Clexit: The New Heights Of Climate Science Denial

Independent Australia - DeSmog Blog

DeSmogBlog's Graham Readfearn reports on a new group, with powerful allies, espousing climate change denial and calling for, among other things, an end to the UN Paris Agreement.

(Image via Clexit Media Release, clexit.net)

IN THE WAKE of the political tsunami caused by the UK's decision to leave the EU, a group of climate science denialists has formed to jump enthusiastically onto the Brexit bandwagon.
Backed by a blitzkrieg of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science, a rapidly convened new group called "Clexit" has been formed.
The group claims to have '60 well-informed science, business and economic leaders from 16 countries' signing on to a founding statement that is chock-full of long-debunked climate change myths, together with attacks on renewable energy and the United Nations.
In a not unambitious founding statement, Clexit says:

'The world must abandon this suicidal global warming crusade. Man does not and cannot control the climate.'

Among the group's many demands are that nations refuse to ratify the United Nations Paris Agreement — a position shared by Republican U.S. Presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The right now wants a "Clexit," because Brexit went so well

As DeSmogUK and Climate Home reported, many of the UK's leading "Leave" campaigners were also climate science denialists.
The group has a committee of well-known climate action blockers and fossil fuel advocates, including British hereditary peer Lord Christopher Monckton and U.S.-based Marc Morano, of the fossil fuel funded think tank Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
Many of the Clexit members are linked to the "web of denial" described by U.S. Democratic Senators in a series of Senate speeches delivered last month.

Founding statement
The Clexit founding statement – all 1200 words of it – is the epitome of modern climate science denial. Here are a few samples:

Brexit was Britain's answer to the growing over-reach of EU bureaucracies. Clexit is our answer to the push for global control through climate hysteria… 

If the Paris climate accord is ratified, or enforced locally by compliant governments, it will strangle the leading economies of the world with pointless carbon taxes and costly climate and energy policies, all with no sound basis in evidence or science…. 

This vicious and relentless war on carbon dioxide will be seen by future generations as the most misguided mass delusion that the world has ever seen… 

Carbon dioxide is NOT a dangerous pollutant – it is a natural, non-toxic and beneficial gas which feeds all life on earth. Its increasing concentration is improving the environment, not harming it… 

The Clexit Campaign aims to prevent ratification or local enforcement of the UN climate treaty. Nations should not tolerate UN and EU bureaucrats manipulating science in order to justify their dreams to redistribute wealth and revert to the central planning that enslaved and impoverished the old command economies…

Global warming has occurred naturally many times in the past and is not to be feared – it is not controlled by carbon dioxide or humans…

 This is the part where we point out that these kinds of positions, while forcefully and repeatedly claimed, run counter to every national science academy on the planet and the governments of every major economy in the world.
The Clexiteers have formed their group during the hottest streak of months on global warming records. According to the U.S. government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, June 2016 was the 14^th consecutive record-breaking hot month.
Despite this, the positions in the Clexit statement mirror those pushed by the likes of U.S. Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, fringe right-wing Australian political party One Nation and some within the ranks of Australia's governing Coalition of the Liberal and National parties.

Hugh Morgan
The Clexit group's secretary is Viv Forbes — a director of Australian company Stanmore Coal who has long stood firm against the tsunami of evidence linking greenhouse gas emissions to risky climate change.
But one of the group's highest profile "founding members" appearing on the published list is Australian businessman and climate "sceptic" Hugh Morgan, a former board member of the Reserve Bank of Australia.
As recounted in Clive Hamilton's book Scorcher: The Dirty Politics of Climate Change, Morgan was a central industry figure in building opposition to climate action within the Liberal Party in the 90s and early 2000s.
Morgan was the president of the Lavoisier Group — an organisation set up to fight ratification of a previous UN climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol.
Morgan, former CEO of Western Mining Corporation, continues to have close ties to Australia's governing Liberal Party.
Before Australia's July general election, The Australian newspaper reported that Liberal leader and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull had met with Morgan and other directors of the key Liberal Party funding group, the Cormack Foundation.
According to records held by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, Morgan has been a Cormack director since it was founded in March 1988.
Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) records show Cormack was the biggest single donor to the Victorian branch of the Liberal party in the 2014-15 financial year, handing over some $4.46m.
AEC records show that in 2014-15, Cormack received $5.4m in income, declaring receipts from major banks as well as mining companies Rio Tinto ($210,000) and BHP Billiton ($293,000). The receipts are not donations but more likely income from investments in those firms.
According to the Australian Financial Review, Morgan is currently trying to raise $2 billion for a mining-focused private equity firm.
Other listed members of the Clexit group include the Heartland Institute's Jay Lehr, coal backed Canadian denialist Patrick Moore and Australian mining figure Ian Plimer.

Links

• Beware Hugh Morgan and the climate sceptic zombie attack!
• The Australian's Great Barrier Reef editorial: A misrepresention of science
• Fossil fuel industry spending millions on 2016 presidential candidates
• Climate science denier Mark Steyn in Australia ... and other reptilian weirdness
• Citibank: Global cost of climate change inaction — $44 trillion by 2040
• Murdoch's Times verbals climate scientist as conspiracy theorist

Scientists Warn World Will Miss Key Climate Target

The Guardian - Robin McKie

Grim backdrop to vital global emissions talks as new analysis shows 1.5C limit on warming is close to being broken

A tropical coral reef off Fiji. Photograph: Alamy

Leading climate scientists have warned that the Earth is perilously close to breaking through a 1.5C upper limit for global warming, only eight months after the target was set.
The decision to try to limit warming to 1.5C, measured in relation to pre-industrial temperatures, was the headline outcome of the Paris climate negotiations last December. The talks were hailed as a major success by scientists and campaigners, who claimed that, by setting the target, desertification, heatwaves, widespread flooding and other global warming impacts could be avoided.
However, figures – based on Met Office data – prepared by meteorologist Ed Hawkins of Reading University show that average global temperatures were already more than 1C above pre-industrial levels for every month except one over the past year and peaked at +1.38C in February and March. Keeping within the 1.5C limit will be extremely difficult, say scientists, given these rises.
These alarming figures will form the backdrop to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change talks in Geneva this month, when scientists will start to outline ways to implement the climate goals set in Paris. Dates for abandoning all coal-burning power stations and halting the use of combustion engines across the globe – possibly within 15 years – are likely to be set.
Atmospheric heating has been partly triggered by a major El Niño event in the Pacific, with 2016 expected to be the hottest year on record. Temperatures above 50C have afflicted Iraq; India is experiencing one of the most intense monsoons on record; and drought-stricken California has been ravaged by wildfires.
Stanford University's Professor Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC working group on adaptation to climate change, told the Observer: "From the perspective of my research I would say the 1.5C goal now looks impossible or at the very least, a very, very difficult task. We should be under no illusions about the task we face."
The Paris summit first agreed to limit global warming to 2C above pre-industrial levels and then decided to try to keep it below 1.5C. This latter limit was set because it offered the planet a better chance of staving off catastrophes such as the melting of polar ice, which would no longer be able to deflect solar radiation and allow even greater global warming. Similarly, coral reef destruction and extreme sea level rises might be avoided if the 1.5C limit is achieved.
"If the world puts all its resources into finding ways to generate power without burning fossil fuels, and if there were international agreements that action must happen instantly, and if carbon emissions were brought down to zero before 2050, then a rise of no more than 1.5C might just be achieved," said Dr Ben Sanderson of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. "That is a tall order, however."
The problem was made particularly severe because moving too quickly to cut emissions could be also be harmful, added Field. "If we shut down fossil fuel plants tomorrow – before we have established renewable alternatives – we can limit emissions and global warming, but people would suffer. There would be insufficient power for the planet. There is an upper limit to the rate at which we can move to a carbon-free future."
The Paris agreement is vague about the exact rate at which the world's carbon emissions should be curtailed if we are to achieve its 1.5C target. It merely indicates they should reach zero by the second half of the 21st century, a goal that was accepted as being ambitious but possible – until global temperatures increased dramatically this year.
"It means that by 2025 we will have to have closed down all coal-fired power stations across the planet," said John Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. "And by 2030 you will have to get rid of the combustion engine entirely. That decarbonisation will not guarantee a rise of no more than 1.5C but it will give us a chance. But even that is a tremendous task."
Many scientists now believe the most realistic strategy is to overshoot the 1.5C target by as little as possible and then, once carbon emissions have been brought to zero, carbon dioxide could be extracted from the atmosphere to start to cool the planet back down to the 1.5C target. In other words, humanity will have to move from merely curtailing emissions to actively extracting carbon dioxide from the air, a process known as negative emissions.
"Some negative emission technology will inevitably have to be part of the picture if you are going to keep 1.5C as your limit," said Professor Jim Skea, a member of the UK government's committee on climate change. "There will always be some human activities that put carbon into the atmosphere and they will have to be compensated for by negative emission technology."
But what form that technology takes is unclear. Several techniques have been proposed. One includes spreading crushed silicate rocks, which absorb carbon dioxide, over vast tracts of land. Another involves seeding oceans with iron to increase their uptake of carbon dioxide. Most are considered unworkable at present – with the exception of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. Under this scheme, vast plantations of trees and bushes would be created, their wood burned for energy while the carbon dioxide emitted was liquefied and stored underground.
"It could do the trick," said Cambridge University climate expert Professor Peter Wadhams. "The trouble is that you would need to cover so much land with plants for combustion you would not have enough space to grow food or provide homes for Earth's wildlife. In the end, I think we just have to hope that some kind of extraction technology, as yet unimagined by scientists, is developed in the next couple of decades. If not, we are in real trouble."

Links

• Environmental records shattered as climate change 'plays out before us'
• Climate models are accurately predicting ocean and global warming
• World set for climate disaster, say activists, as Lima talks falter
• Climate change is not just about science – it's about the future we want to create
• UN's 2C target will fail to avoid a climate disaster, scientists warn
• British plan to avert climate disaster using sun power
• Global warming likely to breach 2C threshold, climate scientists conclude
• Scientists call for overhaul of UN 'blockbuster' climate reports

Rio 2016: Opening Ceremony Features Environmental Rallying Cry

ABC News - AFP

Green was the theme as Brazil sent a message to the world. (AP Photo: Markus Schreiber)

A rallying cry to save the planet from environmental destruction has launched the Olympic Games as Rio de Janeiro put on a glittering opening carnival.

The overwhelming theme of the evening was protection of the environment.
"It is not enough to stop harming the planet, it is time to start healing it," programme notes from the ceremony's organisers read.

"This will be our Olympic message: Earthlings, let's replant, let's save the planet!"

An early opening sequence depicted the birth of life, culminating in the sprouting of a green entanglement of leaves from the stadium floor depicting the Amazon rainforest.
Indigenous Brazilians then performed native dances before creating huge "Ocas" or native huts in the centre of the stage.
Yet the party mood was halted in its tracks by a sombre sequence titled 'After the Party' which used NASA scientific maps to warn of environmental crisis facing the planet, detailing rising sea levels to melting polar ice caps.
It culminated with Oscar-winning British actress Judi Dench and Brazilian thespian Fernanda Montenegro reading Carlos Drummond de Andrade's classic poem A Flor e a Nausea (The Flower and the Nausea).
The gloomy theme was lifted with a hopeful message, showing a boy captivated by the emergence of a seedling in a concrete jungle.
The theme continued as the parade of more than 10,000 athletes from 207 teams across the globe got under way.
Each athlete was presented with a seed and a cartridge of soil to enable them to plant a native tree of Brazil, which will ultimately form an 'Athletes Forest' made up of 207 different species -- one for each delegation.
With the completion of the athletes parade, mirrored towers were cleverly opened to create five green Olympic rings of lush vegetation, symbolising what the forest will one day look like.
The innovative reforestation scheme comes, however, after the failure of one of the most talked about attempts to create an environmental legacy for Rio -- cleaning up the city's polluted Guanabara Bay.
Garbage, dead animals and human effluent continue to pollute the waters of the bay, into which the raw sewage of half the city is pumped daily.

Links

• Artist gives climate science a redesign
• Obama tells federal agencies to get serious about climate change
• From heat domes to rain bombs, climate change is changing how we talk about weather
• 7 charts that make it clear climate change is already here