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico in November. (You can read the document text below).

Top of the list of objectives is to: “Reinforce the perception that the US is constructively engaged in UN negotiations in an effort to produce a global regime to combat climate change.” It also talks of “managing expectations” of the outcome of the Cancun meeting and bypassing traditional media outlets by using podcasts and “intimate meetings” with the chief US negotiator to disarm the US’s harsher critics.

But the key phrase is in paragraph three where the author writes: “Create a clear understanding of the CA’s [Copenhagen accord’s] standing and the importance of operationalising ALL elements.”

This is the clearest signal that the US will refuse to negotiate on separate elements of the controversial accord, but intends to push it through the UN process as a single “take it or leave it” text. The accord is the last-minute agreement reached at the chaotic Copenhagen summit in December. Over 110 countries are now “associated” with the accord but it has not been adopted by the 192-nation UN climate convention. The US has denied aid to some countries that do not support the accord.

The “take it or leave it” approach divided countries in Bonn this weekend and alienated most developing countries including China, India and Brazil who want to take parts of the accord to include in the formal UN negotiations.

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Richard Gray | Telegraph.co.uk

A new study, funded by Nasa, has found that the most serious drought in the Amazon for more than a century had little impact on the rainforest’s vegetation.
The findings appear to disprove claims by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could react drastically to even a small reduction in rainfall and could see the trees replaced by tropical grassland.

The IPCC has already faced intense criticism for using a report by environmental lobby group WWF as the basis for its claim, which in turn had failed to cite the original source of the research.
Scientists have now spoken out against the 40% figure contained in the IPCC report and say that recent research is suggesting that the rainforest may be more resilient to climate change than had been previously thought.

It comes just days after the UN announced an independent review into the panel’s procedures following a series of scandals over its most recent report which was found to contain factual errors and claims which were not based on rigorous scientific research.
The InterAcademy Council, which is the umbrella organisation for the national academies of science around the world, will examine how the IPCC’s reports are compiled and communicated.
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Jeff Fobes  | MountainX.com 

Word is spreading on Twitter and on small-farm listserves that the U.S. Department of Agriculture will drop its program to monitor the movement of all livestock, a plan that encountered widespread resistance from farmers, particularly those from small farms, who argued it would bankrupt them.

The New York Times wrote on Feb 5:

Faced with stiff resistance from ranchers and farmers, the Obama administration has decided to scrap a national program intended to help authorities quickly identify and track livestock in the event of an animal disease outbreak.

In abandoning the program, called the National Animal Identification System, officials said they would start over in trying to devise a livestock tracing program that could win widespread support from the industry.

The program had been pushed by large industrial farms. However the American Farm Bureau Federation is seeking to distance itself from the failed program. The Times reports: “It was just overwhelming in the country that people didn’t like it, and I think they took that feedback to heart,” said Mary Kay Thatcher, public policy director of the American Farm Bureau Federation.

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Heartland Institute

Environment & Climate News > February 2010

Environment > Climate: Consensus

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Written By: James M. Taylor

Published In: Environment & Climate News > February 2010

Publication date: 02/01/2010

Publisher: The Heartland Institute

Only one in four American Meteorological Society broadcast meteorologists agrees with United Nations’ claims that humans are primarily responsible for recent global warming, a survey published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reports.

The survey results contradict the oft-repeated assertion that a consensus of scientists believes humans are causing a global warming crisis.

Objective Methods

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) survey was limited to television weather forecasters who are also meteorologists. A prior survey of all television weather forecasters–including ones without meteorological training–produced a heavy percentage of skeptics. The new survey was designed to determine whether the meteorologists held the same opinion as the broader group of all television weather forecasters.

The survey was conducted by the congressionally funded National Environmental Education Foundation and vetted by an advisory board of climate experts from groups such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, and Pew Center for Global Climate Change.

Alarmist Claims Rejected

The AMS study found:

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Christopher Booker | DailyMail.co.uk

So the Government, as the Daily Mail has revealed, is trying to get rid of £1billion-worth of unwanted swine flu vaccine - because the deadly epidemic they were promising us all last year never materialised.
Several things are shocking about this revelation, not least the charge by the Council of Europe’s head of health that major drug companies might have leaned on the World Health Organisation (WHO) to stoke up last year’s scare by warning that swine flu could be a worldwide ‘pandemic’ killing tens of millions.
Certainly, those companies have made vast fortunes out of selling the vaccines which, at our expense, are now having to be flogged off at give-away prices.

Worthless: The Government is trying to get rid of £1bn worth of swine flu vaccine
But in a way most shocking of all is that this scandalous waste of public money - and the wild over-reaction which gave rise to it - was entirely predictable.
I can say this with confidence because I predicted it on this very page of the Daily Mail in April last year, just when our government, led by the Chief Medical Officer Sir Liam Donaldson, was cranking up the scare-machine to fever pitch by predicting that swine flu could be as bad as the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 which killed 50million people worldwide.

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Katherine Goldstein | Gazelle Emami | HuffingtonPost.com 

In a study released by the International Journal of Biological Sciences, analyzing the effects of genetically modified foods on mammalian health, researchers found that agricultural giant Monsanto’s GM corn is linked to organ damage in rats.

According to the study, which was summarized by Adam Shake at Twilight Earth, “Three varieties of Monsanto’s GM corn - Mon 863, insecticide-producing Mon 810, and Roundup® herbicide-absorbing NK 603 - were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities.”

Monsanto gathered its own crude statistical data after conducting a 90-day study, even though chronic problems can rarely be found after 90 days, and concluded that the corn was safe for consumption. The stamp of approval may have been premature, however.

In the conclusion of the IJBS study, researchers wrote:

“Effects were mostly concentrated in kidney and liver function, the two major diet detoxification organs, but in detail differed with each GM type. In addition, some effects on heart, adrenal, spleen and blood cells were also frequently noted. As there normally exists sex differences in liver and kidney metabolism, the highly statistically significant disturbances in the function of these organs, seen between male and female rats, cannot be dismissed as biologically insignificant as has been proposed by others. We therefore conclude that our data strongly suggests that these GM maize varieties induce a state of hepatorenal toxicity….These substances have never before been an integral part of the human or animal diet and therefore their health consequences for those who consume them, especially over long time periods are currently unknown.”

Monsanto has immediately responded to the study, stating that the research is “based on faulty analytical methods and reasoning and do not call into question the safety findings for these products.”

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Kurt Nimmo |InfoWars.com 

Diane Francis, writing for Canada’s Financial Post, begins an editorial by declaring a myth — the world is over-populated. “The ‘inconvenient truth’ overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world,” she writes. “A planetary law, such as China’s one-child policy, is the only way to reverse the disastrous global birthrate currently, which is one million births every four days.”

An interesting choice of words. Planetary law. In other words, a world government with the power to decide if humans are allowed to procreate.

Currently we do not have such a world government. Behind the scenes at Copenhagen, however, the powerbrokers are working feverishly to establish the sort of world government only partially imagined by Ms. Francis.

The elite realized a big victory when they anointed the Bilderberg and Trilateral commission member Herman Van Rompuy as the “permanent” (and unelected) president of the European Union. Van Rompuy declared 2009 the “first year of global governance” and said Copenhagen is “another step towards the global management of our planet.”

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Kurt Nimmo | InfoWars.com

Not only did Al Gore invent the internet, he has also redefined earth science. The puffed up phrophet of the phony climate change movement went on the Conan O’Brien Show in mid-November and told the world the temperature of the interior of the earth is “millions of degrees.” O’Brien didn’t flinch.

n fact, the Inner Mantle of the earth is 5400 ºF (3000ºC) and the Outer Mantle is 2520 ºF (1400ºC) and 5400 º F (3000ºC). The Core of the earth is between 9032 – 10832 ºF (5000-6000 ºC).
This is an estimation. Nobody knows the exact temperature of the earth’s interior. The estimate of the temperature is derived from theoretical modeling and laboratory experiments, but no scientist believes the temperature is anywhere near a million degrees.
The above video demonstrates that Al Gore is a carnival huckster for the globalist movement peddling junk science and has no idea what he is talking about.

briefingroom.typepad.com

A nationally televised ‘debate’ on global warming followed by a viewers’ poll has delivered a landslide result: 77% don’t believe global warming is man made.
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Dana Farrington | GothamGazette.com

Impatience was contagious in City Hall today as three City Council committees heard from concerned parties about the World Trade Center Medical Working Group’s second annualreport, released in September. Of particular concern was a bill, currently stalled in the U.S. Senate health committee, which would provide long-term medical care for those affected by the World Trade Center collapse — mentally and physically — and worries over which side effects would not be covered in the meantime.

Before the hearing, a man in a full Fire Department captain uniform sat quietly in the front row. The retired captain, John Gallagher, had arrived at the trade center site in the afternoon after the attacks and spent the next 30 hours on duty, followed by another three months of working full time at Ground Zero. He now has pulmonary fibrosis and breathes through an oxygen tank, which sat next to him inside a black rolling suitcase. Though he receives full funding for his medical care because the government has recognized the dust and other hazards at the trade center caused his illness, he said he had come to the hearing to fight for those who are not covered. Among his concerns were people with cancers, such as thyroid and kidney cancers, whose illnesses were not recognized under current coverage programs.

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Chris Tryhorn | Guardian.co.uk 

The Guardian has teamed up with more than 50 papers worldwide to run the same front-page leader article calling for action at the climate summit in Copenhagen, which begins tomorrow.

This unprecedented project is the result of weeks of negotiations between the papers to agree on a final text, in a process that mirrors the diplomatic wrangling likely to dominate the next 14 days in Copenhagen.

Fifty-six papers in 45 countries published in 20 different languages have joined the initiative, and will feature the leader in some form on their front pages.

Among the titles taking part are two Chinese papers – the Economic Observer and the Southern Metropolitan – and India’s second largest English-language paper, The Hindu.

Some of the world’s best known papers, such as Le Monde, El Pais, Russia’s Novaya Gazeta and the Toronto Star, are also on board.

The leader was the work of team of Guardian writers and editors and went through three drafts to arrive at a text that satisfied all the editors involved.

Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said: “Newspapershave never done anything like this before but they have never had to cover a story like this before. No individual newspaper editorial could hope to influence the outcome of Copenhagen but I hope the combined voice of 56 major papers speaking in 20 languages will remind the politicians and negotiators gathering there what is at stake – and persuade them to rise above the rivalries and inflexibility that have stood in the way of a deal.”

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Transcript: This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com and I come here today with a message for you.

You the environmentalists, you the activists, you the campaigners.

You who have watched with growing concern the ways in which the world around us has been ravaged in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

You who are concerned with the state of the planet that we are leaving for our children and our grandchildren and those generations yet unborn.

This is not a message of divisiveness, but cooperation.

This is a message of hope and empowerment, but it requires us to look at a hard and uncomfortable truth:

Your movement has been usurped by the very same financial interests you thought you were fighting against.

You have suspected as much for years.

You watched at first with hope and excitement as your movement, your cause, your message began to spread, as it was taken up by the media and given attention, as conferences were organized and as the ideas you had struggled so long and hard to be heard were talked about nationally. Then internationally.

You watched with growing unease as the message was simplified. First it became a slogan. Then it became a brand. Soon it was nothing more than a label and it became attached to products. The ideas you had once fought for were now being sold back to you. For profit.

You watched with growing unease as the message became  parroted, not argued, worn like a fashionrather than something that came from the conviction of understanding.

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AP

Britain’s University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.

The allegations were made after more than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists were posted to the Web following the security breach last month.

The e-mails were seized upon by some skeptics of man-made climate change as proof that scientists are manipulating the data about its extent.

Patrick J. Michaels | NationalReview.com

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”
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EnvironmentalLeader.com

LINK TO EMAILS IN .ZIP FiLE

Thousands of sensitive documents and emails including some climate change docs dating back a decade ago that indicate scientists may be overstating the case for global warming by manipulating data were stolen from Britain’s Hadley Climate Research Unit by Russian hackers, according to many news reports and blogs.

The release of 1,000 emails and 3,000 documents is fueling the debate between scientists who believe man is responsible for global warming and skeptics of climate-change findings, calling into question the validity of many climate-change reports.

However, the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain, Phil Jones, told The Australian [1] that he cannot confirm which of the emails are authentic and which are fakes.

Some old emails from scientists made references to different ways of evaluating the climate data, according to a Wall Street Journal blog [2].

Initial reviews of the leaked files show that world-renowned climate scientists may be manipulating computer climate modeling data and research reports to support the theory that man-made greenhouse gases are causing global warming, reports Examiner.com [3].
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